Is It Worth It? The
Difficult Case for War in Afghanistan
A war effort that is
costly, risky and worth waging—but only barely so—will be hard to sustain
politically; it would be just as hard to end. The Obama Administration wisely
wants to avoid unrealistic overpromising or the hyping of threats, but for
Afghanistan this means promising smaller benefits in exchange for greater
exertions, yielding a net cost-benefit calculus perilously close to a wash. By
ruling out clarion calls to great sacrifice for transcendent purpose, a sober
approach to Afghanistan makes for a very hard sell and exposes the
Administration to criticism from all sides. Yet disengagement, a weaker policy
on the merits, courts blame, too, if circumstances in Afghanistan, abandoned to
its fate, take a darker turn.
Public opinion is
beginning to sour on the war, but for now most voters prefer reinforcement to
withdrawal. As public attention shifts from Iraq, the domestic political
salience of the Afghan war will grow, however, and public opinion could shift.
Given that the rationale for war is such a close call, it will make for a
daunting challenge in political management regardless of the Administration’s
policy choice. There is no easy way out of Afghanistan, no clear light at
either end of the tunnel, for President Obama.
Analytically, the
merits of the Afghan war turn on three questions: What is really at stake? What
will it cost to pursue those stakes? And what is the likelihood that the
pursuit will succeed?
The
Stakes:
The United States
has two primary national interests in this conflict: that Afghanistan never
again become a haven for terrorism against the United States, and that chaos in
Afghanistan not destabilize its neighbors, especially Pakistan. Neither
interest can be dismissed, but both have limits as casus belli.
The first interest
is the most discussed—and the weakest argument for waging the kind of war we
are now waging. The United States invaded Afghanistan in the first place to
destroy the al-Qaeda safe haven there—actions clearly justified by the 9/11
attacks. But al-Qaeda is no longer based in Afghanistan, nor has it been since
early 2002. By all accounts, bin Laden and his core operation are now based
across the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The
Taliban movement in Afghanistan is clearly linked with al-Qaeda and sympathetic
to it, but there is little evidence of al-Qaeda infrastructure within
Afghanistan today that could directly threaten the U.S. homeland. If the
current Afghan government collapsed and were replaced with a neo-Taliban
regime, or if the Taliban were able to secure political control over some major
contiguous fraction of Afghan territory, then perhaps al-Qaeda could
re-establish a real haven there.
But the risk that
al-Qaeda might succeed in doing this isn’t much different than the same
happening in a wide range of weak states throughout the world, from Yemen to
Somalia to Djibouti to Eritrea to Sudan to the Philippines to Uzbekistan, or
even parts of Latin America or southern Africa. And of course Iraq and Pakistan
could soon host regimes willing to put the state’s resources behind al-Qaeda if
their current leaderships collapse under pressure.
Many of these
countries, especially Iraq and Pakistan, could offer al-Qaeda better havens
than Afghanistan ever did. Iraq and Pakistan are richer and far better
connected to the outside world than technologically primitive, landlocked
Afghanistan. Iraq is an oil-rich Arab state in the very heart of the Middle
East. Pakistan is a nuclear power. Afghanistan does enjoy an historical
connection with al-Qaeda, is well known to bin Laden, and adjoins his current base
in the FATA. Thus it is still important to deny al-Qaeda sanctuary on the
Afghan side of the Durand Line. But the intrinsic importance of doing so is no
greater than that of denying sanctuary in many other potential havens—and
probably smaller than many. We clearly cannot afford to wage protracted warfare
with multiple brigades of American ground forces simply to deny al-Qaeda access
to every possible safe haven. We would run out of brigades long before bin
Laden ran out of prospective sanctuaries.
The more important
U.S. interest is indirect: to prevent chaos in Afghanistan from destabilizing
Pakistan. With a population of 173 million (five times Afghanistan’s), a GDP of
more than $160 billion (more than ten times Afghanistan’s) and a functional
nuclear arsenal of perhaps twenty to fifty warheads, Pakistan is a much more
dangerous prospective state sanctuary for al-Qaeda.
Furthermore, the
likelihood of government collapse in Pakistan, which would enable the
establishment of such a sanctuary, may be in the same ballpark as Afghanistan,
at least in the medium to long term. Pakistan is already at war with internal
Islamist insurgents allied to al-Qaeda, and that war is not going well. Should
the Pakistani insurgency succeed in collapsing the state or even just in
toppling the current civilian government, the risk of nuclear weapons falling
into al-Qaeda’s hands would rise sharply. In fact, given the difficulties
terrorists face in acquiring usable nuclear weapons, Pakistani state collapse
may be the likeliest scenario leading to a nuclear-armed al-Qaeda.
Pakistani state
collapse, moreover, is a danger over which the United States has only limited
influence. We have uneven and historically fraught relations with the Pakistani
military and intelligence services, and our ties with the civilian government
of the moment can be no more efficacious than that government’s own sway over
the country. The United States is too unpopular with the Pakistani public to
have any meaningful prospect of deploying major ground forces there to assist
the government in counterinsurgency. U.S. air strikes can harass insurgents and
terrorists within Pakistan, but the inevitable collateral damage arouses harsh
public opposition that could itself threaten the weak government’s stability.
U.S. aid is easily (and routinely) diverted to purposes other than countering
Islamist insurgents, such as the maintenance of military counterweights to
India, graft and patronage, or even support for Islamist groups seen by
Pakistani authorities as potential allies against India. U.S. assistance to
Pakistan can—and should—be made conditional on progress in countering
insurgents, but if these conditions are too harsh, Pakistan might reject the
terms, thus removing our leverage in the process. Demanding conditions that the
Pakistani government ultimately accepts but cannot reasonably fulfill only sets
the stage for recrimination and misunderstanding.
If we cannot
reliably influence Pakistan for the better, we should at least heed the
Hippocratic Oath: Do no harm. With so little actual leverage, we cannot afford
to make the problem any worse than it already is. And failure in Afghanistan
would make the problem in Pakistan much harder.
The Taliban are a
transnational Pashtun movement active on both sides of the Durand Line and are
closely associated with other Pakistani insurgents. They constitute an
important threat to the regime in Islamabad in rough proportion to the regime’s
inherent weaknesses (which are many and varied). If the Taliban regained control
of the Afghan state, their ability to use the state’s resources to destabilize
the secular government in Pakistan would increase the risk of state collapse
there. Analysts have made much of the threat that Pakistani Taliban base camps
pose to the stability of the government in Kabul, but the danger works both
ways: Instability in Afghanistan also poses a serious threat to the secular
civilian government in Pakistan. This is the single greatest U.S. interest in
Afghanistan: to prevent it from aggravating Pakistan’s internal problems and
magnifying the danger of an al-Qaeda nuclear-armed sanctuary there.
These stakes are
important, to be sure, but they do not merit an infinitely high price tag.
Afghanistan’s influence over Pakistan’s future is important, but it is also
incomplete and indirect. A Taliban Afghanistan would make a Pakistani collapse
more likely, but it would not guarantee it. Nor does success in Afghanistan
guarantee success in Pakistan: There is a chance that we could struggle our way
to stability in Afghanistan at great cost and sacrifice, only to see Pakistan
collapse anyway under the weight of its own elite misjudgments and deep
internal divisions.
The
Cost:
What will it cost to defeat the Taliban? No one really knows. War is an
uncertain business. But it is very hard to succeed at counterinsurgency (COIN)
on the cheap. Current U.S. Army doctrine is clear on this point:
[M]aintaining
security in an unstable environment requires vast resources, whether host
nation, U.S., or multinational. In contrast, a small number of highly motivated
insurgents with simple weapons, good operations security, and even limited
mobility can undermine security over a large area. Thus, successful COIN
operations often require a high ratio of security forces to the protected
population. For that reason, protracted COIN operations are hard to sustain.
The effort requires a firm political will and substantial patience by the
government, its people, and the countries providing support.1
In fact, the
doctrinal norm for troop requirements in COIN is around one security provider
per fifty civilians. Applied to the population of Afghanistan, this would mean
about 650,000 trained soldiers and police. If one assumes that only half the
country requires active counterinsurgency operations (the south and east at the
present time), this still implies a need for about 300,000 counterinsurgents.
Ideally, most of
these forces would be indigenous Afghans, but there is reason to doubt that the
Afghan government will ever be able to afford the necessary number of troops.
If any significant fraction of this total must be American or NATO-based, then
the resources needed would be very large in relation to total force
availability.
The commitment could
also be very long; successful counterinsurgency campaigns commonly last ten to
15 years or more.2 And, at least initially, casualties could be heavy. An
extrapolation from the 2007 experience in Iraq could imply more than fifty U.S.
fatalities per month during active pacification.3
Prospects
of Success:
In general, the historical rate of great
power success in COIN is not encouraging—around 25 percent.4 And some important
features of Afghanistan today are enough to give anyone pause. Orthodox COIN
theory puts host-government legitimacy at the heart of success and failure, yet
the Karzai government is widely seen as corrupt (even by local standards),
inept, inefficient and en route to losing the support of the population.
Ultimate economic and political development prospects are constrained by
Afghanistan’s forbidding geography, lack of infrastructure and political
history. The Taliban enjoy a cross-border sanctuary in the FATA that the
Pakistani government seems unwilling or unable to eliminate. Violence is up,
perceptions of security are down, casualties are increasing, and the Taliban
enjoys freedom of movement, access to the population and financial support from
a thriving drug trade.
Worse perhaps, we
can affect only some of these challenges directly. We can increase security by
deploying more troops, we can bolster the economy to a degree with U.S.
economic aid, we can put some pressure on poppy production, and we can pressure
Karzai to reform. But only the Afghans can create a legitimate government, and
only the Pakistanis can shut down the safe havens in the FATA. We can influence
Afghanistan and Pakistan to a much greater degree than we have so far, but we
cannot guarantee reform ourselves. To date, neither ally seems ready to do what
it takes.
This does not make
failure inevitable, however. Great powers’ poor track record in COIN is due
partly to the inherent difficulty of the undertaking but also to poor strategic
choices. We can learn from experience, and we can change strategies and
methods. Indeed, the U.S. military has learned a great deal about COIN in
recent years. The new Army-Marine counterinsurgency doctrine is the product of
a nearly unprecedented degree of internal debate, external vetting, historical
analysis and assessment of recent experience.
The new
Administration, moreover, seems determined to address one of the Afghan
effort’s most important remaining shortcomings. The new doctrine assumes a
close alignment of interests between the United States and its host government:
The manual assumes that our role is to enable the host government to realize
its own best interest by making itself into a legitimate defender of all its
citizens’ well-being. If this is indeed what the host wants, U.S. aid will
bring improvement in a direct, unproblematic way—and this is largely what the
Bush Administration assumed in providing aid to Afghanistan and Pakistan with
few strings attached. But if local leaders put self-interest ahead of public
interest and rank currying favor with local elites above economic development
or broad political legitimacy, then unconditional aid will often be misdirected
and governing legitimacy sacrificed in favor of short-term personal expediency.
Many see Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf as precisely the kind of leaders who
put their own tenure first and real legitimacy second. Such problems lead some
students of counterinsurgency to emphasize the need for conditionality in aid
in order to encourage behavior that broadens a host government’s legitimacy and
weakens the insurgency. The Obama Administration has made it clear that it
intends to combine bigger carrots with real sticks by withdrawing aid should
recipients fail to adopt needed reforms. This is an important step forward.
The forces
implementing COIN doctrine are also much improved over their Vietnam-era
predecessors—and even over their immediate predecessors in Iraq in 2003–04. The
U.S. military of 2009 has become uncommonly proficient at counterinsurgency,
combining stronger doctrine with extensive COIN combat experience, systematic
training and resources that dwarf most historical antecedents. More should be
done to improve U.S. COIN capability, but we are now vastly better at this
than, for example, the Soviets were in the 1980s, and much more proficient than
most historical great power counterinsurgents have been.
Perhaps most
important, we are blessed in Afghanistan with deeply flawed enemies. Afghans
remember what life was like under Taliban rule, and few want to return to their
brand of medieval theocracy. Of course, these preferences are secondary to the
need for security, and often to the desire for basic services such as courts
free of corruption or police who enforce the laws without first demanding
bribes. But because most Afghans oppose Taliban rule, we enjoy a strong
presumption in favor of the government, as long as that government provides at
least basic services competently.
The Taliban are also
far from a unified opposition group. Contrast them with the Viet Cong of 1964,
for example, a force in which a common ideology bound the leadership together
and linked it to its fighters. The neo-Taliban of 2009 are a much more divided
coalition of often fractious and independent actors. There is a hard core of
committed Islamist ideologues centered on Mullah Omar and based in Quetta, but
much of the Taliban’s actual combat strength consists of an array of warlords
and other factions who often side with the Taliban for reasons of profit,
prestige or convenience. Depending on the circumstances, they may not follow
orders from the leadership in Quetta. We often lament the challenges to unity
of effort flowing from a divided NATO command structure, but the Taliban face
difficulties on this score at least as severe as ours and potentially much
worse. No NATO member would ever switch sides and fight for the Taliban, but
one or more component factions of the Taliban might well leave the alliance for
the government side. This makes it difficult for the Taliban to mount
large-scale, coordinated offensives of the kind needed to conquer a defended
city, for example.
In addition, the
Taliban face major constraints in extending their influence beyond their ethnic
base in southern and eastern Afghanistan. They are a Pashtun movement, but
Pashtuns make up less than 45 percent of Afghanistan’s population overall and
constitute only a small fraction of the population in the north and west, where
the Taliban have very little popular following.5 The Afghanistan war is mainly
about ideology, not ethnicity (the government is itself run in large measure by
Pashtuns such as Hamid Karzai). Nevertheless, the Taliban’s narrow ethnic base
makes it hard for them to conquer the north and west of the country. It acts as
a limit on their expansion in the near term.
Taking all this into
account, advocates for withdrawal from Afghanistan certainly have a case. The
stakes are not limitless, the costs of pursuing them are high, and there is no
guarantee that even a high-cost counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan will
succeed. But success is possible all the same, given our strengths and our
opponents’ limitations. And failure could have potentially serious consequences
for U.S. security.
The Taliban’s
weaknesses make it hard for them to overthrow a U.S.-supported government while
large Western military forces defend it. But without those Western troops, the
Afghan state would offer a much easier target. Even with more than 50,000
Western troops in its defense, the Karzai government has proven unable to
contain Taliban influence and prevent insurgents from expanding their presence.
If abandoned to its fate the government would almost surely fare much worse.
Nor would an orphaned Karzai regime be in any position to negotiate a
compromise settlement that could deny the Taliban full control. With outright
victory in their grasp, it is hard to see why the Taliban would settle for
anything less than a complete restoration.
A Taliban
restoration, as noted, could restore to al-Qaeda a sanctuary for attacking the
United States. And even if a Taliban 2.0 regime vetoed al-Qaeda attacks on the
United States, it would almost certainly provide Pashtun militants and their
allies in Pakistan a massive launching pad for efforts to destabilize the
regime in Islamabad. Even without a haven in Afghanistan, Pakistani insurgents
might ultimately topple the government, but that threat clearly grows with the
additional resources of an openly sympathetic state across the Durand Line. And
this raises the specter of Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into al-Qaeda’s
hands in Pakistan.
The danger of a
nuclear al-Qaeda should not be exaggerated, however. For a U.S. withdrawal to
lead to that result would require a networked chain of multiple events: a
Taliban restoration in Kabul, a collapse of secular government in Islamabad,
and a loss of control over the Pakistani nuclear arsenal (or deliberate
transfer of weapons by sympathetic Pakistanis). These events are far from
certain, and the compound probability of all of them happening is inherently
lower than the odds of any one step alone. But a U.S. withdrawal would increase
all the probabilities at each stage, and the consequences for U.S. security if
the chain did play itself out could be severe. During the Cold War, the United
States devoted vast resources to diminishing an already-small risk that the
USSR would launch a nuclear attack on America. Today, the odds of U.S.
withdrawal from Afghanistan yielding an al-Qaeda nuclear weapon next door in
Pakistan may be relatively low, but the low risk of a grave result has been
judged intolerable in the past and perhaps ought to be again. On balance, the
gravity of the risks involved in withdrawal narrowly make a renewed effort in
Afghanistan the least-bad option we have.
U.S.
Politics and Afghanistan
Barack Obama’s
presidential campaign promised to de-emphasize Iraq and refocus on Afghanistan.
At the time, his Afghan hawkishness drew little opposition. The dovish wing of
the Democratic Party feared they might hand John McCain the presidency if they
undermined support for their nominee. Republicans saw the Iraq war and the
Afghan war as important on the merits and also as Republican political
legacies, discouraging opposition to either war.
Today the political
landscape is different. The Obama Administration put its stamp on Afghanistan
policy by boosting troop levels and contrasting this approach with Bush’s
COIN-lite methods there. But by putting his seal on the current strategy, Obama
has freed Republicans to criticize the conduct of a war that will now be waged
with a distinctively Democratic strategy and led by a new commanding general.
At the same time, some left-leaning Democrats, increasingly frustrated with the
Administration’s centrism on other issues, see escalation in Afghanistan as a
further demotion of the progressive agenda they expected Obama to push forward.
Meanwhile, the
American public, which has focused mostly on Iraq for the past six years, has
begun to rediscover Afghanistan—and it is uncomfortable with what it sees. A
March 17, 2009 USA Today/Gallup poll, for example, found that 42 percent of
those polled believed it was a mistake for the United States to send troops to
Afghanistan, up from 30 percent in February and just 6 percent in January 2002.
The percentage of those saying the war is going well dropped to 38 percent in
March from 44 percent just two months earlier.6
For now, the public
still supports both the war and the Obama Administration’s approach to it: A
February 20–22 Gallup poll found 65 percent of respondents favoring the
President’s decision to send an additional 17,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan,
with only 17 percent favoring a total withdrawal. But that support is fragile.
Indeed, a nascent Afghan antiwar movement is already visible, and it includes
both Democrats and Republicans. It is small now, but if history is any guide,
it will grow as losses do, which they surely will. Even a successful
counterinsurgency campaign looks bad in the early going. Classical COIN trades
higher losses early on for lower casualties later, which will make the coming
year in Afghanistan a hard one, regardless of the strategy’s ultimate merits.
Many of the announced reinforcements will be used to clear areas now held by
the Taliban and hold them against counterattack, both of which will increase
near-term casualty rates. As the U.S. troop count increases, so will the
violence, and many will associate the former with the latter. Expect the calls
for withdrawal to grow apace with the body count.
The coming
Afghanistan debate is unlikely to get as vitriolic as the one over in Iraq in
2006–07. That affair erupted from a potent mix of partisanship and anger at
perceived deceit, and so is unlikely to recur. But the political problems the
new antiwar movement will pose for Obama could actually be harder to overcome
than those the Iraq opposition posed for Bush. After all, Bush was able to
circle the wagons, rally his base, and push an unpopular position through
Congress by holding the Republican Party together, thereby forcing
congressional Democrats to either unite behind a different approach to Iraq or
acquiesce in Republican policies. Democrats chose the latter, giving President
Bush the freedom to conduct the war as he wished.
Obama, by contrast,
heads a Democratic Party that is already divided on the Afghan war and likely
to grow more so over time. He also faces a series of domestic crises that will
require him to spend political capital in order to win support for his
governing agenda. Republicans have shown little willingness to cooperate on
anything else, and the Administration’s new ownership of the Afghanistan war
gives the GOP another opportunity to retreat into opposition as the news from
the front gets worse. Obama could face a situation in which a bipartisan
antiwar coalition threatens the majority he will need to maintain funding for
an increasingly unpopular war. His ability to impose party discipline could be
limited by competing priorities, depending in part on how long and how deep the
economic crisis turns out to be.
These challenges
will likely get harder over time. If U.S. forces reach a positive military
turning point in the Afghan campaign soon enough, political opposition in the
United States will wither, as it mostly has with regard to Iraq since late
2007. But if the conflict proves as long and arduous as many
counterinsurgencies have, votes on many budgets over several years will be
needed to bring this war to a successful conclusion. These votes will take
place against the backdrop of mounting casualties, increasing costs and growing
pressure to restrain Federal budgets in the face of unprecedented deficits. The
result could be a slow bleeding of support as a protracted COIN campaign goes
through its inevitable darkest-before-the-dawn increase in casualties and
violence.
Even if the Afghan
war were an unambiguous necessity, the political challenge of holding a
congressional coalition together through a long period of apparent gloom would
be hard enough. But a war whose merits skirt the margin of being worthwhile
makes this harder still, especially for an Administration that seeks to be restrained
and realistic about expectations in Afghanistan. Moreover, the strongest part
of the Administration’s case for war, the link between Afghanistan and
al-Qaeda, is ultimately indirect. The link is real, but with Osama bin Laden in
Pakistan and with the strategic importance of Afghanistan lying chiefly in its
effect on its neighbor, a candid, realistic appraisal of Afghanistan’s stakes
for the United States requires both modesty and the articulation of a more
complicated causal chain than is normal in wartime appeals for U.S. public
support. This is an honest leader’s nightmare and his speechwriter’s greatest
challenge.
However, reversing
policy and disengaging would be no easier for Obama. It would be the wrong
course on the merits. Politically, it would commit the Administration to a
policy now supported by only 17 percent of the electorate. It would play into
the traditional Republican narrative of Democratic weakness on defense,
facilitate widespread if ill-founded Republican accusations of the Administration’s
leftist radicalism, and risk alienating moderate Democrats in battleground
districts whose support the President will need on other issues. However bad
the news may look if the United States fights on, withdrawal would probably
mean a Karzai collapse and a Taliban victory, an outcome that would flood
American TV screens with nightmarish imagery.
Withdrawal would
also gamble the Democratic Party’s future—not to mention the nation’s—on the
hope that the worst potential consequences of withdrawal and collapse can be
averted safely. If the United States pulls out, the Karzai government falls,
the Taliban establishes an Afghan state haven, Pakistan collapses and a
Pakistani nuclear weapon falls into bin Laden’s hands, then a decision to walk
away from Afghanistan would be seen as one of the greatest foreign policy
blunders of the modern era. Unlikely as this chain of events may be, to
withdraw from Afghanistan while success is still possible is to accept this
gamble voluntarily. It is to stake potentially enormous consequences on a
decision that need not have been taken. Therein lies the dilemma: Neither
course, staying or leaving, is politically easy or strategically safe.
The best policy,
therefore, is to defend an expensive, risky, potentially unpopular war with an
argument that is sound but ultimately indirect and a close call on the merits.
And this will need to be done by the leader of a divided party in the face of
rising antiwar sentiment and a host of competing demands, political and
financial. Barack Obama is a perhaps uniquely skilled political communicator,
and his policy for Afghanistan is the right one. But even the right policy for
Afghanistan is going to be a very hard sell indeed.
1 The U.S.
Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (University of Chicago Press,
2007), p. 4.
2
Seth
Jones, Counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, (RAND Corporation, 2008), p. 10.
3
The
financial costs are also likely to be high. The Congressional Research Service
estimates that the war in Afghanistan cost $34 billion in FY 2008 and projects
that this figure will increase in coming years. See Amy Belasco, The Cost of
Iraq, Afghanistan and other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11
(Congressional Research Service, October 15, 2008).
4
See
Jason Lyall and Isaiah Wilson, “Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes
in Counterinsurgency Wars”, International Organization (Winter 2009); and Ivan
Arreguin-Toft, How the Weak Win Wars: A Theory of Asymmetric Conflict
(Cambridge University Press, 2005), which finds “strong actors” winning only 45
percent of asymmetric conflicts between 1950 and 1998.
5
This
is why, even in their first rule, the Taliban never completely secured the
north. Indeed, it was the unconquered Northern Alliance’s hold over contiguous
territory in that part of Afghanistan that provided the allies a jumping-off
point for U.S. Special Forces, which teamed with them to topple the Taliban in
2001.
6
Tom
Vanden Brook, “Afghan War Hits Peak of Disfavor”, USA Today, March 17, 2009;
Jeffrey Jones, “In U.S., More Optimism About Iraq, Less About Afghanistan”,
Gallup.com, March 18, 2009.
Stephen Biddle is
senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.
© The American Interest LLC 2009 | Terms
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Participants also appealed "to the international community to ensure that the resultant power vacuum may be filled by a UN-sponsored peacekeeping force with Asian forces as major players". This strategy, the statement says, "will help the country's transition towards stability".
"The overwhelming presence and reliance on 52,000-strong foreign forces in Afghanistan has created more animosity among the local people as well as in neighbouring Pakistan. This situation creates an atmosphere ripe for extremist groups to exploit the religious sentiments of ordinary people and involve them in committing more violence," the statement says.
Analyzing what they see as "one of the most volatile regions of the world," participants at the consultation stated that "South Asia has become a hotbed of the war on terror and a victim of the strategic interests of major power blocs keeping the region in constant turmoil and uncertainty".
With the "US-led war on terror" being an overall defining framework for the region's conflicts, "resentments against foreign forces" are "growing among various sectors in society, especially as they feel that peace and security in South Asia are today defined in terms of American [US] strategic interests and objectives".
The consultation condemned "all forms of terrorism both by state and non-state actors in the South Asia region". It also expressed "concern over the emerging religious extremism and fundamentalism in all South Asian countries". Among the "silver linings which provide hope," the consultation's statement mentions a number of "democratic transitions and electoral processes," like those that have taken place recently in Bhutan, Maldives and Nepal.
The statement of the International Consultation on Peace, Security and Development in South Asia can be found here: http://www.oikoumene.org/?id=6743
International News » Tariq Ali on Afghanistan: Six years of a war of terror
Green Left Weekly
Tariq Ali on Afghanistan: Six years of a war of terror
Sherry Wolf
3 November 2007
The US launched its first assault in the “war on terror” in Afghanistan six years ago. Today, the country remains one of the poorest places on Earth, ruled by a corrupt warlord elite. Tariq Ali, a veteran of the anti-war struggle for four decades, spoke to Sherry Wolf about the disastrous consequences of the US-led war — and what the future holds.
This is the sixth anniversary of the US war on Afghanistan, which a lot of people see as the “good” battle in the “war on terror”, as opposed to Iraq. Is that true?
I have always argued that this was essentially a crude war of revenge to hit back immediately after the September 11 attacks — for political leaders to show the American population that “we are busy defending you”. It had no other major purpose to it other than being for revenge — an eye for an eye.
The second aim of this war, as [US President George] Bush spelled it out, was to capture Osama bin Laden “dead or alive”. Those were his exact words, which we shouldn’t forget. Apart from that, there were no war aims.
There was never any question that they were going to capture the country. For one, the Northern Alliance wasn’t going to resist — nor were the Iranians, who were very strong in western Afghanistan. Iranian leaders were hostile to the Taliban for their own opportunistic reasons, so they clambered onto the imperial bandwagon and said, “Fine, we can’t get rid of these guys, but if the Americans do, we’ll see how the situation develops”.
Then there was the Pakistani military regime, without which the Taliban would never have been in power, and which had been backing up the Taliban logistically, militarily and in every other way.
Given that the US was going to use Pakistani military bases, the regime asked for a few weeks to get their military personnel out of Afghanistan before the US went in. In those two crucial weeks, of course, Osama bin laden and the al Qaeda leadership also left Afghanistan. They weren’t going to wait around.
So the US took Kabul with NATO help, but it wasn’t difficult because there was no resistance at all. Then the question arose: What were they going to do with the country?
They couldn’t find Osama, though there was a two-week period media hysteria about “reaching the Tora Bora caves” and all this kind of propaganda. They dropped all these bombs and what happened? Nothing. They destroyed the caves, but the quarry had escaped.
So what were they going to do now? It’s obvious that bin Laden left the country and went to the tribal zones between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the traditions of hospitality are very strong, and he wasn’t going to be handed over.
The US then implanted a puppet regime in Afghanistan. Let’s remember that Zalmay Khalilzad was Bush’s chief adviser on Afghanistan at the time, and he brought in one of his cronies who once worked for the Unocal oil company, Hamid Karzai, to be president of Afghanistan. And, presto, we had a country.
The problem soon became very obvious to the West that its arrangement didn’t really extend beyond Kabul and Kandahar, the two big cities in the south, during the daytime. Elsewhere, in the west of the country, pro-Iranian forces were in control. And in the north, the former Soviet republics, still heavily under Moscow’s influence, were in control.
So what were they going to do with this country? The answer is nothing.
Does the US have any support within Afghanistan?
I’ve argued that there’s no doubt quite a number of Afghans were relieved to have the Taliban removed — quite a few thought, well, at least now we’ll have some peace and safety, and maybe some food to eat. This was also the view of quite a few liberal commentators inside Pakistan.
Some of us argued with them, saying that the Taliban might have been removed, but what would happen now? We warned them that as far as the social infrastructure was concerned, it wasn’t going to change for the majority of Afghans.
That’s exactly what has happened in these six years. What people underestimate is that imperial occupations under neoliberalism reflect the priorities of the new capitalist order, where they’re privatising everything in their own countries. So what happened was that money did pour in — and this money was used by Hamid Karzai and his cronies to construct an elite in Afghanistan.
In the heart of Kabul, on prime land that they took by land-grabbing, the elite were and are building large villas protected by NATO troops in front of the entire population of the city and country.
It costs about $5000 or $6000 to build a cheap house for a family of five or six, but they didn’t do that. They spent millions of dollars constructing large villas. God knows why, since they need a permanent NATO guard to live in one of those villas. And they’ll be taken away from them once the Western armies withdraw.
That created a big crisis, and coupled with it was the fact that a trigger-happy US military embarked on killing innocents.
Wherever the US heard gunfire, they would drop bombs. Someone should have told them that Afghanistan is a tribal society, a culture where people fire guns to celebrate — whether it’s weddings or the birth of a child, they just run out and fire guns in the air. You’d have thought Americans would have been more sympathetic to this, given the gun culture in the US, but somehow they didn’t appreciate it in Afghanistan.
So the US started bombing people. Reports came of a wedding ceremony in the US came and bombed the hell out of it. Casualties: 90 or 100 killed, men, women and children. And this multiplied.
How has the Taliban been able to make a resurgence?
The Taliban began to regroup, rearm and fight, and it scored a few successes. What also began to happen simultaneously is that there were people who were happy to see them back — since no one else was defending them.
So they began to treat the Taliban as an umbrella organisation and tell them what was going on. Lots of people supposedly working with the US-NATO occupying authorities would go tell the Taliban where the troops were going. Classic guerrilla warfare operations began, and the US responded with more bombing raids. So there’s a vicious circle in operation.
If you look at the newspapers over the last year and do a survey of all the reports where there were 60 Taliban were killed, 80 Taliban killed, 90 Taliban killed, you add it up and they’ve already killed thousands of supposed “Taliban” militia members — and the total force was supposed to be about 10,000.
In other words, if you believe these reports, then they’ve wiped out three-quarters of the Taliban organisation, which is far from the truth. But because the US is embarrassed at having killed civilians, it has to say this.
You have a situation in the country where Hamid Karzai’s brother, Wali Ahmed Karzai, is well known as the largest heroin and arms smuggler in the region. He’s become that because his brother runs the country.
Here’s this guy who was happy running an Afghan restaurant in Baltimore and selling high-priced food to the students at Johns Hopkins [University] — and he’s now second-in-command in the country and making a fortune — a “killing”, let’s say.
Symbolically, this has been a total disaster. So, far from being a “good war”, Afghanistan is turning out to be a nasty, unpleasant war, and there’s no way the US or other Western forces are going to be able to stay there for too long.
What are the regional powers hoping to get as an outcome in Afghanistan?
The Pakistani military is hoping that the West will withdraw and some sort of coalition government will be cobbled together between Karzai and chunks of the Taliban.
This is worth stressing. Backed by the West, the Karzai regime, even as we speak, is in serious negotiations with the Taliban. So the Taliban, which was demonised as the worst force that ever existed in the world, is now backed by the West — as long as they do a deal with Karzai.
The Taliban’s first response to Karzai’s offers was to say, “We won’t even discuss this with you unless all foreign troops are withdrawn from the country”. To which Karzai said, “That’s not possible”. He thinks it’s not possible because without foreign troops, he wouldn’t last 48 hours.
But as far as the Pakistani military is concerned, they know that they won’t be able to pull off a deal between the Taliban and Karzai as long as foreign troops are in the region. The military imagines that once Western troops are out, it can grab the country again, through the Taliban and Karzai.
But I think this possibility is excluded now, because NATO made a mess of the occupation, and because in these last six years, regional autonomy has set in as a major factor in the country. Afghanistan was always a tribal confederation, but it’s now even more confederated in character.
And the Iranians and Russians are not going to permit a US-backed Taliban takeover of the country. So Pakistan’s military leaders can hope to rule in one part of Afghanistan, but they won’t be able to rule the whole country.
I’ve been arguing in Pakistan and elsewhere for the total and immediate withdrawal of all major troops and, simultaneously, the convocation of a peace conference by the regional powers involved in Afghanistan — which means Pakistan, Iran, Russia and India, which is the biggest power of all — to set up a national government following Western troop withdrawal and provide a breathing space for this country to rest and hold elections for a constituent assembly in two or three years’ time.
In the meantime, these regional powers will guarantee no fighting and no civil war. People should be sympathetic to such a notion, because Afghanistan has been at war virtually nonstop since 1979. It’s a horrible business taking place in that country.
It’s unlikely that the Americans or Pakistanis would agree to this, in which case the situation will go from bad to worse, in my opinion.
So to sum up the situation in Afghanistan, it’s a total
mess. The US can never win that war, and the main reason they can never win is
that Afghans don’t like being occupied. Afghans kicked out the British in the
19th century, the Russians in the 20th Century, and now they’re fighting again
against the US and its NATO allies.
While Obama's election may indicate a shift in U.S. foreign policy (and hopefully a rejection of the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war), Obama has prescribed more military operations in Afghanistan.
For more than a year, Obama has argued for redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. He has called Afghanistan the "central front in the War on Terror" and has even threatened to bomb Pakistan should there be evidence that Afghan warlords are hiding there and the Pakistani government isn't "doing enough" about it. (On this last point, Bush has already bombed Pakistan several times over the last few months, prompting the Pakistani government to publicly rebuke the U.S. for violating its sovereignty.)
While Obama's rhetoric in arguing for increased involvement in Afghanistan makes some sense — he claims that Bush has been so involved with Iraq that the al-Qaeda leaders who allegedly orchestrated the September 11 attacks are still at large — his proposed methodology doesn't.
Instead of scaling up an already disastrous war, the United States could change course in a way that would ultimately do a lot more to ensure the world's safety. Such measures should include:
If the idea of immediately stopping all military operations in Afghanistan sounds radical, it shouldn't. No less than President Hamid Karzai pleaded for an end to the bombings immediately after the U.S. election, as yet another wedding party fell victim to bombs from the sky.
For the
sake of all us, Afghan and American, let's hope President Barack Obama heeds
his call.