Descent into Chaos
Ahmed Rashid has an excellent reputation as a journalist over here, writing for liberal dailies in Pakistan, and with reports appearing in the Daily Telegraph and NYT, although he also has the negatives associated with gaining a reputation as a pundit, namely, a website, to start with. Nevertheless, his latest book (although somewhat dated by the speed of fast moving events) charts the melancholy progress of events in Afghanistan from 2003 to early 2008 in more detail than most. Although marred by self-serving comments and the inveterate name-dropping ("my friend Hamid Karzai") that is the problem with so many of our journalists, he voices many of the themes that are common to the liberal middle-class of South Asians that so many of us belong to. Some of the themes he echoes is the curious fondness of the US establishment for our less-than-liberal military elites and miscellaneous conservatives from whom we seek liberation ourselves.
The real target of Rashid’s blistering critique is the Bush administration, and particularly Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld insisted on bringing Afghanistan’s notorious warlords into the government. He blocked a “Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan. He opposed expanding the multinational International Security Assistance Force to work beyond Kabul because, he claimed, Europeans did not want to. “A lie,” says Rashid, a journalist who has also been a participant in some of the events he writes about. And the litany goes on throughout this timely book.
Who are these mysterious, shadowy warlords? Rashid had already described many of them in his previous book on the Taliban in 2000 (he was warning about them well before 9/11). He notes Abdul Sayyaf, one of the first warlords on the US payroll after 9/11, while being at the same time godfather to the notorious Abdurajak Janjalani whose outfit Abu Sayyaf in the Phillippines took its name from its mentor, and both to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, as well as to the murderers of Ahmed Shah Massoud. The covert dealings that brought "Marshal" Fahim to power after 9/11 and the murder of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the activities of Generals Atta and Dostum, and possibly most significantly, the active aid given to the horrific regime of Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan. He chronicles, somewhat painfully and laboriously, the turns and twists of the now late and unlamented Musharraf regime in running with the Islamists and collecting billions of dollars of aid from the US - a significant proportion of which ended in the hands of the military. Indeed, a major part of his book expounds on how the army in Pakistan is now woven into the web of society with real estate deals and running supermarkets. India, too, with its active interference in Afghanistan is not spared, as are Russian and other Central Asian republics links dissected in detail. Indeed, the reviewer of the book in the NYT criticises, oddly,
It is a well-written, encyclopedic history of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is much too long; any impact the book might have is diluted by an avalanche of details and names
but an avalanche of details and names should possibly have been the first lesson that was needed before stepping into the Afghan morass. After criticising, Rashid tries to exonerate Zalmay Khalilzad and Lakhdar Brahimi but in view of the present mess in Afghanistan he is compelled to apportion to them a large part of the blame for the failure of the 2003 Constitutional Loya Jirga.
The US was needed in Afghanistan and Pakistan in many ways. Unfortunately, by taking the option of dealing with warlords and military leaders, the involvement has gone down the wrong path. And now, it seems, the US has little option except to withdraw, at the least from Afghanistan.
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References -
Herschel Smith has a pretty good explanation about why we're losing in Afghanistan. NATO's lack of force projection, lack of a coherent strategy and lack of willing troops has caused a crisis of confidence.
--"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton
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)Why should we withdraw? We're sustaining very light losses (the Taliban has a deliberate policy of targeting 'coalition' not US troops), and we are slaughtering them easily when they attack en masse. The suicide bombing strategy is intensely unpopular with Afghans--far more so than among the relatively passive and docile Arabs--and the Taliban, if not for the safe havens of Pakistan, would be extinct by now. Unlike Iraq, there is almost zero political pressure to withdraw; even Obama has hinted at escalation and incursions into Pakistan. I am genuinely baffled by your assertion.
Rumsfeld's strategy of alliance with the warlords may have been immoral and self-defeating from the standpoint of 'nation-building', but it certainly sets the stage for one of Senator McCain's 'hundred-year' occupations.
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)Because the place is sinking into a deep morass.
There are very few benefits accruing to the Afghan people with current US strategy in place. Even less so for NATO.
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| parent )From a military standpoint, we don't care. As long as we have secure bases there we can threaten both Pakistan and Iran, as well as counter-balance a newly aggressive Russia. Our losses are little more than we suffer in military training accidents and crashes.
As for 'morass', Afghanistan has never been an actual country as much as a permanent morass. As long as we don't sink in too deep, again, who cares?
The Afghans dug this hole for themselves by becoming a nest of Barbary-style pirates which hosted the worst military attack on the mainland US in its history. Our retaliation has been relatively benign--I'd have bombed the country back to the stone age (literally). I still fail to see any actual pressure for US withdrawal.
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| parent )Afghanistan was a relatively stable country for many decades. The FATA Pashtuns were even, hard to believe, under the influence of Gandhi for the best part of the past century, under the leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the most pacifist of gandhi's disciples.
The coming of communism in Afghanistan in the 1970s was no more than the general rising of an educated leftwing middle class seeking to overturn an aristocratic hierarchy (in a manner similar to recent events in Nepal), which could have played out, as so much ultraleftwingery, without the necessity for the complete devastation of a land and its people over 2 decades.
As for Barbary-style pirates, well, I'm sure you are aware of the process of development of the pirates under US tutelage and payment. I'm sure the US could have bombed the country back into the stone age (if it hasn't already), and I'm sure that this would have not particularly concerned many. However, the part of the world that lives in this area does face blowback from the response to those events. Mr Rashid details the blowback much more graphically than I have space here for.
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| parent )I personally believe that opium should be legalized. However, it is not legal. And Afghanistan has served as its chief illegal source for most of the past century. If for no other reason, it needed to be quarantined and its crops either purchased legally by pharmaceuticals or eradicated. The fact that Afghanistan's narco-terror tribes were part of the Taliban alliance adds all the more weight to that point of view.
'Stable for decades'? Hardly an endorsement for any supposed nation. The fact is, Afghanistan was only cobbled together under a very shaky kingship in the 19th century, and has spent almost all of the time since in a state of constant civil war. Its tribes were the source of terror and misery in the Punjab for half a millenium, as you well know. For the past two they were used by the Russians to attack the British Raj.
I know we Americans seem naive and ill-educated to you, but a few of us can read--and have long memories.
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| parent )or naive in my experience.
I certainly do consider the US the most highly educated and well-informed populations on the planet today - as I have repeatedly argued with Jordan in the past. With its great liberal universities, think tanks and research institutions, not to speak of internet forums such as this one, any other opinion would be silly.
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| parent )My to K's response seemed to have got messed up - is this a formatting issue? What did I do wrong?
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| parent )close your {quote} tags properly. Every {quote} has to be followed by a {/quote} at the end of the paragraph.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )Thanks for correcting!
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| parent )I use the curly brackets instead of the square brackets so it doesn't get interpreted in the comment. Keep using the square brackets, just make sure to close the tags.
--I blame it all on the Internet
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| parent )And this concept of "shaky kingship" is a myth, created and perpetuated by British historiography of the nineteenth century. The British directly interfered with the reign of Dost Mohammad, replacing him with Shah Shuja, to create a pretext for the British invasion of the Punjab.
It is true to say that there have been tribes in Afghanistan with internecine feuds since the dawn of history, but that was no more a state of civil war than the native Americans in North America as described by Europeans. From the Encyclopedia Iranica
There have been waves of Central Asian peoples immigrating into India for several millennia. But that was a part of normal human history of past ages - immigration restrictions did not develop until the 19th century.
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| parent )I should have said 'internecine'. As you can see from your date of 1838, however, I am correct about the founding of the Afghan kingdom. As well as the term 'occasionally tenuous'. Your sources appear to support every single one of my contentions, so I really don't know what we're arguing about here.
Instead of arguing, may I ask if you have read my reply to your 'Fu Manchu' comment? Any interest in my offer?
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| parent )I really don't see why the Afghan kingdom should be regarded as occasionally tenuous. Amir Abdur Rehman in the 19th century had as much a grip on the country as NATO has today.
Be that as it may. The point I'm making is that seeing as NATO policy is to enable warlords to rule the country as they see fit, what is the point in NATO being there at all? To me, the idea must involve something along the lines of creating Afghanistan that has no home for militants to launch attacks against Western targets, or more specifically NATO countries. If that is indeed the case then there needs to be a coherent plan to achieve this. Randomly killing civilians doesn't seem to be the way to go.
If I have a concern about knowledge of Americans about the Afghan theatre, it is not that people in the US are naive and ill-informed. The information is all out there. The problem is the natural one of what is important and hits news cycles. I would expect the possible deaths of innocent civilian Afghan women and children to be fairly low down the list of priorities of news items because citizens of NATO countries naturally do not, I am sure, expect that NATO deliberately targets and kills civilians as policy - and therefore do not expect news of this kind as there exists a system by which this does not happen. Here, and in Pakistan however, these news do make headlines and talking points and give credence to the militant point of view.
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| parent )The US waged its first war against the Barbary Pirates. Unless you are using them as some extended metaphor for the Taliban, how on earth could you consider the USA responsible for them? The Americans backed Masood, not Mullah Omar. It was the Pakistanis who nurtured the Taliban.
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| parent )nurtured by the US. Wrong typography in my case. I was indeed using the pirates as a metaphor for the Taliban.
I really meant the US support for Rabbani, Hikmatyar, Sayyaf et al directly in the 1980s as well as indirectly via Zia ul Haq.
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| parent )I have long argued the Pashtun should have been treated as a separate entity from both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistan's government, for all practical purposes, is useless in its current configuration and makeup: it is Panjabi with a few Sindhi. The Others, Pashtun, Mujahiri, Baluchi and the rest, especially in the north of the country, have nothing to say about the country, because they cannot say it in Urdu or English.
Pakistan forgot Jinnah, but then, Jinnah condescended to his ethnic minorities, too, and forced Urdu upon Pakistan. Baba Jinnah could have been the Muslim bookend to Gandhi's Hindu satyagraha, but he chose the divisive politics of religion over the wisdom of tolerance and forbearance.
If the Americans backed warlords, and they did, stupidly, it was the Pakistani government who created them, allowed them to grow, and continues to do nothing against them. For Pakistan has always hoped to use Afghanistan as a lever, a vast back yard into which they can expand their influence. Now they play games, attacking Indian interests in Kabul. It will not do. Pakistan must be given a few vigorous slaps, diplomatically. I would threaten to isolate Pakistan, declare it a rogue state, a sponsor of terror. Let Karachi turn to the tender mercies of the Chinese, with whom they have long had problems: China knows Pakistan harbors Uighur terrorists. We are not alone in believing Pakistan is a sponsor of terror: India and China know the score, and something must be done.
The USA, the Chinese should back the formation of a true Pashtun state. The raison d'être for the Taliban would be undercut, removing the bark from the tree and it would die in short order. These warlords would get their just desserts, Pakistan and Afghanistan would be freed from all sorts of troublesome entanglements. The Pashtuns would be obliged to act like the nation they have always wanted to be, and I believe they would change their tune.
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)Ethnically united peoples are divided all over the world - in political terms, I mean.
While the Afghans have their own intra-ethnic problems, I'm not sure making ethnically or linguistically "pure" states necessarily is the answer to these problems.
The Taliban, after all, are not what you or I would call the democratic majority, even among the Pashtuns.
Politics is messy. I do not support our traditional position of accentuating the rivalry between the Tajik and Panjsheri (traditionally pro-Indian) over the Pashtun (traditionally anti-Indian). These politics are relics of a past age of conflict, helped along by the British and now by NATO. If the US is to stand for anything at all, it must stand up for a modern liberal democracy, and not pander to obscurantism. Or so I think, anyway.
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| parent )A new model is emerging, and I'm not sure what to call it. In tribal societies, loyalties aren't absolute anyway. Me against my brother, my brother and I against our father, our family against the clan, our clan against our rival clan....
The Taliban is forcing its way into every corner of Pashtun society. It can't last for very long if we start taking out the Taliban commanders. The best and cruelest route to this goal is to sow dissent among the leaders. As they coalesce, consider the biological metaphor of the boil or carbuncle. Treat a boil improperly and it becomes an even more serious problem. Septicemia can kill in a matter of days.
There are no neat dividing lines. The model I propose considers democracy as we understand it to be a fatally flawed proposition. True democracy protects the minority, the stranger, those with whom we disagree, and it must begin at ground level.
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| parent )