Don’t start new wars. Use diplomacy in Pakistan-Brzezinski

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Brzezinski: Don’t start new wars. Use diplomacy in Pakistan

Zbig Brezezinski knows Pakistan and Afghanistan well. He used to go the Torkham border and address huge pep rallies urging the “believers” to wage war against the “non-believers” of the USSR. He extolled the virtues of the Pakhtuns and wanted them to defeat the USSR–which the Pakistan and the Afghans did. Can the US exit Afghanistan with honor?


"This failure to absorb the lessons of Empire is not only unjust to the victims; it leads us to repeat horrifying mistakes. Today, we are — with the Americans — using unmanned drones to bomb the Pakistan-Afghan borderland, as we did a few years ago in Iraq. Nobody here seems to remember that the British invented aerial counter-insurgency in this very spot — with disastrous consequences. In 1924, Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris bragged that all rebellion could be stopped with this tactic. We have shown them “what real bombing means, in casualties and damage: they know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed,” he said. Yet instead of “pacifying” them, it radically alienated the population and lead to an uprising. If we knew our history, we would not be running the same script and expecting a different ending. Huffington Post. Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent"

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan. As Barack Obama encourages Europeans to dispatch more NATO forces and John McCain says that U.S. troops could be sent in greater numbers, the idea that a bigger military footprint is needed has become something of a consensus in the political mainstream. Obama must avoid creating a backlash in neighboring Pakistan by heavy-handed U.S. military intervention there: David Kilcullen.

Dr. Brezezinski opposed the surge in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was his influence which stopped the surge in its tracks. Only 17000 US troops were sent to Afghanistan. Why the surge in Afghanistan is doomed to failure?



But Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski is not on board — though it’s not the first time President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser has cast a skeptic’s eye on the usefulness of dispatching great numbers of troops to the country. In an famous 1998 interview with France’s Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski admitted his own role in funding Afghanistan’s Mujahadeen in 1979, thereby “increasing the probability” that the Soviets would invade a tough, demoralizing, mountainous theater for combat. US faces ignominious defeat in Afghanistan because it ignored Pakistani advice

And it’s with a similar perspective that Brzezinski now doubts the that the answer to what ails Afghanistan is more troops. “I think we’re literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy,” Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. “When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets.“




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A Somber Warning on Afghanistan

We are running the risk of replicating the fate of the Soviets”- Dr. Brzezinski

By ALISON SMALE
Published: September 13, 2009


GENEVA — Western powers now in Afghanistan run the risk of suffering the fate of the Soviet Union there if they cannot halt the growing insurgency and an Afghan perception that they are foreign invaders, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former U.S. national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter.

In a speech opening a weekend gathering of military and foreign policy experts, Mr. Brzezinski, who was national security adviser when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, endorsed a British and German call, backed by France, for a new international conference on the country. He also set the tone for a weekend of somber assessments of the situation.

He noted that it took about 300 U.S. Special Forces — fighting with Northern Alliance troops — to overthrow Taliban rule after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Now, however, with about 100,000 U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan, those forces are increasingly perceived as foreign invaders, much as the Soviet troops were from the start, Mr. Brzezinski said.

For President Barack Obama, Afghanistan is the foreign policy issue that has “perhaps the greatest need for strategic review,” said Mr. Brzezinski, who met with Mr. Obama during the presidential campaign last year, and endorsed his candidacy but was not a formal adviser.

“We are running the risk of replicating — obviously unintentionally — the fate of the Soviets,” Mr. Brzezinski said in his speech Friday night.

The presence of so many foreign troops underpins an Afghan perception that the Americans and their allies are hostile invaders and “suggests transformation of the conflict is taking place,” he added.

A new international conference would help devise a more refined strategy, Mr. Brzezinski said in a brief interview Sunday. Using the military to support a development strategy would help prolong the European presence, he suggested — “our European friends are less likely to leave us in the lurch.”

If the United States is left alone in Afghanistan, Mr. Brzezinski said Friday night, “that would probably spell the end of the Alliance.”

A discussion on Afghanistan on Saturday featured, among others, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, the British foreign secretary’s special representative for Afghanistan and a former British ambassador to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

“All is not doom and gloom in Afghanistan,” Sir Sherard told the conference, the Global Strategic Review of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, a nongovernment organization. But “walking away would destroy everything that has been achieved.”

“The pullout option is not one that any government could responsibly follow,” he added, emphasizing, that America’s role was crucial. “While Obama remains committed, we remain committed.”

In calling last weekend for a conference on Afghanistan, Britain and Germany seemed anxious both to dispel the tension that has arisen surrounding the election there last month, in which foreign observers say there were clear incidents of fraud, and to shift emphasis away from the rising numbers of foreign troops.

Sir Sherard suggested the solution lay in devolving political power back to tribal elders who have traditionally held sway in Afghanistan, and funneling money for development through them.

With 68,000 troops from the United States expected by the end of the year and some 40,000 from other countries, numbers — and the rising number of deaths and casualties — are going to influence not only hostile Afghans but Western public support for the Afghan mission.

Speakers at the conference said that Americans are unlikely for long to support maintaining many times the number of troops from Britain, Germany and France, the three European allies who have sent the most soldiers to Afghanistan.

What is needed now is “the intelligent application of military force” alongside long-promised development strategies, Sir Sherard said, evoking what he called a dream that, by 2011, a truckload of pomegranates would be able to pass unhindered from Afghanistan through Pakistan and into India, that Western students could study Afghan archaeological ruins, and that posters in the Pashto language inviting Pashtuns to “come on over” from the Taliban would be tattered remnants — unneeded rather than unheeded — on the roadsides of southern Afghanistan.

“That,” he stressed, “is the dream.” A Somber Warning on Afghanistan By ALISON SMALE. NY Times. Published: September 13, 2009

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/wo...pe/14nato.html