The gravest threat

[sonicboom]

The gravest threat
Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Ashraf Jehangir Qazi The writer is Pakistan’s former envoy to the US and India.

Have we entered the endgame in Afghanistan? Not if we take into account Lisbon’s NATO-Afghanistan Joint Declaration, the National Intelligence Estimates on Afghanistan and Pakistan, and now Obama’s AfPak Strategy Review. It is in fact the beginning of the “Long War,” insisted upon by Gen Petraeus. This will increasingly involve military operations in most of the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan; the expansion and intensification of drone attacks the collateral civilian toll of which is never open to verification; night raids and assassinations by CIA special operations beyond the border regions into urban areas covering much of the country; the increased infiltration of the Taliban nexus from North Waziristan into the so-called “Greater Paktika” area in Afghanistan and into the major urban centres of Pakistan.

Retaliatory suicide bombings against military and civilian (including police) targets in Pakistan will also increase. All this human tragedy and destruction of civil society will be accompanied by the relentless US/NATO chorus of “Pakistan must do more” to ensure the “success” of their unworkable war led strategy for “durable” peace.

Over 60 per cent of the US public opposes the war in Afghanistan. Over 80 per cent of Afghan opinion wants an immediate start to negotiations with the Taliban to bring an end to the hell of an American war in their country. The devastating social, economic and political impact of the war in Afghanistan is plain to see. Apparently, there are less than a hundred Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and allegedly their structures have already been seriously weakened in Pakistan. The Al-Qaeda “threat,” however, lies more in the mind and will remain so as long as significant, if uncounted, numbers of civilians continue to be victims of a cruel, humiliating and utterly illegal war fought in the name of every value it violates, such as peace, security, stability, development, democracy, rule of law and human rights.

Civilian lives and opinion count for nothing in state-of-the-art strategies for objectives that are denied, such as control over access to resources. These strategies are uniformly premised on lethal “kinetic” surges designed to “protect civilians” and “create the space” in which to “win hearts and minds.” Given what actually happens, even George Orwell would be impressed with this version of Newspeak. Gen Petraeus presents his counterinsurgency as clearing an area, holding it, protecting the population, building service-delivering administrative infrastructures, and a phased, conditions-bound transitioning of responsibilities to Afghan authorities. All this is to be accomplished through outsmarting, outlasting and out-killing the Taliban, however many civilians are outraged.

The only problem is the Taliban—for all their egregious and criminal excesses—are an indigenous phenomenon that (a) needs to be dealt with through indigenous political, social and administrative processes appropriately assisted by the regional and international community, and (b) represents a major ethnic community that feels politically excluded and attributes its grievances to the military occupation of their country by a foreign power. Afghans, including the Pakhtun, do not support Al-Qaeda and will not support the return of an unreconstructed Taliban in an Afghanistan free of foreign military occupation and political tutelage.

Indefinitely extended foreign military occupation and political tutelage, as envisaged by the Obama/Petraeus strategy, will only reinforce corrupt client elites and abort any political process towards compromise, reconciliation and stability. The Taliban cannot be eliminated from the fabric of Afghan political society by foreign military force or by political, security and development strategies that rely on foreign force. But they can be moderated or isolated by an inclusive Afghan political process. The current US strategy is completely inconsistent with that prospect.

The American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have caused deaths, displacement, trauma and morbidity on a massive scale; disintegration of governance institutions; unimaginable corruption; destruction of basic service structures; a contagion of crime, violence, extremism and ethnic-cleansing; the elimination of urgently needed reforms; and the moral, political, economic, cultural and educational degeneration of society in general. Obama says he is not into nation-building. The record, in fact, suggests that he is much more into destroying Muslim states.

How many in Pakistan will agree with Obama’s statement that “we believe our renewed bilateral partnership is helping to promote stability in Pakistan”? Or that Washington “clearly communicates US commitment to a long-term relationship that is supportive of Pakistan’s interests”? How many Pakistanis believe that Obama’s promise “not to disengage from the region as we have done in the past” to be either credible or reassuring for the people of the region? Are US policies in the region really reassuring? Including the United States’ unstinted support for Israeli war crimes against the Palestinians; abandonment of a Middle East peace process; attempts to diplomatically isolate Iran accompanied by regular threats of a military option against it; consistent preference for dependent regional regimes willing to sell out national interests over independent regimes committed to protecting them; the humanitarian “fruits” of its illegal war of choice against the people of Iraq; the “seeds” it is planting in the AfPak region; the profiling of Muslims as individuals and as a world community; its affirmation of a strategic regional alliance, including nuclear cooperation with India and Israel?

Ahmed Rashid, one of the most eminent authorities on AfPak developments, has recently suggested a ten-step way out of Afghanistan for the US, in an important article published in The New York Review of Books. It involves the release of Taliban prisoners; NATO guarantees of freedom of movement for Taliban peace negotiators; inclusion of Iran in the peace process; Taliban confidence-building measures; US willingness to negotiate directly with the Taliban; a UN resolution for Kabul and the Taliban to negotiate an end to the conflict accompanied by negotiations among Afghanistan’s neighbours to end interference in its affairs; India and Pakistan to end their zero-sum games against each other in Afghanistan; an enabling settlement of the Balochistan problem in Pakistan, including the termination of safe havens for Baloch dissidents in Afghanistan; the exit of Taliban leaders from Pakistan within a year, along with the start of Pakistan military operations in North Waziristan to dismantle al Qaeda and Taliban resistance/terror infrastructures; and developing an Afghan consensus in support of talks with the Taliban.

There is much that one can readily agree with in this prescription. But convincing the US, Afghanistan and its neighbours to implement some of the specifically recommended measures will be a challenge. Fitting an Afghan settlement process into the respective dynamics of India-Pakistan and US-Iran relations will be another. The imperatives and policy-distorting impact of the 2012 US presidential election campaign (which is already underway) will also constrain the process.

The absence of a ceasefire and an end date for US troop withdrawals offers no incentive for the Taliban who will prefer to temporarily reduce their profile rather than negotiate from a significantly weakened position. An indefinite US military presence will always save them from political extinction. A resolution of the Balochistan problem is essential for Pakistan’s future. But tying it to an Afghan settlement can complicate matters. India-Pakistan relations are a much bigger issue than Afghanistan and cannot be approached effectively through an Afghan prism. It is better to set the framework for an Afghan settlement through an India-Pakistan normalisation process.

In the absence of improving India-Pakistan relations the recommendation to launch a military assault on North Waziristan and elsewhere will make little sense to strategic policymakers in Pakistan. No matter how displeased Americans may be, our decision-makers will correctly calculate that they will always refrain from destabilising and alienating the power structure in Pakistan for fear it will bring about a nightmare scenario for US policy objectives in the region.

But if domestic reform and normalisation with India can get underway, feasible options for dismantling extremist infrastructures in Pakistan will increase. Even with these reservations, Ahmed Rashid’s analysis and recommendations deserve a thorough discussion. The fact remains that, with all the shortcomings of Pakistan’s policies, the gravest threat to peace and stability in the AfPak region stems from the implacable short-sightedness of US long-term policies.

Email: ashrafjqazi@yahoo.com


The gravest threat