US shouldn’t get bogged down in Afghanistan

By S.P.SETH

Even as Pakistan grapples with its own Taliban insurgency (the young 28-year old Mehsud, the new leader, is expected to be even more blood-thirsty than his recently killed predecessor), much of the world is awaiting the final outcome in Afghanistan.

The elections, of course, are important but they are not going to really solve Afghanistan’s intractable problems. By holding elections, the international force there is sending a message to the Taliban.

Which is that, despite the Taliban’s efforts to disrupt and destroy, the United States and its allies are determined to stay the course and make Afghanistan a functioning state under a democratic system—however imperfect.

The Taliban, on the other hand, are doing their utmost to create anarchy. They are not interested, at the present time, to capture power. Their objective is to create fear and lawlessness and thus destroy people’s confidence in the regime and the evolving new system.

Without a sense of security in the country, the Afghan government, propped up by external forces, lacks credibility. And elections lack sufficient legitimacy going by the reports of electoral fraud, and very low turnout, particularly in the Pashtun-populated southern and eastern region of the country.

The Pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. President Karzai is one of them. But Karzai clan is steeped deep in corruption and unholy political alliances with unsavory warlords.

Afghanistan, at times, looks like a lost cause.

President Barack Obama has made Afghanistan his project. He has described Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” rather than a “war of choice”.

As he has explained, “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”

It is true that Taliban and al-Qaeda are a serious terrorist threat. But are they such a serious threat requiring the United States to commit large scale armed operations over an extended period of time lasting ten and even more years of military entanglement in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

If that is the case, will the United States and its allies have the patience and the popular support to dig in for that long? Even if they do, what are their plans for Afghanistan’s future, if they do last that long?

It is not just the stamina and staying power of the US-led international force that is a question mark. It is also whether they can afford (in economic terms) a long war in far away region, in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s Depression.

And is it worth bleeding white and, in the process, losing the United States’ position as the world’s primary superpower?

China has already emerged as a challenger in the midst of Bush’s war on terror. And to be bogged down now in Afghanistan (with Iraq still in intensive care) will seriously damage the United States’ global status.

What it means is that terrorism need not become the primary focus of US strategy. It should be dealt with in a phased manner, without getting bogged down in Afghanistan through a preponderant military presence in that country, especially when it is probably part of the problem rather its solution.

Pakistan’s Nuclear Facilities Targeted

By S.P.SETH

There are some disturbing reports that the Taliban and al-Qaeda attacked Pakistan’s nuclear weapons bases in the past two years. A recently published British House of Commons foreign affairs select committee report has suggested that al-Qaeda, which has shifted its strategic focus to Pakistan, might seek to gain access to Islamabad’s nuclear weapons.

At about the same time, some academics have actually identified the sites that were attacked. In his paper published by the US West Point Military Academy, Professor Shaun Gregory, Director of Pakistan Security Research Unit at Bradford University, has detailed three attacks. And he fears that there might be more in the future.

Dr Anupam Srivasava, Director at the Centre for International Trade and Security at Georgia University, believes that there have been more than three attacks on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities. In one such attack on Wah, one of Pakistan’s main nuclear assembly plants, 63 people were killed, though the target at the time was referred to as a conventional weapons factory.

If these reports are true (and they come from multiple sources), Pakistan is truly becoming the focal point of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity.

Hillary Clinton, US secretary of State, also recently highlighted the danger of nuclear weapons in Pakistan falling into the hands of these elements.

Such danger arises because the Pakistani state is increasingly being corroded from within. President Asif Ali Zardari recently said, “We are not a failed state yet but we may become one in ten years if we don’t receive international support to combat the Taliban threat.”

His contention is that, “…we have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive economy. What are we supposed to do?”

It is an extraordinary public statement from Pakistan’s president, even though its context was to demand more funds from the United States and other rich countries.

The point, though, is that Pakistan received about $12 billion from the United States under former president Bush. But there is no accounting of where all that money has gone.

The reports suggest that 80 per cent of $12 billion went to the army. And the army (Pakistan’s military establishment which has ruled the country directly or indirectly for all these years) spent much of it buying weapons for use against India. Again, there is no accounting.

In other words, even with funds coming from the United States and elsewhere as under the Bush administration, there is no action plan about how the money will be spent. Ther are no plans to revamp the country’s economy, create jobs, provide education and create health clinics for the people.

Even faced with the most dire existential crisis, Pakistan’s establishment still sees India as its major security threat.

In a recent article, “Pakistan on the Brink”, in the New York Review of Books, Pakistan’s veteran journalist, Ahmed Rashid, has succinctly summed up Pakistan’s national security goals, as defined by the army.

According to him, “Currently it has two strategic interests. First, it seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy.

Second, the army supports the Afghan Taliaban as a hedge against US withdrawal from Afghanistan and also against Indian influence in Kabul...”

With its strategic priorities focused on India: “Containing the domestic jihadi threat has been a tactical rather than a strategic matter for the army.”

Not surprisingly then, “ there have been bouts of fighting with the militants and also peace deals with them; and these have been interspersed with politics of jailing them and freeing them---all part of a complex and duplicitous game.”

No wonder Pakistan is facing an existential crisis. And no wonder that alarms are being raised about the danger of its nuclear weapons falling into the Taliban and al-Qaeda hands!

Pakistan and Palestine

By S.P.SETH

The alleged killing of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban tribal leader, has created rejoicing in the Pakistani establishment. And it has equally pleased the United States. Mehsud had united some fragmented Taliban groups, and created them into a force to be reckoned with.

He is said to have been the leading hand behind the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. And he also led his followers to unleash a reign of terror in the Swat valley, thus succeeding in creating a virtual state under the Taliban rule.

His death (from an American drone attack), if confirmed, is, therefore, a cause celebration. It will certainly create disarray among his followers. And there are reports that some of his lieutenants, aspiring to leadership, have started fighting among themselves.

Whether this will weaken the Taliban movement is too early to say.

The problem with such militant movements (like the Taliban and al- Qaeda) is that they derive their sanctity from some fundamental beliefs and religious interpretations, however erroneous. They believe that the God is on their side.

Therefore, despite some temporary setbacks here and there (like Mehsud’s reported death), they fervently believe that the divine nature of their cause is bound to prevail sooner or later.

However, the ferocity of the Taliban cause is frightening Pakistan’s middle and professional classes. The creeping Talibanization of the country is not only threatening their comfortable way of life, but is also becoming physically dangerous. This was dramatized with a string of recent bombing incidents in and around Lahore, regarded as the cultural capital of Pakistan.

These people (from the middle classes) would like to seize the initiative away from the Islamic militants. But they lack credibility because they are regarded as part of the country’s corrupt and venal establishment.

There is one issue where they can seize the initiative. And this is the question of Palestine where, across the board, (irrespective of class, sect and status, as is the case all over the Muslim world) people want to see justice done to the Palestinians.

But Pakistan’s middle class leadership (as elsewhere in the Islamic world) finds itself helpless because of the support for Israel from the Western world. And they are increasingly becoming irrelevant and marginalized by the Islamic militants, with the Taliban seemingly emerging as the champion of their religion and people against powerful forces.

The question is: what is it that makes Israel keep on using the bludgeon in Gaza and West Bank, whenever they feel like? The answer might lie in the psychology of the Israeli state. A letter recently published in the Guardian newspaper about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, signed by more than 300 British academics, put it this way:

“The massacres in Gaza are the latest phase of a war that Israel has been waging against the people of Palestine for more than 60 years. The goal of this war has never changed: to use overwhelming military power to eradicate the Palestinians as a political force, one capable of resisting Israel’s ongoing appropriation of their land and resources.”

The letter goes on, “Israel’s war against the Palestinians has turned Gaza and the West Bank into a pair of gigantic political prisons…”

Israel was created largely as a safe haven for European Jews who had continually suffered horrendous persecution wherever they lived in Europe. They were also subject to discrimination in the United States, sometimes bordering on hysteria.

The holocaust under Hitler was its worst manifestation.

Even during World War 11, when Jews were dispatched to concentration and death camps under Hitler, the allied governments were indifferent to their plight. Indeed, those fleeing such persecution were often received with hostility and put in detention camps.

Not surprisingly then that the United States and Europe welcomed the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (anywhere but in their midst) to atone, as if, for having ignored their sufferings.

The idea of returning to their legendry original home, and the sense of belonging and security this engendered, was highly appealing to Jews all over the world.

The problem, though, was that the Palestinians who had lived in that land for whenever, weren’t considered worth consulting by all the external parties promoting the creation of a homeland for the Jews in their midst.

The Western countries, by now overwhelmed by the centuries’ old accumulative guilt of Jewish persecution, made more poignant by Hitler’s holocaust, found in the creation of Israel a convenient solution to an age-old dilemma.

The creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine had been the Zionist demand for many years. It was given some validity by the Balfour Declaration of 1917. Balfour was the British foreign secretary at the time.

What it all means is that the Jewish state of Israel was foisted on the Palestinian people. And it resulted in the expulsion of many of them (some forced out, while others felt unsafe) to constitute a Palestinian diaspora refusing to accept the loss of their Palestinian identity.

With its preponderant military power and the occupation of more Palestinian territory following the 1967 war, Israel had hoped to create a fait accompli which the Palestinians would have no option but to accept.

But it hasn’t worked out like that, even though Israel was able to break Arab solidarity by signing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.

Even the Oslo agreement of 1993, leading Yasser Arafat’s PLO to recognize the state of Israel, did not break the logjam. The building of more and more Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem to encircle and dominate the Palestinian territory, and thus effectively negate the prospect of a new state of Palestine, made any real progress virtually impossible.

At its core, the problem is with the psychology of the state of Israel. Because Israel was created in the midst of Arab opposition, it suffers from this deep sense of insecurity being surrounded by hostile Arab populations all around it.

And even with its preponderant military power and support from the United States and much of Europe, this sense of insecurity tends to surface all the time. Hence, Israel keeps making more and more demands on the Arabs and the world community to feel more secure, which is a never-ending process.

For instance, it wants Hamas to recognize Israel’s existence, among other things. But a similar recognition by the PLO under Yasser Arafat didn’t lead to any worthwhile progress towards a Palestinian statehood.

The Palestinians and the Arab world know for sure that the state of Israel is a fact of life, whether they like it or not. For Israel to nurse a perpetual sense of insecurity and to seek iron clad guarantees (non-existent in any situation) will only prolong its agony, and worse still, of the Palestinian people.

A strong power like Israel should work to win the goodwill of the Palestinian people by withdrawing to its pre-1967 borders. Which will immediately unleash all the possibilities inherent in the situation where both sides desperately need peace.

Only a spectacular initiative like this will eventually work. Only Israel can do this because it has taken away so much and can afford to be magnanimous.

In any case, nothing else is working and such an initiative might do the trick over a period of time.

Imagine how empowered the middle and professional classes in Pakistan and Islamic countries will feel to fight off the unrelenting propaganda of the Taliban and al-Qaeda which focuses, among other things, on the injustice of the Palestinian situation.

Pakistan is the Real Issue

By S.P.SETH

There is a growing feeling on the British and US sides that now is the time to start a dialogue with elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan that might be receptive to such approaches.

The argument is that the recent military offensive against the Taliban in the Helmand province has been a success that puts them on the defensive.

Which should encourage the “second-tier” local leaders to come out of the shadow of the “first-tier” leadership of Mullah Omar and his lieutenants.

Indeed, there is reportedly even talk of a military “exit strategy”, reflecting a level of optimism that doesn’t bear scrutiny.

First, this optimism is based on an assumption that the enhanced military action is tipping the balance against the Taliban.

But it doesn’t square with the high level of casualties they are inflicting on the British and American soldiers.

Indeed, the Taliban were able to simultaneously take the offensive in the eastern city of Khost, regarded as relatively stable.

The second assumption is that the Taliban are a divided lot. And these divisions can be usefully exploited, especially when they are under constant military pressure.

Obviously, the Taliban, like any human group, cannot be an entirely cohesive and united force. But most of them have a strong belief that their religion (and traditions and social codes) is under serious threat from Western onslaught.

These untenable and unsustainable assumptions aside, the entire war effort is geared to visualizing Afghanistan as a normal state with its usual apparatus of coercive and persuasive instrumentalities. The elections are part of that process. Another part is to raise and train enough police and military forces to enforce state power.

The point, though, is that in its recent history Afghanistan has never been a ‘normal’ state with established institutions. The only institution that commanded respect and loyalty (through economic largesse and in other ways) was monarchy.

Which also symbolized, to the extent possible, the concept of an Afghan nation as a conglomeration of different ethnic groups and tribes.

But that symbolic unity was shattered when Prince Daud, the king’s cousin, overthrew the monarch in early 70s and deprived the country of its only identifiable symbol of unity of sorts.

Prince Daud’s government, in turn, was overthrown by the communists. And when they got into trouble, the Soviets came in to save their ideological ally.

And we know what happened to the Soviet troops in Afghanistan as the Mujahideen warriors went after them. In these operations, Pakistan worked as a conduit for supplies, weapons, money and whatever else, supplied by the United States, Saudi Arabia and others.Which made Pakistan the frontline state to fight the old Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Soviet military disaster in Afghanistan further weakened the communist state. And the Soviet Union collapsed a couple of years after its withdrawal from Afghanistan, though that wasn’t the only factor in its demise.

While the US congratulated itself on winning the Cold war in Afghanistan through its proxies, the balance sheet was not as clear-cut.

Take the case of Pakistan. By increasingly depending on its military dictator, General Zia, to prosecute the Mujahideen struggle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Washington gave his military regime a blank cheque not only in financial terms but also in recasting Pakistan to conform to Islamic tenets of governance.

The Pakistani state, under him, increasingly acquired a religious fervor. Which even started to change the character of the Pakistani military, with its ranks and middle level officers increasingly falling under the sway of religious influence.

And this remains a problem to this day, with its Inter Service Intelligence Agency emerging as the Godfather of the various Mujahideen groups inside Afghanistan and creating new ones within Pakistan to start a proxy war in India’s Kashmir region.

After the Soviet military withdrawal, the Mujahideen groups in Afghanistan started a fratricidal war between themselves to capture power. With Pakistan’s help and blessings, the Taliban came on the top.

And even the US seemed quite satisfied with the outcome, as Washington’s interest and commitment to Afghanistan started to wane.

That was until the 9/11 in 2001 when Washington dramatically discovered (though it was known before) that the Taliban-ruled Afghanistan had become the international headquarters of al Qaeda under Osama bin Laden.

The irony of it all is that after the American military invasion of Afghanistan and the toppling of the Taliban regime, its leading figures, like Mullah Omar and others, took shelter in the border areas of Pakistan.

The Taliban leadership reportedly found shelter in the adjoining areas of Baluchistan, and the al Qaeda supremo, Osama bin Laden and his deputy Zawahri, ensconced themselves in Pakistan’s tribal belt, adjoining the North West Front Province.

Even as the Pakistani army was under attack from the Taliban and its associated elements, it started promoting and implementing the line of differentiating between the Taliban (as the home grown elements that should be cultivated) and the “foreign” al Qaeda elements that should be ostracized and kept at bay.

But this didn’t work as the Taliban and al Qaeda refused to be categorized to suit Pakistan’s convenience.

And this convenience has two main elements. First, Pakistan still wants to keep the Taliban structure intact. They strongly believe that the US cannot sustain its military operations in Afghanistan.

And its eventual withdrawal (sooner rather than later) would bring Taliban back into power in Afghanistan. Which will enable Pakistan to renew its close ties.

With the Taliban back in power, a friendly Afghanistan will give Pakistan its strategic depth against India—its classical enemy.

Any distraction from India tends to give Pakistani establishment its loss of national identity. Without India as an enemy, the Pakistani state would need to redefine the country in terms of serving its people.

And this new definition would also require a bold initiative to redefine relations with India in terms of peaceful co-existence and peaceful cooperation.

This is something to ponder about for the future.

But, in the present context, Pakistan’s continuing softness for the Taliban in Afghanistan has resulted in creating its Pakistani version that has been creeping on it to the point that it is now a serious threat to the Pakistani state.

Pakistan is now caught between the Afghan Taliban and its own home-grown version, both wanting the imposition of Sharia and governance based on their interpretation of Islam.

At the same time, there is an increasing fusion of class and ideology (Islam, as interpreted by the militants). The poor in Pakistan increasingly draw comfort from religion because the Pakistani state has not done much, if anything, to improve their lot. The militants promise them a better (as well as divine) future under their brand of Islamic governance.

Without much access to state education, for many poor people the Islamic madrasas have become their only venue for education. And a good number of their students have become active or sympathetic adherents of the Taliban and/or al Qaeda ideology.

The two are virtually interchangeable—the latter with greater emphasis on international jihad.

It is not to suggest that Pakistani masses are all hell bent on Jihad. Indeed, if electoral statistics are anything to go by (when elections have been held), the Islamic parties haven’t fared terribly well. Though, they have done a bit better recently than earlier times.

Which means that the extremist message is creating resonance, with poverty (class) and ideology (religious extremism) becoming a lethal mix.

At another level, even though Pakistan’s admittedly small middle class is worried about the country’s growing extremist and terrorist culture, they are unable to do much about it. They have been complicit in creating a disproportionate role for the military in the nation’s affairs, without meaning (always) to support military dictatorship. And this has been because of a constant obsession with a military threat from India.

In the skewed priorities of the Pakistani governing class (with military in the leading role), its national budget has neglected vital sectors of nation-building like education, health, job creation and so on.

No wonder, Pakistan’s poor are increasingly becoming the militants’ captive audience and sympathizers’, with a good proportion enlisted in the martyrs’ brigade.

This was graphically brought home the other day in a Four Corners program on the last November’s terrorist attack in Mumbai on the Australian television. The TV footage of the Mumbai carnage, with its visuals and audio (recording the Pakistani handlers’ instructions to the terrorists on the ground in Mumbai), clearly shows the rot that has gripped Pakistan.

Incidentally, the Lashkar-e-Toiba, that sent these terrorists to Mumbai, was created by the Pakistani military and its Inter Service Intelligence to fight its proxy war in Kashmir.

As things stand, any kind of tactical alliance with the so-called moderate, or “second-tier”, Taliban is an oxymoron.

Even though Afghanistan remains the focus of Western military operations, the fact is that it is Pakistan that needs most attention, but not of the military kind. And that attention requires a long-term strategy of redefining, restructuring and transforming Pakistani state and society into an active agent for the well-being of its own people.

Far too long, the United States has used Pakistan for its strategic goals in terms of Cold War and now the war against terror. Of course, Pakistan has actively sought such a role as a counterweight to India.

Unless this mindset is changed, Pakistan will always remain susceptible to such machinations of its governing military-dominated class, and the external forces interested only in pursuing their own interests at any given time.

In the meantime, the Talibanization of the country is maintaining its momentum, with dangerous consequences for the world.