Working out the Afghan riddle

By S.P.SETH

Stories about Afghanistan are flying thick and fast. One version has it that the Taliban are in retreat, following the US and allied forces’ offensive in the Kandahar province. The US surge of an extra 30,000 troops, it is said, is starting to make a difference. And that this is not the time for the participating countries to lose their nerve.

Another story doing the rounds suggests that the Quetta Shura (the Taliban high command led by Mullah Omar, believed to be sheltering in Quetta), is no longer in total command. The Taliban are weakened with the loss of a number of field commanders from American drone attacks.

The Haqqani group, on the other hand, is gaining strength, and there have reportedly been some contacts between them and the Karzai government with the help of some senior officers of the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

According to one account, “The Quetta Shura is still important but not as much as people thought two years ago. Its prestige and impact have waned and they are increasingly less important on the battlefield. Now the military threat comes from the Haqqanis.” Pakistan is believed to wield influence with them.

At the same time, it is also reported that the US and its NATO allies had “facilitated” contacts between senior Taliban members and the “highest levels of the Afghan government” by granting safe passage to Taliban leaders traveling to Kabul to meet the Karzai government. The Taliban, though, deny any contact with Kabul. Which shows how wild is the reportage on Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s ISI is also believed to be playing an intermediary role in some or all of the reported contacts between different groups. But Pakistan is not regarded as a benign political actor from the viewpoint of the US and its allies.

In his opinion column in the Sydney Morning Herald, its international editor, Peter Hartcher, worries about Pakistan’s role in “destabilizing Afghanistan”. He writes, “Its [Pakistan’s] powerful intelligence service, the ISI, sends fighters into Afghanistan and gives them sanctuary when they return…”

Greg Sheridan, foreign editor of the Australian, makes a similar point. He thinks that Pakistan is playing a malign role. According to Sheridan: it is not possible to run a successful counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan when “Pakistan is sheltering, aiding and supplying the Taliban.” This is, more or less, the general view between the US and its allies.

In the midst of all this, President Karzai announced the formation of a peace council to formally initiate talks with the Taliban to join his government. He has also said that informal contacts and talks with the Taliban had been going on for some time.

The Taliban have always maintained that any talks with the Karzai government would happen only after the Americans and their allied troops have left Afghanistan. Therefore, all this Karzai-government initiated flurry of a season of negotiations seems a bit over-drawn..

One assumption is that a weakened Taliban, from the US assaults in Kandahar and the loss of some of its commanders, might now be ready to seek a way out. Though the offensive is claimed to be working, even the optimists on the US side haven’t yet claimed a victory.

The point is that there has never been any doubt that the US has the military capability to defeat the Taliban insurgents in conventional warfare. That is why the Taliban have mostly avoided set piece battles with the US forces. They just tend to disappear when they come under heavy military pressure to regroup somewhere else to create another pressure point for the over-stretched allied forces.

And they have the advantage of disappearing among the civilian population. This is not to suggest that the Taliban are popular with the Afghan people. At the same time, many Afghans, if not the majority, hate US military occupation of their country. The Taliban resistance to this occupation by an alien force with their ‘abhorrent’ religion and culture does create empathy with them among many Afghans. Which is not to deny that they are also feared.

Ever since the Americans invaded and occupied Afghanistan, most Afghans have seen them as a transient force not likely to stay long in an inhospitable country like Afghanistan. The prolonged and continuing Taliban insurgency added weight to this belief.

The US is now engaged in a counter-insurgency strategy to deal with the Taliban. While keeping up the military pressure on the Taliban, this strategy aims at training and equipping a large Afghan national army to provide security to the civilian population, thus relieving them of the constant fear of revenge attacks by the Taliban. Which means that the Taliban will increasingly find it difficult to shelter and operate among the civilian population, thus making them highly vulnerable. This new national force will take over after the Americans have left.

The second element is to fund and assist with important development projects to provide infrastructure and employment, particularly at the local levels. Which also means developing connections with local tribal and community leaders.

All this sounds quite logical as a blueprint, but is difficult to execute at the ground level. The underlying problem is that Americans are not local actors and once they are gone (which inevitably they would), the country would revert to its tribal and religious mores. And the newly trained Afghan forces might become a lethal mix in a subsequent civil war.

But, in the meantime, even with the Americans around, Afghanistan is a virtual anarchy. The Karzai government has no popular credentials, and is regarded as a US creation. In other words, it is seen as an instrument of the occupying foreign forces. And the Karzai government hasn’t done much to establish its credentials.

Indeed. It is a family (and friends) oligarchy that exists to enrich their small clique. The New York Times’ reporter James Risen recently compiled for his newspaper a detailed profile of the Karzai dynasty with their business ventures including drug trade, shady business dealings, political patronage and so on.

Karzai knows that the US is not going be around for long to keep bolstering him up, as the Obama administration looks for an exit strategy. There is a tug-of-war of sorts between the highest levels of the administration and the top military brass ,as portrayed in Bob Woodward’s book, Obama’s Wars.

President Obama doesn’t want to be bogged down in Afghanistan and would like to get out of there as soon as possible, with a semblance of order and honor. The generals, though, want to dig in for prolonged action as generals always do, like they did in Vietnam with disastrous results.

Sensing American exit from Afghanistan in the not-too-distant future, Karzai is trying to play politics with all the actors in the Afghan scenario from the Taliban to local warlords. As Ronald Neumann, US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007, has reportedly said, “Karzai is convinced that we are going to abandon him. And what’s his answer? To create a web of loyalties and militia commanders and corrupt families all knitted together.” He adds, “This network is part of his survival mechanism.”

This is hardly a workable solution for a government or, for that matter, Afghanistan. What will emerge out of it? Only time will tell, because Afghanistan is not given to logical reasoning.

Note: This article was first published in Daily Times.

Is there a death wish in Pakistan?

By S.P.SETH

At times one wonders if Pakistani state has a death wish! To be more precise: if its ruling elites (of all descriptions) are vying with each other to bring down their country. The question arises from the unseemly and potentially destructive tug-of-war between its government (representing the parliament, in a sense) and the country’s highest judiciary, compounded further by the perceived threat of a military coup.

The judiciary apparently wants to reopen the corruption cases in Switzerland against Asif Ali Zardari (where he allegedly put away his ill gotten wealth in his earlier incarnation as a minister in his wife’s government). However, as President of the country, he has immunity under law from prosecution. But the court inclines to the view that it is for the judiciary to interpret the law.

Therefore, the issue basically is: which of the two institutions, (government symbolizing the parliament) or the Supreme Court, has the ultimate say in interpreting the country’s laws. Generally speaking, it is the parliament of a country that enacts the law. And as long as the law is straightforward, there is no problem. Because, the courts will simply go about their business of dispensing justice with reference to relevant laws.

The problem arises when the law is not so straightforward and might tend to go outside the spirit of the constitution. Which brings us to the present controversy. Though the judge in this case hasn’t spelled it out, he might think that the provision of immunity for President Zardari for his allegedly corrupt conduct, doesn’t square with the spirit of the constitution. In other words, the parliament might sometimes tend to pass a law for political reasons. But it is for the Supreme Court to uphold the spirit of the constitution that might be at stake.

The court, therefore, might have a cogent point to make here. Which is that until and unless the primacy of law (both in its letter and spirit) is respected, the country’s democracy will have a false start and a cloudy future.

However, Pakistan is in all sorts of troubles. And, on top of it, to plunge the country into a constitutional crisis is a recipe for greater disaster. With the country’s Supreme Court unhappy with the government’s stand on the issue, the opposition might be feeling virtuous.

All this brings us to the role of the military. Altaf Hussein, MQM’s leader in exile, has already called on the military to intervene. According to a report appearing in the New York Times, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has read, what seems like, the riot’s act to the government for its incompetence in the handling of the country’s devastating floods and the perilous state of the economy. And he wants a radical overhaul of the government, which might even include removal of President Zardari.

It is true that that the government has failed to perform, even during the country’s worst floods. Which has made people very unhappy and furious. In such a situation people can throw out their government at the time of the next election. The democratic process, however faulty, should be allowed to work itself out.

In some quarters (mostly for political reasons), there is a naïve belief in the military’s capacity to solve all the country’s problems when going becomes tough with the political institutions. But it should be clear by now from long spells of military rule in the country that the generals haven’t done any better in governing the country than the political class. Indeed, it might even be argued that the political generals are a problem rather than a solution for Pakistan’s myriad travails. In some ways, the idea of a back up system in the military for failures of the political class is a cop out. In any case, the generals end up co-opting the politicians in a subsidiary role. And the rot goes on.

So far, the generals only seem keen to give the government a good shake up. The armed forces are overstretched dealing with the Taliban insurgency, and terrorist attacks. Which should be a sufficient disincentive for the army against taking over civilian governance. In any case, it is not a good image for the country’s elected government to be told by the military how to govern. The government will be performing under the gaze of the military, with the generals deciding when to step in directly.

Therefore, the Pakistani government is in an invidious situation, wedged in by both the judiciary and the military, and an opposition keen to exploit the situation to its advantage. On the face of it, there is no deliberateness between the judiciary and the military against the government. But the coincidence doesn’t look too good.

Not long ago, General (President) Musharraf sought to deal with the judiciary by removing the recalcitrant Chief Justice and putting him under house arrest. Which led to large demonstrations, involving many lawyers and other middle class professionals. This, in turn, led to the restoration of democracy with Asif Ali Zardari taking over as President of the country in the aftermaths of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination.

It is ironic that Pakistan’s highest court, which created the trigger for the restoration of democracy, might now become instrumental in its demise, not because it is their intention but because of a contested position on law. And, as with General Musharraf at the time, the Zardari government is very unpopular. It is seen as corrupt, self-serving, unable or unwilling to deliver even under the direst national emergency of natural disaster. And if the judiciary holds to, what they regard as their, lawful position and the country is thrown into a constitutional crisis, it has the potential of rallying people against the government.

Which, in turn, might bring the generals into power once again because in Pakistan its political class is reviled more than the generals. The army is seen as the last bastion of institutional authority. If the crisis comes to a point where the armed forces seem to be the last resort, it will attract to its political banner all sorts of groups and factions of dubious or not so dubious credentials. And the only ultimate winner will be the Taliban and other militant groups with gun in one hand and the Quran in the other.

Note: This article was first published in Daily Times