The US's Afghan conundrum

By S.P.SETH

The US is in a terrible quandary. Which is: how best to extricate from its ten-year old quagmire in Afghanistan? President Obama’s announcement of a process of withdrawal, starting next month (July), only highlights this predicament. The US doesn’t want to admit that its long military engagement in Afghanistan has been a disaster of monumental proportions in strategic, economic and political terms. Strategically, it has seriously damaged its ally, Pakistan. Parts of Pakistan are now said to be the virtual headquarters of the Afghan Taliban (for which Pakistani establishment cannot escape responsibility), as well as the staging post for operations against NATO and the Afghan government. Which, in turn, invites US drone strikes. This has made many Pakistanis even more bitter with the US than they already were. People are also venting their fury on their own government and the army for their inability or complicity in letting the US flout Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The most dramatic example was the US commando operation in Abbottabad where they killed Osama bin Laden without Islamabad having any inkling of it, until the US informed them after the successful completion of the mission. Not surprisingly, the government and the military came for stinging popular indignation, not so much because the US killed Osama, but the impunity with which the US was perceived to have violated Pakistan’s sovereignty. At times, it would seem that with the US and the Afghan Taliban fighting their battles on or through Pakistani territory, the state in Pakistan has ceased to exist.

The most damaging effect for Pakistan has been the spawning of the Pakistani Taliban, a corollary of its Afghan cousin, which is more dangerous for the Pakistani state because it is its primary target. And with attacks on Pakistani state agencies (police, army and so on), it seeks to destabilize the state, overwhelm it and replace it. The weakening of Pakistan to the point where terrorists run wild and attack people and state institutes at will is an important indictment of the Afghan war. Having gone into Afghanistan to snuff out the al Qaeda and Taliban from Afghanistan and create a stable democratic state, the US has not only failed to do that but its long and unsuccessful military engagement in Afghanistan has also de-stabilized Pakistan.

Again, it is important to point out that the Pakistan’s government and military were willing to play out the US games, without any serious thought of terrible cosequences for their own country. With its Afghan misadventure, the US has seriously weakened its ally, Pakistan, in a very important strategic region bordering on oil and gas rich central Asian states, Iran and China. At another level, its preoccupation with Afghanistan and Iraq wars has enabled China to raise its political and military profile in the Asia-Pacific region to become a serious strategic rival. But that is another story.

At the economic level, although estimates differ about the cost of the US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (another by-product of the US war on terror), it could be as much 3 trillion dollars to include all the costs (medical treatment of the wounded etc) of a prolonged war. This would amount to as much as 20 per cent of the US GDP. And has certainly complicated, if not contributed, to the US economic crisis that is still haunting the country.

Politically, the Afghan and Iraq wars have tended to polarize the United States. There was remarkable political consensus in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which enabled the then President George Bush to not only invade Afghanistan but also follow it with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the consensus started to fray when Iraq was found to have no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the ostensible reason for attacking Iraq. And the war didn’t seem to be following the Bush administration’s script with the United States getting stuck into a quagmire.

And when Obama became President in 2009, he christened the war in Afghanistan as a war of necessity to hunt down the al-Qaeda and create a democratic and stable Afghanistan. All sorts of combinations and permutations of a mix of military strategies to successfully conclude the Afghan operations have failed. In other words, the United States cannot prevail in Afghanistan militarily—a lesson painfully learnt earlier by the British in the 19^th century and the Soviet Union in the nineteen eighties. Even the latest US strategy of putting enough military pressure on the Taliban, applied since last year with more US troops deployed in the Afghanistan, isn’t working. They are able to explode bombs and enact suicide attacks at will, even in the most protected zones.

The US is now seeking to engage Taliban in political talks to, hopefully, bring the war to an end. Confirming that the US is engaged in “very preliminary talks” with the Taliban, the US Defense Secretary Robert Gates, however, maintained, “… that real reconciliation talks are not likely to be able to make any substantive headway until at least this winter [because] I think that the Taliban have to feel themselves under military pressure, and begin to believe that they cant’ win before they’re willing to have a serious conversation.” Another obstacle, according to Gates, was locating members of the Taliban who could credibly speak for its leadership. It might be recalled that last year a supposed Taliban commander flown to Kabul for peace talks was found to be an imposter. Therefore, in the absence of any credible confirmation from Taliban’s top leadership (Mullah Omar, for instance), it is difficult to confirm Robert Gates’ confirmation of peace talks.

In any case, the Taliban has time and again maintained that the NATO forces must withdraw from Afghanistan before peace talks can begin. This doesn’t look like the language of an enemy under military pressure. As for the US, it has its own conditions for the Taliban “to renounce al-Qaeda, forsake violence, and adhere to the Afghan constitution.” Under the circumstances, it seems unlikely that there will be much advance during the supposed peace talks.

The point is: why would the Taliban like to help out the United States with an ‘honorable’ exit when all signs point to the fact that the US cannot sustain intervention much longer due to serious military, economic and political constraints. Militarily, the US is not winning the war. And after ten years of non-result, war weariness has set in with the United States. Economically, the ballooning cost of the war in a depressed economy is further compounding the US’s economic woes. Politically, with the election season setting in for the next presidential election in 2012, Barak Obama needs some kind of forward movement of the Afghan imbroglio to win another term.

The question then is: will the US quit Afghanistan like the Soviet Union? Whatever the result, it will still like to frame its withdrawal as an ‘honorable’ exit. Will the Taliban oblige? Perhaps, not.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Pakistan needs a people’s revolution

By S P SETH

In the midst of Pakistan’s multiple problems, including an existential threat to the state, one wonders why its leaders fail to see the danger. And when some public minded and brave individuals dare to take a stand and expose the rot, they are simply murdered. The murder of the Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer, who publicly argued for an amendment of the blasphemy law for its misuse, is an important example. Instead of following up Taseer’s cause, the Gilani Government just caved in to militants and dropped his passionate advocacy of such a humane measure. Indeed those like Taseer who were similarly committed to amend the blasphemy law were told to lie low and were shuffled around. Sherry Rehman comes to mind in this context.

What it means is that militant Islamists who would like to take the country back to the times when men treated women as their property (they still do, by and large) have the run of the place. They can kill people, intimidate the government and do as they please. And if the state cannot provide security to its citizens for voicing their views, then the government of the country becomes a virtual non-entity. It would sometimes seem that the militants and their agents have penetrated the state and they are running it to the ground.

Salmaan Taseer is now a memory for his relatives and friends. His former political colleagues in the PPP do not want to have a bar of his crusade. This is a message to other activists, who want their country to be decent and humane, that they might also meet the same fate, if they wouldn’t shut up. And when a brave and public-minded journalist like Saleem Shehzad refused to shut up on another issue, he paid the ultimate price. He was murdered in the most gruesome way and gagged forever. His body bore the marks of torture as a lesson to anyone treading his way.

The ISI is believed to have been behind this; though it denies any connection. It raises the important question: if security outfits start killing journalists and others doing their job of uncovering the truth and exposing scandals, who will then police these institutions? Are they beyond the law they are charged to uphold? Apparently, yes. In other words, Pakistan is in the midst of lawlessness where people do not know where to turn when organized killings take place.

Why did they kill Shehzad? The clue is in the first part of his two-part article (the second part never appeared following his murder) in Asia Times Online. Shehzad wrote: “Several weeks ago, naval intelligence traced an al-Qaeda cell operating inside several naval bases in Karachi…” As further investigation of al-Qaeda penetration in the navy was pursued, it “pointed to more than one al-Qaeda cell… in the navy….” The authorities mounted a crackdown. Fearing that the arrest and interrogation of their men would expose the al-Qaeda connection, they mounted an attack on PNS Mehran base with inside knowledge of the layout and geography of the base. The important point in the article was that the al-Qaeda operatives were ensconced in the navy and, presumably, in the army and air force too. And they weren’t answerable to the military hierarchy, its discipline and its doctrine. They got their instructions from their al-Qaeda network. This is a serious situation for Pakistan.

The militants are not only terrorizing the populace of the country, they also seem entrenched within the armed forces systematically destroying its cohesion and discipline. Like a good journalist, Shehzad refused to divulge sources for his story when called for a ‘friendly’ chat by the relevant ISI bosses. And was duly warned obliquely (as he mentioned in his emails to some of his friends and colleagues) what might happen to him. He probably thought that having told his friends of the ISI warning might be a deterrent, but it didn’t work.

The point is that such lawlessness by militants and state agencies is eating Pakistan from within. If this situation continues for some more time, Pakistani state might crumble from within. And there is no knowing what sort of political order might emerge after an indeterminate period of chaos in the country.

And like Roman emperor Caligula, Pakistan’s rulers continue to behave like they are immune to any kind of fallout from their country’s sad state of affairs for which they are themselves responsible. Indeed, if they were to become conscious of the grim reality of their acts of omission and commission (or they simply don’t care), they will have to do something to prevent this slide to destruction and doom. While the rulers don’t care, the people of Pakistan do. For instance, they have time and again voted (whenever elections were held) overwhelmingly for moderate political parties, thus rejecting the politics of militancy in the name of religion.

They hoped that these parties would steer the country toward economic and physical security. Alternately, after losing faith in the elected civilian establishment given to corruption, nepotism, dynastic cronyism, and shady deals with all and sundry; they looked to the military, after periodic coups, for a better outcome. Unfortunately, they have been disappointed and frustrated time and again. No wonder, the people are losing heart not knowing how to adjust and adapt to a state of constant insecurity and deprivation. Which has bread a sense of apathy and indifference.

They apparently don’t see much difference between the country’s political and military establishment, and the militants--- both unconcerned about people’s security and welfare. When some public-minded citizens like Saleem Shehzad and Salmaan Taseer cared and dared, they were eliminated unceremoniously. And that should intimidate those who might take up where they left.

The only hope lies in a peaceful people’s movement to reclaim their country. One discerns small stirrings of this as people are urged to come together for peaceful protests like the Arab Spring. This need is further reinforced by the killing of a youth by the Rangers for no real reason; its video broadcast all over the world highlighting the sad state of lawlessness in Pakistan. The peaceful protests by the people tend to overcome fear because there is security in numbers. Will people rise to reclaim their country? Only time will tell.

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.