The US-led coalition is unambiguously
losing the war in Afghanistan, and it is
important, at this stage, to reiterate the
obvious, that is, precisely why the war was
undertaken in the first instance: because of
September 11, 2001, because of the al-Qaeda
presence in Afghanistan, and because of the
assessment that the Taliban regime there had
provided safe haven and operational facilitation
to al-Qaeda for its planning and execution of the
multiple and catastrophic strikes in the United
States. The
war
was not merely punitive, it was intended to be
preventive. It has proved a failure on both
counts.
As with all the pertinent
leaderships confronted with the possibility, if
not imminence, of defeat, saving face has become
infinitely more important than the original
objectives of this war. It is useful to emphasize
here that this was not a war of conquest, or even
of "liberation" (despite the rhetoric of "Enduring
Freedom"), but of defense. Its principal objective
was to deny a base for future September 11s to be
strategized, planned and executed.
But the
Taliban and al-Qaeda have survived - albeit
somewhat damaged - and, if current trends persist,
will soon have the freedom, the power and the
required setting to plan out their next wave of
attacks against the West. And Western -
particularly US - leaderships are squarely to
blame for this. US diplomat Alberto Fernandez has
spoken scathingly of the "stupidity in Iraq", but
the stupidity in Afghanistan is far more manifest,
and was considerably the more avoidable.
Warning of the dangers of defeat, Field
Marshal Sir Peter Inge, the United Kingdom's
former chief of the defense staff, noted, "I think
we've lost the ability to think strategically."
General David Richards, a British officer
commanding North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) troops in Afghanistan, noted the "upsurge
of violence along the eastern border with
Pakistan" and warned that the situation was
approaching a tipping point where a majority of
Afghans would switch their allegiance to the
resurgent Taliban if there were no visible
improvements over the coming six months.
The outgoing British commander, Brigadier
Ed Butler, described Taliban operations in
Afghanistan as "more ferocious than anything in
Iraq", and reports suggest that the Taliban were
operating in battalion-sized units of 400 men,
equipped with "excellent weapons and field
equipment".
Distressed military commanders
are increasingly advocating the "Musharraf model"
of cutting deals with the Taliban, virtually to
cede vast territories to the extremists on the
perverse argument that the only way to restore
security in the Pashtun south is a comprehensive
accommodation with tribal leaders, mullahs, former
mujahideen and the Taliban forces they are related
to.
At the same time, General Richards
concedes that Pakistani President General Pervez
Musharraf's deal with the Taliban in Waziristan is
an integral part of the problem, and that "there
has been an upsurge in terrorist activity inside
Afghanistan since this agreement was reached". US
military officials have confirmed that attacks on
coalition and Afghan forces have tripled along the
eastern border with Pakistan since Pakistani
troops relinquished control of the area under the
"peace agreement" with the Taliban.
Every
single detail of what is occurring has been
closely scripted, and Pakistan has been key to
these developments from the very commencement of
Operation Enduring Freedom to the present
"reconquest" of nearly a third of Afghanistan by
the resurgent Taliban. This, indeed, is the core
of the enduring stupidity of US policy in the
region: the utter and abysmal failure to see
through Pakistani machinations, the continued and
abject dependence on Pakistani "cooperation" to
secure coalition objectives in Afghanistan, and
the inability to comprehend the irreducible
conflict of interests that excludes the very
possibility of Pakistani good faith. US and
coalition military commanders have repeatedly
confirmed what Afghan President Hamid Karzai has
repeatedly stated: that the "main problem lies
inside Pakistan". Unfortunately, as one
commentator has noted, "General Musharraf has
played the Americans beautifully."
For
nearly three decades now, Pakistan has remained
the most active and aggressive player in the South
Asian region, defining for itself a role that has
substantially shaped the foreign-policy priorities
and security concerns of all its neighbors to an
extent far in excess of its size and strategic
strengths. Islamist extremism and terror have
remained the primary instruments of motivation,
mobilization and execution of its policies of
strategic extension. Covert asymmetric warfare and
terrorism in Afghanistan are only one
manifestation of this politics of violent
disruption, and they remains central to the
Pakistani vision.
The rationale and
continuance of this strategy is now clearly
visible in Pakistan's proxy "reconquest" of
extended areas of Afghanistan through the Taliban.
After September 11, and under US threat, Pakistan
apparently disowned the Taliban and claimed to be
enthusiastically "hunting" Osama bin Laden. In
reality, a duplicitous policy of helping relocate
al-Qaeda and allowing it significant operational
space on Pakistani soil was combined by a
pretended participation in the "war against
terrorism".
Pakistan's "cooperation" in
the "war on terror" has been, and remains,
entirely coerced, except in the case of a handful
of domestic sectarian terrorist groups and a few
"renegades" who turned against the establishment
in Pakistan. At the same time, Islamabad has
helped the Taliban recover from the reverses of
Operation Enduring Freedom and has enabled them to
carry out a campaign of escalating terrorism in
Afghanistan from bases and widely known
operational headquarters in Pakistan - not just
the "uncontrollable" areas of Waziristan, but also
across North-West Frontier Province and northern
Balochistan, where the writ of the Pakistani state
is far less in dispute.
Over the past five
years, the Taliban have successfully disrupted
Kabul's influence in ever widening areas, and now,
exhausted and desperate Western forces are
striking deals with local Taliban commanders, and
the idea of accommodating an oxymoronic "moderate
Taliban" in Kabul is finding increasing support in
Washington.
In essence, Pakistan has
managed to wait out the storm, with its strategic
tool, the Taliban, substantially intact. The
calculation has always been that the US and
Western powers will eventually lose patience in
Afghanistan and return, in desperation, to the
earlier "franchise" arrangement, restoring
Pakistan and its Taliban proxies to influence over
Afghanistan. The enemies of freedom, evidently,
have had, and held on to, the capacity for
strategic thinking despite the tremendous - and
now evidently transient - reverses they suffered.
And their calculations are proving to be entirely
correct.
A quick overview of recent
developments in Afghanistan is edifying. More than
3,000 people had already been killed across the
country in 2006, by October 10, according to an
Associated Press count; this is more than twice
the toll for the whole of 2005. Coalition
fatalities in 2006 touched 172 by October 10, far
exceeding the 130 coalition soldiers killed
through 2005.
Taliban attacks have also
become the more lethal, with an increasing number
of suicide bombings decimating top Afghan
officials, including associates and appointees of
the beleaguered President Karzai. This year has
already witnessed 91 suicide attacks in
Afghanistan, with at least one every week, up from
21 suicide attacks in 2005, six in 2004, and just
two in 2003, when the first such attacks in the
country occurred. Suicide attacks this year have
taken place not just in the Taliban strongholds in
southern and eastern Afghanistan, but across the
country, even in the relatively secure northern
and western provinces.
Just counting
September and October, the major targeted attacks
have included:
October 15: Two gunmen on a motorcycle killed
a Kandahar provincial council member, Mohammad
Younis Hussein, outside his house.
October 14: The governor of the eastern
province of Laghman escaped unhurt after a bomb
exploded outside his compound.
October 9: The district police chief,
administrator and intelligence chief were killed
by a roadside bomb as they were on their way to
investigate the overnight burning of a school in
Khogyani district of the eastern province of
Nangarhar.
September 26: A suicide bomber killed 18
people outside the provincial governor's compound
in Helmand province. The governor escaped unhurt.
September 25: Gunmen on a motorcycle killed
Safia Ama Jan, the director for the Ministry of
Women's Affairs for Kandahar province. Jan, a
leading women's rights activist, ran an
underground school for girls during the Taliban's
rule.
September 10: A suicide bomber killed Abdul
Hakim Taniwal, governor of the eastern province of
Paktia, outside his home. Another suicide bomber
killed six people at his funeral the next day.
The Pakistan-Taliban strategy is clearly
to deny access and disrupt the operation of
coalition and government forces and officials,
undermining the administration and relief efforts
even in secure areas, to bring both Kabul and the
international coalition to its knees - as has been
the case with British forces at Musa Qala, a key
forward base in Helmand province, who were forced
into a humiliating "agreement" with "tribal
elders" who "approached the Afghan government to
negotiate a ceasefire between British forces and
the Taliban in the area".
The Pakistani
strategy and involvement is even visible in major
Taliban reverses, such as the bloody confrontation
with NATO forces in Panjwai district between
September 4 and 17. NATO's Operation Medusa ended
with nearly 1,100 of a 1,500-strong Taliban force
- which reportedly "crossed over from Quetta waved
on by Pakistani border guards" - dead, and 160 in
NATO custody. Interrogation of the captured
Taliban cadres has confirmed, in significant
detail, the complicity and support of Pakistan's
Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).
Further
confirmation of such support came from the sheer
firepower that the Taliban forces brought to the
battle: according to NATO's post-battle
assessment, the Taliban fired an estimated 400,000
rounds of ammunition, 2,000 rocket-propelled
grenades, and 1,000 mortar shells. Further,
ammunition dumps unearthed after the battle
exposed an additional stock of more than a million
rounds.
An unnamed senior NATO officer,
cited by Ahmed Rashid, Pakistan's foremost expert
on the Taliban, noted, "The Taliban could not have
done this on their own without the ISI." Rashid
noted, "NATO is now mapping the entire Taliban
support structure in Balochistan, from ISI-run
training camps near Quetta to huge ammunition
dumps, arrival points for the Taliban's new
weapons and meeting places of the shura, or
leadership council, in Quetta, which is headed by
Mullah Mohammed Omar, the group's leader since its
creation a dozen years ago."
Pakistan's
military establishment, through the ISI, has long
been the principal terrorist organization in South
Asia. The Taliban - as is the case with the many
named Islamist terrorist groups operating in India
from Pakistani soil - is no more than an
instrumentality, a proxy, an agent, of the ISI.
Unless the West recognizes and addresses this
reality, it will fail in Afghanistan, and will
become the more vulnerable on its own soil to the
rampage of Islamist terrorists.
The idea
that Afghanistan and Iraq are America's "new
Vietnam" is gaining wide currency, as failing
coalition forces in both theaters flail about
desperately for a face-saving exit strategy. What
is often missed, however, is that the world and
the ways of warfare have changed tremendously and
irrevocably since the war in Vietnam.
The
option simply to "declare victory and leave" no
longer exists. If these theaters are ceded to the
extremists, the war will simply move to Western
soil. US President George W Bush has been wrong -
and disastrously wrong - about a lot of things.
But he is right when he says, "We're fighting the
enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the world
so we do not have to face them here at home."
If the Americans fail in Iraq, in
Afghanistan or in Pakistan, they will have nowhere
to hide.
Ajai Sahni is editor of
the South Asia Intelligence Review and executive
director of the Institute for Conflict
Management.
