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2 Outsourcing the Afghan
problem By M K Bhadrakumar
Success, Fernando Pessoa wrote in The
Book of Disquiet, consists in being
successful, not in having potential for success.
The summit of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) in Riga at the end of last
month nonetheless reiterated what the Bonn
conference also stated exactly five years ago -
that the "war on terror" in Afghanistan was full
of potential for success.
The NATO
statesmen should have heeded Pessoa when he said,
"Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of
a palace, but
there's no palace till it's
built." Now NATO needs to trade its swords for
plowshares and build a palace.
Hardly 12
days have passed since the Riga summit ended, but
any glimmer of hope that NATO can be a builder is
already vanishing. The United States has begun
debunking the NATO decision to form a "contact
group" on Afghanistan.
Richard Boucher, US
assistant secretary of state for South and Central
Asian affairs, reacted after talks with NATO
officials in Brussels that Washington would like
to look "more carefully" at whether the
international community needed "another group to
sort of drive this process". Boucher argued that
any contact group should meet Afghanistan's "real
needs", and, therefore, he would be "asking more
questions about what people think is needed than
what this group would do". Clearly, at Riga,
French President Jacques Chirac took everyone by
surprise by his initiative on the "contact group",
as he had not consulted Washington.
The
administration of US President George W Bush will
wait until next spring, watch the Segolene
Royal-Nicolas Sarkozy political saga run its
course in France, and see Paris embark on a course
careering away from Chirac's policy of
non-alignment. Meanwhile, the coming three to six
months in Afghanistan are crucial for the United
States. The entire US strategy for Afghanistan is
reaching a tipping point. One last push is going
to be made by the US to co-opt the Taliban into
the power structure in Kabul. A degree of
distancing from President Hamid Karzai is
apparent.
The New York Times spoke of the
"unraveling of the Karzai government". Quoting
unnamed Western diplomats, The Los Angeles Times
reported from Kabul last week, "Popular support
for the central government is faltering, and
Western military allies are deeply divided over
how best to combat the insurgency.
"On the
other side of the fight, the Taliban [have]
regained the strength to dominate large swaths of
Afghanistan; government control is tenuous at best
in at least 20% of the country ... The allies are
well aware that simply killing large numbers of
insurgents will not constitute a victory."
The earlier US criticism of the NATO
policy of striking a deal with the Taliban in the
Musa Qala district of Helmand province in
September has now given way to a conscious attempt
to justify the approach of striking local deals
with the Taliban. "Musa Qala proved to be a very
good deal. After the agreement, there were 34 days
of calm," NATO's chief spokesman in Kabul said in
justification. Karzai, who once voiced skepticism,
too, felt compelled to defend the deal (see Rough justice and blooming
poppies, Asia Times Online, December
7).
The clamor may have begun for an
Afghan version of the James Baker-Lee Hamilton
report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (ISG).
Canada's newly elected main opposition leader,
Stephane Dion, sharply etched the debate, "There's
no use for us to try to kill the Taliban in every
corner of every mountain and to risk the lives of
our soldiers in this way."
Karzai must
feel very lonesome. Nowhere is the shift in mood
more evident than in the hardening of Pakistan's
stance toward him. Islamabad no longer handles
Karzai with kid gloves. The message from Islamabad
is loud and clear: "The Taliban are winning the
war and NATO is bound to fail. Karzai should see
the writing on the wall. He should study the
implications of the recent US congressional
elections. America is not going to stay
indefinitely in Afghanistan, and sooner rather
than later Karzai will be left to fend for
himself."
The Karachi daily Dawn warned
last week, "This is, therefore, the time for the
beleaguered Afghan president to try to be on his
own and deal with his countrymen politically.
Blaming Pakistan has not helped and will not serve
Afghanistan's interests." Karzai tried to hit back
in a last-ditch attempt to rally the support of
Pashtun nationalists in Pakistan. But an
unprecedented Pashtun peace jirga (tribal
council) held in Peshawar, the capital of
Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP),
could not succeed in getting the hujra
(symbol of Pashtun social and communal life) and
the mosque to work together in rescuing the
Pashtun from the Taliban's appeal.
Ironically, the star performer at the
jirga was the figure who launched the
Taliban in 1994 - Maulana Fazlur Rehman, leader of
the radical Jamiat-e-Ulema Islam party that
currently rules the two border provinces of
Balochistan and NWFP. Pashtunkhwa
(left-wing Pashtun nationalism) seemed to be
losing the fight against the Taliban even before
one got under way.
Again, Karzai's game
plan to create a non-Taliban locus of Pashtun
aspirations in the nature of calling jirgas
of tribal leaders
