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2 US, Britain stung by an Afghan
temper By M K Bhadrakumar
Admiral William Fallon, head of the US
Central Command, traveled to Tashkent,
Uzbekistan's capital, last Thursday. It was the
first visit by a high-level US military officer
since Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov evicted
American troops from the Karshi-Khanabad airbase
in Uzbekistan (used for ferrying supplies for
Afghan operations) in retaliation for the covert
American encouragement of the abortive Andizhan
uprising in the Ferghana Valley in May 2005.
Central Asian leaders can be excessively
polite. Karimov told Fallon, "We see your visit
... as a meaningful event in relations between the
US and Uzbekistan." Karimov went on to say the
visit
was a chance to discuss "issues of common
interest, first of all in the military and arms
sphere". To be sure, Karimov knew his strategic
defiance of the George W Bush administration has
paid off splendidly well.
He will be
justified in estimating that Washington is
desperately keen to regain influence in Tashkent
so it can effectively counter Russian and Chinese
influence in Central Asia. He sizes up that the
medium-term US objective will also be to
consolidate a permanent North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) presence in Central Asia. In
short, the Bush administration has learnt the hard
way that Uzbekistan is a key country in Central
Asia.
But in immediate terms, US Central
Command is badly in need of Tashkent's cooperation
for operating a second air corridor to Afghanistan
so that the heavy dependence on Islamabad gets
somewhat reduced.
Kabul rejects
Washington's choice What lends urgency to
Fallon's mission to Tashkent is the criticality of
the Afghan situation. Much thinking has gone into
Fallon's mission and it was preceded by months of
mediation by the European Union between Washington
and Tashkent. Karimov took time to relent. Yet,
ironically, the fragility of the overall situation
in Afghanistan is such that the thaw in US-Uzbek
relations was overtaken within 24 hours of
Fallon's mission by dramatic developments in
Kabul.
In a series of statements over the
weekend, President Hamid Karzai's government
rubbished a major decision taken by Washington and
London on the appointment of Lord Paddy Ashdown as
the United Nations' super envoy in Kabul.
Kabul knew for months about the impending
appointment of Ashdown as a key step in a new NATO
strategy spearheaded by the US and Britain, aimed
at stabilizing the Afghan situation. Karzai knew
detailed planning had gone into the move involving
NATO, the EU and the United Nations Security
Council. But Karzai waited patiently until the
eleventh hour before shooting it down publicly on
Saturday in a interview with the BBC while
attending the World Economic Forum meet in the
Swiss resort town of Davos. The move was
pre-planned and carried out in a typical Afghan
way with maximum effect.
Karzai insists
there has been a serious misunderstanding of
motives because Kabul had never taken a "decision"
on Ashdown's appointment. He is perfectly right in
saying so. But in actuality, Karzai has put on
display his proud Afghan temper. He has taken
umbrage that Washington and London took the
decision on Ashdown's appointment in consultation
with Brussels and thereupon got UN secretary
general Ban Ki-moon to execute it, all the time
taking Kabul's agreement for granted.
Karzai had fired a warning shot recently
by expelling two diplomats from the UN and
European Union. But Washington failed to take
notice. US commanders have routinely ignored
Karzai in the conduct of the heavy-handed war. On
a number of occasions, he cut a lonely figure,
left to pick up the debris after coalition forces
behaved like a marauding army in Afghan villages
where three quarters of the people live. Each
instance humiliated him and eroded his
credibility, especially among Pashtuns. Now, by
saying no to Ashdown's appointment, Karzai settles
scores. Washington and London should have known
Karzai's Afghan snub was long overdue.
At
the same time, it is much more than a snub. An
Afghan snub is never one-dimensional. Karzai knows
his rejection of Ashdown's appointment is bound to
go down well with the Afghan elite.
Second, Karzai anticipated that Ashdown,
true to his reputation in the Balkans, would
function like a colonial viceroy. Karzai knows
that the Western agencies and organizations
operating in Afghanistan lack coordination. But a
"unified command" under Ashdown would create a
counterpoint in Kabul to Karzai's own authority.
Karzai didn't want that to happen.
The
bottom line concerns Karzai's political future. He
sizes up that Ashdown is part of a political
package leading toward a post-Karzai era. There
has been persistent chatter in recent weeks that
Zalmay Khalilzad, US ambassador to the UN - an
ethnic Afghan - is in the mix for a run as
president of Afghanistan. According to Washington
Post columnist Al Kamen, Karzai took the rumor
seriously and point-blank asked Khalilzad about it
when the two met in London in October, but
Khalilzad "didn't give a Shermanesque response".
At any rate, no matter Karzai's own
motive, his act of defiance will have serious
consequences at different levels. The UN has
certainly taken a beating. Ban made a last-minute
personal intervention with Karzai. Evidently, Ban
had no clue about Afghan character. The UN's
capacity to spearhead the political process in
Afghanistan now stands seriously impaired. This
deprives Washington of a neutral international
bridge - but under its control - leading toward
the Taliban camp, which is a pre-requisite for
commencement of any meaningful intra-Afghan
dialogue.
Meanwhile, the war hangs
perilously on the edge of an abyss. Almost
everyone is talking to the Taliban one way or
another. Confusion is near-total. All this is
happening at an awkward time when NATO lacks a
counterinsurgency strategy. In particular,
Britain, which lately assumed a lead role within
NATO, has been embarrassed.
Karzai singled
out British operations in Afghanistan for
criticism in an interview with the Times newspaper
of London on the eve of his meeting with British
Prime Minister Gordon Brown in Davos on Friday.
Karzai alleged that Afghan people "suffered" from
the coming of the British. He had little praise
for the 7,800 British troops deployed in
Afghanistan. He said, "Both the American and
British forces guaranteed to me they knew what
they were doing and I made the mistake of
listening to them. And, when they came in, the
Taliban came."
There was an angry
rejoinder from No 10 Downing Street. The very next
day, Karzai went public with his rejection of
Ashdown's appointment. This spectacular
Afghan-British falling-out goes beyond a mere
blame-game. At the root lies Karzai's insistence
that it will be his sole prerogative to decide on
the appointment of key provincial officials and
that he will not brook top-level requests from
NATO commanders and diplomats. (But Karzai also
knows in the Afghan bazaar, any snub to Britain
will enhance his stature, given the complicated
history of Afghan-British relations.)
As
The Times commented, "British forces believe that,
in many respects, their Afghan allies pose more of
a challenge to their mission than the Taliban ...
It is the Afghan government that is now proving
more of an obstacle to stability in an area where
a mixture of official corruption, ineptitude and
paranoia are stymying British efforts." There is
bound to be questioning in Britain about the
government's policy. After all, a total of 87
British troops have died in Afghanistan since 2001
and Britain has spent US$3.2 billion on its
military campaign there.
The setback to
Britain's leadership role will impair Washington's
effort to drum up greater NATO involvement in
southern Afghanistan. Hardly 10 weeks lie between
now and the NATO summit meeting in Bucharest,
Romania. Again, Washington's monopoly over the
political process in Afghanistan itself has got
frayed at the edges. How long more will the
monopoly be sustainable when the war has been
almost lost already? Reports indicate Russia has
been pressing for Turkey's Hikmet Cetin in place
of Ashdown.
On a broader geopolitical
plane, it remains to be seen how long Washington
can keep Karzai away from the reach of the
Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty
Organization and the Russia and China-dominated
Shanghai Cooperation Organization. From the
Ashdown saga, Karzai must have realized his
capacity to shake up US strategy in the region. In
an interview with CNN in Davos on Thursday, Karzai
said, "We have opened our doors to them [Iran].
They have been helping us in Afghanistan." Karzai
then insisted that the Bush administration has
"wisely understood that Iran is Afghanistan's
neighbor". Karzai was speaking hardly two days
after the latest attempt by Washington to isolate
Iran over its nuclear program at the meeting of
the "Five plus One" (US, UK, France, Russia and
China plus Germany) in Berlin on Tuesday.
Musharraf wards off US pressure
But it is in Islamabad that the
reverberations of Karzai's mini-revolt will be
most keenly felt. The impasse in the "war on
terror" weakens Washington's capacity to further
undermine President Pervez Musharraf or to
pressure the Pakistani military. Conversely,
Musharraf will know that his own defiance of
Washington's recent attempts to dictate the nature
of the political set-up in Islamabad now enters a
conclusive phase. He will know that with such a
first-rate mess-up in the war in Afghanistan,
Washington is hardly in a position to be
intrusive, let alone dictate terms of engagement
to him. In a curious way, Karzai has considerably
smoothened for him the passage from now until the
elections in Pakistan on February 8.
In
all probability, Pakistan, which has excellent
intelligence outfits in Kabul, knew in advance
that Karzai was about to give shock-and-awe
treatment to Washington. Clearly, Musharraf has
begun finger-pointing at anyone who will even
remotely suggest the need of deploying US troops
on Pakistani soil.
US Defense Secretary
Robert Gates virtually challenged Islamabad in his
sensational press conference in Washington last
Thursday where he made the unsolicited offer -
despite Islamabad's repeated rejection of the idea
- that "we [US] remain ready, willing and able to
assist the Pakistanis and to partner with
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