An Afghan bone for Obama to chew on
By M K Bhadrakumar
When Robert Blackwill, who was former United States secretary of state
Condoleezza Rice's deputy as national security adviser and George W Bush's
presidential envoy to Iraq, took the podium at the International Institute of
Strategic Studies think-tank in London on Monday to present his "Plan B" on
Afghanistan, readers of the Wall Street Journal would have wondered what was
afoot.
Blackwill is wired deep into the bowels of the US establishment, especially the
Pentagon headed by Robert Gates. And the IISS prides itself as having been
"hugely influential in setting the intellectual structures for managing the
Cold War". Thus, the setting on Monday was perfect.
Blackwill has remarkable credentials to undertake exploratory
voyages into the trajectory of US foreign policy. In a memorable opinion piece
in the Wall Street Journal in March 2005 titled "A New Deal for New Delhi", he
accurately predicted the blossoming of the US-India strategic partnership. He
wrote:
The US should integrate India into the evolving global
non-proliferation regime as a friendly nuclear weapons state ... Why should the
US want to check India's missile capability in ways that could lead to China's
permanent nuclear dominance over democratic India? ... We should sell advanced
weaponry to India ... Given the strategic challenges ahead, the US should want
the Indian armed forces to be equipped with the best weapons systems ... To
make this happen, the US has to become a reliable long-term supplier, including
through co-production and licensed manufacture arrangements.
Blackwill's
construct almost verbatim did become US policy. Again, in December 2007 he
penned a most thoughtful article titled "Forgive Russia, Confront Iran". He
wrote:
To engage Russia, we need to substantially change our current
policy approach to Moscow ... This is not to underrate the difficulties of
interacting with Moscow on its external policies and its often-raw pursuit of
power politics and spheres of influence ... But there are strategic priorities,
substantive trade-offs and creative compromises that Western governments should
consider. The West needs to adopt tactical flexibility and moderate compromise
with Moscow.
Again, he hit the bull's eye in anticipating the
US's reset with Russia. So, an interesting question arises: Is he sprinting
indefatigably toward a hat-trick?
There can be no two opinions that the crisis situation in Afghanistan demands
out-of-the-box thinking. Blackwill's radically original mind has come up with
an intellectual construct when hardly 10 weeks are left for US President Barack
Obama to take the plunge into his Afghanistan strategy review.
Blackwill foresees that the US's Afghan counter-insurgency (COIN) strategy is
unlikely to succeed and an accommodation of the Taliban in its strongholds
becomes inevitable in the near future. The current indications are that the
process is already underway. (See
Taliban and US get down to talks Asia Times Online, September 10,
2010.)
The Blackwill plan probes the downstream of this "accommodation". Blackwill
flatly rules out a rapid withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan as that
would be a "strategic calamity" for regional stability, would hand over a
tremendous propaganda victory to the world syndicate of Islamist radicals,
would "profoundly undermine" the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and
would be seen as a failure of US leadership and strategic resolve.
Therefore, he proposes as a US policy goal a rationalization of the tangled,
uneven Afghan battlefield so that it becomes more level and predictable and far
less bloody, and enforcement of the game can come under new ground rules.
Prima facie, it appears scandalous as a plan calling for the "partition" of
Afghanistan, but in actuality it is something else. In short, US forces should
vacate the Taliban's historic strongholds in the Pashtun south and east and
should relocate to the northern, central and western regions inhabited by
non-Pashtun tribes.
Blackwill suggests the US should "enlist" the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras to do
more of the anti-Taliban resistance, instead of COIN. And the US should only
take recourse to massive air power and the use of special forces if
contingencies arise to meet any residual threats from the Taliban after their
political accommodation in their strongholds.
A striking aspect of the Blackwill plan is that it is rooted in Afghan history
and politics, the regional milieu and the interplay of global politics. Since
1761, Afghanistan has survived essentially as a loose-knit federation of ethnic
groups under Kabul's notional leadership. The plan taps into the interplay of
ethnicity in Afghan politics. The political reality today is that the Taliban
have come to be the best-organized Afghan group and they are disinterested in a
genuinely broad-based power-sharing arrangement in Kabul.
Unsurprisingly, the non-Pashtun groups feel uneasy. Their fears are not without
justification insofar as the erstwhile anti-Taliban Northern Alliance has
disintegrated and regional powers that are opposed to the Taliban, such as
Russia, Iran and India, have such vastly divergent policy objectives (and
priorities) that they cannot join hands, leave alone finance or equip another
anti-Taliban resistance.
The Kabul government headed by President Hamid Karzai is far too weak to
perform such a role. (Blackwill, curiously, doesn't visualize Karzai
surviving.) According to Blackwill's plan, the US offers itself as the bulwark
against an outright Taliban takeover. It envisages the US using decisive force
against any Taliban attempt to expand beyond its Pashtun strongholds in the
south and east, and to this end it promises security to non-Pashtun groups.
If it works, the plan could be a geopolitical coup for the US. It
quintessentially means the US would hand over to the Taliban (which is heavily
under the influence of the Pakistani military) the south and east bordering
Pakistan while US forces would relocate to the regions bordering Central Asia
and Iran.
The US would be extricating itself from fighting and bloodshed, while at the
same time perpetuating its military presence in the region to provide a
security guarantee to the weak Kabul government and as a bulwark against
anarchy and extremism - on the pattern in Iraq.
The US's and NATO's profile as real-time providers of regional security and
stability can only boost their influence in Central Asian capitals.
Seemingly recent random "happenings" mesh with Blackwill's plan, including:
A base to be built for US special forces in Mazar-i-Sharif.
The expansion of the air bases at Bagram and Shindand.
The overhaul of the massive Soviet-era air base in Termez by the US and NATO.
An agreement between the German Bundeswehr and the Uzbek government regarding
Termez as a stop-off point for NATO military flights.
Fresh deployments of US special forces in Kunduz.
The US's parleys with non-Pashtun leaders in Berlin.
Mounting pressure on Hamid Karzai's brother Ahmed Wali Karzai to vacate
Kandahar
(Blackwill said in an interview with the British Telegraph newspaper last week,
"How many people really believe that Kandahar is central to Western
civilization? We did not go to Afghanistan to control Kandahar.")
As a seasoned diplomat, Blackwill argues that China and Russia will choose to
be stakeholders in an enterprise in which Washington underwrites Central Asia's
security. True, China and Russia will be hard-pressed to contest the US's
open-ended military presence in Afghanistan that is on the face of it projected
as the unfinished business of the "war on terrorism". Central Asian states will
be delighted at the prospect of the US joining the fight against creeping
Islamism from Afghanistan.
The Blackwill plan brilliantly turns around the Taliban's ascendancy since
2005, which had occurred under Pakistani tutelage and, in retrospect, thanks to
US passivity.
Blackwill admits that his plan "would allow Washington to focus on four issues
more vital to its national interests: the rise of Chinese power, the Iranian
nuclear program, nuclear terrorism and the future of Iraq".
Without suffering a strategic defeat, the US would be able to extricate itself
from the war while the drop in war casualties would placate US opinion so that
a long-term troop presence (as in Iraq) at the level of 50,000 or so would
become sustainable. This was exactly what General David Petraeus, now the top
US man in Afghanistan, achieved in Iraq.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign
Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka,
Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
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