by Conn Hallinan - May 24, 2009
Afghanistan is a gatherer of metaphors: “crossroads of
Asia,” “graveyard of empires,” and the “Great Game,” to name a few, although it
might be more accurate to think of it as a Rubik’s Cube, that frustrating
puzzle of intersecting blocks that only works when everything fits perfectly.
The trick for the Obama Administration is to figure out how to solve the puzzle
in a time frame rapidly squeezed by events both internal and external to that
war-torn central Asian nation.
At first glance, the decision to send 21,000 more U.S.
troops into a conflict that has dragged on for almost 30 years seems to combine
equal parts illusion and amnesia: illusion that the soldiers could make a
difference, amnesia in trying something that already failed disastrously in
2005. But then, Afghanistan seems to have a deranging effect on its occupiers.
Way back in the spring of 2005, British Lt. Gen. David
Richards, then commander of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces in southern Afghanistan,
told a press conference in Khandahar that quadrupling the number of allied
troops in Helmand Province would spell the end for the Taliban. Three years
later Helmand is unarguably the most dangerous province in the country.
As former British Foreign Service officer Rory Stewart
argues, “when the decision to increase the number of troops in 2005 was made,
there was no insurgency.” Indeed,
it was the surge—and the civilian casualties which accompanied
it—that ignited the current resistance movement. Back then the Taliban
controlled 54 percent of the country. Today that figure is 72 percent and
rising. In February, Taliban soldiers attacked Kabul, killing scores of people
and besieging several government buildings.
The illusion is that adding 21,000 troops to the 38,000 U.S.
soldiers and 50,000 NATO soldiers could possibly make a difference. The U.S.,
with 500,000 soldiers, could not prevail in South Vietnam, a country of 67,000
square miles and 19 million people. Afghanistan has half again that population
and 250,000 square miles of some of the planet’s most unforgiving terrain.
As Brig. Gen. Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain’s top military
officer in Afghanistan, bluntly told the Sunday Times, “We’re not going to win
this war.”
So has the madness that seems to seize Afghanistan’s
invaders infected the White House? Maybe not.
First, if Obama were serious about a military victory in
Afghanistan he would have sent 40,000 troops, not 21,000. The former
figure—which the Administration initially discussed—would fulfill
the Pentagon’s formula of soldiers to population counterinsurgency strategy,
although that is an illusion in its own way.
Second, unlike the Bush Administration, the White House has
invited Iran to join a regional conference on the war, and the President has
hinted that he is open to talking with the Taliban. Neither of these moves
suggests the Administration is only thinking in terms of a military “victory”
in Afghanistan.
In a sense the Administration has little choice.
The price tag
alone should give the White House pause. According to the Congressional
Research Service, Afghanistan has cost $173 billion and is on track to cost $1
billion by 2012.
And, increasingly, the U.S. is on its own. The Europeans
have made it clear that they will not join a “surge,” except to contribute a
token number of troops for the run up to the August elections . Polls show a
substantial majority of Germans, British, French and Italians are opposed to
sending any more troops to Afghanistan.
The U.S. is also facing trouble among its regional allies.
The 2005 surge not only revitalized the Taliban, it spread
the war to Pakistan and created the Pakistani Taliban that has seized the Swat
Valley and most of the Northwest Territory and Tribal Regions. This border war
has killed some 1500 Pakistani soldiers, innumerable civilians, and cost
Islamabad at least $34 billion. With the country’s economic system
collapsing—inflation is rampant, unemployment skyrocketing, and the
International Monetary Fund is currently keeping Pakistan afloat—aiding
the U.S. war on terrorism is deeply unpopular. According to polls, 89 percent
of the Pakistani population opposes it.
Pakistanis are particularly angry at attacks by U.S. drones.
According to the Pakistan newspaper, The News, some 60 attacks by Predator and
Reaper drones between Jan. 1, 2006 and April 8, 2009, managed to kill just 14
“militants,” a 6 percent success rate. The attacks, however, killed 687
civilians, many of them women and children.
The war has also ratcheted up tensions between Pakistan and
India.
India has
deployed its paramilitary Indo-Tibetan Border Patrol in Afghanistan to protect
its road building projects from Taliban attacks. But for the Pakistanis, their
traditional enemy now has troops on both borders. Indian and Pakistan have
fought three wars since the 1947 partition of the two countries, and India is
currently in the middle of a major expansion of its military.
A pact with the Bush Administration —the so-called
“1-2-3 Agreement”— allows New Delhi to bypass the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, and may ignite a nuclear arms race between the two
countries, a race which neither can afford and which will measurably increase
the possibility of nuclear war in South Asia. Both countries came perilously
close to one in 1999.
The right wing Hindu fundamentalist BJP, jockeying for
position in the current Indian elections, has called for a military
retaliation, including the blockade of the port of Karachi, for the recent
attack on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants.
In the meantime, the political situation within Afghanistan
is growing increasingly unstable. President Harmid Karzai, once the darling of
Western powers, has come under intense criticism for his regime’s widespread
corruption, and the fact the government has little influence outside of the
capital. Karzi’s nickname is “the mayor of Kabul.”
A sharp increase in civilian casualties has soured most
Afghans on the occupation. Allied bombing in Afghanistan has increased 1,100
percent from 2004, which translates into 14,000 tons, in explosive power very
close to the size of the Hiroshima bomb. A recent BBC/ABC poll found that 73
percent oppose an increase in the U.S. presence. Polls also show that a majority
now support a negotiated end to the war, even if that means a coalition
government that includes the Taliban.
While Afghanistan looks increasingly unstable, the Taliban
appear to be getting their act together. According to Saeed Shah of the McClatchy
newspapers, Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, has forged an
alliance with the fractious Pakistan Taliban that will direct the power of both
organizations toward fighting “the occupation forces inside of Afghanistan.”
With NATO falling away, regional allies at each other’s
throats, growing turmoil inside of Afghanistan, and the Taliban uniting, it is
truly a “lions, and tigers and bears, oh my” moment for the Obama
Administration.
But the puzzle is solvable.
For instance, Mullah Omar, through Saudi Arabian King
Abdullah, also made a peace offering that no longer requires the western forces
to withdraw before opening talks. The plan proposes setting a timetable for
withdrawal, forming a “consensus government,” and consolidating the Taliban forces
into a national army.
The inclusion of Iran in talks on Afghanistan draws in a key
regional player that the Bush Administration deliberately kept out of the
process.
To make all the cubes fit together, the Obama Administration
will have to recognize that the U.S. is only one player at the table, and that
the interests of other parties, both inside and outside of Afghanistan, must be
given equal weight. It will also need to revisit the Bush Administration’s
ill-advised nuclear agreement with New Delhi, which not only increases tensions
in the region, but also threatens to unravel a critically important
international nuclear treaty.
And it might pay some attention to a recent case study of
fighting terrorism by the Rand Corporation. Rand looked at 648 terrorist groups
and found that only 7 percent of them were defeated militarily. The study concluded: “There is no
battle field solution to terrorism. Military force has the opposite effect from
what is intended.”
Afghanistan certainly needs help, but not the variety that
comes out of bomb bays. The country ranks fifth from the bottom on the United
Nation’s Development Index, and has the highest infant mortality rate in the
world. For every Afghan that dies as a result of the war, 20 others die of
treatable diseases or malnutrition.
What the Obama Administration must avoid are an aggressive
military surge like the one in 2005 that will only further destabilize
Afghanistan and the dead-end tactic of refusing to talk with people it doesn’t
agree with. 