by Conn Hallinan - January 31, 2010
When President Barak Obama laid out his plan for winning the
war in Afghanistan, behind him stood an army of ghosts: Greeks, Mongols,
Buddhists, British, and Russians, all whom had almost the same illusions as the
current resident of the Oval Office about Central Asia. The first four armies
are dust, but there are Russian survivors of the1979-89 war that ended up
killing 15,000 Soviets, hundreds of thousands of Afghans, and virtually
wrecking Moscow’s economy.
One is retired General Igor Rodionov, commander of the
Soviet’s 120,000-man 40th Army that fought for 10 years to defeat the Afghan
insurgents. In a recent interview with Charles Clover of the Financial Times,
he made an observation that exactly sums up the President’s deeply flawed
strategy: “Everything has already been tried.”
The President laid out three “goals” for his escalation:
One, to militarily defeat al-Qaeda and neutralize the Taliban; two, to train
the Afghan Army to take over the task of the war; and three, to partner with
Pakistan against a “common enemy.” The purpose of surging 30,000 troops into
Afghanistan, the President said, is to protect the “vital national interests”
of the U.S.
But each goal bears no resemblance to the reality on the
ground in either Afghanistan or Pakistan and, rather than protecting U.S.
interests, the escalation will almost certainly undermine them.
The military aspect of the surge simply makes no sense.
According to U.S. National Security Advisor James Jones, al-Qaeda has fewer
than 100 operatives in Afghanistan, so “defeating” it means trying to find a
few needles in a 250,000 square mile haystack.
As for the Taliban, General Rodionov has a good deal of
experience with how fighting them is likely to turn out: “The war, all 10 years
of it, went in circles. We would come and they [the insurgents] would leave.
Then we would leave, and they would return.”
The McClatchy newspapers reported this past July, that the
Taliban had successfully evaded last summer’s surge of U.S. Marines into
Helmand Province by moving to attack German and Italian troops in the northern
part of the country. Does the White House think that the insurgents will forget
the lessons they learned over the last 30 years?
Another major goal of the escalation is to increase the size
of the Afghan Army from around 90,000 to 240,000. The illusions behind this
task are myriad, but one of the major obstacles is that the Afghan Army is
currently controlled by the Tajik minority, who makes up about 25 percent of
the population, but constitutes 41 percent of the trained troops. More than
that, according to the Italian scholar Antonio Giustozzi, Tajiks command 70
percent of the Army’s battalions.
Pashtuns, who make up 42 percent of Afghanistan, have been
frozen out of the Army’s top leadership, and, in provinces like Zabul, where
they make up a majority, there are virtually no Pashtuns in the army.
The Tajiks speak Dari, the Pashtuns, Pashto, yet Tajik
troops have been widely deployed in Pashtun areas. According to Chris Mason, a
member of the Afghanistan inter-agency Operations Group from 2003 to 2005 says
that Tajik control of the Army makes ethnic strife almost inevitable. “I
believe the elements of a civil war are in play,” says Mason.
Matthew Hoh, who recently resigned as the chief U.S. civil
officer in Zabul Province, warns that tension between Pashtuns and the
Tajik-led alliance that dominates the Karzai government, is “already bad now,”
and unless the Obama Administration figures out how to solve it, “we could see
a return to the civil war of the 1990s.”
It was the bitter civil war between the Tajik-based Northern
Alliance and the Pashtun-based Taliban that savaged Kabul and led to the
eventual triumph of the Taliban.
Obama’s escalation will target the Pashtun provinces of
Helmand and Khandahar. The Soviets followed a similar strategy and ended up
stirring up a hornet’s nest that led to the creation of the Taliban. U.S.
troops will soon discover the meaning of the old Pashtun axiom: “Me against my
brothers; me and my brothers against our cousins; me, my brothers and my
cousins against everyone.”
Afghanistan has never had a centralized government or a
large standing army, two of the Obama Administration’s major goals. Instead it
has been ruled by localized extended families, clans, and tribes, what Hoh
calls a government of “valleyism.” Attempts to impose the rule of Kabul on the
rest of the country have always failed.
“History has demonstrated that Afghans will resist outside
interference, and political authority is most often driven bottom-up by
collective local consent rather than top-down through oppressive central
control,” says Lawrence Sellin, a U.S. Army Reserve colonel and veteran of the
Afghan and Iraq wars. “It is absolutely clear that the path to peace in
Afghanistan is through balance of power, not hegemony.”
Yet a powerful Tajik-controlled army at the beck and call of
one of the most corrupt—and isolated—governments in the world has
been doing exactly the opposite in the Pashtun areas. A Pashtun pushback is
inevitable. According to Hoh and Mason, it has already begun.
The goal of a U.S. “partnership” with Pakistan is predicated
on the assumption that both countries have a common “terrorist” enemy, but that
is based on either willful ignorance or stunningly bad intelligence.
It is true that the Pakistan Army is currently fighting the
Taliban, but there are four Talibans in Pakistan, and their policies toward the
Islamabad government range from hostile, to neutral, to friendly.
Pakistan’s Army has locked horns in South Waziristan with
the Mehsud Taliban, the Taliban group that was recently driven out of the Swat
Valley and that has launched a bombing campaign throughout the Punjab.
But the wing of the North Waziristan Taliban led by Hafiz
Gul Bahadur has no quarrel with Islamabad and has kept clear of the fighting.
Another South Waziristan Taliban, based in Wana and led by Mullah Nazir, is not
only not involved in the fighting, it considers itself an ally of the Pakistani
government.
Washington wants Pakistan to go after the Afghan Taliban,
led by Mullah Omar and based in Pakistan. But Omar has refused to lend any
support to the Mehsud Taliban. “We are fighting the occupation forces in
Afghanistan. We do not have any policy whatsoever to interfere in the matters
of any other country,” says Taliban spokesperson Qari Yousaf Ahmedi. “U.S. and
other forces have attacked our land and our war is only against them. What is
happening in Pakistan is none of our business.”
The charge that the Taliban would allow al-Qaeda to operate
from Afghanistan once again is unsupported by anything the followers of Mullah
Omar have said. The Afghan Taliban leader has gone out of his way to say that
the West has nothing to fear from a Taliban regime. “We do not have any agenda
to harm other countries including Europe,” the Taliban leader said in October.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyer, a former U.S. ally against the Soviets
and the current leader of the Taliban-allied Hizb-I-Islam insurgent group, told
al-Jazeera, “The Taliban government came to an end in Afghanistan due to the
wrong strategy of al-Qaeda,” reflecting the distance Mullah Omar has tried to
put between the Afghan Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s organization.
The “other” forces Ahmed refers to include members of the
Indo-Tibetan Border Patrol, an Indian paramilitary group defending New Delhi’s
road building efforts in southern Afghanistan. The Pakistanis, who have fought
three wars with India—including the 1999 Kargil incident that came very
close to a nuclear exchange—are deeply uneasy about growing Indian
involvement in Afghanistan and consider the Karzai government too close to New
Delhi.
In short, Obama’s “partnership” would have the Pakistanis
pick a fight with all four wings of the Taliban, including one that pledges to
remove India’s troops. Why the Pakistanis should destabilize their own country,
drain their financial reserves, and act contrary to their strategic interests
vis-à-vis India, President Obama did not explain.
Will the escalation have an impact on “vital American
interests?” Certainly, but most of the consequences will be negative.
Instead of demonstrating to the international community that
the U.S. is stepping away from the Bush Administration’s use of force, the
escalation will do the opposite.
Instead of bringing our allies closer together, the
escalation will sharpen tensions between Pakistan and India—the latter
strongly supports the surge of U.S. troops—and pressure the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization to scrape up yet more troops for a war that is deeply
unpopular in Europe.
Instead of controlling “terrorism,” the escalation will be
the recruiting sergeant for such organizations, particularly in the Middle
East, where the Administration’s show of “resolve” on Afghanistan is contrasted
with its abandonment of its “resolve” to resist Israeli settlements in the
Occupied Territories.
And finally, the deployment will cost at least $30 billion a
year on top of the billions has already spent and the $70 billion the U.S is
shelling out to support its current force of 81,000 troops. In the meantime,
the Administration is too starved for cash to launch a badly needed jobs
program at home.
And keep in mind that the President said such a July
2011withdrawal would be based on “conditions on the ground,” a caveat big
enough to drive a tank through.
“More soldiers is simply going to mean more deaths,” says
Gennady Zaitsev, a former commander of an elite Soviet commando unit in
Afghanistan. “U.S. and British citizens are going to ask, quite rightly, ‘Why
are our sons dying?’ And the answer will be ‘To keep Hamid Karzai in power.’ I
don’t think that will satisfy them.”
Looking back at years of blood and defeat, General Rodionov
put his finger on the fundamental flaw in Obama’s escalation: “They [the U.S.
and its allies] have to understand that there is no way for them to succeed
militarily…It is a political problem which we utterly failed to grasp with our
military mindset.”
That misunderstanding could become the epitaph for a
presidency.