AFTER seven long years in which it seemed a sideshow to the bigger conflict in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan has reached a critical point. The US must now choose how far it will become further embroiled in a messy conflict which affects its relations with Pakistan, India and the wider Middle East including Iran. Washington will have to decide if it really wants to invest time, money, military and political resources in beating back the ragged bands of Taleban who increasingly control southern Afghanistan.
At the end of last year, the White House was talking about repeating what was deemed to have been the success of the “surge” in Iraq. But the real turning point in Iraq was probably the defeat of the Sunni Arabs by the Shiites. Nothing of this sort is likely to undermine the Taleban in Afghanistan just as their guerrilla attacks are inflicting more casualties than ever.
For a long time, the Afghan war seemed confined to one country. But in the past year there has been cross-infection between a whole series of crises, from the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir to the fundamentalist takeover of the Swat Valley west of Islamabad.
The crisis in Afghanistan has been a slow-motion disaster. This was not the case in Iraq where guerrilla warfare against the US occupation erupted within weeks of the American occupation. In 2001 the Taleban appeared to have been swiftly and decisively defeated in a campaign in which the anti-Taleban Northern Alliance advanced with the support of the US Air Force directed by small teams of American special forces on the ground. The Taleban vanished from their frontline positions and fled Kabul and Kandahar without a fight. The aim of closing down Al-Qaeda training camps was easily accomplished. In fact it was all too easy.
There was a fecklessness about the whole venture on the American and British side. Not surprisingly other NATO allies wondered what exactly they were getting into in sending their troops to Afghanistan. It is astonishing that only now the US is finally producing a policy for Afghanistan which is in keeping with the real nature of the imbroglio into which Bush plunged in 2001 and floundered for seven years afterward. The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was carried out by members of Al-Qaeda orchestrated from camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But the Bush administration used the attacks to justify the neocon agenda of war with Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein and vocal hostility toward Iran and Syria as members of the “axis of evil”.
The main US ally in its war on terror was going to be Pakistan under Gen. Pervez Musharraf, though it was an open secret that it was the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI, which had fostered the Taleban and established it in power in Kabul. So long as it had the covert backing of the ISI, the Taleban was never going to be truly defeated.
The reality on the ground was that the Taleban was the foster-child of the ISI. Gen. Musharraf was prepared to join in an unenergetic pursuit of Arab members of Al-Qaeda in Pakistan. But the main objectives of the Pakistani Army’s traditional policy were never abandoned. These were to resist India, support the Muslims of Kashmir, protect the Pakistani nuclear weapons and seek to establish a pro-Pakistani government in Kabul.
From the beginning, the army saw the Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government as an enemy of Pakistan. Once the US decided to invade Iraq in 2003 Gen. Musharraf concluded Washington was none too serious about its war on terror and the Taleban could be quietly revived. By 2006 the insurgency was back in business.
The Taleban were unpopular all over Afghanistan. In the aftermath of the fall of the Taleban there was hope all over Afghanistan that life might be about to get better.
Afghanistan is an economic wreck ravaged by war since 1980. The problems are immense whoever is handling them. The government of Hamid Karzai has limited authority outside Kabul. Instead power has remained in the hands of warlords and militia leaders, detested by ordinary Afghans, who batten on the population. The Taleban’s rise to power in the 1990s came about partly because they seemed an alternative to the warlords but in practice their success was often the result of coopting them or buying their services. The US and the Karzai government pursued a similar policy after 2001 so the power of the warlords was never really broken.
The strength of the Taleban is in large part a reflection of the weakness of the government. This has enabled the Taleban to set up a parallel administration in many areas, meting out its own justice. The group also benefited from the ill-thought-out approach of the US-led foreign forces.
The US troop surge in Afghanistan can probably prevent further erosion of the Afghan government’s position if enough troops are deployed and money spent. But there are limits to what the US can do. The Taleban are never going to be defeated so long as it has its bases in the Pushtun belt inside northwestern Pakistan. Nor is it likely that the Pakistani military will act against the Taleban so long as it sees them as one of its few allies against India. American drone attacks on Taleban and Al-Qaeda within Pakistan may kill some leaders but further anger ordinary Pakistanis. The ISI may not directly control the insurgency in Afghanistan but it can determine its intensity. This in turn gives Pakistan leverage over the US to prevent the Americans going too far in supporting India.
One of the main achievements of the surge in Iraq was that it gave the US public the impression that a victory had been won which in turn allowed the Americans to agree to withdraw their forces. The surge may play a similar role in Afghanistan. One of the main reasons for keeping American and British forces there is because it would be humiliating to withdraw.
The Americans are finding, as the British did in the 19th century and the Russians in the 20th, that the effort of keeping an army in Afghanistan is not really worth it.
