Afghanistan
President Obama’s drawdown of US forces in Afghanistan is a step toward addressing a large gap between US effort in Afghanistan — we are now spending a trillion dollars a decade in immediate costs alone — and the actual importance of Afghanistan. As Richard Haass put it on “Charlie Rose” yesterday, there is a “strategic misalignment” in this policy that will leave future historians puzzled as to why were were so devoted to a sideshow.
As a futurist, I simply don’t see much relationship between what we do in Afghanistan over the next few years and outcomes a couple of decades down the road — and yet we are expending lives and dollars as if something huge is at stake, increasingly against the will of the American people.
The reasons for continuing the war at present levels are not convincing:
- Terrorist havens — Afghanistan is and will be something of a terrorist haven whether we are there or not. A counterterrorism strategy with a much reduced force can ameliorate this, but there are other refuges for al Qaeda, whatever we do in Afghanistan. Additionally, fighting Muslims in Afghanistan in itself bolsters the militant jihadist narrative.
- Afghan society — Afghanistan will be illiberal, corrupt, and cruel by Western standards whether we stay or go. We do not want the worst excesses of the Taliban to return, but that in itself is not worth a full-scale war.
- Regional stability — Afghanistan is a cockpit in which Pakistan, India, Iran, China, and Central Asian nations may collide in various combinations in the future, but that will eventually be true whatever the US does. We can merely tweak the timeframe by a few years. Pakistan’s stability is important to us, but the relationship of that stability to what the US does over the next few years is unclear — and the US role has helped convince the great majority of Pakistanis that the US is their enemy.
- US credibility — Again, we are leaving eventually. Better to do it on our own terms rather than because we are truly exhausted. World public opinion is largely in favor of rapid withdrawal, and elite opinion will be more impressed by sensible strategy than sheer doggedness.
In short, a relatively quick departure seems in order.
(A sidenote: In the short term, Karzai’s erratic threats to turn against NATO forces should remind us of how the Soviet Union ended up in a pseudo-invasion of that country. It didn’t just suddenly swarm across the border; Soviet troops were already fighting alongside the Afghan government against an insurgency. The Soviets came to view their ally with distrust, and the Afghans began to distance themselves from their patrons, and so the Russians moved to replace the government, partly with forces already in place. One can now imagine that circumstances might provoke the US to stage a similar “invasion,” except that we would already have the forces within the borders. At this point, though, we might simply not care, and use it as an excuse to leave even faster.)
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Image: Courtesy ISAFmedia (Flickr)
Writing in Foreign Policy, Paul Quinn-Judge outlines a scenario in which “the fighters of the Caucasus Emirate link up with their jihadi allies in Central Asia, turning much of the southern rim of the former Soviet Union into a zone of low-intensity warfare.”
He writes that “The absolute worst-case scenario — a gradual linking-up of insurgents in Central Asia with the North Caucasus’ young Islamist fighters — might be remote, but it is now possible. Such a link-up would require at least three factors.”
- “Russia’s policy of blind brutality in the North Caucasus would have to continue, ensuring a steady stream of recruits to the Islamist cause.”
- “The Taliban would have to consolidate along Afghanistan’s frontiers with Central Asian countries such as Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, or Tajikistan, turning the borderlands into safe havens and creating a series of conduits allowing fighters to move from Afghanistan into Central Asia and beyond.”
- “Central Asian jihadists from countries such as Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan would have to emerge as a fighting force large enough to exert serious regional pressure.”
As to their likelihood, Quinn-Judge suggests that
- “The first is already happening.”
- “The second is a matter of time.”
- “The third cannot be ruled out.”
Analyst Andrew Bacevich questioned the US strategy in Afghanistan on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today.
We don’t need to fix Afghanistan and the world, he said; we simply need to defend the US. The American interest in Afghanistan is limited to insuring “that Afghanistan does not become a sanctuary for a large number of jihadists plotting attacks against the United States.”
Our current strategy and level of commitment does not reflect that limited interest, he said. The current approach fails “to think seriously about where our interests lie and to think seriously about how much power we have available and where it can most effectively be used.”
As an alternative, “explore the possibility of providing incentives to the warlords to get them to rule their little patch of Afghanistan in ways that keeps the Taliban and especially keeps al-Qaida out. In other words, we would pay them in order to accomplish that for us.”
Present strategy leads to “perpetual occupation,” according to Bacevich.
This alternative strategy could present several issues:
- The warlords are often corrupt and brutal — sometimes as brutal as the Taliban — and backing them could be difficult for Americans to stomach.
- The brutality and oppression of the warlords brought the Taliban to power in the 1990s, and could enable them to triumph again.
- If American aims are limited to blocking hostile jihadists, we might do as well negotiating with the Taliban directly, as some say is inevitable.
(Image courtesy NASA)
On “Fresh Air” on NPR, Charles Sennott said today that the US plan for Afghanistan does not look like a plausible route to success.
The US and allied force ratios are not right for a vast, rural country such as Afghanistan, he said.
On the Taliban, Sennott said that its leadership shows a range of outlooks, and some Taliban leaders see the movement’s embrace of extreme policies during its time in power as a mistake.
As for how things will go forward, negotiations with elements of the Taliban are “inevitable,” Sennott asserts, though the organization may not yet have a realistic position to bring to talks.
(Image courtesy NASA)
A Sunni extremist takeover of Pakistan would be an immense threat to the US and hard to counter, Bruce Reidel writes in The National Interest.
Such a takeover
would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror. Pakistan as an Islamic-extremist safe haven would bolster al-Qaeda’s capabilities tenfold. The jihadist threat bred in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk in comparison. The old Afghan sanctuary was remote, landlocked and weak; a new one in Pakistan would be in the Islamic mainstream with a modern communications and transportation infrastructure linking it to the world.
“A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future,” he writes. It would require the Taliban expanding eastward, and teaming up with the radical group Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Punjab, assisted by harnessing the grievances of Pakistan’s vast impoverished classes.
A jihadist Suni emirate would face significant internal resistance, Reidel writes, including from Shia, who make up a fifth of the population. To counter potential opposition within the army, the new regime would likely create a parallel military force, like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
“In the end, we would be left with an extremist-controlled Pakistan, infested with violence, an almost completely dysfunctional economy, harsh laws and even-harsher methods for imposing them, and above all a nuclear-armed nation controlled by terrorist sympathizers,” Reidel suggests.
External effects would be severe:
- Pakistan would increase its influence in Afghanistan, with some of the Pashtun areas all but incorporated into Pakistan.
- Afghanistan would be split between Pakistan-backed Pashtun and their Tajik, Uzbek, and Shia opponents backed by Russia, Iran, and the Central Asian countries.
- Iran and Pakistan would face off in Afghanistan, and support separatists movements. Iran would accelerate its nuclear program in the face of the Pakistani threat.
- India and Pakistan might easily come to blows, with anti-Indian extremists in power in Islamabad.
- Israel and Pakistan would be active adversaries, but Israel would have few options for countering the distant Asian state.
- All Muslim countries would face the prospect of a newly energized radical movement using Pakistan as a support and training base.
- The United States would lack military options, and a blockade would be difficult to carry out and hard to sustain.
(Image courtesy openDemocracy)
The Taliban insurgency continues to hold the momentum in Afghanistan.
The AP reports that they are setting up shadow governmental structures within 30 miles of Kabul, increasingly replacing those of the official, Western-backed government.
US officials quotes in the article downplay this and ascribe Taliban success to intimidation, but a tribal elder in one province asserts that 90% of the population of the region support the insurgents.
To counter the Taliban, the US and the Afghan government are planning to arm local militias, in hopes of replicating some of the success of that strategy in Iraq.
But, the New York Times notes, “the plan is causing deep unease among many Afghans, who fear that Pashtun-dominated militias could get out of control, terrorize local populations and turn against the government.”
And a Taliban commander suggested to the Times “that the government militias would find it hard to put down roots in the area, if only because the Taliban had already done so. ‘We are living in the districts, in the villages — we are not living in the mountains. The people are with us.’”
The upshot is that the neglect of Afghanistan by the Bush administration may have set up Obama to be LBJ: firmly pledged to get deeper into a deteriorating situation.
The Post reported last week that American intelligence analysts are worried about a “looming strategic failure.”
Intelligence analysts acknowledge the battlefield victories, but they highlight the Taliban’s unchallenged expansion into new territory, an increase in opium poppy cultivation and the weakness of the government of President Hamid Karzai as signs that the war effort is deteriorating.
US and NATO forces are not retaining control of the countryside, where three-fourths of Afghans live, and the Taliban is operating in new areas:
the Taliban’s control has extended beyond the group’s traditional southern territory, with extremists making substantial inroads this year into the western provinces of Farah, Herat and others along the Iranian border even as they regularly challenge eastern-based U.S. forces.
Pakistan’s role is also an issue:
Several experts believe that the United States can no longer afford to leave the Pakistani military to clean up its side of the border. “Unless we resolve the safe-haven issue, this is not going to succeed,” said Henry A. Crumpton, a CIA veteran
In this month’s Atlantic, 44 experts were polled about the trajectory of the extremist Taliban movement. Asked to evaluate the likelihood of the Taliban’s returning to power by 2012, they gave these responses:
- 45% — unlikely
- 27% — somewhat likely
- 18% — more and more likely
- 9% — nonexistent
Some specific forecasts by the experts:
- “The Taliban is likely to remain a force in the politics of Afghanistan for the foreseeable future, perhaps even establishing effective control over some parts of the country.”
- “The Taliban is riding back to power on the alienation of the Pashtuns. We risk collapse if we let [that] alienation get out of hand.”
- “NATO forces will need to remain for decades.”
(”Return of the Taliban,” June 2007, p. 38)
Ralph Peters recently offered a map of how the Middle East might look if borders were redrawn to better reflect sectarian and ethnic divides. (Click on “Next” under the map, then click on the map to enlarge.)
Among the changes that would unfold in this scenario:
- Kurdistan becomes a large, independent state, at the expense of Turkey, Iraq, and other countries. Says Peters, “A free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.”
- The remainder of Iraq divides into Sunni and Shia states, and the Shia portion unites with Shia areas of Saudi Arabia.
- Saudi Arabia also loses Mecca and Medina to an “Islamic sacred state.”
- Iran loses territory to the Kurds and Arab Shia, and to Baluchistan to the southeast.
- Pakistan is much-diminished, transferring lands to Baluchistan and Afghanistan.
- Afghanistan gains from Pakistan but loses to Baluchistan and Iran.
- “For Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders.”
Peters concludes:
Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may be impossible. For now. But given time — and the inevitable attendant bloodshed — new and natural borders will emerge.
The situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate.
On NPR today Ahmed Rashid suggested that the Taliban insurgents are finding rising “sympathy,” if not full support, among segments of the population. They now enlist thousands of fighters, far more than they did a few years ago.
They also seem to be broadening their areas of operations. Rashid writes on ReliefWeb:
Taliban attacks have taken place in the north near the border with Central Asia and in the west near Iran, hundreds of miles from the main battleground in the south. Every day a school is burnt down or a teacher killed by the Taliban.
The Taliban’s resurgence raises the likelihood of negative scenarios, including full-scale war, partition, or even the extremist group someday regaining power.