The US and Afghanistan

PRESIDENT Barack Obama’s appointment of Richard Holbrooke as his special envoy on Pakistan and Afghanistan will make sense only if it is followed by a policy review that touches the core of the United States’ policy.

Holbrooke’s visit to the region next month will be a precursor to the review. During the election campaign Obama promised to send two additional brigades to Afghanistan (7,000 troops) to join their 34,000 compatriots. There are in all 200,000 foreign forces in the country.

If there is one single factor that governed the United States’ approach in three states in Asia where its policies have yielded a colossal failure at the end — Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran — it is its arrogant disavowal of diplomacy and reliance exclusively on the use of force.

Professions of friendship for the Muslim world are fine. The stark reality is that two Muslim countries were wantonly and brutally laid waste by the US-led invasion for ends that could have been achieved by diplomacy. An exceptionally informed report by James Risen of The New York Times in November 2003 cited Iraqi overtures to the US before the war, based on documents and interviews. Iraq offered to: (1) help in the peace process in Palestine; (2) grant “US oil concessions”; (3) consent that “Americans could send 2,000 FBI agents to look wherever they wanted” and (4) “hold elections within the next two years”.

The offer came “from the highest levels of the Iraqi government”. The CIA was in touch with the Iraqi intelligence service. Its chief of operations, Hassan al-Obeidi, spoke in a “begging” tone in early March. He as well as his director, Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti, were prepared to meet US representatives in Beirut. “Such a meeting has Saddam Hussein’s clearance.” The US was not interested. It invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003.

By April 2000 the Taliban chief Mullah Omar “wanted to get rid of Osama but did not know how”, Pakistan’s special envoy to Afghanistan (1996 to 2000) S. Iftikhar Murshed records in his memoirs, Afghanistan: The Taliban Years. Omar said he was in a bind and proposed a group of ulema from Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and a third Islamic country to decide the issue. The Taliban would comply. The proposal was rejected by the Saudis and the Americans.

To these revealing memoirs add the reportage by David Ottaway and Joe Stephens of the Washington Post (Oct 29, 2001) and ‘The Taliban File’ put out by the National Security Archive at Washington DC on Sept 11, 2003 in its Electronic Briefing Book No. 97 containing 32 declassified official documents (1994 to 2001). What emerges is a picture of a feckless US which made not the slightest effort to understand the Taliban. They were begging of the US for recognition. In November 1997, on the steps of Pakistan’s Foreign Office, President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called the Taliban “despicable” for their gender policies. Gender policies of others in the region received no such reproach.

Murshed writes: “The stabilisation of Afghanistan could have been achieved much earlier had the international community engaged with and not isolated the Taliban. …The 9/11 tragedy might not have happened and other acts of terrorist violence could have been averted. The opportunity was squandered.”

Arrogance cuts across party lines. As Zbigniew Brzezinski said, 9/11 was an act of terrorism, not aggression. The British security service MI5’s chief Stella Rimington said last October, that the US’ response was “a huge overreaction … it was another terrorist incident”, albeit on a horrible scale.

Do you blame the Taliban for insisting that the foreign forces withdraw? On Nov 17 Mullah Brother, their deputy leader, said that “as long as foreign occupiers remain in Afghanistan we are not ready for talks. …The problems in Afghanistan are because of them.”

Is Obama capable of looking into the abyss? That will be a test of his capacity for leadership. Else it will be Bush’s policies garnished with a special envoy. Only an awareness of the wrongs done can prompt a review worth the name. As Simon Jenkins put it, “Waging war in Afghanistan ranks with marching on Moscow in the canon of military folly…. It is obscene to justify this carnage by citing a few rebuilt Afghan schools and roads, as British ministers do. The country will never be at peace and Pakistan never safe until the West withdraws its troops — and probably not even then. We shall leave another nation in ruins.”

The war is unwinnable. The British ambassador in Kabul Sherard Cowper-Coles noted last October that Nato was not winning “The presence of the Coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of the solution.” A few days later Brigadier Carleton-Smith UK’s C-in-C in Helmand, said “we are not going to win this war” and the idea of a political accord with the Taliban “shouldn’t make people uncomfortable”.

In a recent article in Foreign Affairs Barnett R. Rubin and Ahmed Rashid advocate “a political settlement with current insurgents”. Leaders linked to the Taliban and others wanted to know the US’ war aims. “They claim to be willing to support an Afghan government that would guarantee that its territory would not be needed to launch terrorist attacks in the future — in return, they say for the withdrawal of foreign troops.” This can “constitute a framework for negotiations”.

A regional approach will help. That would require an understanding between the US and Iran and between India and Pakistan. Last month the former ISI chief Asad Durrani told an Indian journalist “There is no bigger threat to peace in the region than the foreign troops in Afghanistan. We are neighbours and are stuck with each other; others can come and go as they please. We have to approach this problem in a spirit of cooperation and mutual benefit.”

The writer is a lawyer and an author.

Heavy costs of a dirty war

THAT the world changed with the departure of Bush was borne out by Obama’s words at his inaugural address when he said, “Our founding fathers … drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man … those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

This is what distinguishes the western civilisation from what the Taliban and Osama are selling: it underscores the supremacy of the rule of law, and its cornerstone, that everyone is innocent till proven guilty. It was a rejection of rendition, water-boarding and other euphemisms for the torture of prisoners, incarcerated for years without trial. It is not difficult to fathom why the US, and Britain under Blair, lost their moral leadership of the world.

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, a gifted man by all accounts, and son of the well-respected scholar and academic Ralph Miliband, felt that the time had come to accept that the war on terror, as conducted since 9/11, had been self-defeating, and that “we must respond to terrorism by championing the rule of law and not subordinating it, for it is the cornerstone of the democratic society”.

He was articulating much the same vision as Obama, and like him mentioned the need to settle the Kashmir issue, “as that would deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms”. He was referring to one of the “contexts” of terrorism, as Arundhati Roy refers to it, and which must be addressed if a long-term end to terrorism is to be found.

Obama had stated the need to settle the Kashmir issue and take a regional approach to terrorism, and appoint an emissary for South Asia. However, caving in to Indian lobbying, he restricted Richard Holbrooke’s remit to Pakistan and Afghanistan, although India’s proactive role in Afghanistan is now well established. As for Miliband, despite visceral attacks on Miliband by the Indian government and media, his spokesman was quoted in the Independent as saying, “The foreign secretary was very open and honest about his views, which are those of the British government.”

The Indian government and media’s response to Miliband’s statement was in the same vein as that to the tragic Mumbai attacks — bellicose and jingoistic. The pulverisation of the financial centre of this aspiring world power for 60 hours by just 10 men brought into focus the deep fault lines in Indian society: the running sore of the Kashmir issue and the treatment of its minorities, of which the Sachar Report is a damning testament.Threatening war on Pakistan, knowing that its military was already stretched in the west in Fata and Swat, was a nightmare for Pakistan. But India showed a dangerous lack of restraint and responsibility by a nuclear power in demonstrating brinkmanship, sending its air force planes into Pakistan’s air space, and threatening pre-emptive strikes. It does not take great wisdom to conclude that an attempt to destabilise Pakistan would spread the fire of terrorism from Pakistan’s western borderlands all the way to India’s eastern frontier, where they are already embroiled in a long-standing insurgency.

Pakistan has paid a heavy price for the strategic blunders of the previous American administration in its conduct of the international war on terror. As Obama has argued consistently, going into Iraq took away from what should have been the main focus of the US, the war in Afghanistan. The half-hearted pursuit of its war aims in Afghanistan has caused the insurgency to spread to Pakistan, and strengthened the hold of the Taliban in Afghanistan. While the coalition forces have lost 1,000 soldiers, Pakistan has lost about 2,000 of its security forces in Fata and Swat, and 14,000 civilians. About 400,000 people have been displaced from Fata and another 500,000 from Swat. All made refugees in their own country.

And what does Pakistan get for fighting this dirty war? One billion dollars as replacement for the money spent in the war on terror by our military forces, and $60m in aid. Peanuts when compared to the $2bn per year given to Egypt and $3bn per year to Israel, while the Americans continue to drag their feet on the Biden-Lugar Bill.

With the prospect of being well-equipped and better paid than any Pakistani soldier or policeman, and funded by the opium grown in Afghanistan, now a source of 90 per cent of the world’s output, it is difficult for unemployed young men of our tribal areas and Afghanistan to resist this lucrative employment with the Taliban. The selling of the cause in religious terms has an added appeal for the young men, especially in Afghanistan, where 80 to 90 per cent are illiterate.

Asymmetric wars have shown the limitations of state military force. The use of air power and artillery on non-state actors has resulted in large civilian casualties, and provided a fertile recruiting ground to the extremists. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has been protesting the cost of civilian casualties as a consequence of bombings by the coalition forces with little effect, and the same is happening with the attacks by drones in Fata. Having got a drubbing in Vietnam, barely managing to survive in Iraq, one would have expected the Americans to be more receptive to the arguments of their partners in the war on terror. Expectations that Obama would break from the imperial hubris of his predecessor seem to be misplaced.

The government of Pakistan must re-negotiate the terms with the Americans. The state of Pakistan is the biggest casualty of the incompetence and lack of commitment of the coalition forces in Afghanistan, as even at this point in time, the Europeans are reluctant to volunteer more troops or funding for the war.

Brussels, not London, in Obama’s sights

IN these giddy times not a day passes without some spectacular repudiation of the Republican past by the Obama administration. Never mind the vaunted first 100 days.

The first 10 days alone have already seen an opening to the Muslim world, the abandonment of military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, the dispatch of a senior Middle East envoy, the unveiling of a new green agenda, the removal of the abortion bar on foreign aid programmes, an eye-wateringly large fiscal stimulus package, major moves to increase government transparency, and now, as was reported on Thursday, a decisive change of approach towards revolutionary Iran.

As each new move is revealed it is hard not to luxuriate vicariously in the self-confident deployment of smart power by a progressive leader at the peak of his influence. But hard not to reflect too — unhistorically, of course, — on the terrible wasted years. How different our globe might have been today if this sort of world view rather than George Bush’s had held sway in Washington since 2001. Yet this moment of potency is simultaneously a moment of fragility. For although America’s government has changed decisively this month, America’s actual power in the world has not. The Republican defeat in November marked the historic failure of the unipolar post-Cold War approach to world power that lasted from 1989 until now. Obama cannot, therefore, be a unipolar president even if he wants to be.

In fact, every international move he makes marks an implicit accommodation to multipolarity, albeit one in which America remains the decisive power. We should welcome this. Yet it follows that Obama cannot be expected to solve the problems of the world on his own. To paraphrase John Kennedy, the remainder of us need to ask what the rest of the world can do for America, not the other way around. And that irresistibly poses the question of whether we in Britain are spectators or players in such a process. It compels us to ask what our own best role should be in contributing to this new order of things.

Inescapably that raises the question of Britain’s relationship with the European Union. Flawed though it is, weakened though it may be, and problematic though it undoubtedly remains, the EU is nevertheless at the heart of any serious strategic answer to the question of how Britain can play an effective part in the multipolar world that Obama is obliged to try to shape.

If he seeks an effective global partner for his efforts on Iran, the Middle East, climate change or the restructuring of financial institutions, he will not look first to Britain — whatever the Downing Street spin machine would have us believe. He will look to the EU, of which Britain is a part. Likewise, if and when China or Russia want to strike deals on trade, energy or almost any other subject, they too will look first to Washington and then to Brussels, not to London.

The debate about Europe in the UK always takes place on the basis that the EU is too strong. Yet the reality is in many ways the opposite. Actually Europe is often too weak, in terms both of the hard power of integrated military effectiveness and the soft power of international influence building. Whatever Europe’s strength vis-à-vis the sovereign states that make up the union, it is certainly too weak to be really effective in representing its own best interests internationally, or in commanding resources that would enable it to sit at the top table as a truly effective player. Britain ought therefore to have a strong national interest in building up the EU.

In order to achieve what? Climate change or overseas aid are often cited as the kind of subjects in which Britain’s interests are most effectively advanced in global forums by the weight of the EU. Rightly so. But what about an even more anguishing and urgent subject, like the hundreds of thousands who are unable to live safe lives in sub-Saharan Africa due to the breakdown of order?

If you want peace in Sudan or Congo or Somalia, you have to want not just international aid but international peacekeeping. Existing peacekeeping efforts, though large and expensive, are also ineffective. Western engagement in these efforts would be controversial, but it could be very effective. Yet it will only happen — to the extent it happens at all — through the EU, not through nation states. There is a pressing need for an intelligent post-Iraq debate about how Europe can best develop, organise and use hard power.

At a seminar in London this week, several senior Labour heavy hitters argued that now, with Obama reaching out to the world, is exactly the time for the European case to be made more urgently in Britain. Labour should press more boldly for merged defence capabilities, then for a Europe-US framework for financial service reform, and for individual European nations to have fewer votes in a reorganised system of global financial institutions.

Fine. But here’s the rub. It is not going to happen. If an instinctively pro-European leader like Tony Blair could not change the terms of Britain’s debate about Europe when he was on the crest of a wave during the late 1990s, an instinctively Eurosceptic leader like Gordon Brown — who was a large part of the reason Blair never turned the issue around — is not even going to try doing so when he is being battered in the polls a decade later. As potential Tory PM, David Cameron would certainly have no intention of going there either.

— The Guardian, London