Taking the Fight into Pakistan

The idea has been bandied about before – go after the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in their lairs inside Pakistan. It’s an option George w. Bush himself brought up this week. It’s a decision that also could have enormous ramifications, the sort that the frat boy Bush has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to grasp until it’s too late.

Richard Nixon did it. He sent his military forces swarming into Cambodia to attack the safe havens of the North Vietnamese army infiltrators. He kicked proper hell out of the place, killed an awful lot of civilians, and maybe bought himself a year’s grace before the inevitable.

The idea is the same but the turf is not and neither are the people our side would have to deal with, the Pashtun. It’s sort of like putting a bare foot into a bag full of scorpions. You’re going to get stung, it’ll hurt like hell and it might even kill you. Chances are good, when it’s over, you’ll realize you made a huge mistake.

The Toronto Sun’s Eric Margolis has travelled through these lands and he knows better:

I spent a remarkable time in this wild medieval region during the 1980s and ’90s, travelling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and their chiefs, called “maliks.”

These tribal belts are always called “lawless.” Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn’t like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, “save your last bullet for yourself.”

…there is law: The traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behaviour and personal honour. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, War at the Top of the World.

The 40 million Pashtun — called “Pathan’ by the British — are the world’s largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan’s Pashtun number 28 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation’s largest ethnic group.

The tribal agency’s Pashtun reluctantly joined Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops entering there.

But under intense U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan’s constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region’s tribes, killing 3,000 of them.

In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen.

As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war.

The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region.

Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf’s government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honour far more than money, and cannot be bought.

Any U.S. attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake.

Margolis (quite correctly in my opinion) argues that carrying the fighting into Pakistan will only widen the war and transform it into a battle against western occupation. Think Iraq. Secondly, he points out that Musharraf’s fate lies in the hands of his army’s officers who may topple the general in response to US or NATO attacks. His third point is that this tactic could reignite the movement for a unified Pashtun homeland, Pashtunistan, that could fatally undermine the modern Pakistan state which, in case you need reminding, has a troublesome nuclear arsenal. Lastly he notes the US military has a mixed record from taking on what were, at best, weak and small opponents – such as Iraq. Pakistan, with its half-million soldier military, could well be much more than the US and NATO could handle.

Those Bush administration and Harper government officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.

 

The Bitter Truth

Canada’s and NATO’s policies in Afghanistan are fundamentally flawed. We’re just not getting this right and it makes the loss of each of our soldiers killed over there especially bitter to take.

Since I began this blog back in August, I’ve been writing about the profound mistakes we’re making in Afghanistan. If you do a quick search of this site you’ll find those articles and there are plenty of them. Taken together, they stand as an indictment of our sitting prime minister and his top soldier, General Rick Hillier.

I wish that I had some genius no one else has, that I was prescient at a mystical level. I don’t and I’m not. The fact is that everything I’ve drawn upon in coming to my criticisms is relatively common knowledge, not even very obscure. Insurgency and counter-insurgency is probably the most clearly defined form of warfare that exists. It’s the only form of warfare in which the weakest side – the one that fights at a huge disadvantage in firepower, manpower, communications and mobility – almost always wins. It’s been practised time and again and it’s an experiment that produces consistent results. Every mistake that we’re making in Afghanistan today has been demonstrated repeatedly in the past.

But what do I know. Fortunately I don’t have to rely on my say so. The US military has finally come to its senses, digested the lessons of history (some of that history they themselves made) and produced a new counter-insurgency field manual FM 3-24. It virtually catalogues everything we’re doing wrong in Afghanistan. Check out Lawrence of Arabia, Col. T.E. Lawrence has his excellent accounts of his successful insurgency in the Middle East in WWI. There are several others.

Now Thomas Walkom, writing in today’s Toronto Star, summarizes a report written by Gordon

Smith, now director of the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria, is Canada’s former ambassador to NATO and a former deputy minister of foreign affairs. His Canada in Afghanistan: Is it Working? was done for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, a Calgary think-tank that is not known for being squishy on matters military.

Smith maintains that negotiating with the Taliban is our only realistic option:

“‘We do not believe that the Taliban can be defeated or eliminated as a political entity in any meaningful time frame by Western armies using military measures,’ he says.

“The reasons for this are fourfold. First, the Taliban are still the dominant force among Pashtuns in Afghanistan’s south, where Canadian troops are operating. NATO bête noire Mullah Omar ‘remains unchallenged as leader of the Taliban,’ Smith writes. ‘There is no alternative representing Pashtun interests who has more clout than he.’

“Second, neighbouring Pakistan ‘is highly ambivalent about crushing the Taliban insurgency.’ While technically on NATO’s side in this matter, important elements of the Pakistani state apparatus, Smith writes, continue to support the Taliban as their proxy in Afghanistan – mainly as a way to fend off what they see as hostile Russian and Indian influences.

“To destroy the Taliban would be to end Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, he says – which perhaps explains Islamabad’s less than total support for the NATO mission.

“Third, the NATO strategy of using air power and heavy armour is backfiring. So is the policy of opium eradication. One destroys Afghan lives, the other their livelihoods. The net result, writes Smith (and here he echoes reports from the London-based Senlis Council), is to make Afghans even more hostile to NATO troops.

“Fourth, NATO countries don’t have the will to fight a protracted war in a faraway country.
‘If NATO states it will only be satisfied with a decisive military victory, the Taliban will call our bluff,’ Smith says. ‘The Taliban have demonstrated greater resolve, tactical efficiency and ability to absorb the costs of war over the long term than have NATO forces.’

“As a result, ‘talking to the Taliban’ emerges as the only feasible solution. ‘Given the costs of war,’ he writes, ‘NATO needs to look candidly at the prospects – aware that there can be no guarantee – of a political solution.'”

Smith is clearly right that we’re not going to somehow win this battle but he ends his discourse a bit too soon. Not mentioned is the real hurdle that will remain to be cleared – restoring some balance in political power in Afghanistan.

The Pashtun of Afghanistan are the Shia of Iraq – a majority. Thanks for 5+ years of Western indifference the Kabul government has come to be dominated by warlords, drug lords and common criminals of the minority Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaris and Turkmen. As far as they’re concerned, the Afghan civil war is over and they’re the victors. The Taliban are obviously not accepting that result and want to renew the civil war.

To settle this conflict NATO or the US or Pakistan or all of them (India included) will have to use their influence to get these mortal enemies, the Northern Alliance and the Taliban, to engage in some sort of legitimate power-sharing. The US will also have to use its influence to prevent India from exploiting Afghanistan to wage a proxy war against Pakistan. But, if we cannot broker some genuine agreement between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance we’ll have to decide whether we’re going to become embroiled in their civil war or step completely away from it.

This is a real conundrum but it’s one that might have been avoided had George Bush not turned indifferent to Afghanistan in 2001 so that he could conquer Iraq. The US should have played a more direct role in shaping Afghanistan’s first post-Taliban government. It should have developed a legitimate political entity to represent the majority Pashtun and it should have given Karzai essential support to prevent the warlords and drug lords from seizing political power. Our side should have kept that scum out of government and thereby prevented the corruption of the country’s security services that simply drives the Pashtun into the arms of the Taliban.

We have to recognize that we can’t turn back the clock to 2001 (unless we oust the warlords and go to war with the Northern Alliance mujahideen). We can’t use firepower to legitimize a corrupted regime. We can’t even expect our firepower to defeat this insurgency. So just what the hell are we doing there? It’s time we revisited that debate.

 

The Price of Peace

A genuine conundrum. Afghanistan has the wrong people in government.

Afghanistan’s majority ethnic group is the Pashtun. They’re in the south and along the border with Pakistan. They have only a marginally effective presence in their parliament and virtually none at all in the cabinet of Hamid Karzai.

The civil war was won (with essential American assistance) by the Northern Alliance, a cobbled-together alliance of warlords and murderous thugs from the Uzbek, Tajik and Hazari regions in the north. When the Taliban and al-Qaeda were driven out, the Americans helped create a supposed democracy. However, the victorious minorities were not about to see another government controlled by Pashtuns and they took over Karzai’s cabinet. This is Karzai’s conundrum.

The northerners have sought the backing of India, the traditional foe of Pakistan, and they’ve got it. India backs the Afghan government and its army, if only to give Islamabad fits. Pakistan, of course, has traditionally supported the Pashtun in Afghanistan whose tribal lands are pretty evenly split between the two countries.

Here’s the rundown. The minority northerners, who control the Afghan government and army, serve as India’s proxies. The majority Pashtun, through their home team, the Taliban, serve as Pakistan’s proxies and its main hope of keeping Afghanistan within its influence.

The map shows what an Indian-dominated Afghanistan means to Pakistan. Already outnumbered and massively outgunned by India on its eastern border, it would also face a threat along its western border. Pakistan can’t resist helping, or at least acquiescing, to the Taliban’s activities in its tribal lands. This is Pakistan’s conundrum.

It is not in the interests of the United States to see the Pashtun retake control of their government. America does not welcome the prospect of a return of the Taliban. Pakistan just doesn’t have much clout with Washington. The nation they’re courting is India, mainly as an ally in containing the threat of Chinese expansion. India is also economically far more important to Washington than Pakistan can ever dream of becoming. This is America’s conundrum.

Afghanistan cannot become a genuine democracy when minorities hostile to the majority control the government’s key ministries and its security forces. India seeks to undermine Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan and so supports the minorities in control, effectively putting India also in opposition to the Pashtun majority. America also sides with the northern minorities, undercutting Pakistan’s influence.

There’s your problem – India, Pakistan and America are each exploiting Afghanistan to advance their own, divergent interests. The stability and wellbeing of Afghanistan and its supposed democracy are really secondary factors if they factor in at all. It’s the “Great Game” played out in yet another variant and history shows that it’s a game that rarely turns out well for the visiting team.