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by William Pfaff
It would be a great service to the American nation if Barack Obama would tell us what he himself thinks the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are about. To capture Osama bin Laden? There have been eight years in which to capture bin Laden and it's not been done yet, and there seems no reason to think that anything important would change if the thousands of Marines now scheduled for Afghanistan did capture him. What did it change to capture and execute Saddam Hussein in Iraq?
Gen. Stanley McChyrstal says the Taliban are winning. Does the president think he can have a military solution -- or a political solution? The latter is not impossible.
Is the war meant to defeat the Taliban? Why? What business is it of the United States to determine who runs Afghanistan, when the Afghan nation has absolutely no ability, interest or capacity to do harm to the United States or to any of the
The Bush administration put Hamid Karzai into the Afghan presidency because he was a compliant figure Americans could work with. He was a Pathan, an Americanized Pathan, and Pathans (also known as Pashtuns) are the majority ethnic in Afghanistan. As the U.S had worked with the hostile
Washington manipulated the Loya Jirga (national assembly of regional and tribal leaders) called in
By acting as it did, the Bush administration robbed Karzai of legitimacy, making him a foreign puppet. That, and his own inadequacies, are responsible for the weakness and corruption of his government, which may be fatal to it in the national elections scheduled to take place
Moreover, since the Karzai government was set up in 2001, northern Pakistan has largely been purged of Pathans -- as well as of those Taliban religious fundamentalists inside the Pathan community who dominated the country until the Americans came, and who now are making their bid to return to power, despite the fact that the cruelty of their previous practices seem widely to have discredited them.
Carlo Cristofori, who was secretary of the International Committee for Solidarity with the Afghan Resistance, says this purge has been an almost completely unreported aspect of the situation, and a dangerous one. (The committee was set up by members of the European Parliament at the time of the Soviet invasion, in 1979.)
"It is sufficient to take a look at a map of the insurgency to see that it is practically the same as an ethnic map of the Pashtun areas (including the Pashtun areas of Pakistan). This is why throwing more military forces into the cauldron, and killing more Pashtuns" -- and American and
President Barack Obama is likely to be influenced by a quite different report prepared for him by an interagency U.S. policy review earlier this year. The review's chairman, Bruce Riedel, has just published in Washington's
The coolest head in the regional policy debate since 2001 has been the
His view is the common-sense one that the struggle in Pakistan-Afghanistan is essentially over local matters of great import to the Pathans, and to their neighbors, and of very little consequence for anyone else -- least of all the
The advice of Carlos Cristofori is to convoke a new Loya Jirga as soon as possible, possibly including surviving members of the royal family (the king himself is dead), and within a republican rather than monarchical framework. Such a meeting is the traditional method for settling political issues among the ethnic communities of Afghanistan.
The Pathans have to be restored to their proportional weight in the meeting, and the U.S. and