Despite inept Karzai government, the U.S. cannot let al Qaeda return

History has been unkind to great powers seeking to subdue Afghanistan. All have failed. The vanquished include the Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, who invaded in the 6th century B.C., Alexander the Great, who rolled in 300 years later, the British in the 19th century, and the Soviets from 1979-89. Now it's our turn, and the situation is more complex than ever.

It's never been difficult to invade Afghanistan. The hard part has been maintaining control in a land divided by impossible geography and immutable tribal rivalries. Ethnic tensions that seem as fixed as the geography of isolation and warlordism always evaporate in the wake of outside intervention. The rival ethnic groups may fight a civil war (as did the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Hazara, Uzbeks, and Turkmen against the Taliban), but they have generally made common cause to expel any foreign body.

In his recent book The Great Gamble, a must-read, Gregory Feifer describes how the Soviets tried to explain that they were in Afghanistan to help restore order, but the central government they set up faced spontaneous resistance. With an uncertain grasp on the center, they were even less able to exert authority in the open and mountainous countryside, where even the local drinking water had to be regarded as an enemy. Rural Afghans, calling themselves mujahideen or "holy warriors," refused to tolerate invaders, no matter how friendly they claimed to be. The mujahideen were outgunned so they formed small, highly mobile guerrilla units to ambush the ponderous Soviet forces. Snipers were ideally situated on the heights overlooking the threading roads. Soviet airpower was of little use against mujahideen hiding in caves. They fought only when the conditions favored them against soldiers who hardly knew whom they were fighting. When, in exasperation, the Soviets randomly unleashed their firepower to avenge the deaths of their comrades, they crystallized a virtually unanimous opposition among the people. The Soviet soldiers fought to stay alive, but their enemy was fighting for his beliefs and his land.

Most Afghans are Pashtuns -- Sunni Muslims -- and so were the "Students of Islamic Knowledge" who emerged as the Taliban, many of them after years of indoctrination in Pakistan. They took over in 1996 and imposed their version of a strict Sharia law and were natural hosts for al Qaeda, another Sunni grouping attached to the even more extreme Wahhabism of Saudi Arabia. We invaded only when the Taliban refused to eject al Qaeda and were welcomed by the population at large who'd suffered many cruelties. Now many Afghans have come to see us as representing yet another "imperial" army impervious to local culture. Gen. Stanley McChrystal understood this when he said, "If the people view us as occupiers and the enemy, we can't be successful and our casualties will go up dramatically." Long-term success clearly depends on the emergence of a large number of well-equipped Afghans ready to keep a civilized order within the bounds of Afghan culture.

Why be so concerned about Afghanistan? The answer is clear. Practically all the jihadist plots against the West in the recent past lead to one part of the world: the tenuous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Both have hosted al Qaeda training camps. Their graduates in terror include Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; Ahmed Ressam, who plotted to blow up LAX airport in 1999; the people behind suicide attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000; all 19 of the September 11 hijackers; the leader of the 2002 Bali murders of more than 200, mostly Western, tourists; the ringleader of the 2005 London subway bombing; those who plotted to blow up passenger planes leaving Heathrow and attack Ramstein Air Base.

The Taliban were prepared to lose everything after 9/11 rather than give up Osama bin Laden. They have grown closer since. Let's remember, too, that al Qaeda doesn't just want a safe haven. It seeks a Muslim caliphate established in a Muslim state to rally Muslims worldwide. Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri explained soon after 9/11: "Without achieving this goal, our actions will mean nothing."

The core issue in resisting this mortal threat is that in Afghanistan, the abuses of the inept Karzai government have inspired sympathy for the Taliban. It now controls perhaps 40 percent of the country and with that a big part of the profits from the 90 percent of the world's opium and heroin produced there. The Taliban are thus able to pay new recruits at least twice as much as the Afghan army.

The result is the Afghans have had too few soldiers to hold territory. This has forced us to use air power, which, in turn, produces civilian casualties and hostility. How can we retain popular support to prevent our enemies from getting more power to kill more Americans (and terrorize more Afghans)?

Pakistan is the key.

The Taliban grew up there and all too easily retreat home. But Pakistan has always regarded Afghanistan as not just the next-door state but one central to its existential struggle against India and as a necessary corridor to Muslim-dominated central Asia. And we have vital interests, too, in the stability of Pakistan since it has dozens of nuclear weapons and has the potential for a confrontation with another American ally, India. This means that Pakistan cannot be excluded from Afghanistan.

Our aims must be to get Pakistan to shut down the Taliban and al Qaeda safe havens while we strive to empower the Afghan military and police forces to establish a safe space for an effective civil government. To succeed, we must establish this as an Afghan war, not an American war. The Afghans must have the chance to win their own country back. Since the strategy is eerily reminiscent of our attempts to bolster South Vietnam, an alternative way out has been suggested: seek a compromise with the central Taliban leadership that already operates a shadow government. President Hamid Karzai has reached out to see if this offers a way he can end the eight-year war, but it begs the question of whether there is any Taliban leadership capable of a compromise with the Afghans and the United States on security (and human rights). We just cannot risk a re-emergence of al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The excruciating difficulty we have, the battlefield aside, is that the longer we stay, the more we may be resented. But if we seem to be cutting loose soon--as history suggests we will--the local tribes will want to play it safe and not get on the wrong side of the Taliban. The Afghans have a saying. "The Americans have the wristwatches, but we have the time." They fear the Taliban will come back and kill every family that collaborated with the Americans or the Karzai government. It's a fear that can be dealt with only by strengthening the Afghan security forces--and reaching a cast-iron understanding with Pakistan on establishing a strong, viable Afghanistan free of Taliban terror. Recently, the Pakistanis do seem to have shifted their focus. They've arrested several Taliban leaders, improved intelligence sharing with us, and undertaken serious military operations in the militant havens of Swat, Malakand, South Waziristan, and Bajaur.

We also have to make sure that Pakistan doesn't disintegrate, given its volatile politics and the nuclear arsenal we just cannot let fall into jihadist hands. Pakistan now believes that Americans are finally coming to understand its fear of encirclement: a rising India to the east, uncertain relations with Iran to the west, and growing Indian influence in Afghanistan. We must find a way to encourage this confidence, and not just by military means. Pakistan would be given huge help just by allowing increased textile exports to the United States, as frequently requested by former President Musharraf, and just as frequently turned down by a protectionist, narrow-minded Congress. Furthermore, we must bolster the Karzai government, imperfect as it is.

Our capacity for endurance cannot last forever. The clock is ticking. But what we must never do is behave like a power not planning to win. Without U.S. troops, al Qaeda might return, rebuild, and strike the West again. That is why Afghanistan is of such a vital strategic interest to the United States and why President Obama's policies there have to be supported.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

The Great Gamble

At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes

 

 

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