Descent Into Chaos (4 page)

With a population of 175 million, Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world. Its society is riddled with deep ethnic, social, and economic fissures. Quite apart from the Islamists, there are grave dangers of secular separatist movements in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh that could divide the nation, just as ethnic nationalism did in 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh. With such threats, is it surprising that foreign experts are worried about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

My three books before 9/11 dealt with the problems of failed states, the rise of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and the failure of U.S. policy in the region, topics I have covered as a reporter and analyst since the late 1970s. What I term “the region”—Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the five Central Asian Republics—is even more vital to global stability now than when I first wrote about it. When I wrote about the Taliban and called for greater international commitment to help the Afghans, I did not expect any response. Today nobody can plead ignorance about what is at stake, the worsening state of affairs, or the risks involved in once again letting this region stagnate.

As with my other books, this one is a mixture of reportage, analysis, and the accumulation of decades of knowledge and experience traveling in the region and to Western capitals. For many of these major events I was on the ground personally, and almost all the interviews with key political actors were conducted as events and crises were unfolding, rather than afterward. This book is an attempt to define history in the making rather than a scholarly reappraisal years after the event.

My previous books were based on reporting about people, movements, and events that surrounded the rise of Islamic extremism and that few people seemed particularly interested in at the time. It proved immensely difficult even to get these books published. Now there is a vast literature on 9/11 and its consequences in the region. I have absorbed all this literature, but that has not distracted from the fact that I was intimately involved as a reporter or an adviser or an onlooker to most of the events in this book.

I have also resisted the temptation to delve too deeply into the past. This book is not about the causes of 9/11 or the story of al Qaeda or the history of specific individuals and countries in the region. There are other, better books for such information. This book will not tell you where bin Laden is hiding. Nor is this book about Iraq—although the war in Iraq serves as a vital backdrop to everything. This book shows how the United States ignored consolidating South and Central Asia—the homeland of global terrorism—in favor of invading Iraq. American resources and military manpower that Afghanistan should have received went to Iraq. “Iraq was more than just a major distraction to Afghanistan,” says Kofi Annan in retrospect. “Huge resources were devoted to Iraq, which focused away from nation building in Afghanistan. The billions spent in Iraq were the billions that were not spent in Afghanistan.”
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Moreover, the U.S. attack on Iraq was critical to convincing Musharraf that the United States was not serious about stabilizing the region, and that it was safer for Pakistan to preserve its own national interest by clandestinely giving the Taliban refuge.

What makes the war in Iraq, and the enormous human losses there, even more tragic is that all the mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq had already been made in Afghanistan—yet nothing was learned. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, not enough U.S. troops were deployed, nor were enough planning and resources devoted to the immediate postwar resuscitation of people’s lives. There was no coherence to U.S. tactics and strategy, which led to vitally wrong decisions being taken at critical moments—whether it was reviving the warlords in Afghanistan or dismantling the army and bureaucracy in Iraq.

The bitter divisions that surfaced within the administration as the neoconservatives clashed over power and prerogative effectively paralyzed decision making as both wars were being fought. The cabinet system of the U.S. government virtually collapsed, ruinous laws were enacted that flouted the U.S. Constitution, and torture became the norm for U.S. security agencies. Foreign policy became the prerogative of the Department of Defense, which was unaccountable to the U.S. Congress or the public, rather than the domain of the State Department. Insufficient regional alliances were forged to neutralize Afghanistan’s neighbors before, during, and after the invasions. An invasion force that does not first politically neutralize all potential sources of trouble in its rear does not understand either military strategy or diplomacy. Above all, arrogance and ignorance were in abundant supply as the Bush administration invaded two countries in the Muslim world without any attempt to understand the history, culture, society, or traditions of those countries.

Today some retired American generals and historians call the U.S. invasion of Iraq the greatest strategic military disaster in American history, a massive squandering of lives and resources that will affect the Middle East and reduce the power of the United States for years to come. Yet compared with what is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq may well turn out to be a mere sideshow, a historical folly that diverted global attention for some years but had little impact in changing the real nature of power and politics in the Middle East. The U.S. failure to secure this region may well lead to global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and a drug epidemic on a scale that we have not yet experienced and I can only hope we never will.

This book is about American failure to secure the region after 9/11, to carry out nation building on a scale that could have reversed the appeal of terrorism and Islamic extremism and averted state collapse on a more calamitous scale than could ever have happened before 9/11. The World Bank estimates that there are now twenty-six failing states in the world that could breed terrorism, as opposed to seventeen such states in 2003. Clearly we have gotten a great deal wrong about the post-9 /11 world.
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This book is an attempt to frame events and their consequences across the largest landmass in the world, and to show what went wrong on the ground and why, while describing how such poor decisions were made in Washington. It tries to answer the question of why the world is less secure seven years after 9/11.

The quick American victory in Afghanistan in 2001 created the feeling that a new era was now inevitable. Despite their cowboy president, the Americans were momentarily humbled by their own vulnerability and felt guilty about having ignored Afghanistan for the past decade. U.S. TV networks suddenly began to cover the Muslim world, and the Koran became a bestseller in U.S. bookshops. The rest of the world rallied around America as international organizations such as the UN sanctioned the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

At the time of the invasion, I broke with many of my colleagues by arguing that the war in Afghanistan was a just war and not an imperialist intervention, because only external intervention could save the Afghan people from the Taliban and al Qaeda and prevent the spread of al Qaeda ideology. My book
Taliban,
which had been published in 2000, criticized the United States for abandoning Afghanistan for too long and argued for just such an intervention. At the time my conclusions were strongly criticized by Islamic fundamentalists, the liberal left, and the Pakistani military, who considered my critique of their interventions in Afghanistan as traitorous.

I had seen the accumulating dangers posed by al Qaeda’s expansion in Afghanistan and Pakistan early on, due to my intense involvement with the Afghan saga. I had seen firsthand Afghans’ fortitude during a quarter century of war.
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Afghanistan had become an incubator for al Qaeda, but so had my own country, Pakistan, because of the nexus between Islamic extremists and the army, both of which tolerated an al Qaeda presence before 9/11. The army backed the Taliban and encouraged thousands of Pakistani youngsters to fight and die for the Taliban, just as it mobilized thousands of Pakistanis to fight in the Kashmiri insurgency against India. I warned that armed with nuclear weapons and fueled by jihadism, a military regime led by the rash and impetuous General Musharraf was capable of creating a perfect storm of circumstances and events that could plunge the region into even greater danger and chaos and undermine Pakistan’s very existence. That is what we are seeing today.

To the north of Afghanistan, in Central Asia, five states newly independent from the Soviet Union remained largely isolated from world events. Economic misery in four of these states was now far worse than it was during the Soviet era. These four were ruled by dictators, holdovers from the Soviet era, but the region was ripe for reform and democratic change. The increased birth rate of the 1980s had produced an alienated, angry, and jobless mass of young people under age twenty-five who were looking for change. The longer such change was delayed, the greater the chances that underground Islamic extremist movements linked to al Qaeda could exploit the coming crisis.

The major center of any turmoil would be Uzbekistan, the most populated state, where the twin forces of severe state repression and Islamic fundamentalism were in conflict. Ignored by the world and in turmoil, Uzbekistan could destabilize an immense zone lying between the vast landmasses of Russia and China; al Qaeda could exploit the situation readily.

After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, optimists like me expected that the U.S.-led international community would commit to rebuild Afghanistan and help undertake reforms and nation building in Pakistan and throughout Central Asia. The region had to be seen as a single entity because it was beset by many of the same problems. Rebuilding Afghanistan alone would only push its problems into neighboring states. Ending the “failing states syndrome” in the region and integrating those states into the world economy would require massive aid, internal economic reforms, democratization, and literacy. This would need nothing less than a Western-led Marshall Plan for the region and a commitment that would have to be measured in not months or years but decades. The leaders in the region would be persuaded to change their autocratic ways only if they saw an unfaltering Western military and aid presence on their doorstep.

It was equally important to wean Muslims away from the message of al Qaeda and its perversion of Islam. As I saw al Qaeda evolve in Afghanistan in the 1990s, I considered it nothing more than a blatant power grab by men whose naked political aims were cloaked in the garb of Islamic ideology. Yet to a handful of Muslims, al Qaeda posed a civilizational solution—albeit an extreme one—to the issue of justice denied to Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. Now Muslims had to be in the forefront of changing their own environment and governments, and taking responsibility for creating the mechanisms in which the rule of law and civil society could grow and flourish.

The American response to events in the region was not encouraging. The Republicans had won the 2000 U.S. elections on the basis of not more but less involvement in the world and a shortsighted “go it alone” philosophy that ignored existing alliances and treaties. Condoleezza Rice wrote in a January 2000 article for
Foreign Affairs
that a Bush presidency would focus on the national interest instead of international humanitarian actions, as Clinton had done. Muslim leaders in the region read this as a lack of U.S. interest. Bush said he would avoid “open-ended deployments and unclear military missions,” adding, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building—I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win wars.”
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These words were to haunt Bush after 9/11.

Bush became president with no knowledge of or interest in the outside world—reflective of the attitude of most Americans at the time. He had barely traveled outside the United States, did not read about other countries, and knew no foreign leaders, frequently mixing up their names and designations. During his election campaign in 2000, he committed two grand faux pas—the first when he did not know the name of General Pervez Musharraf, who was then president of Pakistan, and the second when he thought the Taliban were an all-girls pop group. His ignorance toward the region was on full display every time these jokes were told.
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The ease with which Bush’s lack of interest in foreign policy was accepted by the American political elite was unfortunately also a reflection of the attitude of President Bill Clinton to global problems. During his eight years in office, Clinton had cherry-picked his way through a whole raft of foreign policy issues, determining that intervention was a good idea when the polls told him that Americans supported intervention and doing nothing when the polls indicated the contrary. Thus, intervening in the former Yugoslavia was a good idea once the U.S. media had built up traction for the case, while the Rwanda genocide was ignored.

Clinton blew hot and cold when it came to Afghanistan and chasing al Qaeda. There were long periods of inaction; whimsical plans, such as the CIA hiring hit squads from Pakistan and Uzbekistan to capture bin Laden; and a sudden decision to use cruise missiles to hit al Qaeda camps after the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa. But there was no clear American determination to get rid of al Qaeda or the Taliban, and there was even less of a policy toward Pakistan, especially one that addressed the military’s support to the Taliban. In the second Clinton term, U.S. government departments seemed to have different agendas for the region. For the State Department the main issue was easing India-Pakistan tensions, deterring nuclear proliferation, and persuading both countries to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty after they had both tested nuclear weapons. The CIA focus was on bin Laden and the threat of the Pakistani military supporting causes that were deemed to be terrorist by the outside world. Yet the CIA refused to support the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and mistrusted its leader, Ahmad Shah Masud. The Pentagon declined to get involved either way and did not even bother to draw up contingency plans for any possible military action in Afghanistan.