The Duel (37 page)

Colin Powell’s ignorance also extended to regional and ethnic complexities. During a closed meeting in Islamabad soon after the occupation, he openly failed to grasp the difference between ethnicity and ideology, happily equating Pashtun and Taliban. Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, the Pakistan foreign minister, corrected the misapprehension by pointing out gently that two senior Foreign Office officials present at the meeting were Pashtuns, definitely not Taliban.

And lastly, while economic conditions failed to improve, NATO military strikes often targeted innocent civilians, leading to violent anti-American protests in the Afghan capital in 2006. What was initially viewed by some locals as a necessary police action against Al Qaeda following the 9/11 attacks is now perceived by a growing majority in the entire region as a full-fledged imperial occupation. The neo-Taliban is growing and creating new alliances not because its sectarian religious practices have become popular, but because it is the only available umbrella for national liberation. As the British and Russians discovered at a high cost in the preceding two centuries, Afghans never like being occupied.

The repression, striking blindly, leaves people with no option but to back those trying to resist, especially in a part of the world where the culture of revenge is strong. When a whole community feels threatened, it reinforces solidarity, regardless of the inadequacies of those who are fighting back. Many Afghans who detest the Taliban are so angered by the failures of NATO and the behavior of its troops that they will support any opposition. A related problem is the undisciplined nature of the mercenaries deployed to assist the NATO armies. They are not responsible
to the military commanders, and even sympathetic observers admit that “their behavior, including alcohol consumption and the patronage of a growing number of brothels in Kabul (both very effectively prohibited to U.S. military personnel), is arousing public anger and resentment.”
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To this could be added numerous incidents of rape, unlawful killings of civilians, indiscriminate search-and-arrest missions, and the rough treatment of women by male soldiers. This has created a thirst for dignity that can be assuaged only by genuine independence.

The middle-cadre Taliban who fled across the border in November 2001 had regrouped and started low-level guerrilla activity by the following year, attracting a trickle of new recruits from madrassas and refugee camps in Pakistan. By 2003 the movement was starting to win active support in the mosques—first from village mullahs, in Zabul, Helmand, Ghazni, Paktika, and Kandahar, and then in the towns. From 2004 onward, increasing numbers of young Waziris were radicalized by the attacks by armed U.S. drones and Pakistani military and police incursions in the impoverished tribal areas. By 2006 there were reports of Kabul mullahs who had previously supported Karzai’s allies but were now railing against the foreigners and the government; calls for jihad against the occupation were heard in the northeast border provinces of Takhar and Badakhshan.

But the largest pool of recruits, according to a well-informed recent estimate, has been “communities antagonized by the local authorities and security forces.” In Kandahar, Helmand, and Uruzgan, Karzai’s cronies—district and provincial governors, security and police chiefs— had enraged local people through harassment and extortion, if not by directing U.S. troops against them. In these circumstances, the Taliban were the only available defense. According to the same report, the Taliban themselves have claimed that families driven into refugee camps by indiscriminate U.S. airpower attacks on the villages have been the major source of recruits. By 2006 the movement was winning the support of traders and businessmen in Kandahar and led a mini “Tet offensive” there that year. One reason suggested for their increasing support
in towns is that the neo-Taliban have relaxed their strictures, for males at least—no longer demanding beards or banning music—and improved their propaganda (producing tapes and CDs of popular singers, and DVDs of U.S. and Israeli atrocities in Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine).

The reemergence of the Taliban cannot therefore be blamed simply on Islamabad’s failure to police the border or cut “command and control” links, as is sometimes claimed by Washington. While the ISI played a commanding role in the retreat of 2001, they no longer have the same degree of control over a more diffuse and widespread movement, for which the occupation itself has been the main recruiting sergeant. NATO’s failure cannot therefore be blamed simply on the Pakistani government.

It is a traditional colonial ploy to blame “outsiders” for internal problems: Karzai specializes in this approach. If anything, the destabilization functions in the other direction: the war in Afghanistan has created a critical situation in two Pakistani frontier provinces. The Pashtun majority in Afghanistan has always had close links to its fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan. The present border was an imposition by the British Empire, but it has always remained porous. It is virtually impossible to build a Texan fence or an Israeli wall across the mountainous and largely unmarked twenty-five-hundred-kilometer border that separates the two countries. The solution is political, not military, and should be sought in the region, not in Washington or Brussels.

The cold winds of the Hindu Kush have, through the centuries, frozen both native reformer and foreign occupier. To succeed, a real peace process must be organically linked to the geography and ethnic composition of the country. Those who argue that all that is needed is to throw money at the Afghans to buy off the tribal elders, as the British used to do, have little idea of what is really happening on the ground. The resistance is assuming classical proportions. If one compares Elizabeth Rubin’s graphic reports from Afghanistan in the
New York Times
with coverage from South Vietnam in the same newspaper forty years ago, remarkable similarities are apparent. Rubin, like David Halberstam in Vietnam, is alarmed by the high rate of civilian deaths caused by NATO: “The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on
Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half-a-million in all of 2006.” She later describes the war in Kunar province, where Afghan guerrillas maintain an astonishing level of attacks. American troops come under fire outside their own temporary headquarters:

The bullets smacked the dirt in front of us. Kearney shoved me into a shack where an Afghan was cooking bread. A few more shots were fired. It was “One-Shot Freddy,” as the soldiers refer to him, an insurgent shooter everyone had a theory about regarding the vintage of his gun, his identity, his tactics—but neither Kearney’s scouts nor Shadow the drone could ever track him. I accidentally slashed my forearm on a nail in the shack and as I watched the blood pool I thought that if I had to live with Freddy and his ilk for months on end I, too, would see a forked tongue in every villager and start dreaming of revenge.
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Washington’s strategic aims in Afghanistan can appear to be primarily focused these days on merely disciplining European allies who betrayed them in Iraq and testing others. In March 2008 the NATO secretary-general, Jaap Scheffer, was full of praise for the Croatians in Afghanistan: “The Croatian participation, and that goes for many other partners, is very important. One of the yardsticks . . . by which nations who are knocking on the door of NATO . . . are measured is are they willing to be a security exporter with us, not only a security consumer but also a security exporter? Croatia is clearly one of those nations who has a good track record of being a security exporter, and I’m happy to hear from my Montenegrin friend that Montenegro, I know that, is also in the process.”

The Germans, still training the Afghan police force, would do well to consider whether the skills they are imparting to young Afghans in the “procedural elements of a transatlantic nation-building strategy” today will not be used against NATO tomorrow, as happens in Iraq
when newly minted soldiers, ordered to kill their own people, often desert to the other side.

Clearly the capture of the Al Qaeda leaders cannot be the main goal of the NATO occupiers. Even if the ISI located and handed the leaders over to Washington, NATO would not likely leave the country. To portray the invasion as a “war of self-defense” for NATO makes a mockery of international law, which was perverted to twist a flukishly successful attack by a tiny, terrorist Arab groupuscule into an excuse for an open-ended American military thrust into the Middle East and Central Asia.

Herein lie the reasons for the near unanimity among Western opinion makers that the occupation must not only continue but expand— “many billions over many years.” The reasons are to be sought not in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan but in Washington and Brussels. As the
Economist
summarizes, “Defeat would be a body blow not only to the Afghans, but”—and more important, of course—“to the NATO alliance.” As ever, geopolitics prevail over Afghan interests in the calculus of the big powers. The bases agreement signed by the United States with its appointee in Kabul in May 2005 gives the Pentagon the right to maintain a massive military presence in Afghanistan in perpetuity. That Washington is not seeking permanent bases in this fraught and inhospitable terrain simply for the sake of “democratization and good governance” was made clear by NATO’s secretary-general Jaap Scheffer at the Brookings Institution in March 2008: the opportunity to site military facilities, and potentially nuclear missiles, in a country that borders China, Iran, and Central Asia was too good to miss.

More strategically, Afghanistan has become a central theater for uniting, and extending, the West’s power, its political grip on the world order. On the one hand, it is argued, it provides an opportunity for the United States to shrug off its failures in imposing its will in Iraq and persuading its allies to play a broader role there. In contrast, as Obama and Clinton have stressed, America and its allies “have greater unity of purpose in Afghanistan. The ultimate outcome of NATO’s effort to stabilize Afghanistan and U.S. leadership of that effort may well affect the cohesiveness of the alliance and Washington’s ability to shape
NATO’s future.”
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Beyond this, NATO strategists looking to the rise of China propose a vastly expanded role for the Western military alliance. Once focused on the Euro-Atlantic area, “in the 21st century NATO must become an alliance founded on the Euro-Atlantic area, designed to project systemic stability beyond its borders”:

The center of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably eastward. The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have built, to lead the way . . . security effectiveness in such a world is impossible without both legitimacy and capability.
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The only way to protect the international system the West has built, the author continues, is to “reenergize” the transatlantic relationship: “There can be no systemic security without Asian security and there will be no Asian security without a strong role for the West therein.”

At present these ambitions are still fantasies. In Afghanistan, angry street demonstrations occurred all over the country in protest of Karzai’s signing the U.S. bases agreement—a clear indication, if one was still needed, that NATO will have to take Karzai with it if it withdraws.

Uzbekistan responded by asking the United States to withdraw its base and personnel from their country. The Russians and Chinese are reported to have protested strongly in private, and subsequently conducted joint military operations on each other’s territory for the first time. “Concern over apparent U.S. plans for permanent bases in Afghanistan and Central Asia” was an important cause of their rapprochement. More limply, Iran responded by increasing export duties, bringing construction in Herat to a halt. In response to Karzai’s pleas, Tehran proposed a treaty that would prohibit foreign intelligence operations
in each country against the other; hard to see how Karzai could have signed this with a straight face.

Washington’s options are limited. The most favored solution, balkanization and the creation of ethnic protectorates, might not work in Afghanistan. The Kosovars and others in the former Yugoslavia were willing client-nationalists, but the Hazaras are perfectly happy with indirect Iranian protection, and Tehran does not favor partitioning Afghanistan. Nor do the Russians and their Central Asian allies, who sustain the Tajiks. Some U.S. intelligence officers have informally been discussing the creation of a Pashtun state that unites the tribes and dissolves the Durand Line, but this would destabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan to such a degree that the consequences would be unpredictable. In any event there appear to be no serious takers in either country at the moment.

If this is understood, then a second alternative, both preferable and more workable, becomes apparent. This would involve a withdrawal of all NATO forces either preceded or followed by a regional pact to ensure Afghan stability for the next ten years. Pakistan, Iran, India, Russia, and possibly China could guarantee and support a functioning national government pledged to preserving the ethnic and religious diversity of Afghanistan. A serious social and economic plan to rebuild the country and provide the basic necessities for its people would become a necessary prerequisite for stability.

This would not only be in the interests of Afghanistan, it would be seen as such by its people, exhausted by decades of endless war and two major foreign occupations. The NATO occupation has made such an arrangement much more difficult. Its predictable failure has revived the Taliban, uniting increasing numbers of poor Pashtuns under its umbrella. But a NATO withdrawal could facilitate a serious peace process. It might also benefit Pakistan, provided its military leaders abandoned foolish notions of “strategic depth” and viewed India not as an enemy but as a possible partner in creating a regional cohesion within whose framework many contentious issues could be resolved. Are Pakistan’s military leaders and politicians capable of grasping the nettle and moving their country forward? Can they move out of the flight path of U.S. power?