AFPAK OR PAKAF? OBAMA’s DILEMMA
By Bhabani Sen Gupta
A long, searing debate has been going on at the White House
in Washington DC on what should be president Barak Obama’s next
strategy in Afghanistan. Vice-president Joe Biden asked at one of
the sessions how much was America spending on Afghanistan and
Pakistan.The answer came as $ 65 billion and $ 2.25 billion. “Well,”
drawled the prolix vice-president, “ by my calculations, that’s 30-to-1
ratio in favour of Afghanistan.” Pausing a few moments of silence
among the select group of national security advisers, Biden asked
a question. “Al-Qaeda is almost all in Pakistan, and Pakistan had nuclear
weapons. And yet for every dollar we are spending in Pakistan, we’re
spending $ 30 in Afghanistan. Does that make strategic sense?”
The debate may consume the rest of the month of October, may extend to November.
President Barack Obama inherited two wars from George W.Bush.
He was not elected to the White House to win the first war Bush had started
-----America invaded Afghanistan way back in 2001! His campaign promise to the American people was to end the war in Iraq; he did not promise to win the war in Afghanistan but to bear with it.. His commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40-60,000 more troops and years of warfare without anything like a victory. The General has publicly confessed that America cannot expect to win the war in Afghanistan. And he has also confessed that the longer he stays in Afghanistan, the less he understands the country., The Economist, inheritor of the imperial ethos of the Raj, felt let down by Obama’s “dithering” in October when he took his time to determine changes in Afghan strategy/.The Economist praised Gordon Brown, British prime minister, for offering 500 more men to fight in Afghanistan. The offer , however, was hedged by several conditions.. Brown could not afford to forget that the British from India had invaded Afghanistan twice, facing defeat both times, but succeeding in dividing the largest ethnic group in the multi\ethnic, multi-lingual population, the Pushtuns, thereby depriving Afghanistan of the principal ingredient of political stability. Neither Brown nor The Economist nor indeed most of the nations of the world want America to get defeated in Afghanistan.
What is needed is an Obama strategy to pull out of Afghanistan. Obama will be better advised to ask the UN to find a settlement of the Afghan conflict or even NATO plus a few chosen neighbours of Afghanistan like Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia.
Obama, in his election campaign, called this war “the right war” ( the “wrong war” was in Iraq) because Afghanistan was seen asthe haven and the largest nest of Taliban, the jihadi offspring of fundamentalist Islam.
That perception seems to be changing at the White House Situation Room. Not
only has the Afghan war cost America $ 65 billion; it has lost support of most of
America’s Coalition of the Willing, and it has no support among a majority of the
American voters who will vote soon in the first Congressional election since Obama
took the White House.
. Osama bin Laden sounded softer than in the past when he addressed
the invading powers from his unknown hideout on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 to tell them that they should quit the war they could hardly win.” You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” Turning to his own followers, said this fugitive man of darkness, “The time has come to liberate ourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives.” It could have meant fear to negotiate or fear to fight.
In London, the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, Robert Fisk was
moved by the Al Zazzera video to comment that “Obama and Osama are at least participating in the same narrative For the U.S. president’s critics-indeed for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan—are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.”
Much of the marathon debate at the Situation Room in the White House revolves
around crucial questions about how Al Qaeda and Taliban relate to one another. Are they two different phenomena, each with its own sociology and political objectives?Or are that two faces of one single body of violent, resurgent, fundamentalist Islam committed to turning the entire space ofAfghan-Pakistan into an armed Islamic fortress? The perceptions the Obama administration inherited from that of
He was not elected to the White House to win the first war Bush had started
-----America invaded Afghanistan way back in 2001! His campaign promise to the American people was to end the war in Iraq; he did not promise to win the war in Afghanistan but to bear with it.. His commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, has asked for 40-60,000 more troops and years of warfare without anything like a victory. The General has publicly confessed that America cannot expect to win the war in Afghanistan. And he has also confessed that the longer he stays in Afghanistan, the less he understands the country., The Economist, inheritor of the imperial ethos of the Raj, felt let down by Obama’s “dithering” in October when he took his time to determine changes in Afghan strategy/.The Economist praised Gordon Brown, British prime minister, for offering 500 more men to fight in Afghanistan. The offer , however, was hedged by several conditions.. Brown could not afford to forget that the British from India had invaded Afghanistan twice, facing defeat both times, but succeeding in dividing the largest ethnic group in the multi\ethnic, multi-lingual population, the Pushtuns, thereby depriving Afghanistan of the principal ingredient of political stability. Neither Brown nor The Economist nor indeed most of the nations of the world want America to get defeated in Afghanistan.
What is needed is an Obama strategy to pull out of Afghanistan. Obama will be better advised to ask the UN to find a settlement of the Afghan conflict or even NATO plus a few chosen neighbours of Afghanistan like Iran, Pakistan, China and Russia.
Obama, in his election campaign, called this war “the right war” ( the “wrong war” was in Iraq) because Afghanistan was seen asthe haven and the largest nest of Taliban, the jihadi offspring of fundamentalist Islam.
That perception seems to be changing at the White House Situation Room. Not
only has the Afghan war cost America $ 65 billion; it has lost support of most of
America’s Coalition of the Willing, and it has no support among a majority of the
American voters who will vote soon in the first Congressional election since Obama
took the White House.
. Osama bin Laden sounded softer than in the past when he addressed
the invading powers from his unknown hideout on the eighth anniversary of 9/11 to tell them that they should quit the war they could hardly win.” You are waging a hopeless and losing war,” Turning to his own followers, said this fugitive man of darkness, “The time has come to liberate ourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives.” It could have meant fear to negotiate or fear to fight.
In London, the Middle East correspondent of The Independent, Robert Fisk was
moved by the Al Zazzera video to comment that “Obama and Osama are at least participating in the same narrative For the U.S. president’s critics-indeed for many critics of the West’s military occupation of Afghanistan—are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama’s (and their) greatest enemy.”
Much of the marathon debate at the Situation Room in the White House revolves
around crucial questions about how Al Qaeda and Taliban relate to one another. Are they two different phenomena, each with its own sociology and political objectives?Or are that two faces of one single body of violent, resurgent, fundamentalist Islam committed to turning the entire space ofAfghan-Pakistan into an armed Islamic fortress? The perceptions the Obama administration inherited from that of
George Bush was the apocalyptic vision of a single fanatic Islamic monster
challenging America to nothing short of a civilisational war across undefined battlefronts ; the “war” that was carried to the American homeland on 9/11 must be fought on as many fronts as the Enemy chose to strike from. The American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003 locked two fundamentalist belligerent gospels in a mutually mortal combat.
Humanity demands that the new American president shakes off this terribly
jaundiced vision. From the little narrow windows that have been allowed to open on
the secret Situation Room debate, it seems that two major schools of thought have begun to emerge. One, led by Biden, sees the Taliban in Afghanistan as the country’s own political movement inevitably wearing Islamic masks because the country, battered by 3O years of warfare lacks institutional frames with which to build political parties.
There is indeed an Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, but it is a small one, perhaps about 100 dedicated jihadis; Al Qaeda does not drive Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it does so in Pakistan where the Army, cuddled, armed, indoctrinated, financed, and armoured by America, granted it a safe haven in the huge, rugged, tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistsn. Pakistan was created by M.A. Jinnah as a secular republic for the Muslim minority of the British Indian empire. It was midwifed by the Raj in clumsy, desperate haste in 1947. In a mere ten years, it
was usurped by the Army and in another ten given Islamic trappings, until General
Zia-ul Huq, a darling of Washington, proclaimed an Islamic Republic. General Zia
also created Taliban and endowed it with the role of throwing out the Soviet-backed
Saur Revolutionary regime in Afghanistan and proclaim an Islamic regime in Kabul
that would be bound to Pakistan to fight India from a strategic depth. All this military- strategic thinking and planning had the open or implied support or approval of the United States. Obama is now engaged in a thorough review of the inherited wisdom or folly that the Taliban, because it is led by Islamic cleriks trained in Madrasas is a threat to the national security of the United States. As of November 24, when this analysis is being written, it seems that the president and his advisers as well as cabinet colleagues have reached a consensus that the Taliban, as long as it operates only in Afghanistan without Al Qaeda leadership as well as infiltration, it is not a security threat to America, and it can be brought into a network of negotiations leading to a political understanding. The United States can then focus entirely on Al Qaeda which has now dug its toes in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and built a compact with Pakistan Taliban . The combination constitutes a formidable Islamic terrorist force, the largest in the world, very well armed for guerrilla warfare of long duration, and seemingly well-supplied with financial and other resources.
If separation of Afghan Taliban from the Al Qaeda-Taliban joint front
in Pakistan informs Obama’s new military-political, that is, strategic thrust
at the end of the debate in the White House, it will mark the end of the short-lived
strategic AFPAK concept of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy` for the
South Asian front of American diplo-military thrusts.
A new strategic concept will emerge. Americans may be prompted to call
it PAKAF strategy. But it will fall far short of an adequate intellectual under-
standing of the problem. Pakistan has been all these years a major American asset
in the Cold War and even in the 16 years that have glided by since 1991. Will
the friendship endure if the U.S. puts enough pressure on Pakistan to incapacitate, if not kill, the monster the Army itself created and nurtured with America’s tacit
approval and loud economic and military support?END
Humanity demands that the new American president shakes off this terribly
jaundiced vision. From the little narrow windows that have been allowed to open on
the secret Situation Room debate, it seems that two major schools of thought have begun to emerge. One, led by Biden, sees the Taliban in Afghanistan as the country’s own political movement inevitably wearing Islamic masks because the country, battered by 3O years of warfare lacks institutional frames with which to build political parties.
There is indeed an Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, but it is a small one, perhaps about 100 dedicated jihadis; Al Qaeda does not drive Taliban in Afghanistan.
But it does so in Pakistan where the Army, cuddled, armed, indoctrinated, financed, and armoured by America, granted it a safe haven in the huge, rugged, tribal borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistsn. Pakistan was created by M.A. Jinnah as a secular republic for the Muslim minority of the British Indian empire. It was midwifed by the Raj in clumsy, desperate haste in 1947. In a mere ten years, it
was usurped by the Army and in another ten given Islamic trappings, until General
Zia-ul Huq, a darling of Washington, proclaimed an Islamic Republic. General Zia
also created Taliban and endowed it with the role of throwing out the Soviet-backed
Saur Revolutionary regime in Afghanistan and proclaim an Islamic regime in Kabul
that would be bound to Pakistan to fight India from a strategic depth. All this military- strategic thinking and planning had the open or implied support or approval of the United States. Obama is now engaged in a thorough review of the inherited wisdom or folly that the Taliban, because it is led by Islamic cleriks trained in Madrasas is a threat to the national security of the United States. As of November 24, when this analysis is being written, it seems that the president and his advisers as well as cabinet colleagues have reached a consensus that the Taliban, as long as it operates only in Afghanistan without Al Qaeda leadership as well as infiltration, it is not a security threat to America, and it can be brought into a network of negotiations leading to a political understanding. The United States can then focus entirely on Al Qaeda which has now dug its toes in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and built a compact with Pakistan Taliban . The combination constitutes a formidable Islamic terrorist force, the largest in the world, very well armed for guerrilla warfare of long duration, and seemingly well-supplied with financial and other resources.
If separation of Afghan Taliban from the Al Qaeda-Taliban joint front
in Pakistan informs Obama’s new military-political, that is, strategic thrust
at the end of the debate in the White House, it will mark the end of the short-lived
strategic AFPAK concept of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy` for the
South Asian front of American diplo-military thrusts.
A new strategic concept will emerge. Americans may be prompted to call
it PAKAF strategy. But it will fall far short of an adequate intellectual under-
standing of the problem. Pakistan has been all these years a major American asset
in the Cold War and even in the 16 years that have glided by since 1991. Will
the friendship endure if the U.S. puts enough pressure on Pakistan to incapacitate, if not kill, the monster the Army itself created and nurtured with America’s tacit
approval and loud economic and military support?END
