The march of folly: Obama’s four-word Afpak strategy

In its first foreign-policy test, the new Indian government will have to contend with pressing U.S. proposals that India assist Obama’s politically expedient “Afpak” strategy, which actually threatens to bring Indian security under added pressure

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, May 20, 2009

Now that the national election is over, Indian diplomacy will face demands to aid US President Barack Obama’s strategy on Afghanistan-Pakistan (“Afpak”). To win greater Pakistani military cooperation on the Afghan frontier, Obama is seeking New Delhi’s assistance on at least two fronts — border-troop reductions and a resumption of “peace” talks with Islamabad.

India can assist to the extent that its own interests are safe. India has no offensively-configured troop formations along the Pakistan border, and any cut in border deployments must not provide the Pakistani military an opening to infiltrate more armed terrorists into India. New Delhi has no quarrel with Pakistan’s fledgling civilian government, but a renewed bilateral dialogue can be meaningful only if Islamabad goes beyond cosmetic measures against its military-nurtured, India-directed Punjabi terror groups, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad.

The Obama team also had sought an easing of Pakistani concerns that India is seeking to encircle Pakistan through its role in Afghanistan. But Obama’s special envoy, Richard Holbrooke, has rubbished Pakistani claims of Indian intelligence operations there, saying that contrary to the alleged presence of “hundreds” of Indian operatives in Kandahar, his inquiry revealed that the Indian consulate there has merely “six or eight people”. India has a major stake in the future of Afghanistan and will stay an important player there. This is exemplified by the constructive role it is currently playing to help rebuild that landlocked country through a $1.2 billion aid programme.

The real issue is Obama’s Afpak approach. For a president elected on the slogan of change, his Afpak strategy hardly represents consequential change. In fact, Obama doesn’t have one integrated, comprehensive strategy but distinctly separate plans on Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Take his Pakistan strategy. It can be summed up in just four words: More of the same. Actually, it is more of what hasn’t worked in the past. Unsuccessful US policies have helped generate a terrifying mess in Pakistan, which today resembles a Molotov cocktail waiting for a match.

Yet Obama is seeking to copy that failed approach on a much-bigger scale, as illustrated by his plan to make Pakistan the largest recipient of US aid in the world without setting clear benchmarks for judging progress. In fact, his administration currently is seeking to dissuade Congress from imposing any rigid benchmark on the unparalleled aid for Pakistan.

Throwing more money at Islamabad, pampering the wielder of real power — the military — and undercutting Pakistan’s civilian leaders are examples of why Obama is offering more of the same in US policy. To persuade the Pakistani military establishment against providing terrorist succour and sanctuary along the Afghan border (but not the India frontier), Washington willingly is paying billions of dollars in ransom money, with no assurance that such payouts will make any difference.

What’s the Obama strategy on Afghanistan? Again, it can be summed up in four words: Surge, bribe and run. Obama actually has lifted this strategy lock, stock and barrel from his predecessor, but from a different theatre (Iraq), and without giving George W. Bush any credit.

Obama has set out to replicate in Afghanistan his predecessor’s experiment in Iraq. As happened in Iraq from early 2007, Obama intends to employ a military surge more as a show of force to pursue largely political objectives, especially to explore truces and alliances with tribal chieftains and insurgent leaders. Just as many Sunni tribal leaders were bought off in Iraq, the Obama plan is to cut deals with the Taliban leaders and field commanders.

For such deal-making to be successful, Obama intends to squeeze the Taliban first, including by putting 21,000 more American troops on the battlefield and taking yet another page from Bush’s Iraq experiment to establish US-funded local civil militias in every Afghan district. The first such militia unit, compromising 240 Afghans, was armed and deployed in Wardak province last month after receiving just three weeks of training.

In a country already teaming with militiamen, more militias are being set up. But just as the existing Afghan militias took to terrorism after being armed during the Ronald Reagan presidency to fight Soviet forces, the new militias will begin terrorizing local populations before long. Yet such is the rush to establish new militias that in an unusual decision to remove a wartime commander, the Obama administration last week fired the top American general in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, because he was overly cautious in creating such militias.

It is unlikely that the dubious Iraq experiment can work in Afghanistan, whose mountainous terrain, myriad tribes, militants operating from across national frontiers, patterns of shifting tribal and ethnic loyalties, low level of literacy, lack of natural resources, special status as the global hub of poppy trade and a history of internecine civil conflict set it apart from any other Muslim country. Also, unlike the internally confined Iraq conflict, the Afpak belt already is the springboard of international terrorism.

Still, Obama’s Afghanistan plan borrows so heavily from Bush’s Iraq ideas that the military general who implemented the surge-and-bribe experiment in Iraq has been pressed into service to replicate that in Afghanistan. David Petraeus, the former commander of American forces in Iraq who now heads the US Central Command, is the inspiration and leading light of the “surge, then negotiate” plan for Afghanistan. “Obama for Change” also has retained Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, revived Guantánamo military tribunals, flip-flopped on releasing detainee-abuse photos, and set the same year as his predecessor — 2011 — for a military exit from Iraq.

The blunt truth is that Obama doesn’t want the Afpak problem to burn his presidency the way Iraq consumed Bush’s. As a result, his aides are panning the internationally agreed goal of institution-building in Afghanistan as nation-building — a business in which the US shouldn’t get into.

Before he comes up for re-election, Obama wants to earn acclaim for ending his predecessor’s two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That objective is necessitating both a redefinition of “success” and the taking of shortcuts, as exemplified by his Afghan militia-building plan.

To compound matters, Obama has made the mistake — however inadvertently — of undercutting the legitimacy of the Afpak elected leaders. No sooner had he assumed office than his aides began calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai corrupt, incompetent and a millstone for US policy. Such talk died down when the Obama team realized there was no credible substitute to Karzai, now set to be re-elected. More surprising was Obama’s act, at the news conference marking his 100th day in office, in excoriating President Asif Ali Zardari’s government as “very fragile,” ineffectual and unable “to gain the support and loyalty” of the Pakistani people. Undermining civilian leaders is no recipe for success of a cut-and-run strategy.

Obama’s strategy essentially fails to recognize the structural character of the Afpak problem and attempts to deal with only the symptoms. Today, counterinsurgency (or “COIN” in US military jargon) has replaced institution-building and the “war on terror” in American policy. Accordingly, the Afpak strategy aims not to defeat terrorism, but to regionally contain terrorism — an approach that is set to bring Indian security under greater pressure.

While Obama cannot be faulted for wanting to exit Afghanistan, why did he have to advertise his intent? He publicly declared, “There’s got to be an exit strategy”. Now, the Taliban and their sponsors, the Pakistani military, just need to wait out the Americans to reclaim Afghanistan.

Rather than merely respond to US demands, strategic-partner India needs to be up-front on Obama’s unworkable Afpak strategy. That strategy is doomed to fail, with serious security consequences for India and the rest of the free world.

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

Obama’s five-pillar Afpak plan to add to India’s woes

A shortsighted, dangerous Afpak strategy has prompted Washington to extend technical assistance to India over the Mumbai attacks, but not the much-needed political assistance to bring its planners to justice

Brahma Chellaney

Asian Age, March 25, 2009

By sketching out in advance five key pillars of his strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (“Afpak” in Washingtonese), President Barack Obama has preempted the inter-agency review of US options that he had himself ordered on his most difficult foreign-policy challenge. The review, to be unveiled next Tuesday, will be reduced to a public-relations exercise to market decisions already taken, especially by packaging them in better light and camouflaging their real intent.

The review is set to overlook the central reality on Afghanistan and Pakistan — that the political border between these two artificially-created countries has ceased to exist in practice. The so-called Durand Line, in any event, was a British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two.

Today, that 1893-drawn line exists only in maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance. A de facto Pashtunistan, long sought by Pashtuns, now exists on the ruins of an ongoing Islamist militancy but without any political authority in charge.

The momentous disappearance of the Afpak political border seems irreversible. In that light, “Afpak” is a fitting term because by fusing the two countries, it suggests they now need to be tackled as a single geopolitical entity. Yet in the Obama strategy, there is still no meaningful integration in the policy approaches toward the two countries.

In short, Obama is set to cut and run from Afghanistan. As he has told CBS News, “there’s got to be an exit strategy.” He wants to seek re-election on the plank of having ended America’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — wars that already have tied up the US military for a period longer than World War II. His timeframe for an Afghanistan exit appears the same as for Iraq — by 2011.

That does not mean that the 190,000 US troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan combined (including the 17,000 additional forces being sent to Afghanistan) would all be home by 2011-end. Once their missions officially end, some of these troops would be reassigned to military bases Washington intends to maintain indefinitely in the two countries.

The five pillars of Obama’s Afpak strategy are:

● Shift from the current approach of counter-insurgency and institution-building in Afghanistan to a narrower objective to regionally confine terrorism and deter attacks against US interests from the Afpak belt. Having formally ended the global “war” on terror initiated by his predecessor, Obama has no intent to prosecute a regional war on terror in the Afpak belt.

Although in the election campaign Obama repeatedly said the Iraq invasion had diverted US attention from the war of necessity in Afghanistan, he now realizes that defeating Afpak terrorism and building civilian and military institutions to create a stable Afghanistan are long-drawn-out missions that threaten to consume his presidency the way Iraq seared his predecessor’s reign. So he is lowering the bar and seeking shortcuts. Indeed, his defence secretary has described a cohesive, democratic Afghanistan as an impractical objective to create “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla.”

● Pursue a minimalist “surge” of US forces in Afghanistan as a show of force to pursue political rather than military goals. Obama knows that sending more US forces into Afghanistan is a losing strategy. After all, the Soviet Union, with 100,000 troops, couldn’t pacify a country that historically has been “the graveyard of empires.” Last year proved the deadliest for American forces in Afghanistan even though the number of NATO and US troops nearly doubled in the first half of 2008.

Ironically, after having been elected on the slogan of change, Obama has set out to do in Afghanistan what his predecessor did in Iraq, where behind the cover of a surge, local tribal chieftains were bought off. The attempt to replicate the Iraq strategy in Afghanistan overlooks several dissimilarities, including the key fact that Sunni insurgents in Iraq —  unlike Afghan militants — have had no safe havens across the borders.

● Pretend the badly weakened and splintered Al Qaeda is the main enemy while quietly seeking a political deal with the Taliban leadership. Al Qaeda remnants operate not on the battlefield but furtively out of mountain caves. Those that openly challenge the US and NATO forces are the Taliban and private armies led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and others. Yet, the Obama administration has blessed secret negotiations by Saudi, Pakistani and Afghan agencies and individuals with the Taliban and Hekmatyar (who is aligned with the Taliban).

The “reconcilables” (the good terrorists, or what Obama meretriciously calls the “moderate” Taliban) are to be offered amnesty, payoffs and a stake in power. The “unreconcilables” (the bad terrorists) are to be hunted down with the help of the “reconcilables” and eliminated.

To pressure the top Taliban leaders to negotiate and cut a deal, Washington is threatening military strikes on their sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Quetta area. Taliban chief Mullah Omar and members of his supreme shura (council) have been ensconced for years in Quetta under Pakistani intelligence protection, but the US military has thus far not carried out a single air, missile or drone attack on their known hideouts. Obama indeed is agreeable to bring the Taliban shura into the Afghan political fold.

But the Taliban leaders and their main patron, the Pakistani military, know that the US — with a faltering military campaign — is desperate for a ticket out of Afghanistan. All they have to do is to bide their time.

● In the same way the US in the 1980s established the so-called “mujahideen” (the “good” terrorists until they turned on their creators), Washington has unilaterally embarked on a plan to set up local civil militias in every Afghan province. The internationally agreed goal to build institutions is degenerating into militia-building in a country already swarming with heavily armed militiamen.

Long after the US war has ended, the new militias would be terrorizing populations.

● Prop up the Pakistani state, including through a quantum jump in US aid. Just as the imperatives of its covert war in Afghanistan in the 1980s prompted the US to provide multibillion-dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to the latter’s rogue activities, the current overt war is prompting Obama to significantly boost the already-generous level of aid and help the tottering Pakistani state stay solvent. As the CIA steps up cooperation with the Pakistani intelligence, history is repeating itself.

The greater US reliance on the terror-rearing Pakistani military establishment explains why America has extended technical assistance to India in the Mumbai probe, but not political assistance. Washington is unwilling to put pressure on Islamabad to even secure FBI access to those arrested by Pakistani authorities. Four months after the unparalleled terrorist strikes, there is distinct possibility its key planners may go scot-free.

Instead of formulating his Afpak strategy in coordination with allies and friends, Obama is presenting them with a fait accompli even while seeking their cooperation to help implement a plan likely to create a more unstable and terrorist-infested Afpak belt.

Not only is institution-building now being disparaged as nation-building, the new administration also is shifting the military goal. Having failed to rout the Taliban, the US, Obama believes, should return to what it traditionally is good at — containing and deterring.

But the consequence of abandoning the goal to establish a functioning Afghan state and a moderate Pakistan will be greater pressure on Indian security. The brunt of escalating terrorism will be borne by next-door India, which already has been described by ex-US official Ashley Tellis as “the sponge that protects us all.”

(c) Asian Age, 2009.

Why U.S. policy risks repeating history

Brahma Chellaney  The Hindu  March 3, 2009

At a time when the Taliban, with its inner shura (council) ensconced in the Quetta area, is making deeper inroads into Pakistan, U.S. President Barack Obama’s policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan (“Afpak” in Washingtonese) raises fundamental questions: Is Washington serious about solving what it helped bring about? And can a solution involve doing more of what caused the problem?

The Obama administration has set out to train and arm local militias in every Afghan province, even as Defence Secretary Robert Gates has triggered alarm bells by declaring in Krakow, Poland, that the U.S. “would be very open” to a Swat Valley-style agreement in Afghanistan with the Taliban. Faced with grim realities on the ground, the new administration is seeking to pursue shortcuts, lest Afpak burn Mr. Obama’s presidency in the same way Iraq consumed George W. Bush’s. Still, it is important to remember the origins of the Afpak problem.

A covert U.S. war against the nine-year Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan helped instil an Afpak jihad culture and create Frankensteins like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. It was at a mid-1980s White House ceremony attended by some turbaned and bearded Afpak “holy warriors” that President Ronald Reagan proclaimed “mujahideen” leaders the “moral equivalent of the founding fathers” of America. Now a second military intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 — this time by the U.S., with the aid of NATO and other allied troops — has further destabilised the region.

Yet, in trying to salvage the overt U.S. war in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama is ignoring the lessons of the earlier covert war and unwittingly seeking to repeat history. In the same way the U.S. created “mujahideen” by funnelling billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington has now embarked on a plan to set up local militias across Afghanistan. And just as the covert war’s imperatives prompted the U.S. in the 1980s to provide multibillion-dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to its nuclear-smuggling and other illicit trans-border activities, Washington is now unveiling a quantum jump in aid to that country while seeking to neither bring the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence under civilian oversight nor subject the recently-freed A.Q. Khan to international questioning.

While pursuing major changes domestically, Mr. Obama is demonstrating a degree of caution that makes his foreign policy look like a repackaged version of Mr. Bush’s. Besides retaining Mr. Bush’s defence secretary and rendition policy, the once anti-war Mr. Obama is in less of a hurry to exit Iraq, with his full troop withdrawal to be completed in 2011 in accordance with Mr. Bush’s plan. While asking his aides to come up with an Afpak strategy before he goes to Europe for the April 2 NATO summit, Mr. Obama has already made key decisions — from sending more troops to Afghanistan to pushing ahead with new civilian militias. In Pakistan, U.S. cooperation has been stepped up with the military, including new joint CIA-ISI missions in tribal areas, commando training to Frontier Corps and sharing of U.S. intercepts of militant cellular and satellite phone calls.

Under the militia-building plan, designed to complement Mr. Obama’s troop “surge,” lightly trained militias are being set up in the Afghan provinces as part of a supposed game-changing strategy. The first such militia units are almost ready to be rolled out in Wardak province, near Kabul. The costs to the U.S. to train and maintain such provincial militias will depend on how many recruits the programme is able to draw. But the financial costs can only be small compared to the likely costs to regional security.

The plan, initiated quietly without any consultation with allies and partners, flies in the face of the common agreement that the international community must focus on institution-building, demobilisation of existing militias and reconstruction to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — goals that have prompted India to pour massive $1.2 billion aid into that country and start constructing the new Afghan Parliament building. The decision ignores the danger that such militias could go out of control and threaten international security. That is exactly what happened with the militias Reagan heavily armed in the 1980s, the so-called “mujahideen.”

Before long, the new militias would be terrorising local populations. Today, America is unable to stop the misuse of its large annual military aid by Pakistan or account for the arms it has supplied to Afghan and Iraqi security forces. Controlling non-state actors is even harder. That is the lesson from the rise of the Taliban, fathered by the ISI and endorsed by U.S. policy as a way out of the chaos that engulfed Afghanistan after President Najibullah’s 1992 ouster.

Prodded by the intense lobbying of Unocol, a U.S. firm that was seeking to build energy pipelines from Turkmenistan, the Clinton administration called the Taliban’s 1996 ascension to power “an opportunity for a process of national reconciliation to begin.” Some 13 years later, as if no lesson has been learned from the Taliban’s rampages, Secretary Gates has used the same term “reconciliation” to suggest compromise with that rabidly Islamist militia.

To be sure, building civilian and military institutions to recreate a unified, stable Afghanistan out of the ashes of three decades of war is not easy. But the shortcuts Mr. Obama is seeking are likely to impose enduring costs. Just because Afghan security forces are not yet sufficiently large or adequately groomed to take over the fight cannot justify the setting up of more militias in a country already swarming with armed militiamen. When the United Nations-sponsored programme to disarm and demobilise existing militias is in limbo, the move to create new militia units in the name of an “Afghan Public Protection Force” risks seriously undermining the secular Afghan national army and triggering more ethnic and sectarian bloodletting.

The real threat today is from the disparate militias that have been at loggerheads in the past but now oppose foreign intervention. The insurgency is made up of the ragtag Taliban — oiled by drug money and petrodollars — and a number of private armies, including Jalaluddin Haqqani’s militia force, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi. To create more armed militiamen is to play with fire.

Just as the Pakistani army and the ISI served as America’s most critical eyes and ears in the 1980s’ covert war, U.S. logistics and intelligence dependence on them in the current overt war is being reinforced by several factors — a troop surge to steady a faltering military campaign; the desire to cut a deal with the Taliban; and the recent Kyrgyz decision to shut down the American air base at Manas, a major hub for troops and cargo to Afghanistan. Despite the Manas loss, Mr. Obama, at this stage, is unlikely to seriously explore the only possible alternative he has to greater U.S. reliance on Pakistan: Do a deal with Tehran to gain access to Afghanistan through the Iranian port of Chabahar and the Indian-built Zaranj-Delaram highway, which links up to the ring road to Kandahar and Kabul.

If Richard Holbrooke’s appointment as special representative is not merely intended to sell decisions already made in Washington, such as to set up militias and increase troop levels, genuine prior consultations with partners and friends are essential, or else Mr. Obama would be following Mr. Bush’s much-criticised footsteps. Yet Mr. Obama made his first presidential telephone call to Afghan President Hamid Karzai to merely convey an Afghanistan-related decision he had already made — to send 17,000 more U.S. troops.

In fact, while pampering the Pakistani military establishment that is working to undermine the civilians in power, the U.S. is undercutting the present civilian government in Kabul by directly reaching out to provincial governors and seeking their help, among other things, to establish militias. While Mr. Gates scoffs at a cohesive, stable, democratic Afghanistan as “some sort of Central Asian Valhalla,” Mr. Obama is itching to dump Mr. Karzai. Mr. Obama’s scaled-back objective is not to rout the Taliban but, as he told a joint session of Congress, “to defeat al-Qaeda.”

The Afpak problem won’t go away without a clear break from failed U.S. policies and unceasing investments in institution-building. Continuing more of what hasn’t worked in the past, such as throwing more money at Pakistan and pouring more foreign troops into Afghanistan without a sustained commitment to uproot terrorism, is like feeding the beast. A U.S. deal with the Taliban will not only repeat history, but also reinforce Afpak’s position as a global narco-terrorist beachhead.

Building institutions and defeating transnational terrorism, of course, are long-drawn-out missions. But Mr. Obama wants to demonstrate change in keeping with his election-campaign slogan. That means giving priority to what is politically expedient than to long-term interests — the very mistake that gave rise to the phenomenon of jihadist transnational terror. It also means redefining success and taking shortcuts, including using the troop surge as a show of force to cut grotty deals and rear new armed thugs. “Surge, bribe and run” sums up Mr. Obama’s unfolding strategy. Little surprise Pakistani generals are smiling. 

(c) The Hindu, 2009.

Brahma Chellaney, a professor of strategic studies at the privately funded Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author, most recently, of "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan."

By Brahma Chellaney

Global Viewpoint

Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media

Even as U.S. special representative Richard Holbrooke has embarked on his mission to find an answer to the Afghanistan-Pakistan predicament (“the Afpak problem” in Washingtonese), there is continuing reluctance in the international policy discourse to face up to a central reality: The political border between these two countries has now ceased to exist in practice.

The so-called Durand Line, in any event, was an artificial, British-colonial invention that left the large Pashtun community divided into two. Set up in 1893 as the border between British-led India and Afghanistan, the Durand Line had been despised and rejected by Afghanistan for long as a colonial imposition.

Today, that line exists only in maps. On the ground, it has little political, ethnic and economic relevance, even as the “Afpak” region has become a magnet for the world’s jihadists. A de facto Pashtunistan, long sought by Pashtuns, now exists on the ruins of an ongoing Islamist militancy but without any political authority in charge.

The disappearance of the Afpak political border seems irreversible. While the writ of the Pakistani state no longer extends to nearly half of that country (much of Baluchistan, large parts of the North-West Frontier Province and the whole of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas), ever-larger swaths of Afghanistan are outside the control of the government in Kabul.

The Pakistani army has lost increasing ground to insurgents in the western regions not because it is weaker than the armed extremists and insurgents but because an ethnic, tribal and militant backlash has resulted in the state withering away in the Pashtun and Baluch lands.

Forced to cede control, the jihadist-infiltrated military establishment and its infamous Inter-Services Intelligence agency have chosen to support proxy militant groups, especially the Taliban. However, with its own unity unraveling, Pakistan is paying a heavy price for having fathered the Taliban.

The international reluctance to come to terms with the new reality is because of the fundamental, far-reaching issues such acceptance would throw open. It is simpler to just keep up the pretense of wanting to stabilize Pakistan and Afghanistan within their existing political frontiers.

Take U.S. policy. As if determined to hide from this reality, Washington is now pursuing, at least outwardly, a military approach toward Afghanistan through a troop “surge” and a political strategy toward Pakistan centered on the tripling of non-military aid — or what Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi calls a “civilian surge.”

In reality, the Afghanistan surge is intended for a non-military mission — to cut deals with moderate Taliban leaders and other local commanders in the same way that the surge in Iraq was used as a show of force to buy off many Sunni leaders.

A surge-bribe-and-run strategy can hardly work in mountainous Afghanistan, a largely tribal society without the literacy level and middle class of Iraq.

A forward-looking Afpak policy demands consistency in approach toward two interlinked countries and recognition of the 2,640-kilometer Durand Line’s disappearance. The ethnic genie cannot be put back in the bottle.

To arrest further deterioration in the seven-year Afghan war, the U.S. military needs to focus less on al-Qaeda — a badly splintered and weakened organization whose leadership operates out of mountain caves — and more on an increasingly resurgent Taliban that operates openly and has sanctuaries and a command-and-control structure in Pakistan.

It is unproductive to keep blaming the fragile civilian governments in Kabul and Islamabad for the Afpak ills. In each of the two countries, the president is more like the mayor of the capital city. While in Afghanistan the assorted warlords and tribal chieftains call the shots, in Pakistan it is the powerful, meddling military establishment, except, of course, in the anarchic western tribal regions.

Presidents Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari, although regarded by their critics as too close to their American patrons, are powerless and helpless to deliver on anything. Yet the Obama administration is itching to dump Karzai as if his replacement with another U.S.-friendly figure in Kabul would help transform the situation.

Washington now complains that a weak, corrupt government in Kabul is driving Afghans into the Taliban’s clutches. So, even if it undermines the federal government, it wants to do business directly with provincial governors and tribal leaders and seek their help to set up local, Iraq-style militias.

Yet in Pakistan it is doing the opposite: propping up a shaky, inept central government while pampering the military establishment that is working to undermine the civilians in power.

Let’s be clear: Pakistan and Afghanistan, two artificially created states with no roots in history that have searched endlessly for a national identity, constitute the most dangerous region on earth. They have emerged as the global epicenter of transnational terrorism and narcotics trade. Additionally, Pakistan is where state-nurtured terrorism and state-reared nuclear smuggling uniquely intersect.

Yet, as if the forces of terror can be boxed in, the U.S. is now scaling back its objective to regionally contain rather than defeat terrorism — a strategy that promises to keep the Afpak problem as a festering threat to global security.

Given that this region has become ungovernable and borderless, it seems pointless to treat the existing political frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan as sacrosanct when the Afpak fusion term itself implies the two are no longer separate entities. The time has come to start debating what kind of a new political order in the Hindu-Kush region could create stable, moderate, governable and ethnically more harmonious states.

Make no mistake: The Afpak problem won’t go away without a fundamental break from failed U.S. policies. Continuing more of what hasn’t worked in the past, such as throwing more money at Pakistan and pouring more foreign troops into Afghanistan, is akin to feeding the beast.

(c) 2009 Global Viewpoint
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES

February 13, 2009