U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration has decided to keep U.S. military bases and conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after bringing the longest war in America’s history there to an end in 2014. But its decision, centered on keeping a substantial residual military force, risks locking the United States in a low-intensity but never-ending war in that lawless, rugged country.

The Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) reached between Washington and Afghan President Hamid Karzai recently defines a U.S.-led counterterrorism and training mission involving up to 12,000 NATO troops, mostly American, lasting “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated with two years’ advance notice. This will mean virtually an indefinite U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan with a mandate, as the text says, to “conduct combat operations.”

Obama’s decision in favor of strong military basing in Afghanistan — where there are currently about 45,000 American troops — stands in sharp contrast to his earlier action in pulling out all U.S. forces from Iraq after a decade-long American occupation of that country.

While there has been little U.S. debate about the merits of extended military engagement in Afghanistan, the Loya Jirga, or assembly of Afghan tribal leaders, on November 24 put its imprimatur on the BSA, which grants the U.S. important concessions, including a controversial immunity for American troops from Afghan law and permitting U.S. special operations forces to conduct antiterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Washington leveraged a pledge of more than $4 billion in annual security aid to secure these provisions.

However, rejecting Washington’s demand that the deal be signed by yearend, Karzai — concerned over leaving behind a legacy as the main facilitator of a long-term U.S. military presence — has threatened to delay that action until his successor is elected in next April’s presidential election. Washington has warned it would begin planning for a complete troop withdrawal if the BSA was not signed by yearend.

In any event, the U.S. needs a separate deal with the Afghan Taliban, or else its military bases would likely come under intense insurgent attacks after 2014. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to cut a broader deal with the Taliban to allow it to “honorably end” combat operations next year — an objective that has prompted it to kiss and make up with Pakistan, which shelters the top Taliban leadership.

The U.S. recently restored its $1.6 billion aid flow to Pakistan, which had been blocked because that country never came clean over who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital, Islamabad. The aid was suspended also because the Pakistani military establishment harbors the Afghan Taliban’s one-eyed chief, Mullah Mohammed Omar, and other senior Taliban leaders and aids jihadists who carry out cross-border attacks in India and Afghanistan.

Imperial Britain created many unnatural political constructs, including two countries that have searched vainly to shape a national identity — Afghanistan and Pakistan (or “Afpak” in Washingtonese). The Afpak belt, for the foreseeable future, is likely to remain a bastion of transnational terrorists, with the Durand Line legacy making Afghanistan and Pakistan virtual Siamese twins.

The Durand Line — arbitrarily bisecting ethnic Pashtun and Baloch homelands — is the Afghan-Indian border the British demarcated in 1893 and which later became the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Decades after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Durand Line remains a mythical border, with successive Afghan governments refusing to recognize it and the validity of the porous line challenged by daily cross-frontier movement of people and extremists.

America’s post-2014 strategy risks perpetuating the same mistake that has led it to falter in the ongoing 12-year war, which has cost it nearly a trillion dollars — limiting its military operations to Afghanistan in a binational region that has become a single geopolitical unit, with militant sanctuaries, command-and-control structure and support infrastructure for the Afghan insurgency located on the other side of the Durand Line. Terrorism and insurgency have never been defeated anywhere in the world without cutting off transboundary sustenance and support.

In recent years, the U.S. has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, targeting the nemesis of the Pakistani military — the Pakistani Taliban. But to preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — the U.S. has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against that militia’s leadership, which is ensconced in Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, located to the south of Waziristan.

The Afghan Taliban was created in the early 1990s by the Pakistani intelligence as part of Pakistan’s strategy to install a pliable regime in Kabul and acquire “strategic depth” against India. In reality, it is the Afghan Taliban — enjoying a safe haven across the border after its ouster from power by the U.S.-led military intervention — that has secured “strategic depth.”

In seeking to co-opt the Afghan Taliban, the Obama administration seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas currently under its control and which, according to a recent United Nations report, raised $155 million last year from illicit opium production, besides skimming profit off illegally mined gemstones, including rubies and emeralds.

Even if Washington succeeded in cutting a deal with the motley Afghan Taliban, powerful factions within the militia may not honor it. As the U.N. report has pointed out, an increasingly fragmented insurgency has led to the rise of a new generation of local commanders operating largely independent of the Taliban’s command and control. A better U.S. strategy would be to try and undermine ethnic-Pashtun support for the Taliban by clinching a series of deals with local tribal chieftains and commanders.

Obama, who had earlier promised to bring all troops home, has not explained how a residual American force, even if sizable, would make a difference in Afghanistan when a much larger force is staring at defeat. In fact, last May, he recalled the warning of James Madison — America’s fourth president — that “no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”

A long-term U.S. military engagement, besides compelling Washington to work with Afpak elements that have a long record of duplicitous conduct, could boost the militants’ cause. Yet if the U.S. completely washed its hands of Afghanistan, Afpak could sink deeper into a jihadist dungeon. The U.S. faces difficult choices, compounded by the White House’s failure to clarify strategic goals.

With violence soaring, Afpak’s future remains more uncertain than ever. There is considerable risk of an Iraq-style “soft” ethnic partition of Afghanistan.

The worst scenario would be the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, with the thuggish militia’s control extending across much of Afghanistan. That would not only unleash a fresh reign of Islamist terror but also allow transnational terrorists to re-establish a major operational base, thereby sucking U.S. forces into bloody counterterrorism missions. It would be as if history had come full circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) The Japan Times, 2013.

By Brahma Chellaney, The Washington Times, November 27, 2013

President Obama has decided to maintain U.S. military bases and conduct counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan after bringing the longest war in America’s history there to an end next year. His decision, though, centered on keeping a substantial residual military force, risks locking the United States in a never-ending, low-intensity war in that lawless, rugged country post-2014, including continued cross-border drone strikes on targets in Pakistan.

The Bilateral Security Agreement reached between Washington and Afghan President Hamid Karzai last week defines a U.S.-led counterterrorism and training mission involving up to 12,000 NATO troops, mostly American, and lasting “until the end of 2024 and beyond” unless terminated with two years’ advance notice. This will make the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan virtually indefinite.

Mr. Obama’s decision in favor of strong military basing in Afghanistan — where there are currently about 45,000 American troops — stands in sharp contrast to his earlier action in pulling out all U.S. forces from Iraq after a decade-long American occupation of that country.

Afghanistan’s Loya Jirga, or assembly of tribal leaders, put its imprimatur last Sunday on the agreement, which grants the United States important concessions, including a controversial immunity for American troops from Afghan law and permission for U.S. special operations forces to conduct antiterrorism raids on private Afghan homes. Washington leveraged the more than $4 billion annual security aid it has promised to secure these provisions.

However, rejecting Washington’s demand that the deal be signed by year’s end, Mr. Karzai — concerned over leaving behind a legacy as the key facilitator of a long-term U.S. military presence — has threatened to delay that action until his successor is elected in next April’s presidential election.

In any event, the United States needs a separate deal with the Afghan Taliban, or else its military bases would likely come under intense insurgent attacks post-2014. Indeed, the Obama administration is seeking to cut a broader deal with the Taliban to allow it to “honorably” end combat operations next year — an objective that has prompted it to kiss and make up with Pakistan, which shelters the top Taliban leadership.

The United States recently restored its $1.6 billion aid flow to Pakistan, which had been blocked because that country never came clean over who helped Osama bin Laden hide for years in a military garrison town near its capital, Islamabad. The aid was suspended also owing to the fact that the Pakistani military establishment harbors the leaders of the Afghan Taliban, who kill American troops, and aids jihadists who carry out cross-border attacks in India and Afghanistan.

Imperial Britain created many unnatural political constructs, including two countries that have searched vainly to shape a national identity — Afghanistan and Pakistan (or “Afpak” in Washington-speak). The Afpak belt, for the foreseeable future, is likely to remain a bastion of transnational terrorists, with the Durand Line legacy making Afghanistan and Pakistan virtual Siamese twins.

The Durand Line — arbitrarily bisecting ethnic Pashtun and Baloch homelands — is the Afghan-Indian border the British demarcated in 1893 and which later became the frontier between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Decades after Pakistan’s creation in 1947, the Durand Line remains a mythical border, with successive Afghan governments refusing to recognize it and the validity of the porous line challenged by daily cross-frontier movement of people and extremists.

America’s post-2014 strategy risks perpetuating the same mistake that has led it to falter in the ongoing 12-year war, which has cost nearly $1 trillion and killed tens of thousands of people — limiting its military operations to Afghanistan in a binational region that has become a single geopolitical unit, with militant sanctuaries, command-and-control structure and support infrastructure located on the other side of the Durand Line. Terrorism and insurgency have never been defeated anywhere in the world without cutting off transboundary sustenance and support.

In recent years, the United States has carried out from Afghanistan a series of air and drone strikes on Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, targeting the nemesis of the Pakistani military, the Pakistani Taliban. To preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with its main battlefield opponent — the Afghan Taliban — America has not carried out a single air, drone or ground attack against that militia’s leadership, which is ensconced in Pakistan’s sprawling Baluchistan province, located to the south of Waziristan.

In seeking to co-opt the Afghan Taliban, the Obama administration seems unconcerned that it is bestowing legitimacy on a terrorist militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas currently under its control. Even if the administration succeeded in cutting a deal with the motley Afghan Taliban, powerful factions within it may not honor it. A better strategy would be to undermine ethnic-Pashtun support for the Taliban by clinching a series of deals with local tribal chieftains.

Mr. Obama, who had earlier promised to bring all troops home, has not explained how a residual American force, even if sizable, would make a difference in Afghanistan when a much larger force is staring at defeat.

A long-term U.S. military presence, besides compelling Washington to work with Afpak elements that have a long record of duplicitous conduct, could boost the militants’ cause. Yet if the United States completely washed its hands of Afghanistan, Afpak could sink deeper into a jihadist dungeon. The White House faces difficult choices, compounded by the administration’s failure to clarify long-term goals.

Afpak’s future remains more uncertain than ever, with considerable risk of an Iraq-style “soft” ethnic partition of Afghanistan.

The worst scenario would be the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul, with the militia’s control extending across much of Afghanistan. That would not only unleash a fresh reign of Islamist terror, but also allow transnational terrorists to re-establish a major operational base, thereby sucking U.S. forces into bloody counterterrorism missions. It would be as if history had come full circle.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author.

(c) The Washington Times, 2013.

@washtimes on Twitter

By Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, October 1, 2013

President Obama has aborted his planned military attack on Syria, but the proxy war that pits America and its allies against Russia is set to intensify in that critically located nation, with further horrific consequences for civilians and the likely proliferation of transnational terrorists.

The proxy war injects greater volatility into the Arab world, where internal tumult risks recasting the entire Arab state system, centered on a series of artificial states created in the last century by departing colonial powers.

The Washington-Moscow deal to strip Syria of its chemical arms will have little effect on the internal war there, one of the world’s bloodiest conflicts. This conflict has been fueled by Russian and Western arms supplies to rival sides. Indeed, Russia and the U.S.-British-French combination are determined to continue their 2-year-old proxy war in an already fractured Syria. Who cares for civilians?

Most of the estimated 100,000 deaths in the Syrian violence have been caused by foreign-origin weapons, largely made in the proxy-war-waging countries that have shed crocodile tears over civilian deaths in an Aug. 21 sarin attack in suburban Damascus. The U.S. arms supply to rebels is primarily bankrolled by the oil sheikdoms.

In this light, the key questions relate to Syria’s future: Will a new international-terrorist hub emerge that stretches across much of northern Syria and into the Sunni areas of Iraq? Will Syria’s fate be different from that of Afghanistan?

The Syria issue is about more than just President Bashar Assad or chemical weapons: It is integral to the geopolitical clash between the Sunni Middle East, which remains under the U.S.-British-French sway, and the Shiite crescent stretching from Iran through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon to the Mediterranean Syrian port of Tartus, Russia’s only military base outside the former Soviet Union. With Russia emerging as a great-power patron in the Shiite crescent, the United States and the region’s two former colonial powers, Britain and France, are seeking to safeguard the regional geopolitical hegemony that they have enjoyed since the early 1970s, when Egypt switched sides.

Over the decades, the United States has cemented close ties with Sunni Islamist rulers, including the cloistered Arab monarchs who fund Muslim extremist groups and madrassas overseas. Washington has already forgotten the main lesson from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes — that it must focus on long-term strategic goals rather than short-term tactical victories. One reminder of that is President Obama’s current effort to strike a Faustian bargain with the thuggish Afghan Taliban.

Since the 1990s, espousing military action as humanitarianism has been the common leitmotif uniting American neoconservatives and liberal interventionists — the hawks on the left who were most vocal recently in promoting a war against Syria. The serial interventionists have failed to take a good, hard look at the lessons of America’s past interventions. For example, those who took the United States to war in Libya have ignored how that “humanitarian” intervention has boomeranged, creating a lawless Islamist state affecting its neighbors’ security.

In backing jihad against Mr. Assad’s autocratic rule, Mr. Obama’s policy has inadvertently strengthened the hands of radical Islamists. The CIA-aided, faction-ridden Free Syrian Army is in danger of being eclipsed by the pro-al Qaeda insurgent groups designated as terrorist organizations by the U.S. State Department — the al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

The risk of an Iraq-style “soft” partition of Syria is high. Indeed, in a July 18 briefing, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Jay Carney, declared that Mr. Assad “will never rule all of Syria again.” This was a reminder that the unstated goal of Mr. Obama’s military stalemate in Syria is an eventual partition, with Mr. Assad’s power confined to a rump Syria. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has acknowledged, “A stalemate is in our interest” — a Machiavellian scenario to lock regime and rebel forces in mutually debilitating combat.

However, with jihadists already in control of much of northern Syria, the danger, as the CIA’s former deputy director, Michael J. Morell, has warned, is that an al Qaeda haven could emerge. This is exactly what happened earlier in Afghanistan as an unintended byproduct of America’s proxy war against the Soviet forces there.

In fact, the transition from covert to overt aid to Syrian rebels by the CIA has occurred much faster than it did in the 1980s Afghanistan, although Syria has already become a magnet for foreign Sunni jihadists. As happened when the United States armed the Afghan mujahedeen, the CIA’s arms supply — far from winning loyal surrogates in Syria — is likely to end up empowering radical forces with transnational ties that extol and perpetrate violence as a religious tool.

For some in Washington and for America’s regional allies — the petro-sheikdoms, Israel and Turkey — the proxy war in Syria is really part of a larger proxy war to contain Iran. The grinding proxy war in Syria thus promises to exact increasing costs regionally and internationally while allowing the U.S.-allied regional autocrats from Abu Dhabi to Ankara to step up their repression at home without fear of international censure. Russia, meanwhile, will continue to prop up the Assad regime.

Given the increasingly murky geopolitics in spite of a rising tide of Syrian civilian displacement, suffering and death, Syria seems set to meet the fate of Afghanistan, a source of regional instability for more than a generation and where the United States is seeking to end its longest-ever military conflict, which has already cost it nearly $1 trillion dollars.

Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013).

(c) The Washington Times, 2013.

By Brahma Chellaney, A Project Syndicate column

In just one decade, the United States has intervened militarily in three Muslim-majority countries and overthrown their governments. Now the same coalition of American liberal interventionists and neoconservatives that promoted those wars is pushing for punitive airstrikes in Syria without reflecting on how US policy has ended up strengthening Islamists and fostering anti-Americanism. Indeed, the last “humanitarian intervention” has clearly backfired, turning Libya into a breeding ground for transnational militants.

As the intense US debate about President Barack Obama’s proposed use of military force highlights, the attack-Syria push is not about upholding America’s national interest. Rather, the desire to protect US “credibility” has become the last refuge of those seeking yet another war in the wider Middle East.

If “credibility” were purged from the debate and the focus placed squarely on advancing long-term US interests, it would become apparent that an attack on Syria might not yield even temporary geopolitical gains. Beyond the short term, it would unleash major unintended consequences, potentially including an Iraq-style “soft” partition of Syria and the creation of a haven for extremists stretching across much of Islamist-controlled northern Syria and into the Sunni areas of Iraq.

Indeed, an attack would most likely increase America’s reliance on unsavory Islamist rulers in countries ranging from Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. Some Arab monarchs have pledged to bankroll the U.S. attack — an investment that they would easily recover, given that the war talk has already increased oil prices.

Al Qaeda-type groups already have gained ground in the Middle East and North Africa as an unintended byproduct of US policies, creating fertile conditions for stepped-up international terrorism in the coming years. The US invasion and occupation of Iraq, for example, created a major opening for Al Qaeda, whose affiliates now represent the Sunni struggle against the Shia-dominated government.

Likewise, regime change in Libya aided the rise of Al Qaeda-linked militants, leading to the killing in Benghazi of the US ambassador. A system based on sharia (Islamic law) has been imposed, human-rights abuses are legion, and cross-border movement of weapons and militants has undermined the security of Libya’s neighbors.

Meanwhile, America’s support for the regimes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia has contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. In parts of southern Yemen, an Al Qaeda affiliate, Ansar al-Sharia, functions as a de facto government.

In Syria, where sizable chunks of territory are already under Islamist control and the pro-Al Qaeda Al Nusra Front overshadows the US-backed Free Syrian Army, the Obama administration is staring at the bitter harvest of its previous policy choices. Airstrikes now would merely make matters worse by undercutting the FSA’s grassroots legitimacy and aiding Islamist forces.

Farther east, the US wants an “honorable” exit from Afghanistan — the longest war in its history — through a peace deal with the Taliban, its main battlefield opponent. In seeking to co-opt the Taliban — an effort that has resulted in the Taliban establishing what amounts to a diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar — the US is bestowing legitimacy on a thuggish militia that enforces medieval practices in the areas under its control.

America’s dalliances with Islamist-leaning political forces — and governments — have been guided by the notion that the cloak of Islam helps to protect the credibility of leaders who might otherwise be seen as foreign puppets. That simply will not work, even in the short term. On the contrary, until the Egyptian army removed him from the presidency, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi was coming to be seen by many as America’s man in Cairo.

In the long term, the US will gain nothing — and risk much — by continuing to back oil sheikhdoms that fund Muslim extremist groups and madrasas from the Philippines and India to South Africa and Venezuela. By supporting Islamist rulers, the US is contributing to a trend evident from the Maghreb to the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan — Muslims killing Muslims.

American policy has also contributed to a growing conflict between Islamist and secular forces in Muslim countries. This is best illustrated by Turkey, where Obama has ignored Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s heavy-handed efforts to annul free speech and turn himself into a twenty-first-century Sultan.

There and elsewhere, the US, motivated by the larger geopolitical goal of containing Shia Iran and its regional allies, has embraced Sunni rulers steeped in religious and political bigotry, even though they pose a transnational threat to the values of freedom and secularism. Moreover, the clash within Islam is likely to be destabilizing regionally and counterproductive to the interests of the free world.

Against this background, Obama should heed the doctrine proposed in 1991 by General Colin Powell. The Powell doctrine stipulates that the US should use military force only when a vital national-security interest is at stake; the strategic objective is clear and attainable; the benefits are likely to outweigh the costs; adverse consequences can be limited; broad international and domestic support has been obtained; and a plausible exit strategy is in place.

Given the US record since the doctrine was formulated, another criterion should be added: the main beneficiaries of military intervention are not America’s mortal enemies.

(c) Project Syndicate, 2013.