A Dangerous Plan for Afghanistan

Obama’s about to repeat a Soviet-era mistake

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY | Wall Street Journal | February 24, 2009

President Barack Obama has unveiled a troop surge in Afghanistan that will put 17,000 more American soldiers on the ground. But his plan still lacks clarity on how to save a faltering military mission.

His administration risks repeating the very mistakes that have come to haunt the security of the free world. In the same way the United States created mujahedeen (holy warriors) by funneling billions of dollars worth of arms to them in the 1980s, Washington has now embarked on a plan to establish local militias in various Afghan provinces.

Hamid Karzai

The U.S. covert war against the nine-year Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan helped create Frankensteins like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Mohammad Omar. That war, fuelled by the CIA, contributed to the jihad culture that today plagues Afghanistan and Pakistan. Now, while trying to salvage the overt war that the U.S. has waged in Afghanistan since 2001, Mr. Obama is unwittingly seeking to repeat history.

Under this new program, designed to complement the U.S. surge, lightly trained militias will be set up in the provinces to help enforce order. According to the Afghan interior minister, America will pay for the upkeep of the militias and provide them with Kalashnikov automatic rifles as well as other arms. The militia are modeled on the U.S.-established Sunni "Awakening Councils" in Iraq, which have been credited with significantly reducing violence. The first such Afghan militia units, already being trained, are set to be rolled out shortly in Wardak province.

At the same time, Washington is unveiling a quantum jump in aid to Pakistan, tripling its nonmilitary assistance to an annual $1.5 billion and maintaining its existing munificent level of military aid, without seeking to bring the rogue Inter-Services Intelligence agency under civilian oversight. This is also a repeat of the 1980s, when the ISI was the main conduit in the covert war and the U.S. provided multibillion dollar aid packages to Pakistan while turning a blind eye to the ISI’s nuclear-smuggling and other illicit transborder activities.

There is real danger that the new Afghan militias could go out of control and threaten regional and international security. Already, according to a Government Accountability Office report, the Pentagon cannot account for 87,000 weapons handed out to Afghan security forces, and Washington admits misuse of its military aid by Pakistan. These abuses will only grow under Mr. Obama’s plan.

Institution building holds the key to a more moderate, viable Afghanistan and Pakistan. These two countries are a tangled web of competing tribes and ethnic communities, and their ultimate stability depends on national institutions like a secular educational system and security forces that are under civilian oversight. Building such institutions is not easy in the face of mushrooming madrassas — the Islamic schools that have become jihad factories — and spreading militancy. But it is the objective that the international community must continue to focus on — a goal that has prompted India to pour $1.2 billion in development aid into Afghanistan.

Mr. Obama is right to give priority to this region and to try to rectify a war that had been undermanned and underfinanced for so long because of Iraq. But to establish militias is to seek a dangerous shortcut in a region already swarming with armed militiamen.

Genuine prior consultations with partners and friends actively engaged in Afghanistan are essential. Richard Holbrooke’s job as special representative is not merely to market decisions already made in Washington. So far, however, the signs aren’t good: Mr. Obama last week made his first presidential telephone call to Afghan President Hamid Karzai only to convey an Afghanistan-related decision he had already made — to send 17,000 more U.S. troops.

If Afghanistan is not to unravel or split into distinct sectarian parts, skillful negotiations with clan leaders are needed to beef up Afghan security forces, not to establish new provincial militias. The insurgency can be contained not by foreign forces but by an Afghan national army that is sufficiently large and adequately trained. It is only when Afghans take over the fight that the thuggish Taliban and other militias will loose ground.

The avowed mission of the U.S., NATO and other states has been nation-building. It should not degenerate into militia-building. The answer to the warlords’ power is a more capable national army, not more private armies.

Mr. 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" (HarperCollins, 2007).

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123541054607849715.html

The Japan Times

How gun-toting Islamists are expanding their hold on western Pakistan has been laid bare by Islamabad’s U.S.-condoned peace agreement effectively ceding the once-pristine Swat Valley to the Taliban to set up a mini-state barely 160 km from the Pakistani capital. The deal came even as Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari warned that the Taliban wants to take over his country. The Taliban’s sway on territory on both sides of the British- drawn Durand Line shows that the Afghanistan-Pakistan ("Afpak") border no longer exists in practice.

Less obvious is the Obama administration’s interest to seek a political deal with the Taliban behind the cover of a U.S. troop "surge" in Afghanistan. Having failed to rout that Islamist militia, Washington is now preparing the ground to strike a deal with the Taliban leadership, but from a position of strength. That is why the surge has been initiated.

The very day Obama announced the surge, he acknowledged in an interview that "you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban and the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means." In that light, U.S. officials are expanding contacts with the Taliban.

The Taliban leadership — with an elaborate command-and-control structure oiled by Wahhabi petrodollars and proceeds from the $720-million opium trade — has been ensconced for long in the Quetta area of Pakistan’s southwestern Baluchistan province, which abuts the insurgency-wracked provinces of southern Afghanistan.

Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. Central Command chief, is openly looking for ways to win over local Taliban commanders. Petraeus sees higher troop levels as increasing U.S. leverage for political deals with the Taliban just as his use of the Iraq surge co-opted Sunni tribal chieftains.

His boss, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, has gone one step further to say Washington could accept a Swat Valley-style agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Speaking at the close of a NATO meeting in Krakow, Poland, Gates recently said: "If there is reconciliation, if insurgents are willing to put down their arms, if the reconciliation is essentially on the terms being offered by the government then I think we would be very open to that."

The scourge of transnational terrorism cannot be stemmed if attempts are made to draw distinctions between good and bad terrorists, and between those who threaten their security and those who threaten ours. But, unfortunately, that is what the Obama administration is itching to do, first by drawing a specious distinction between al-Qaida and the Taliban, and then seeking to illusorily differentiate between "moderate" Taliban (the good terrorists) and those that rebuff deal-making (the bad terrorists).

Worse yet, Obama is following in his predecessor’s footsteps by taking friends and allies for granted. Several decisions — to induct 17,000 more troops, set up local Afghan militias in a country already bristling with armed militiamen, and open lines of communication with the Taliban — have been taken without prior consultations with partners, including NATO allies, Japan and India.

The decision to train and arm local militias in every Afghan province flies in the face of the commonly agreed objective that the international community must focus on institution-building to create a stable, moderate Afghanistan — a goal that has prompted India to pour massive $1.2 billion development aid into that country. When the United Nations-sponsored program to disarm and demobilize existing militias is in limbo, the U.S. move to create new militia units risks seriously undermining the secular Afghan Army and triggering more bloodletting.

Indeed, to arrest further deterioration in the Afghan war, the U.S. military needs to focus less on al-Qaida — a badly splintered and weakened organization whose leadership operates out of mountain caves — and more on a resurgent Taliban that openly challenges NATO forces and terrorizes local populations. As CIA chief Leon Panetta acknowledged in his Senate confirmation hearing, "al-Qaida today is less capable and effective than it was a year ago." Yet advocates of a Taliban deal exaggerate the threat from al-Qaida while underplaying the Taliban’s evil role.

Tellingly, unmanned U.S. drones have targeted senior figures from al-Qaida and other insurgent groups holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but not the Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Pakistan’s Baluchistan, even though most drone aircraft reportedly fly out of Baluchistan’s CIA-run Shamsi airfield.

U.S. ground commando raids from Afghanistan into Pakistan also have spared the Taliban’s command- and-control in Baluchistan. Even as the CIA’s covert war expanded this month to take on Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud — a major thorn in the side of the Pakistani military establishment — the Afghan Taliban’s Baluchistan-based core leadership has been left unscathed so that the U.S. can potentially pursue a deal with it.

The CIA still maintains cozy ties with the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which has sheltered the Taliban’s top Afghan leadership. Created by the ISI and midwifed by the CIA in 1994, the Taliban rapidly emerged as a Frankenstein’s monster. Yet the Clinton administration acquiesced in the Taliban’s ascension to power in Kabul in 1996 and turned a blind eye as that thuggish militia, in league with the ISI, fostered narco-terrorism and swelled the ranks of the Afghan war alumni waging transnational terrorism.

With 9/11, however, the chickens came home to roost. The U.S. came full circle in October 2001 when it declared war on the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to al-Qaida. Now, desperate to save a faltering military campaign, U.S. policy is edging to come another full circle, as Gates and Petraeus seek to employ the surge to strike deals with "moderate" Taliban (as if there can be moderates in an Islamist militia that enforces medieval practices).

If the U.S. were to conclude a political deal that rehabilitates the Taliban chief, the one-eyed Mullah Muhammad Omar, and his top associates, it would be a powerful vindication of the Pakistani military’s role in rearing the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba as force multipliers vis-a-vis Afghanistan and India respectively. Indeed, it would buoy up its long-running asymmetrical war against India, waged through militants like those who carried out the unparalleled Mumbai terrorist attacks recently.

The tactical gains Obama is seeking in the Afpak belt will come at strategic costs. The notion that attacks against America can be prevented not by defeating terrorism but by regionally confining it is preposterous. Terrorism cannot be boxed in hermetically in a region that already is the wellspring of global terror.

A U.S. deal with the Taliban will be a bad bet. It won’t yield a ticket out of Afghanistan for the U.S. military; rather it will reinforce Afpak’s position as the narco-terrorist beachhead.

Obama must rethink his Afpak strategy and resist the temptation to pursue narrow, short-term objectives.

Despite a spreading jihad culture, U.S. President Barack Obama has ended America’s global "war on terror" as dramatically as his predecessor had initiated it. With the stroke of his pen, Obama has effectively terminated the war on terror that President George W. Bush had launched to defeat terrorists who, he said, wanted to "establish a radical Islamic empire that spans the Earth from Spain to Indonesia."

Effective defense against the asymmetric weapon of terrorism is difficult. Dealing with such unconventional warfare remains a central theme in international discourse, given the growing threat from jihadists and the spreading virus of Wahhabi Islam.

But the blunt truth is that the war on terror derailed long before Obama took office. The U.S. occupation of Iraq proved so divisive in international relations that it fractured the post-9/11 global consensus to fight terror. Guantanamo, the CIA’s secret prisons overseas and the torture of detainees, including waterboarding, came to symbolize the excesses of the war on terror.

The abrupt end of the war on terror thus means little. With Iraq searing his presidency, Bush himself had given up the pretense of waging a global war on terror — a war he had once equated with the Cold War struggle against communism while comparing Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida figures with tyrants like Josef Stalin and Pol Pot.

In fact, ever since the U.S. declaration of a global war on terror, the scourge of transnational terrorism has spread deeper and wider in the world. The war’s only outcome has been that it enabled the Bush administration to set up new U.S. military arrangements extending from the Caspian Sea basin to Southeast Asia.

Not calling it a war any longer but labeling it "an enduring struggle," as Obama has done, doesn’t change the realities on the ground. Secular, pluralistic states, depending on their location, have come under varying pressures from the forces of terror. Vulnerability to terrorist attacks is critically linked to a state’s neighborhood.

A democracy geographically distant from the Muslim world tends to be less vulnerable to frequent terrorist strikes than a democracy proximate to Islamic states. The luxury of geography of, say, Japan and Australia contrasts starkly with the tyranny of geography of India and Israel. It is such realities that no change of lexicon can address.

Still, Obama is right in saying, "The language we use matters." He has been wise to reach out to the Muslim world and to start undoing some of the excesses of the Bush years. The international fight against terrorism will be a long, hard slog. After all, the problem and solution are linked: Terrorism not only threatens the free, secular world, but also springs from the rejection of democratic and secular values.

Worse, terrorism is pursued as a sanctified tool of religion and a path to redemption. Indeed, because the concept of jihad is deeply embedded in religion, the line between an Islamic extremist and terrorist can be a thin one. Islamist ideology catalyzes terrorism, and acts of terror in turn strengthen Muslim extremism.

It is thus obvious that counterterrorism will have to be a long-haul exercise. The struggle against transnational terror can be won only by inculcating a liberal, secular ethos in societies steeped in religious and political bigotry — a daunting challenge indeed.

In that light, the with-us-or-against-us terminology and use of offensive terms like "Islamo-fascism" were counterproductive. Counterterrorism is not a struggle against any religion but against those that misuse and misappropriate religion.

The need is to reach out to Muslim moderates through correct idiom, not to unite the Muslim world through provocative language. It is imperative to cash in on the historical sectarian and ethnic schisms in the Islamic world.

Obama’s gentler, subtler tone no doubt will help. Such a tone has proven such an ideological challenge to al-Qaida — deprived of a hate-spewing and polarizing American leader like Bush — that it has hurled one insult after another at Obama.

Obama, however, will be able to sustain his softer tone only if the United States continues to be free of any terrorist attack at home, as it has been for 7 1/2 years. If a terrorist strike occurs in the U.S. on Obama’s watch, the president will come under intense attack for dismantling tools that had successfully shielded that country for long. Already, former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused the new administration of pusillanimity in approaching the "tough, mean, dirty, nasty business" of keeping the country safe from terrorists.

It is not an accident that Obama, in one of his first acts in office, has appointed a special envoy for each of the two regions central to the global fight against terrorism — the Pakistan-Afghanistan belt and the Middle East. With Cheney predicting a "high probability" of a nuclear or biological terrorist attack in the coming years, safeguarding nuclear assets in quasi-failed Pakistan from insider threats and militant strikes is another challenge.

Obama is likely to discover that ending the war on terror was the easy part. In fact, at a time when America’s challenges have been underscored by a deep economic recession, increasing reliance on capital inflows from authoritarian China and jihad-bankrolling Saudi Arabia, two overseas wars and eroding global influence, Obama already has started redefining U.S. antiterror objectives more narrowly.

Robert Gates, his defense secretary, has given the clearest indication yet that the new administration will seek to regionally contain terrorism rather than defeat it. While outwardly the U.S. looks set to pursue a military strategy in Afghanistan and a political approach toward Pakistan, in reality its troop surge in Afghanistan is intended to cut a political deal with the Taliban from a position of strength. Obama’s Afghanistan strategy can be summed up in three words: Surge, bribe and run.

Also, Washington’s proposal to triple nonmilitary aid to Islamabad while keeping existing military-aid flow intact, other than to tie it to concrete Pakistani cooperation on the Afghan front, will free the Pakistani military to continue its asymmetric war of terror against India.

Internationally, there is greater need than ever to bring the fight against terror back on track. It will require a concerted, sustained global campaign — and the employment of the full range of counterterrorism tools domestically — to beat back the challenge from the forces of terror.

Yet the jarring U.S. intent to focus on preventing attacks against America by regionally confining terrorism means that democracies with uncongenial neighborhoods, like India and Israel, will bear the brunt of escalating terrorism.