Afghanistan (62 page)

Pakistan and the Future

The future of Afghanistan is also being shaped by decisions made over the border in Pakistan, be it by the government, the military, or the insurgents. The February 2008 Pakistani elections and the peaceful demonstrations against Zardari and even Musharraf before him show that there is widespread support for rational, competent, and effective civil society in Pakistan. In the past, when the military has stepped in to take power, rationality and competence was what they offered, but the latter years of the Musharraf government discredited them, especially when the economy declined, and Pakistan experienced the rise of insurgency, and terrorism appeared to be a response to cooperation with US policies. Even though, by 2009, the concern over the insurgency and dissatisfaction with the civilian government and the economy made the military look better in comparison, they have been reluctant to take over again. There are too many intractable problems for which the military has no solution, and neither Pakistan’s electorate nor its foreign friends want to see them back in power.

Pakistan’s radical Islamic parties and the insurgents offer another alternative to Pakistan’s often-dysfunctional politics, but through the path of Sharia law, which they claim would bring about long-denied social justice for all Pakistanis, not simply the “feudal” political leaders and their
patrons. But in the FATA, Swat, and elsewhere, it is becoming obvious that they offer beheadings and beatings rather than a better life.
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There has been no groundswell of popular support for the radicals, despite the widespread disillusionment and dissatisfaction.

The insurgent takeover in Swat was eventually met by military action in 2009 only when the TNSM’s Maulana Sufi Mohammed used this success to challenge the legitimacy of Pakistan’s constitution and to condemn democracy as a way of life counter to Islam.
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This energized Pakistan and persuaded the military that the insurgency was actually a threat to the future of the country. The need is for policies that will show Pakistanis that there
is
a way to achieve a better life. South Waziristan remains no one’s model of a good life, and the Pakistani state needs to build on that hard truth to deny the appeal of the radicals and insurgents, especially in the FATA, where they were able to use the “Taliban culture” to become entrenched.

In Pakistan, countering the insurgency needs to work on a number of levels. The bottom line is strengthening civil society. Until then, foreign aid will be required. All the armed Predator UAVs in the world would not be able to prevent the reestablishment of terrorist infrastructure nor, more to the point, can they enable the establishment of a legitimate Pakistani authority, one that can gain popular support, run a school system, or collect taxes. Pakistan-India rapprochement would make the needed internal changes in Pakistan easier, as with everything else in the subcontinent. Peace would undercut the Pakistani military’s current claim to determine national security policy and government spending priorities. But India has shown itself unwilling to effectively compromise on issues such as Kashmir, and the US has been unable to raise any benefits to Pakistan accruing from its better security relationship with India. So while such action remains a long-term goal, meanwhile steps to strengthen Pakistani civil society such as aid to education, or development and political integration in the FATA, must help stem the long-running crisis of governance in Pakistan that neither military nor civilian governments have succeeded in addressing.

Pakistan’s military and elites fear India and distrust the US, the perceived leader of a world in which their country is increasingly unable to
cope with mounting challenges. The Pakistan military does indeed oppose terrorists that set off bombs in their cities or insurgents that occupy their territory, but Al Qaeda, other terrorists, and the Afghan insurgents are not among those whom they perceive to be the true enemy, which remains India and, to an extent, the US, now seen as India’s supporter in its quest for regional power. Pakistan’s strategy of supporting Afghan insurgents and tolerating Pakistani terrorist groups stems from its belief that it can control these groups, despite the fact that blowback from their actions could cause national disaster, as when India threatened military action after high-profile attacks there in 2001 and 2008 were linked back to Pakistan-based groups. But in attempting to persuade the government of Pakistan of this fact, the US is effectively asking them to turn away from their primary policy tool in Afghanistan, namely a proxy war through Pushtun insurgents, while, at the same time, demonstrating that these polices may lead the US (and its coalition partners) to withdraw from Afghanistan, creating a vacuum that Pakistan may regret.

Pakistan’s objective of putting a “moderate” Pushtun-dominated government that would be responsive to its security into power in Kabul cannot be achieved by tolerating insurgent sanctuaries. If the Afghan Taliban is ever able to regain power in Kabul, the impact on Pakistan will be devastating. Pakistan will be less able to control a Taliban regime than it was pre-2001. The blowback, in terms of refugees and radicalization, will likely outstrip anything seen in previous decades, and so the rational choice for Pakistan is to align with Kabul and the coalition and look at Afghanistan as a potential site for economic growth. While Pakistan has done this in the past, as when it refused to act as a spoiler to the Bonn agreement in 2001, persuading them to do this as a fundamental part of their national security policy, however, is still a task that remains, and will be difficult as long as Afghanistan is perceived in terms either of India-Pakistan competition or Pakistan’s internal politics, especially the role in them of the military, ethnic Pushtuns, and Islamic radicals.

Future US and Coalition Actions

Unless current trends are turned around, the future for Afghanistan may turn out to be worse than its already grim past. If the US and
other foreign supporters disengage from Afghanistan or withdraw their troops in the near future, it will not bring peace. Nor will it remove the motivation for continued violent attacks by the insurgents. Disengagement from Afghanistan is likely to seem an attractive option as casualties and expenses mount. If those Afghans working for the government in Kabul or those standing against the insurgents in their home districts see that they are going to be triaged away again by the same foreign countries that supported them against the Soviets and then walked away in the 1990s, many will end up fleeing or cutting a deal with the enemy. Some will stay and fight another round in Afghanistan’s civil wars. The foreign supporters will have then ended up undercutting rather than enabling Afghan self-determination.

The US and the West have tried disengagement (effectively giving Pakistan a free hand) as their Afghanistan policy before, starting in 1989, and results were 11 September 2001 for the US, misery and destruction for Afghans, blowback and insurgency for Pakistan. Even today’s Afghanistan is much preferable to leaving the future to a new, more brutal, Afghan Taliban and their allies. That would mean another generation of conflict in Afghanistan and, instead of a beacon, a torch to the dry tinder of the surrounding regions of central Asia, the subcontinent, and Iran and the Gulf. The rise of the Pakistani and Punjabi Talibans are an indication that the Taliban brand name remains a beacon to increasingly radicalized Muslims frustrated by current regimes and looking for the answer in fundamentalist religious politics.

Walking away is simply not going to work. It will not even make people in the West feel good about themselves. It will instead bring things back to the 1990s, with regional powers—especially Pakistan—backing Afghans in a proxy war, creating a huge humanitarian crisis among other disasters. It will not make today’s networked terrorists focus their activities on a different set of target countries. It
will
mean that those in Pakistan’s security services who bet on the Taliban will have succeeded. But that is unlikely to be good news for Pakistan. The consequences of their previous policies created the current insurgency, and more such policy implementation may prove fatal to the future of the country. As it is, violence is eroding away what Pakistan actually needs: strengthened civil
society, revitalization of the economy, and development. This is especially the case in the FATA, which needs these things more than even the remainder of Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban did not create the four percent female literacy that currently cripples the FATA, but they surely have taken advantage of it and the lack of development, political isolation, and economic marginalization that goes along with it.

People in the US and the West need to care about Afghanistan and the regions it borders because the threats there have still not been defeated and thus have the potential either to strike at them directly, as on 9/11, or create a crisis by turning Afghanistan back into an international anarchic battleground and Pakistan into Somalia with nuclear weapons. Just as Afghanistan is not a graveyard
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—people do not live in graveyards—neither the US nor NATO is an empire. Empires used to be able to triage away places like Afghanistan, full of independent-minded people with many weapons and few exploitable natural resources. The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall. The British drew the Durand line. Neither was a viable long-term solution. They could keep out invading warbands or lashkars, but not the movement of individuals or ideas. The West found this out when transnational terrorism planned in Afghanistan led to the 11 September 2001 attacks. Pakistan found this out when their Afghanistan policies, supported by military and civilian governments alike since the 1970s, incubated the Pakistani insurgency that was threatening Islamabad in 2009. The impact of any failure in Afghanistan cannot be limited to Afghanistan.

Neither the globalized world economy nor the globalized security system that sent NATO troops to the battlefields of Afghanistan can build a new frontier to protect themselves from terrorists and insurgents. An effective frontier is a flexible economy-of-force approach that allows those manning it to decide which outsiders are a threat and which can be incorporated into the system. The world of the frontier is a far cry from the world of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, where “you are either with us or against us.” Pakistan remains the friend of the US, yet has been both “with us
and
against us” with regard to its Afghanistan policy.
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The money that enables terrorist and insurgent action comes heavily from friendly countries, including Saudi Arabia and
the Gulf. Even Al Qaeda, a group that thinks in moral absolutes and acts with bloodshed, has been successful because it has been able to deal with those that are both with it and against it, including the Pakistani security services and Afghan and Pakistani Pushtuns who do not share their worldview, religious practices, or focus against a primary enemy that is also a distant one.

With the coalition’s limited sense of the history of Afghanistan and why it is the way it is today, there has been too strong an emphasis on the short-term goals of the coalition partners. There have been too many outsiders who sought to reverse the whole course of Afghanistan history since 1973 during a unit’s tour of duty, or before the next donor conference or before the next election. Not all these frustrated outsiders are Westerners. They include the Pakistanis who have seen their strategy backfire and Arabs who have seen their religious proselytizing resisted and their clients proven unreliable. Similarly, there are enough negative examples of policy failures in Afghanistan to warn future decision-makers. The US in the 1990s tried disengagement. The Soviets in the 1980s tried massive firepower, bribery, and political consolidation. The Afghan Khalqi Communists in 1978–79 were willing to murder everyone who opposed them. King Zahir started in the 1930s to build centralized state power but failed to check the growing power of the Communist opposition that was receiving Soviet support. None of these policies worked. There is no alternative to an incremental, trial-and-error approach, stressing effective feedback that reflects the nuances of Afghan realities rather than what the decision-makers want to hear.

Success in Afghanistan means creating a country that is viable in security and economic terms. With aid, the Afghans were able to have a Golden Age and defeat the Soviets. In recent years, there have been enough Afghan successes among the larger picture of disappointment and frustration to suggest how they might once again accomplish great things. Policies need to leverage the proven dedication and courage of the Afghan people rather than their divisions and polarization, emphasizing the strengths of society rather than the reluctance to take individual responsibility or avoid corruption that stems from its collectivist nature. Faith needs to be embraced as a foundation of society rather than a tool
of fundamentalist politics. Insisting on Afghan responsibility and backing Afghan solutions is important; but those who seek to have the Afghans responsible for their own security or economy in a finite, single-digit number of years so that the foreign combat troops can go home and aid can be reduced are sending the message that the Western commitment will be a transient one. This is the message that has inspired Pakistan to view the Afghan Taliban as a policy tool rather than a threat and Afghans to view any access to money and power as an opportunity to get what they can while they can, making the cycles of dependency and corruption harder to break. Only a long-term commitment by the US and the coalition can make fundamental changes in these perceptions.

For a long-term commitment to be potentially sustainable by the US and its allies, Afghan forces will have to be able to carry the burden of combat operations, but in a controlled manner, as the rapid expansion of the ANSF offers many potential pitfalls, stretching the limited pool of competent and literate Afghan leaders and creating a force that will be dependent on foreign aid for its funding. Afghanistan will need to offer legitimate governance throughout the countryside and be able to point out that their enemies offer neither peace nor Islam, despite their claims. The US should commit itself to enable Afghans to build a future for the same reasons it defended West Germany in the Cold War and South Korea after the Korean War. In Germany, when the threat was internal Communist penetration, the US and its allies countered with building democratic institutions. When the threat was Soviet tanks through the Fulda Gap, the US and NATO countered that by committing large forces to Europe’s central front. Today, unlike the Cold War, there is no peer competitor to the US. There are individual adversaries, each requiring a different set of actions to counter them. Some of the most persistent adversaries—including the Pakistani military—are, in many ways, also friends. As with the Cold War, there will likely be no substitute for US engagement. Afghanistan, like Israel, may never be at peace, may have tensions with its neighbors (even those that are US friends), have a percentage of the internal population more or less permanently alienated from the state, deal with lingering corruption, and endure adversary relations between elites. But to survive this way requires a commitment
from the US that will be more important than the number of troops, and to get to this relatively stable situation requires a near-term military commitment to stabilize the situation, so that a new generation of Afghan leaders and elites of all ethnolinguistic groups can move in and demand and work for effective governance, a functional private sector economy, and a civil society.