Crawling from the Wreckage (3 page)

In the days just after 9/11, George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population? Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on?

Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of
CIA
agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various ethnic militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated Afghanistan’s northern regions. Although the Taliban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower the opponents of the Taliban with money and weapons, and tip the balance against the regime?

It worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had originally created the Taliban, withdrew its support. The Northern Alliance’s forces advanced, the US Air Force bombed wherever they met resistance, the regime fled Kabul, and most of the Taliban troops melted back into
their villages. The government of a country of twenty-seven million people was taken down for a death toll that probably did not exceed four thousand on all sides.

By mid-December 2001, the United States effectively controlled Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern minority groups: the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have accompanied a conventional U.S. invasion, so there was no guerrilla war. The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtuns, who had put their money on the Taliban and lost, would have to be brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making should take care of that.

Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan that had never had much to do with the Taliban, its puppet president in Kabul, but it didn’t follow the same logic in its broader policy towards the Pashtuns. It froze out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had dealings with the Taliban—which was, of course, almost all of them.

The Taliban had been the government of Afghanistan for almost five years, and were at the time the political vehicle of the Pashtun ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader, how could you not have had dealings with them? An amnesty that turned a blind eye to the past, plus pressure by the United States on its recent allies to grant the Pashtuns a fair share of the national pie, would have created a regime in Kabul to which Pashtuns could give their loyalty, even if they were less dominant at the centre than usual. But that never happened.

The United States confused the Taliban with al-Qaeda and would not talk to Pashtun leaders who had been linked to the Taliban. Six years after the invasion that wasn’t, the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the Taliban are coming back.

Afghanistan has generally been run by regional and tribal warlords with little central control: nothing new there. But now it is also a country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities, and then blocked the process of accommodation by which the various Afghan ethnic groups normally make power-sharing deals.

The current fighting in the south, the Pashtun heartland, which is causing a steady dribble of American, British and Canadian casualties,
will continue until these Western countries pull out. (Most other
NATO
[North Atlantic Treaty Organization] members sent their troops to various parts of northern Afghanistan, where non-Pashtun warlords rule non-Pashtun populations and nobody wants to attack the foreigners.) When the foreigners have finally pulled out of the south, the Afghans will make the traditional inter-ethnic deals and something like peace will return.

Will Karzai still be the president after that? Yes, if he can convince the Pashtuns that he is open to such a deal once the foreigners leave.

Will the Taliban come back to power? No, only to a share of power, and only to the extent that they can still command the loyalty of the Pashtuns. Their hold on Pashtun loyalties may dwindle once they are no longer leading a resistance movement against foreign occupation.

Will Osama bin Laden return and recreate a “nest of terrorists” in Afghanistan? Very unlikely. The Afghans paid too high a price for their hospitality the first time round.

By the time I wrote the next article, in 2009, there was something new in the equation: Barack Obama was the president of the United States, and there were deeply worrisome signs that he was buying into the Washington orthodoxy about the war in Afghanistan. His appointment of a new general and the latter’s declaration of a “new” strategy in Afghanistan seemed to indicate that Obama had drunk the Kool-Aid
.

There is always a high turnover of generals in wartime. Some get replaced because they turn out to be no good at the job, but many others are changed because they have failed at a task that was beyond anybody’s ability to accomplish.

They are fired, in other words, because the alternative would be to blame the person who gave them the impossible task in the first place. That certainly seems to be the case with General David McKiernan, the American commander in Afghanistan, who was appointed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates less than a year ago, when President Bush was still in power.

The specific event that caused McKiernan’s dismissal may have been his recent admission that there is a “stalemate” in Afghanistan. But his removal was probably inevitable anyway because Gates, who was retained from the Bush administration by President Obama, needed somebody to blame for the fact that the military situation in Afghanistan is now worse than ever. What’s needed is “fresh thinking, fresh eyes on the problem,” said Secretary Gates, explaining why he was appointing General Stanley McChrystal to the job instead. So what should General McChrystal’s fresh eyes see?

He could start by understanding that the United States is not just fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is fighting the entire Pashtun nation, some thirty million people, two-thirds of whom live across the border in Pakistan. That border has never really existed for the Pashtuns, who move freely across it in peace and in war.

It is warlords from the other Afghan ethnic groups, the Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek, who have controlled the Afghan government ever since the U.S. take-over. “The political, religious and economic mafia are all Northern Alliance people,” says Daoud Sultanzoy, a member of parliament from Ghazni province, exaggerating only slightly. “Nobody outside the Northern Alliance is in the government.” Except, of course, President Hamid Karzai, the token Pashtun, who is mockingly known as “the mayor of Kabul.”

This is not a war about ideology, even if all the American and Taliban commanders insist that it is. The Pashtuns are fighting to regain at least a major share of power in Afghanistan, while the U.S. and other foreign troops are for all practical purposes allied to the other ethnic groups. That is why
all
the fighting is in the Pashtun-majority provinces.

Hamid Karzai has ensured his re-election as president in August by bribing or bullying his most serious challenger into withdrawing from the race. And his second term will be a reprise of his first: the same ethnic imbalance; the same rampant corruption and warlordism; the same toadying to the foreigners who provide the cash flow; and the same outbursts of nationalist resentment when U.S. air strikes kill too many innocent civilians.

On top of everything else, the U.S. still insists on eradicating the poppy-growing that provides over half of the country’s national income. Opium use is obviously a problem in Afghanistan—as one observer said,
“If you applied a drug test to the Afghan army, three-quarters of them would be kicked out”—but burning farmers’ fields leaves them no alternative source of cash income except fighting for the Taliban, who pay $200 CAD a month.

The final thing McChrystal should understand is that “winning” or “losing” in Afghanistan makes almost no difference to U.S. security. The Taliban are not “outriders for al-Qaeda,” in the lazy formula used by State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke. They are an Afghan phenomenon with almost exclusively Afghan goals, and even if the Taliban should win absolute power after the U.S. leaves (which is unlikely), there is no reason to believe that they would send terrorists to attack the United States. Indeed, Osama bin Laden probably didn’t even let the Taliban’s leaders know in advance about his plans for the 9/11 attacks.

This war is not only unwinnable but unnecessary, and if Stanley McChrystal understood all these things he wouldn’t have taken the job. But he did take it, so he doesn’t understand.

Then we had an election so spectacularly corrupt that Karzai’s Western supporters insisted on a rerun. Afghans were less shocked, since they already understood the name of the game. And in the end, there was no rerun
.

“They have the watches, but we have the time,” say the Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, and it’s perfectly true. The election on August 20 is not going to change that.

The foreign forces, U.S., Canadian and European, are well-trained, well-equipped troops who can inflict casualties on amateur Taliban fighters at a ratio of at least ten-to-one, but the Taliban have an endless flow of fresh fighters, and much popular support among the Pashtuns of the south and southeast. Not to mention all the time in the world.

Now we are asked to believe that an election will restore confidence in the Afghan government. It is nonsense: this election has no more relevance than the ones that the United States staged in Vietnam.
Colonel David Haight, commanding the Third Brigade Combat Team of the U.S. Tenth Mountain Division in Logar and Wardak provinces near Kabul, was helpfully indiscreet about it in a recent interview. “I think that apathy is going to turn into some anger when the administration doesn’t change, and I don’t think that anybody believes that Karzai is going to lose,” Haight told an embedded reporter from the
Guardian
. “There is going to be frustration from people who realize there is not going to be a change. The bottom line is they are going to be thinking: ‘Four more years of this crap?’ ”

Unless bribery, blackmail and threats no longer work in Afghanistan, Karzai is going to win. Karzai isn’t even bothering to run a conventional campaign: he bailed out of a televised debate with the other presidential candidates at the last moment, and leaves it to them to hold election rallies in provincial towns. Karzai has made his deals with the warlords and the traditional ethnic and tribal power-brokers, and is counting on them to deliver victory.

The West’s government in Kabul is not going to get any better. It cannot, given its origins. There will be “four more years of crap,” and by the end of that, the American, Canadian and European voters whose governments sent their troops to Afghanistan will be ready to bring them home. What will happen then?

Nothing particularly dramatic. Afghanistan was invaded in revenge for 9/11, but the U.S. could have played it differently from the start. Right after 9/11, a thousand-strong
shura
(congress) of Muslim clerics in Kabul declared its sympathy with the dead Americans and voted to expel Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda from the country.

The Taliban regime had just made a lucrative deal with the United States to eradicate poppy-growing in the country, and after 9/11 most younger Taliban commanders wanted to maintain the deal and expel the Arab crazies. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, barely managed to overrule them. If the U.S. had shown more patience and spread some serious money around, the regime might well have decided to hand over the al-Qaeda leaders peacefully rather than face overthrow.

Washington wasn’t interested in that outcome because, after 9/11, the American public wanted blood. American analyst Edward Luttwak even told me once that he thought a major reason why the U.S. public supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that the invasion of Afghanistan
had not involved
enough
blood. But although invading Afghanistan is always temptingly easy at first, it always ends in tears.

There’s enough blood flowing in Afghanistan now, certainly, but the exit door for the Western armies remains permanently open—and once the invaders have left, the Afghans never follow them home. It won’t happen this time either.

Western government rhetoric insists that the hills of Afghanistan are directly connected to the streets of Manhattan, London and Toronto. But no Afghan, not even any member of the Taliban, was involved in the planning or execution of 9/11, nor in the later, lesser attacks elsewhere in the West. Nor would the Taliban sweep back into power if all Western troops left Afghanistan tomorrow; the other players are still in the game.

Everybody who dies in this conflict is dying for nothing, because it will not change what happens when the foreign troops finally go home. As they eventually will.

Has Obama really drunk the Kool-Aid? Maybe, but maybe not
.

When he announced in December 2009 that he would send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan in early 2010, bringing the total reinforcements that he had committed to the country since taking office to over 60,000, he also stated that he would start withdrawing them again in 2011. This could just be overconfidence, but it could also be a way of signalling to the Taliban, “I’m sending more troops now to placate the hawks at home, but I’m really on the way out of Afghanistan. Go relatively quiet for a while and let it look like I’m making progress militarily, and I’ll be out of your hair in no time. Then make whatever deal you can with Karzai or his successors in Kabul, or just roll over them if you have the power.”

That’s basically what Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State, told the North Vietnamese negotiators at the Paris peace talks in 1973, and he got the Nobel Peace Prize for it
.