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Indecision bad for Afghanistan
With Obama set to compromise on his strategy for the conflict, more trouble can confidently be expected
- By Patrick Seale, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 November 6, 2009
- Image Credit: Illustration: Nino Jose Heredia/Gulf News
All the indications from Washington suggest that President Barack Obama's long-awaited strategy for Afghanistan will be a compromise between the views of his principal advisers. But, as compromises please no one and are rarely effective, more trouble can confidently be expected.
Vice President Joe Biden advocates a counter-terrorist strategy aimed at capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden and his small band of Al Qaida followers, ideally by means of targeted air strikes against their alleged sanctuaries in the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
In contrast, the US commander on the spot, General Stanley McChrystal, has argued in favour of a wider counter-insurgency strategy, for which he has requested 40,000 more troops. Its main goals would be to protect the population in a dozen Afghan cities from Taliban attacks, prevent Al Qaida from penetrating these urban areas, while building up the Afghan army, police, provincial administration and central government to the point that they can keep the Taliban at bay without external help.
It is by no means clear, however, that either of these strategies — or a compromise between them — will stave off defeat for the US and its Nato allies.
This year has been the worst for the Coalition since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001. Western military casualties are creeping up towards the 500 mark. Cities and military installations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have suffered ferocious Taliban attacks, often carried out by suicide bombers, such as the recent slaughter of over 100 people in a market in Peshawar or the attack on a UN guest house in Kabul.
Overshadowing the debate in Washington is the extraordinary advocacy of Matthew Hoh, a US Foreign Service officer and former Marine, who resigned from government service last September and has since become a leading critic of the Afghan war.
In his resignation letter, Hoh wrote: "I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan ... I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties and expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war".
Educated versus uneducated
Hoh depicted the ‘civil war' as being violently and savagely waged between the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. But the latter, he suggested, were clearly the overwhelming majority.
Most of the Pashtun people, he wrote, perceived the Western military presence as "a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion ...". They therefore supported the insurgency.
At the same time, Hoh described President Hamid Karzai's Afghan government as comprising "drug lords and war crimes villains", guilty of "glaring corruption" and blatant electoral fraud. "Why and to what end" he asked, is the US pursuing this war?
In several TV appearances, Hoh has disputed the view — put forward by both Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — that the war in Afghanistan is being waged to protect the West against Al Qaida attacks. Al Qaida has evolved, Hoh says, into an "ideological cloud" on the internet. The 9/11 attacks on New York, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were planned and organised in Western Europe, not in the tribal areas of Afghanistan.
Hoh's views are now being widely debated, since they undermine the very rationale for the war. The fact that they are uttered by a brave Marine officer, who served his country overseas for 10 years, makes them difficult to rebut.
Adding to Obama's woes is the rampant anti-Americanism of Pakistan, as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton discovered during her three day visit at the end of October. The New York Times reported that her audiences heckled her and groaned audibly when she defended American policies.
Opposition in Pakistan has been aroused by the campaign that the Pakistan army has waged in the Swat Valley and is now waging in South Waziristan — with US military aid and under intense US political pressure. The campaign has caused misery to hundreds of thousands of displaced people, who fled their homes to avoid the fighting.
The US has promised Pakistan $7.5 billion in aid over the next five years to allow it to continue the battle against the insurgents in the tribal areas. In addition, it has been rushing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to the Pakistani forces, including 10 Mi-17 troop transport helicopters.
Many conspiracy-minded Pakistanis see America's aid package as a plot to bring Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal — the pride of the nationalists — under American control.
There is little relief in prospect for Obama. Karzai is back in power for another presidential term, but it seems highly unrealistic to expect him to root out the nepotism and corruption that have kept him in power.
As Hoh argues convincingly, "the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul".
At the end of the day, only the Afghans themselves can defeat the Taliban. It is surely time for the United States and its Nato allies to get out.
Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs.
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