Afghanistan: doomed by history?
Imtiaz Gul
Friday Times
Issue: January 19-25, 2007
Afghanistan desperately wants the US on its side in accusing Pakistan for not doing enough
It couldn’t have been a worse New Year for Pakistan. Within the first two weeks of 2007, it looked as if the Afghan government, led by President Hamid Karzai and America’s 16 civilian and military intelligence outfits, had managed to get the US on its side against Pakistan for “not doing enough”.
The tirade began with Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz’s Kabul visit on January 4. Accompanied by a battery of officials and journalists, Aziz received, probably the first lesson in the Pak-Afghan ‘love-hate relationship’.
“We are not satisfied with Pakistan’s efforts to organise an agreed tribal council to discuss the worsening Taliban insurgency. We have said, let us work against places where training for terrorism is taking place, where funding for terrorism is taking place, where supplies are given…The gap between Afghanistan and Pakistan unfortunately is widening,” Karzai told the media after a tense meeting with Aziz.
Karzai also singled out Pakistan at a gathering of students and educators on December 13 in Kandahar. After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, neighbouring states, ‘specifically Pakistan’, tried to destroy Afghanistan, he said: “I tell Pakistan to stop its animosity towards the Afghans and the Pashtun…In reality these [suicide] attacks are a message from the Pakistani government to scare us,” Karzai had said. On a different occasion, Karzai had also announced that the problem in Afghanistan was not the Taliban but Pakistan.
Back in Washington, the outgoing National Intelligence Director John Negroponte deposed before the Senate Intelligence Committee on January 11 that Al Qaeda terrorists were cultivating stronger operational connections and relationships that radiated outwards from their leaders’ secure hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.
Pakistan as “a frontline partner in the war on terror has captured several Al Qaeda leaders, but it remains a major source of Islamic extremism and the home stop for some top terrorist leaders…Eliminating the haven extremists have found in Pakistan’s tribal areas is not sufficient to end the Afghan insurgency, but is necessary,” Negroponte said in a public indictment of Pakistan.
Overjoyed Afghan officials instantly welcomed Negroponte’s assessments. “These comments endorse what we have been repeatedly saying – that the sources of terrorism are across Afghan borders…Time-wise it was late but we consider this a good step,” defence ministry spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi told reporters in Kabul on January 13. “We wished it would have been made clear sooner that the leaders of Al Qaeda and the terrorists are operating outside Afghan borders,” he added.
Although Negroponte also underlined that the ability of the Karzai government, NATO and the United States to arrest the resurgence of the Taleban would determine the country’s future, yet what appeared obvious was that critical scrutiny by the Democrat-majority Congress – also witnessed during the January 11 testimony in which Negroponte and heads of CIA and FBI faced scathing questions – had forced the Bush administration to issue warnings to its regional allies. Negroponte’s ‘questionable criticism’ is how Pakistani officials involved in meetings with assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, Richard Bouhcer, termed Negroponte’s statement.
In fact the statement before the Senate Intelligence Committee ominously overshadowed Boucher’s meetings in Islamabad, including the one with President Pervez Musharraf. Both American and Pakistani officials attempted to control damage through mutual appreciation and by recounting the cooperation since late 2001. However, the barrage of criticism from Washington’s intelligence community and Kabul left no doubt that Pakistan’s honesty and sincerity in the anti-terror war was being called into question because of 296 US deaths and almost 4000 casualties in Afghanistan during 2006 alone.
These pronouncements, however, sound and look quite unfair, placing the entire burden of failure on Pakistan alone. And there are reasons why. “The reduction of incidents in Afghanistan since autumn has much to do with activities on this [Pakistan] side of the border,” British General David Richards told reporters after the 20th meeting of the tripartite commission comprising top military officials of Pakistan, Afghanistan and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
General Richards, in fact, complained that the media had not highlighted the successes of the last few months. “The reduction is to a degree the result of Pakistan army activity and we are the beneficiaries of that,” he said, adding that the 2,500 kilometres (1,553 miles) of the rugged, complex and difficult frontier still posed a big challenge.
General Richards’ public appreciation for Pakistan was succour for the upset Pakistan as was the General’s open admission of the challenges that tribal areas’ topography and sociology pose to the hunt for Islamist militants.
There are of course, other than the reported Pakistani support for the Taliban, many reasons that are responsible for the explosive but stalemated situation in Afghanistan. “There are, above all, the immediate blunders of the occupiers who, despite extensive European involvement, are led by the Americans. Next are deeper historical dynamics dating back to the US role in the anti-Soviet jihad. And finally there are much older, cultural, political and economic facts about Afghanistan that have long made this a wild, lawless place, impervious to conquest and even resistant to the modernising efforts of its urban middle classes,” says a commentator.
“The harsh truth is that the West, led by the US, has been defeated in Afghanistan. It is only a matter of time, probably three to five more bloody years, before international troops are forced to leave and a new government, or several governments, or a civil war takes hold. For 130 years or more, Kabul has been fighting a losing battle to subjugate the wild Afghan tribes. Sometimes the great powers aid Kabul, sometimes they undermine it by aiding the restive tribes,” says the commentator.
While the rushed political process after the fall of the Taliban in December 2001 did meet US political deadlines, it created a hopelessly dysfunctional and intensely corrupt Afghan government, and that foreordained Western failure. “After all, who would stand up as the West stood down?” says an analyst.
The writer is a freelance columnist. Email: vogul1960@yahoo.com