- Date: Mon, 11 May 2009 01:44:36 -0400
- From: Graham E. Fuller <bozorgg@aol.com>
-
- My lastest op-ed below from Saudi Gazette and also IHT on 8-9
May.
-
- best,
- Graham Fuller
-
- -------------------------
-
- Sunday, 10 May 2009
- - 15 Jumada Al-Awwal 1430 H
-
- Saudi Gazette –Internet Edition
-
- Obama worsening Afghan-Pak state
-
- By Graham E. Fuller
-
- For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing
down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George
Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of US
strategic thinking.
-
- • Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or
Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the US military
footprint.
-
- • The Taleban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain
Islamists.
- They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the
Taleban -- like them or not -- as the primary vehicle for
restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001.
Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized
and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the
foreign invader. In the end, the Taleban are probably more Pashtun
than they are Islamist.
-
- • It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Du rand Line” is an arbitrary
imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the
border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there
are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has
already enflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.
-
- • India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not
Afghanistan.
- Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a
friendly state.
- India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in
Afghanistan
- - in the intelligence, economic and political arenas - that
chills Islamabad.
-
- • Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the
Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not.
Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in
control of Kabul, or at home.
-
-
- • Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the US is learning.
Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement
at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally
themselves at home with Al-Qaeda against the US military.
-
- • The US had every reason to strike back at the Al-Qaeda
presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taleban
were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh
regime. But the Taleban retreated from, rather than lost, the war
in 2001, in order to fight another day.
- Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible --
with sustained pressure from Pakis tan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taleban as
primitives - to force the Taleban to yield up Al-Qaeda over time
without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the
consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still
spreading.
-
- • The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a
direct consequence of the US war raging on the Afghan border. US
policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into
Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations -
the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one
country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?
-
- • The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of
Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will
not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably
several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social
and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and
atavistic response.
-
- • Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the
relentless pressure directly exerted by the US. Anti-American
impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic
radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by
non-Islamists.
-
- Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground
will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to
subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down.
Pa kistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal
with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances;
until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of
electoral success in the Muslim world.
-
- But US policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia
and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that
Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad
can no longer manage its domestic crisis.
-
- The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state
power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a
convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that -
something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still
succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present
hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule - not what
Pakistan needs - will be the likely result, and even then
Islamabad’s basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic
level.
-
- In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail
over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from
inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly,
US forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of
co-dependency.
-
- It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy
established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and
education - areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather
well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one
generation, given the history of social and economic devastation
of the country over 30 years.
-
- Al-Qaeda’s threat no longer emanates from the caves of the
borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since
metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile,
the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in
Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will
long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once
the incitement of the US presence is gone. Nobody on either side
of the border really wants it.
-
- What can be done must be consonant with the political culture.
Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of
geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the
building of state structures. If the past eight years had shown
ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for US policies could
be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only
continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we
have more of the same? Or will there be a US recognition that the
American presence has now become more the problem than the
solution? We do not hear that debate.
-
- – Global Viewpoint
-
- Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a
former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He
is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including “The
Future of Political Islam.”