In the wake of President Obama’s announced increase of 30,000 US troops in Afghanistan I want to share an article forwarded to me by a friend. Out of everything I’ve read and watched over the past two days this was the most insightful analysis of Obama’s decision. I was a bit apprehensive at first due to the writer’s glowing approval of Obama but his praise was tempered within a pragmatic and historical assessment of South Asian, or South Central Asian, security and politics. The only questions this leaves me is understanding whether Pakistan is fighting or supporting the Taliban and if a schism exists between the Pakistani government and the ISI?
Obama rings the curtain on Pax Americana
By M K Bhadrakumar
United States President Barack Obama scored a convincing "A" in the tortuous test that he was put to on the structuring of a new Afghan strategy.
It turned out to be a tough learning process and it bears testimony to Obama's extraordinary intellect and character that he grasped the essence of the problem, honestly assessed what went wrong, had the clarity of mind not to be distracted and showed the sincerity of purpose to adopt a whole new approach.
He threw out of the window altogether the entire baggage of "regional initiatives", international conferences and "grand bargains" and zeroed in on the heart of the matter, namely, that the Afghan people are starting to view the Americans as occupiers and it is time to consider an exit strategy.
Nowhere does it become clearer than in his readiness to attribute centrality in his strategy to the government led by President Hamid Karzai. The US is unceremoniously putting behind it the bitter harvest of the Afghan presidential election and is finally getting down to work with Karzai, now at the beginning of a second five-year term. This is as much a choice as a necessity.
With all the imperfections of the situation, Karzai heads a "government that is consistent with Afghanistan's laws and constitution" - as Obama admitted - and that's all that matters anymore.
Obama's new strategy emphasizes the strengthening of Karzai's government as quickly as possible. It acknowledges that only Afghans themselves can solve their problem. Hopefully, the campaign to debunk and discredit Karzai will now come to a halt.
Obama will do well to check not only some of his impetuous fellow Americans but also his British allies, who still seem to harbor an itch now and then to put down Karzai.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the House of Commons that he was determined to hold Karzai to account. He vowed that in the next nine months, Karzai's appointment of governors of Afghanistan's 400 provinces and districts would be entirely on "merit". This is precisely the kind of bluster that must be avoided.
On the difficult road ahead, Karzai's coalition partners are going to be useful associates for the US (and British) troops. Everything in the Hindu Kush has worked from time immemorial on the basis of trust and loyalty and kinships. All that claptrap about merit, etc falls by the wayside. That's how Afghanistan lives, and will live for the foreseeable future.
Obama in his entire speech never once decried "warlordism". Indeed, Afghanistan needs to be viewed in its cultural and historical context.
The US strategy implicitly assigns a major role for the so-called "warlords" for stabilizing Afghanistan. There simply is no alternative when US forces do not intend to maintain peace beyond weakening the current Taliban-led insurgency.
It is an open secret that the Afghan National Army (ANA) suffers from many infirmities, and US funding is needed for a massive expansion of the ANA, which is not going to be easy. The additional cost of the deployment of 30,000 additional US troops is high - US$30 billion to $40 billion per year in extra spending. The budget estimate for 2010 already stood at $65 billion for Afghanistan (outstripping $61 billion for Iraq).
However, the most profound part of the new Obama strategy is that it signals a conclusive farewell to the neo-conservative agenda for US foreign policy. As Obama put it, the nation-building project in Afghanistan "sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests". He was brutally frank in admitting that America "can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars".
More important, he stressed that it was time the US turned away from wars and instead tried to "rebuild our strength here at home ... That's why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended - because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own ... We'll have to use diplomacy, because no one nation can meet the challenges of an interconnected world acting alone."
Amid the cacophony over the Afghan strategy, we should not fail to note that the age of Obama has truly begun. On Tuesday, the president formally brought the curtain down on Pax Americana. The global implications will be far-reaching - be it for Iran, North Korea or Venezuela - as Obama underscored with extraordinary frankness that America had forgotten to "appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy ... So we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars."
Obama's new approach on Afghanistan jettisons the counter-insurgency strategy in favor of a forceful counter-terrorism strategy. No "nation-building", no clarion calls of freedom, progress, democracy, and so forth. The objective of the remaining portion of the war will be extremely narrow: to degrade the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the shortest possible time within the coming 18 months or so and to restore advantage to the hands of the Afghan government, which in turn enables a US pullout on the pattern of Iraq within a definable timeline.
The unfolding Afghan scenario bears a striking resemblance to the second half of the 1980s, when it became clear that the Soviet army would withdraw. President Mohammad Najibullah surprised everyone - including Moscow - that he was capable of initiating a national reconciliation program under his own steam, and, more important, of holding his ground even without the Soviet army. He ran into trouble only when the Soviets cold-shouldered him altogether.
The famous Jalalabad offensive planned by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) with the combined strength of all the mujahideen groups, including Northern Alliance leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, still couldn't defeat Najibullah. With a bit more help from the international community, Najibullah would have proved more than a match for the mujahideen and the jihadis and their foreign masters put together. Correct lessons need to be learnt from history.
The US agenda should be to transform the war to its pre-2001 form as quickly as possible, namely, a civil war stemming from a fratricidal strife. The international community should incrementally confine itself to dealing with the established Afghan government in Kabul.
Obama didn't quite reveal his mind on a political settlement in Afghanistan. Perhaps, it was beyond the scope of his Tuesday speech. All the same, he didn't entirely leave the subject untouched.
In carefully chosen words, he said, "We have no interest in occupying your country. We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens."
There is no doubt whatsoever that enduring peace is possible only if there is an inclusive settlement that includes the Taliban. But, here again, the current approach to engage the Taliban via the good offices of the Saudi or Pakistani intelligence is extremely short-sighted and dangerous. The fact remains that while the Saudis might be the US's allies, they also happen to have their own Wahhabist agenda toward Afghanistan and Central Asia.
Therefore, Obama should allow Afghan reconciliation to come out of an intra-Afghan initiative. The US must be gracious enough to give up the center stage. The Afghans have their traditional methods of dialogue and reconciliation. Karzai must spearhead the reconciliation process. Instead of sniping at his idea of a loya jirga (grand council), its potential should be explored.
Broadly speaking, the attempt should be to "liberate" the Taliban from the Pakistani clutches. In the ultimate analysis, the "Afghan-ness" of the Taliban is bound to surface if it is provided the opportunity. It is precisely this "Afghan-ness" that Pakistan fears most. The Pakistani strategy has been to develop a mystique about the Taliban and to keep it fragmented so that it remains under the ISI's control.
Only Afghan groups can break this syndrome. The battlelines in Afghanistan have never been clear-cut. Karzai has allies who can reach out to the Taliban. They know who the Taliban are, where they are and who is worth talking to. They must be given a free hand. They don't need the guidance of British, Saudi or Pakistani intelligence to make out the identity of their countrymen.
However, all said, the success of any Afghan strategy crucially depends on the US's capacity to compel Pakistan from supporting militant groups. Obama made not less than 22 references to Pakistan in his speech. But he needs to forthrightly address the issue of forcing elements in Pakistan to give up terrorism.
He exuded optimism that there was a genuine change of heart on the part of Pakistan. Time will show whether this optimism is warranted, especially as the time approaches for the US troop withdrawal.
Inevitably, regional equations come into the reckoning. India and Pakistan must be firmly dissuaded from turning Afghanistan into an arena of rivalry. But this is easier said than done as Kabul traditionally viewed Delhi as a counterweight to Islamabad; Delhi viewed Afghanistan as a second front against Pakistan; and Pakistan sought strategic depth vis-a-vis India.
The vicious cycle needs to be broken and any effort in this direction must include addressing the root causes of the Afghanistan-Pakistan antipathy. Obama has the moral authority to take such an historic initiative.
This is not a matter of Karzai's political personality or those of the warlords who are his partners. It must be remembered that even the Taliban regime in Kabul failed to recognize the Durand Line that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan, no matter its critical dependence on Pakistani goodwill.
Secondly, the US has de facto become a party to the India-Pakistan relationship, especially during the past decade since its mediation in the brief Kargil war in 1999, which Delhi sought despite its professed aversion towards "third-party mediation" in India-Pakistan disputes.
Without doubt, the dynamics of the US-India strategic partnership will be keenly watched by Islamabad. The Obama administration has done well to "demilitarize" the US-India strategic partnership. That process must not only continue, but should be hastened and India will get used to it.
There is plenty of scope to advance the US-India strategic partnership without causing apprehensions in the Pakistani mind or upsetting the delicate strategic balance in the region. What South Asia needs is not more hubris but less and less of it, and security and stability.
The present log jam in India-Pakistan relations is dangerous. By offering a substantial, long-term partnership to Pakistan, and by offering a more balanced and forward-looking relationship to both India and Pakistan, Obama hopes to alleviate the threat perceptions in the Pakistani mind.
Without doubt, unless Pakistan's threat perceptions of a "hegemonistic" India are squarely addressed, Islamabad will continue to resort to asymmetrical warfare.
Actually, Obama's score could have been "A+". But his Afghan strategy does not seem to factor in one possibility that borders on probability. Will Obama's emphasis on an exit strategy have the unexpected result of encouraging Pakistan's military to estimate that all that is needed is to counsel the Taliban to lie low during the forthcoming buildup of US troops and simply wait until the troops go home?
That is to say, there is always the risk that Obama may end up emboldening the very forces he hopes to defeat. The bottom line, therefore, is Washington's commitment to stability in the region for years to come.
Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey.
