THE AFGHAN CONUNDRUM

Ahmed Rashid

In Afghanistan: a war going in the wrong direction, a fatally flawed election, reconstruction at a standstill and a growing political vacuum that the Taliban is filling even as some NATO countries contemplate withdrawing their troops.

In nuclear-armed Pakistan: a long-running multidimensional crisis, political and ethnic strife, an unprecedented economic depression, and growing local Islamic extremism which plays host to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban; despite these mounting domestic challenges, Pakistan is still vying for influence in Afghanistan in anticipation of an eventual Western withdrawal.

In Washington and European capitals: growing doubts about the viability of the US-led military campaign in Afghanistan, continuing suspicions about the intentions of Pakistan’s military, the inability to push ahead with a regional strategy or engage with Taliban moderates, and a lack of a credible government in Kabul.

The disastrous legacy that President Barack Obama inherited in Afghanistan is primarily the fault of former President George W. Bush and his failure to deliver sufficient political, military and economic resources to both the country and the region writ large. But lest we think revisiting the past is an unnecessary detour into mistakes no longer relevant, it is fixing these missteps that are key to preventing a complete radicalisation of the region.

The descent of Afghanistan to the brink of anarchy was solidified in 2009. It was the result of eight years of blunders, miscalculations and wanton neglect. It was the Bush team’s lack of a strategic agenda for Afghanistan in three critical areas that led to an inevitable escalation of violence. There were woefully insufficient US troops and no comprehensive strategy that would have integrated US military and civilian activity to help the Afghan government increase capacity, improve governance and speedily build its security forces. Instead the US armed and financed rapacious warlords, many 320of them members of the former Northern Alliance, which antagonised the Pashtuns and Pakistan. For several years the Pashtun belt was treated as a war zone as US Special Forces hunted for al Qaeda and US aircraft carried out indiscriminate bombing.

Within weeks of winning the victory in Afghanistan, US troops were training for the invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan became a stepchild as the Bush administration preserved US resources, money and troops for the invasion of Iraq. But the insurgency could never have taken off in the way it did without the Taliban having safe sanctuaries in Pakistan. After losing between 12,000 to 15,000 men the remnants of Taliban fighters and its leadership who had escaped capture or death arrived in Pakistan and found a safe haven there. Key figures from the former Taliban regime constituted a new Taliban Shura in Quetta where many lived with their families.

Second, there was no comprehensive diplomatic or regional approach to Afghanistan’s six direct neighbours, a necessary precondition if Bush’s team was to come to grips with the complex history of these states’ interference and battle for influence in Afghanistan. Two of them, Iran and Pakistan, were clandestinely backing the Taliban. Still, Pakistan’s military ruler, then- President Pervez Musharraf, remained Bush’s hero. And Afghanistan’s influential distant neighbours Russia, India and Saudi Arabia were also ignored.

Last, there was no political strategy for state building and improving governance by dealing comprehensively with President Hamid Karzai, government ministers, warlords, tribal elders, governors, the parliament and other players.

Setting out clear benchmarks for Karzai and his government to adhere to should have increased Afghan effectiveness, but Bush’s regular telephone calls to the president were largely wasted on fireside chats. This culminated in a critical deterioration. In the spring of 2008, large tracts of Afghanistan in the south and east, and for the first time provinces around Kabul, were under the control of the Taliban, which began to appoint its own governors, courts, police and tax collectors to run these areas.

The Taliban’s two greatest assets became its safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly the recruiting and logistic bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas and Balochistan province, and the uninterrupted flow of money from the likes of donations, drug sales and kidnappings. More than half of the country’s thirty-four provinces turned into no- go areas for Afghan government officials, foreign aid workers and even some NATO forces who were not allowed by their governments to fight the Taliban.

For the first time since losing its regime, the Taliban had broken out of its traditional Pashtun ethnic power base in the south, making it easier to deploy guerrillas to the north and the west in 2009. The Taliban expansion in 2008 was matched by its extraordinary progress in improved military tactics: more sophisticated ambushes, suicide car bombs, mine warfare, multiple urban terrorist attacks, and targeted killings and kidnappings to demoralise the Afghan public and Western civilians. In 2009 the Afghan Taliban had all but become a countrywide movement.

The role Pakistan played from 2001 onwards was critical in shaping the outcome. The Army which had been deployed in and around FATA after 9/11 withdrew many of them in early 2002 because of the build-up of tensions with India, after the storming of the Indian parliament by Kashmiri militants. For much of that year tensions with India preoccupied the army allowing al Qaeda and the Taliban to move around at will in FATA and create new allies among the local Pakistani Pashtun tribes and other extremist groups in Punjab.

Pakistan’s security agency continued to give tacit support to the Taliban. This was a result of the Army’s fear that by backing the US invasion of Afghanistan, it had inadvertently helped bring to power the former Northern Alliance, which the military detested because of the support it had received from Pakistan’s regional rivals India, Iran and Russia. The NA held most of the important ministries in the Karzai government. The Army was also deeply perturbed at the sudden influx of Indians into Kabul. The Bush administration did little to avert the build- up of tensions.

Moreover, the US focus on Iraq and lack of commitment to rebuilding Afghanistan convinced the Pakistan military that the US would soon pull out of Afghanistan. Pakistan believed it would be left dealing with an unstable Afghanistan as it was in 1989 after the Soviets and the US withdrew from the region. For President Musharraf it made more sense to hold the Taliban in reserve as a proxy force for Islamabad to influence future events in Afghanistan, while mistrust between Pakistan and India and the US, further convinced the military that its policies were the right ones. In particular the military were deeply riled by the nuclear deal agreed to by the US and India which legitimised India’s nuclear weapons program.

Nevertheless, the ISI did move against al Qaeda, cooperating with the CIA to arrest several leading figures who were hiding out in Pakistani cities including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks and Abu Zubaydah, a key recruiter for al Qaeda.

In retaliation al Qaeda enlisted local Pakistani extremist groups to try and assassinate Musharraf.

Two unsuccessful suicide attacks were made on his life in December 2003 but even these attacks failed to convince the military that they now faced a growing threat at home from the newfound alliance of al Qaeda, the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban and extremist groups in Punjab. The Army had sidelined these groups after Musharraf ordered their activities in Indian Kashmir to be wound down and he began a back channel peace process with India.

There was no attempt by the Army to demobilise the Punjabi extremist groups.

In April 2007 Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry who commanded US and NATO forces became the first US general to publicly tell the US Congress, the White House and NATO that it could not win in Afghanistan without addressing Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan. Pressure on the Musharraf regime began to mount, just as Musharraf himself entered a volatile political situation at home with rising opposition to his rule.

The stepped-up US pressure led to greater intelligence cooperation between the ISI and the CIA which led to the deaths of several top Taliban commanders including Mullah Akthar Usmani who was killed in December 2006 and Mullah Dadullah in May 2007. Mullah Obaidullah was arrested in March 2007 and later freed by the Pakistanis.

These losses led to the elevation of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a close companion of Mullah Omar, who now presided over the Taliban’s military committee in Quetta. Brader became the de facto field commander of the Taliban as Mullah Omar remained largely in hiding.

The Taliban and Pakistan were seeking to outlast the presence of Western forces and to some extent they were succeeding. As long as the Karzai government failed to govern effectively or provide services and jobs to the people while allowing corruption and drug trafficking to take place, the Taliban were winning by default. Despite the growing US and NATO pressure on the military which faced growing threats from its own Pakistani Taliban, the Pakistan Army refused to abandon the Afghan 323Taliban leadership in Quetta.

In 2008-9 the Taliban moved out of their southern strongholds and expanded into the provinces around Kabul and to Kunduz in the northeast and Herat in the south west. The Taliban were now a national, countrywide movement even though their base remained among the Pashtun tribes.

By late 2008 the Taliban controlled some 164 Afghan districts out of a total of 364, compared to control of just thirty in 2003. NATO said the Taliban had shadow governors in thirty-three out of 34 provinces.