"With a population of 175 million, Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world. Its society is riddled with deep ethnic, social and economic fissures. Quite apart from the Islamists, there are grave dangers of secular separatist movements in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh that could divide the nation, just as ethnic nationalism did in 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh. With such threats, is it surprising that foreign experts are worried about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?
_____________________
by Ahmed Rashid
July 02, UAE, Sri Lanka Guardian: Today some retired American generals and historians call the US invasion of Iraq the greatest strategic military disaster in American history, a massive squandering of lives and resources that will affect the Middle East and reduce the power of the United States for years to come. Yet compared with what is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq may well turn out to be a mere sideshow, a historical folly that diverted global attention for some years but had little impact in changing the real nature of power and politics in the Middle East. The US failure to secure this region may well lead to global terrorism, nuclear proliferation and a drug epidemic on a scale that we have not yet experienced and I can only hope we never will.
Initially it seemed that September 11 would ensure that the world addressed the social stagnation and state failure in South and Central Asia. Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways and listen to their alienated and poverty-stricken citizens. Iran had to be made part of the international community. The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education and unresolved conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Afghanistan, which it had ignored for too long and which could no longer be allowed to fester. The West and democratic-minded Muslims had to help each other counter this new and deadly form of Islamic extremism.
Instead, seven years on, the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001. Rather than diminishing, the threat from al Qa’eda and its affiliates has grown, engulfing new regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe and creating fear among peoples and governments from Australia to Zanzibar. The US invasions of two Muslim countries, billions of dollars, armies of security guards and new technology have so far failed to contain either the original organisation or the threat that now comes from its copycats – unemployed young Muslim men in urban slums in British or French cities who have been mobilised through the internet. The al Qa’eda leader, Osama bin Laden – now a global inspirational figure – is still at large, despite the largest manhunt in history.
In the region that spawned al Qa’eda and which the United States had promised to transform after 9 /11, the crisis is even more dangerous. Afghanistan is once again staring down the abyss of state collapse, despite billions of dollars in aid, forty-five thousand Western troops and the deaths of thousands of people. The Taliban have made a dramatic comeback, enlisting the help of al Qa’eda and Islamic extremists in Pakistan, and getting a boost from the explosion in heroin production that has helped fund their movement. The UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi had promised what he termed “a light footprint” for the UN presence in Afghanistan, while some US officials eventually promised that they would carry out “nation building lite.” In fact, barely enough was done by any organisation in the first few years when 90 per cent of the Afghan population continued to welcome foreign troops and aid workers with open arms. The international community had an extended window of opportunity for several years to help the Afghan people – they failed to take advantage of it.
Pakistan’s military regime, led by President Pervez Musharraf, has undergone a slower but equally bloody meltdown. The military has refused to allow a genuinely representative government to take root. In 2007 Musharraf, after massive public demonstrations, suspended the constitution, sacked the senior judiciary, imprisoned more than twelve thousand lawyers and members of civil society and muzzled the media in an attempt to stay in power and ensure that any elections favoured him rather than the opposition. The country is beset by a major political crisis and the spread of Islamic extremism that now sees its chance to topple the state. Musharraf’s plunge from hero to villain was compounded by the assassination of the country’s larger-than-life opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007, followed by a wave of suicide bombings and mayhem.
Across the five independent states of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – dictatorships have ruled continuously since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The lack of basic political freedoms, grinding poverty, huge economic disparities and an Islamic extremist political underground are set to plunge Central Asia, despite its oil and gas reserves, into ever greater turmoil.
The consequences of state failure in any single country are unimaginable. At stake in Afghanistan is not just the future of President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people yearning for stability, development and education but also the entire global alliance that is trying to keep Afghanistan together. At stake are the futures of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), the European Union, and of course America’s own power and prestige. It is difcult to imagine how Nato could survive as the West’s leading military alliance if the Taliban are not defeated in Afghanistan or if bin Laden remains at large indefinitely. Yet the international community’s lukewarm commitment to Afghanistan after September 11 has been matched only by its incompetence, incoherence and conflicting strategies – all led by the United States.
What is at stake in Pakistan is even greater. A nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive and double-dealing policies after September 11, even under the watchful eye of the CIA. The recent blowback from these policies is now threatening the state, undermining the army, decapitating the political elite, and drowning the country in a sea of blood. In 2007 there were 56 suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed 640 people, compared to just 6 bombings in the previous year. President Bush’s embrace of Musharraf and the military, rather than of the Pakistani people and the development of state institutions and a democratic process, has created immense hatred for the US Army and America, hatred that penetrates all classes of society. Ninety per cent of the $10 billion in aid that the United States has provided Pakistan with since September 11 has gone to the military rather than to development.
Moreover, anti-Americanism has hit Pakistani society’s core values, undermining people’s understanding of democracy, secular education, modernization and civil society – because all these facets of society are deemed to be American. When the Bush administration continued to back Musharraf in late 2007, despite the general’s rampage against the judiciary and civil society, Pakistan’s middle class was overtaken by feelings of anti-Americanism, making it impossible to persuade Pakistanis to resist the extremists. Neither was it possible to convince people that the struggle against extremism was not just America’s war but equally Pakistan’s.
With a population of 175 million, Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world. Its society is riddled with deep ethnic, social and economic fissures. Quite apart from the Islamists, there are grave dangers of secular separatist movements in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh that could divide the nation, just as ethnic nationalism did in 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh. With such threats, is it surprising that foreign experts are worried about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?
The United States ignored consolidating South and Central Asia – the homeland of global terrorism – in favour of invading Iraq. American resources and military manpower that Afghanistan should have received went to Iraq. “Iraq was more than just a major distraction to Afghanistan,” says Ko Annan in retrospect. “Huge resources were devoted to Iraq, which focused away from nation building in Afghanistan. The billions spent in Iraq were the billions that were not spent in Afghanistan.” Moreover, the US attack on Iraq was critical to convincing Musharraf that the United States was not serious about stabilising the region, and that it was safer for Pakistan to preserve its own national interest by clandestinely giving the Taliban refuge.
What makes the war in Iraq, and the enormous human losses there, even more tragic is that all the mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq had already been made in Afghanistan – yet nothing was learnt. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, not enough US troops were deployed, nor were enough planning and resources devoted to the immediate postwar resuscitation of people’s lives. There was no coherence to US tactics and strategy, which led to vitally wrong decisions being taken at critical moments – whether it was reviving the warlords in Afghanistan or dismantling the army and bureaucracy in Iraq.
I had seen the accumulating dangers posed by al Qa’eda’s expansion in Afghanistan and Pakistan early on, due to my intense involvement with the Afghan saga. I had seen firsthand Afghans’ fortitude during a quarter century of war. an had become an incubator for al Qa’eda, but so had my own country, Pakistan, because of the nexus between Islamic extremists and the army, both of which tolerated an al Qa’eda presence before 9 /11. The army backed the Taliban and encouraged thousands of Pakistani youngsters to fight and die for the Taliban, just as it mobilised thousands of Pakistanis to fight in the Kashmiri insurgency against India. I warned that, armed with nuclear weapons and fuelled by jihadism, a military regime led by the rash and impetuous General Musharraf was capable of creating a perfect storm of circumstances and events that could plunge the region into even greater danger and chaos and undermine Pakistan’s very existence. That is what we are seeing today.
After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, optimists like me expected that the US-led international community would commit to rebuild Afghanistan and help undertake reforms and nation building in Pakistan and throughout Central Asia. The region had to be seen as a single entity because it was beset by many of the same problems. Rebuilding Afghanistan alone would only push its problems into neighbouring states. Ending the “failing states syndrome” in the region and integrating those states into the world economy would require massive aid, internal economic reforms, democratisation, and literacy. This would need nothing less than a Western-led Marshall Plan for the region and a commitment that would have to be measured in not months or years but decades. The leaders in the region would be persuaded to change their autocratic ways only if they saw an unfaltering Western military and aid presence on their doorstep.
It was equally important to wean Muslims away from the message of al Qa’eda and its perversion of Islam. As I saw al Qa’eda evolve in Afghanistan in the 1990s, I considered it nothing more than a blatant power grab by men whose naked political aims were cloaked in the garb of Islamic ideology. Yet to a handful of Muslims, al Qa’eda posed a civilisational solution – albeit an extreme one – to the issue of justice denied to Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. Now Muslims had to be in the forefront of changing their own environment and governments, and taking responsibility for creating the mechanisms in which the rule of law and civil society could grow and flourish.
The great empire builders quickly learnt that when it came to ruling newly conquered lands, they had to put back in almost as much as they took out. If the conqueror was to extract the raw materials, taxes, and manpower he needed from the colony, he had to establish a system of security and law and order over the conquered and help his subjects maintain their economic livelihoods. Most significantly, empire builders from Alexander the Great to Queen Victoria had to learn about their subjects if they were to rule over them with any authority. At the very least they had to be curious about them. In the nineteenth century the British epitomised a colonialism that exploited with responsibility, used force judiciously, and yet learnt about its subject peoples.
In comparison, the first thought of the Bush administration after the Afghan war ended was how to declare victory, get out and move on to Iraq. The administration wanted no responsibility for reconstructing the now-occupied nation of Afghanistan and was unwilling to learn about the people or the country. In their haste to move on, security in Afghanistan was handed over to warlords and drug barons, who were supported lavishly by the CIA and the Pentagon with a one-billion-dollar budget, because Washington wanted to focus on the upcoming war in Iraq.
Historically, when the United States has intervened in the third world – largely in Latin America and Southeast Asia – it has never been much concerned with nation building or rebuilding shattered societies. Regime change during the cold war was all about replacing one pro-American corrupt dictator with another, while societies trundled on in their misery. As I’ve said, some observers hoped that after regime change in Afghanistan, the Americans would do more simply because the US homeland had suffered such terrible consequences. The neocons, obsessed with the mechanics of regime change and instant gratification, never linked successful regime change with nation building. As a direct result, Afghanistan and Iraq both witnessed renewed insurgencies after the quick victories by US forces precisely because of the failure first to plan and then to pursue nation-building policies the moment the war was won. A military doctrine of “shock and awe” could not substitute for boots on the ground and an inclusive strategy that would win hearts and minds.
Moreover, Pakistan, the base area, recruiting ground and logistics centre for both al Qa’eda and the Taliban, needed major help in both state and nation building if it was to overcome past legacies. By state building, I mean the opportunity for countries to rebuild their infrastructure such as the army, police, civil service and judiciary, which would provide security and services to its citizens. However, state building is prolonged, expensive and requires a long-term commitment from international donors as well as a democratic culture prevailing at home – something the Pakistan army was to deny its citizens. Defined in the broadest possible way, nation building involves aid and support to civil society to rebuild the shattered economy, provide livelihoods, create social and political structures and introduce democracy. The process of democratisation is about not just holding elections but creating institutions and a culture of tolerance and shared responsibility among rulers and citizens alike.
Everywhere I went after September 11, I urged governments and experts to devote resources for nation building in Afghanistan so that the country could emerge as a bastion of development and democracy to counter the growing trends of extremism and state repression in the Islamic world. The United States and the West had the opportunity to show Muslims and the world that they may be bombing a country to free it from Taliban tyranny, but they also had the willingness and patience to help rebuild it. I strongly countered the myths being circulated in the Western media at the time that the Afghans would oppose the presence of Western troops. Instead, after being battered by twenty-five years of war, most Afghans saw the presence of Western forces as a way forward to stability and development.
Most experts reckoned that Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas, needed about US$4 to 5 billion every year for the next ten years to put it on its feet – a small amount in geopolitical donor terms and a pittance compared to what was later spent in Iraq. Such an act of sustained commitment by the international community would also help undermine support for extremism in the neighbouring states and encourage them to pursue reforms.
In the early months of 2002, no outsider, least of all myself, had any idea that Iraq rather than Afghanistan was the real focus of the Bush administration’s attention and that the “war on terrorism” would be fought in Baghdad rather than Kabul or Islamabad. The reluctance of the Pentagon to commit more American troops to Afghanistan should have alerted us that either the US military was very stupid or it had preoccupations other than Afghanistan. Yet at the time few people I spoke to, including US officials, could believe that the neocons would willfully give up tracking down al Qa’eda leaders and would move on to Iraq. We now know that the chase was given up in March 2002 – just three months after the fall of Kandahar – when the Arabic- and Persian-speaking US SOF teams were moved out of Afghanistan to train for Iraq and surveillance satellites were pulled from the skies over Afghanistan and redirected to Iraq.
The American failure to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq or to move Pakistan and Central Asia toward reform and democracy made it almost impossible for Muslim moderates to support the West’s struggle against Islamic extremism or to bring about change in their own countries. The US campaign to eliminate al Qa’eda had turned into a much larger American intervention across the Islamic world that had nothing to do with al Qa’eda and that Muslims could not support or tolerate. The treatment of prisoners by the US military at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were symptoms of an ever-expanding war that alienated the entire globe. By 2007 a decisive shift had taken place in key countries such as Pakistan, where hatred for Musharraf and the Americans took precedence over hatred for al Qa’eda, even as Pakistanis died in large numbers from al Qa’eda–sponsored suicide bombings. This made fighting the extremists much more difficult.
As the Bush era nears its end in 2008, American power lies shattered. The US Army is overstretched and broken, the American people are disillusioned and rudderless, US credibility lies in ruins, and the world is a far more dangerous place. The Iraq war has bankrupted the United States, consuming up to US$11 billion a month. Ultimately the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9 /11. There are now full-blown Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the next locus could be Uzbekistan. The safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is uppermost in the minds of Western governments. There are more failing states in the Muslim world, while al Qa’eda has expanded around the world.
The American people have understood the tragedy associated with Bush’s imperial overreach, and as the 2008 US elections will doubtless show, they are no longer as naive, ignorant or scared as they were after 9 /11. However, it has taken the American people time to learn such lessons, and in the meantime American power has been squandered, and hatred for Americans has become a global phenomenon. Bush’s historical legacy will be one of failure. Bush promised a great transformation in 2001, and he has certainly transformed the world, but not in the way that anyone us could have ever imagined.
But the peoples and regimes of this region have to understand that unless they themselves move their nations toward greater democracy, the chaos that presently surrounds them will, in time, overwhelm them. Pakistan has shown a new beginning in 2008, and Afghanistan still has the potential to do so. If we can better understand what has happened before, what has gone wrong and what needs to go right, then we can better face up to our collective future.
Ahmed Rashid’s books include Jihad (2002) and the worldwide bestseller Taliban (2000). He writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post, and the International Herald Tribune.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
_____________________
by Ahmed Rashid
July 02, UAE, Sri Lanka Guardian: Today some retired American generals and historians call the US invasion of Iraq the greatest strategic military disaster in American history, a massive squandering of lives and resources that will affect the Middle East and reduce the power of the United States for years to come. Yet compared with what is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq may well turn out to be a mere sideshow, a historical folly that diverted global attention for some years but had little impact in changing the real nature of power and politics in the Middle East. The US failure to secure this region may well lead to global terrorism, nuclear proliferation and a drug epidemic on a scale that we have not yet experienced and I can only hope we never will.
Initially it seemed that September 11 would ensure that the world addressed the social stagnation and state failure in South and Central Asia. Afghanistan had to be rescued from itself. Autocratic regimes in Pakistan and Central Asia had to change their repressive ways and listen to their alienated and poverty-stricken citizens. Iran had to be made part of the international community. The West had to wake up to the realities and responsibilities of injustice, poverty, lack of education and unresolved conflicts such as those in Kashmir and Afghanistan, which it had ignored for too long and which could no longer be allowed to fester. The West and democratic-minded Muslims had to help each other counter this new and deadly form of Islamic extremism.
Instead, seven years on, the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day in 2001. Rather than diminishing, the threat from al Qa’eda and its affiliates has grown, engulfing new regions of Africa, Asia, and Europe and creating fear among peoples and governments from Australia to Zanzibar. The US invasions of two Muslim countries, billions of dollars, armies of security guards and new technology have so far failed to contain either the original organisation or the threat that now comes from its copycats – unemployed young Muslim men in urban slums in British or French cities who have been mobilised through the internet. The al Qa’eda leader, Osama bin Laden – now a global inspirational figure – is still at large, despite the largest manhunt in history.
In the region that spawned al Qa’eda and which the United States had promised to transform after 9 /11, the crisis is even more dangerous. Afghanistan is once again staring down the abyss of state collapse, despite billions of dollars in aid, forty-five thousand Western troops and the deaths of thousands of people. The Taliban have made a dramatic comeback, enlisting the help of al Qa’eda and Islamic extremists in Pakistan, and getting a boost from the explosion in heroin production that has helped fund their movement. The UN representative Lakhdar Brahimi had promised what he termed “a light footprint” for the UN presence in Afghanistan, while some US officials eventually promised that they would carry out “nation building lite.” In fact, barely enough was done by any organisation in the first few years when 90 per cent of the Afghan population continued to welcome foreign troops and aid workers with open arms. The international community had an extended window of opportunity for several years to help the Afghan people – they failed to take advantage of it.
Pakistan’s military regime, led by President Pervez Musharraf, has undergone a slower but equally bloody meltdown. The military has refused to allow a genuinely representative government to take root. In 2007 Musharraf, after massive public demonstrations, suspended the constitution, sacked the senior judiciary, imprisoned more than twelve thousand lawyers and members of civil society and muzzled the media in an attempt to stay in power and ensure that any elections favoured him rather than the opposition. The country is beset by a major political crisis and the spread of Islamic extremism that now sees its chance to topple the state. Musharraf’s plunge from hero to villain was compounded by the assassination of the country’s larger-than-life opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007, followed by a wave of suicide bombings and mayhem.
Across the five independent states of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – dictatorships have ruled continuously since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. The lack of basic political freedoms, grinding poverty, huge economic disparities and an Islamic extremist political underground are set to plunge Central Asia, despite its oil and gas reserves, into ever greater turmoil.
The consequences of state failure in any single country are unimaginable. At stake in Afghanistan is not just the future of President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people yearning for stability, development and education but also the entire global alliance that is trying to keep Afghanistan together. At stake are the futures of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), the European Union, and of course America’s own power and prestige. It is difcult to imagine how Nato could survive as the West’s leading military alliance if the Taliban are not defeated in Afghanistan or if bin Laden remains at large indefinitely. Yet the international community’s lukewarm commitment to Afghanistan after September 11 has been matched only by its incompetence, incoherence and conflicting strategies – all led by the United States.
What is at stake in Pakistan is even greater. A nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive and double-dealing policies after September 11, even under the watchful eye of the CIA. The recent blowback from these policies is now threatening the state, undermining the army, decapitating the political elite, and drowning the country in a sea of blood. In 2007 there were 56 suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed 640 people, compared to just 6 bombings in the previous year. President Bush’s embrace of Musharraf and the military, rather than of the Pakistani people and the development of state institutions and a democratic process, has created immense hatred for the US Army and America, hatred that penetrates all classes of society. Ninety per cent of the $10 billion in aid that the United States has provided Pakistan with since September 11 has gone to the military rather than to development.
Moreover, anti-Americanism has hit Pakistani society’s core values, undermining people’s understanding of democracy, secular education, modernization and civil society – because all these facets of society are deemed to be American. When the Bush administration continued to back Musharraf in late 2007, despite the general’s rampage against the judiciary and civil society, Pakistan’s middle class was overtaken by feelings of anti-Americanism, making it impossible to persuade Pakistanis to resist the extremists. Neither was it possible to convince people that the struggle against extremism was not just America’s war but equally Pakistan’s.
With a population of 175 million, Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world. Its society is riddled with deep ethnic, social and economic fissures. Quite apart from the Islamists, there are grave dangers of secular separatist movements in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh that could divide the nation, just as ethnic nationalism did in 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh. With such threats, is it surprising that foreign experts are worried about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?
The United States ignored consolidating South and Central Asia – the homeland of global terrorism – in favour of invading Iraq. American resources and military manpower that Afghanistan should have received went to Iraq. “Iraq was more than just a major distraction to Afghanistan,” says Ko Annan in retrospect. “Huge resources were devoted to Iraq, which focused away from nation building in Afghanistan. The billions spent in Iraq were the billions that were not spent in Afghanistan.” Moreover, the US attack on Iraq was critical to convincing Musharraf that the United States was not serious about stabilising the region, and that it was safer for Pakistan to preserve its own national interest by clandestinely giving the Taliban refuge.
What makes the war in Iraq, and the enormous human losses there, even more tragic is that all the mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq had already been made in Afghanistan – yet nothing was learnt. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, not enough US troops were deployed, nor were enough planning and resources devoted to the immediate postwar resuscitation of people’s lives. There was no coherence to US tactics and strategy, which led to vitally wrong decisions being taken at critical moments – whether it was reviving the warlords in Afghanistan or dismantling the army and bureaucracy in Iraq.
I had seen the accumulating dangers posed by al Qa’eda’s expansion in Afghanistan and Pakistan early on, due to my intense involvement with the Afghan saga. I had seen firsthand Afghans’ fortitude during a quarter century of war. an had become an incubator for al Qa’eda, but so had my own country, Pakistan, because of the nexus between Islamic extremists and the army, both of which tolerated an al Qa’eda presence before 9 /11. The army backed the Taliban and encouraged thousands of Pakistani youngsters to fight and die for the Taliban, just as it mobilised thousands of Pakistanis to fight in the Kashmiri insurgency against India. I warned that, armed with nuclear weapons and fuelled by jihadism, a military regime led by the rash and impetuous General Musharraf was capable of creating a perfect storm of circumstances and events that could plunge the region into even greater danger and chaos and undermine Pakistan’s very existence. That is what we are seeing today.
After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, optimists like me expected that the US-led international community would commit to rebuild Afghanistan and help undertake reforms and nation building in Pakistan and throughout Central Asia. The region had to be seen as a single entity because it was beset by many of the same problems. Rebuilding Afghanistan alone would only push its problems into neighbouring states. Ending the “failing states syndrome” in the region and integrating those states into the world economy would require massive aid, internal economic reforms, democratisation, and literacy. This would need nothing less than a Western-led Marshall Plan for the region and a commitment that would have to be measured in not months or years but decades. The leaders in the region would be persuaded to change their autocratic ways only if they saw an unfaltering Western military and aid presence on their doorstep.
It was equally important to wean Muslims away from the message of al Qa’eda and its perversion of Islam. As I saw al Qa’eda evolve in Afghanistan in the 1990s, I considered it nothing more than a blatant power grab by men whose naked political aims were cloaked in the garb of Islamic ideology. Yet to a handful of Muslims, al Qa’eda posed a civilisational solution – albeit an extreme one – to the issue of justice denied to Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. Now Muslims had to be in the forefront of changing their own environment and governments, and taking responsibility for creating the mechanisms in which the rule of law and civil society could grow and flourish.
The great empire builders quickly learnt that when it came to ruling newly conquered lands, they had to put back in almost as much as they took out. If the conqueror was to extract the raw materials, taxes, and manpower he needed from the colony, he had to establish a system of security and law and order over the conquered and help his subjects maintain their economic livelihoods. Most significantly, empire builders from Alexander the Great to Queen Victoria had to learn about their subjects if they were to rule over them with any authority. At the very least they had to be curious about them. In the nineteenth century the British epitomised a colonialism that exploited with responsibility, used force judiciously, and yet learnt about its subject peoples.
In comparison, the first thought of the Bush administration after the Afghan war ended was how to declare victory, get out and move on to Iraq. The administration wanted no responsibility for reconstructing the now-occupied nation of Afghanistan and was unwilling to learn about the people or the country. In their haste to move on, security in Afghanistan was handed over to warlords and drug barons, who were supported lavishly by the CIA and the Pentagon with a one-billion-dollar budget, because Washington wanted to focus on the upcoming war in Iraq.
Historically, when the United States has intervened in the third world – largely in Latin America and Southeast Asia – it has never been much concerned with nation building or rebuilding shattered societies. Regime change during the cold war was all about replacing one pro-American corrupt dictator with another, while societies trundled on in their misery. As I’ve said, some observers hoped that after regime change in Afghanistan, the Americans would do more simply because the US homeland had suffered such terrible consequences. The neocons, obsessed with the mechanics of regime change and instant gratification, never linked successful regime change with nation building. As a direct result, Afghanistan and Iraq both witnessed renewed insurgencies after the quick victories by US forces precisely because of the failure first to plan and then to pursue nation-building policies the moment the war was won. A military doctrine of “shock and awe” could not substitute for boots on the ground and an inclusive strategy that would win hearts and minds.
Moreover, Pakistan, the base area, recruiting ground and logistics centre for both al Qa’eda and the Taliban, needed major help in both state and nation building if it was to overcome past legacies. By state building, I mean the opportunity for countries to rebuild their infrastructure such as the army, police, civil service and judiciary, which would provide security and services to its citizens. However, state building is prolonged, expensive and requires a long-term commitment from international donors as well as a democratic culture prevailing at home – something the Pakistan army was to deny its citizens. Defined in the broadest possible way, nation building involves aid and support to civil society to rebuild the shattered economy, provide livelihoods, create social and political structures and introduce democracy. The process of democratisation is about not just holding elections but creating institutions and a culture of tolerance and shared responsibility among rulers and citizens alike.
Everywhere I went after September 11, I urged governments and experts to devote resources for nation building in Afghanistan so that the country could emerge as a bastion of development and democracy to counter the growing trends of extremism and state repression in the Islamic world. The United States and the West had the opportunity to show Muslims and the world that they may be bombing a country to free it from Taliban tyranny, but they also had the willingness and patience to help rebuild it. I strongly countered the myths being circulated in the Western media at the time that the Afghans would oppose the presence of Western troops. Instead, after being battered by twenty-five years of war, most Afghans saw the presence of Western forces as a way forward to stability and development.
Most experts reckoned that Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas, needed about US$4 to 5 billion every year for the next ten years to put it on its feet – a small amount in geopolitical donor terms and a pittance compared to what was later spent in Iraq. Such an act of sustained commitment by the international community would also help undermine support for extremism in the neighbouring states and encourage them to pursue reforms.
In the early months of 2002, no outsider, least of all myself, had any idea that Iraq rather than Afghanistan was the real focus of the Bush administration’s attention and that the “war on terrorism” would be fought in Baghdad rather than Kabul or Islamabad. The reluctance of the Pentagon to commit more American troops to Afghanistan should have alerted us that either the US military was very stupid or it had preoccupations other than Afghanistan. Yet at the time few people I spoke to, including US officials, could believe that the neocons would willfully give up tracking down al Qa’eda leaders and would move on to Iraq. We now know that the chase was given up in March 2002 – just three months after the fall of Kandahar – when the Arabic- and Persian-speaking US SOF teams were moved out of Afghanistan to train for Iraq and surveillance satellites were pulled from the skies over Afghanistan and redirected to Iraq.
The American failure to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq or to move Pakistan and Central Asia toward reform and democracy made it almost impossible for Muslim moderates to support the West’s struggle against Islamic extremism or to bring about change in their own countries. The US campaign to eliminate al Qa’eda had turned into a much larger American intervention across the Islamic world that had nothing to do with al Qa’eda and that Muslims could not support or tolerate. The treatment of prisoners by the US military at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were symptoms of an ever-expanding war that alienated the entire globe. By 2007 a decisive shift had taken place in key countries such as Pakistan, where hatred for Musharraf and the Americans took precedence over hatred for al Qa’eda, even as Pakistanis died in large numbers from al Qa’eda–sponsored suicide bombings. This made fighting the extremists much more difficult.
As the Bush era nears its end in 2008, American power lies shattered. The US Army is overstretched and broken, the American people are disillusioned and rudderless, US credibility lies in ruins, and the world is a far more dangerous place. The Iraq war has bankrupted the United States, consuming up to US$11 billion a month. Ultimately the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9 /11. There are now full-blown Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the next locus could be Uzbekistan. The safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is uppermost in the minds of Western governments. There are more failing states in the Muslim world, while al Qa’eda has expanded around the world.
The American people have understood the tragedy associated with Bush’s imperial overreach, and as the 2008 US elections will doubtless show, they are no longer as naive, ignorant or scared as they were after 9 /11. However, it has taken the American people time to learn such lessons, and in the meantime American power has been squandered, and hatred for Americans has become a global phenomenon. Bush’s historical legacy will be one of failure. Bush promised a great transformation in 2001, and he has certainly transformed the world, but not in the way that anyone us could have ever imagined.
But the peoples and regimes of this region have to understand that unless they themselves move their nations toward greater democracy, the chaos that presently surrounds them will, in time, overwhelm them. Pakistan has shown a new beginning in 2008, and Afghanistan still has the potential to do so. If we can better understand what has happened before, what has gone wrong and what needs to go right, then we can better face up to our collective future.
Ahmed Rashid’s books include Jihad (2002) and the worldwide bestseller Taliban (2000). He writes regularly for The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post, and the International Herald Tribune.
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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