Af-Pak: The stakes & options Afghanistan

[What follows is an extract from a 10,000 word paper on Prospects for Conflict Resolutions in South Asia presented by Dr Dayan Jayatilleka at the 5th International Conference on South Asia organized by the Institute for South Asian Studies (ISAS) of the National University of Singapore. Paper presenters included Sartaj Aziz former Finance Minister and Foreign Minister of Pakistan, Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, former Foreign Minister of Bangladesh, and Mani Shanker Iyer former Minister of Rural Local Self-Government of India.]

By Dayan Jayatilleka

(November 16, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) From a global point of view there can be little doubt the Afghanistan-Pakistan-India triangle is the most decisive in South Asia, for the obvious reason that two of these three states are nuclear armed. It is true that the Indo-Pak relationship has been relatively stable and that this stability has been mightily assisted by diplomacy of the United States during moments of tension such as the Kargil crisis.

This diplomatic adhesive has been strengthened by the new style and approach of President Barack Obama. It is no less true that the Indo-Pakistani nuclear equation has not achieved the degree of depth and stability that the US-USSR relationship had acquired during the Cold war, and one may envisage a scenario in which more ideologically charged governments come into office in both Pakistan and India, perhaps in reaction to one another, and set off an escalation of tensions which bring the two states to the brink. However, since this is not an imminent prospect I shall not dwell on it and prefer to move onto the more strikingly sensitive current theatre, the so-called Af-Pak area.

As an entry point let me use an old question which has assumed the status of a cliché: is Afghanistan, which was Russia’s Vietnam, going to be America’s second Vietnam? Is the USA going to suffer the same fate as Russia in Afghanistan?

At one level the answer is clearly no. The USSR was already suffering serious internal stagnation and decay, and while the USA is in grave economic difficulty, there is no evidence of any weakness which can result in systemic implosion. When the USSR entered Afghanistan it had long lost its ideological vitality while the USA under President Obama has clearly regained its own. The USA was able to create a quagmire for the USSR by securing the support of a wide coalition of disparate forces, ranging from China to Saudi Arabia, and most importantly, Pakistan. It provided the Afghan insurgents the means – Stinger missiles--to neutralize Soviet airpower. By contrast, the only coalition that exists today, however skimpy, is one supportive of the USA. There is no state, neighboring or further afield, that supports the insurgency. Even a regime with which the USA has serious contradictions, Iran, does not seek to undermine US policy in Afghanistan.

Perhaps most importantly there are the twin factors of the nature of the insurgent leadership itself and the period of history in which the struggle takes place. The Vietnamese were led by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist party, a tough minded and brilliant leadership capable of the most sophisticated understanding of the world and possessed of a mastery of strategy and tactics ranging from small unit and large scale battles to the negotiations in Paris. The Taliban simply is not in the same class. At its most starkly personal, Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan were more than a match for Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon while Mullah Omar and Osama Bin Laden is hardly the intellectual equal still less superior, of Barack Obama. While North Vietnam was itself a state which functioned as a rear base for the Southern guerrillas and later, conventional units operating in the South, the Vietnamese Communists were able to count on the support of either the USSR or the PRC, using their rivalry to secure support from both or at least one. The Taliban has no state which constitutes a rear base. The Vietnamese fought their war when Communism or socialism was a truly global contender, while the Taliban’s brand of radical Islam is not a truly global contender in that this ideology is culturally circumscribed and is not universalist in its appeal. By contrast the Vietnamese had tens of thousands of youngsters in the West, educated at the best of western universities, chanting slogans in favor of the Viet Cong and waving portraits of Uncle Ho, while it is unthinkable that Osama Bin laden or Mullah Omar would have such a resonance within western societies.

Still there are disturbing possibilities that the experience of the USA in Afghanistan could resemble its experience in Vietnam. On the ground, the war is not being won. The US economy may be unable to risk an escalation of American commitment in terms of far more troops for a far longer period. US public opinion may well flag. If so, the Taliban which is unable to beat the US on the battlefield and score anything like a Dien Bien Phu or even a Tet offensive, may be able to secure the same result as in Vietnam: a US withdrawal through sheer fatigue. If so the consequences are incalculable. Perhaps as in the case of Vietnam the dominoes will not fall and the fallout will be absorbable. Or perhaps the opposite will be at least partially true and Islamic radicals, whatever their sectarian differences, will feel emboldened by their victory considering it evidence of the weakening of the moral fiber of liberal democracies and the decline of the sole superpower the USA, signaling God-given sanction for endless jihad. This may in turn undermine the political fortunes of liberalism in the West, especially in the USA and aid the recovery of the Right, with all the polarizing consequences this holds for world politics. Whichever way it goes, failure in Afghanistan may impact upon the future of the Obama presidency. If so it may have a knock on effect on US relations with the rest of the world, which have improved dramatically under the Obama presidency. Yet, how is one to define failure? Is it withdrawal or a continued stay in a quagmire? More importantly how will the US electorate, or the majority of it, define failure?

How will victory and defeat each impact on Pakistan and Indian Kashmir? The surge of force levels, drone strikes and casualties inflicted on the Taliban in the event of victory could either stabilize or radicalize areas and social sectors of Pakistan. Conversely, an American military failure in Afghanistan could have the impact of further motivating and emboldening militancy in that state, and in Indian Kashmir, heightening threat perceptions in India.

What then are the prospects of conflict resolution? President Obama has so far seen the Afghan war, in contradistinction to the one in Iraq, as a necessary war, in an echo of Machiavelli’s dictum that the only just war is a necessary war. It would perhaps be prudent on his part to avoid the main mistake of Donald Rumsfeld which was the under commitment of troops, and to observe the fundaments of the Powell doctrine of deploying sufficiently large force levels if a particular war is deemed a necessary one.

Militarily the situation necessitates a pincer action from the Afghan and Pakistani fronts, with a degree of coordination that has yet to be witnessed, the political consequences if not managed, could be counter-productive. While the recent military offensive by the Pakistani army in the Swat valley has been a relative success with little visible political blowback, and the handling of the internally displaced has been vastly better than that in Sri Lanka, public opinion polls reveal that at the level of the Pakistani people, a broad consensus must be constructed. How to involve and yet insulate Pakistan is the dilemma. The stabilization of the Pakistani factor requires drawing in the two major Pakistani political formations led by the two pre-eminent figures, President Zardari and Nawaz Sharif. Given the zero-sum nature of politics in South Asia (outside, arguably of India), this seems as impossible as it is imperative. Perhaps it is the Obama administration that can play a productive role here, but US involvement may make the process radioactive on the Pakistani street.

This makes it impossible for me to resist the temptation to make two suggestions, one out-of-the-box, and the other, possibly heretical, as how the situation in Afghanistan may be stabilized and possibly turned around.

The first is that the Obama administration should take a second look at and seek to bolster SAARC (the South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation) as a rearguard and counterweight to the spread of extremism, and a regional body which, in augmented form, may be able to play a stabilizing role in Afghanistan. An active US role may be able to better manage and balance off the structural asymmetries of SAARC which have had a dysfunctional, even debilitating effect.

The second suggested step, the heretical one, derives from my perception of the essential problem which seems to me to be the thinness of the human resource base of the state. The state lacks qualified cadre. The irony is that there are pools of potential cadre who are educated and professionally trained, share the same ideals of the education of women and broad social modernization as the US administration, and, more dramatically, have a proven resistance to the siren song of radical Islamic militancy. These are the scattered, exiled cadre of the PDPA, the party of the Afghan revolution of 1978, with its notorious fratricidal factions the Khalq and the Parcham, whose internecine strife probably cost them state power. These cadres are scattered in parts of the former Soviet space, in India and even Pakistan. They are in no shape to attempt any political adventures, now that the Cold War is over, global socialism has collapsed, the USSR is no more, History has moved on and their very existence would depend on US power. They are far more likely to be Obama fans than anything else! I am not arguing for their re-instatement in power but for their reincorporation and re-integration into the Afghan state and society in what Enrico Berlinguer the father of Euro-communism used to call a “compromesso storico”, a “historic compromise”. With many, even less savory precedents in the post World War II period, this strategy is a low risk, (potentially) high yield one, which can “thicken” the state with trained, educated, middle class professionals, expanding the core of an anti-Taliban modernizing coalition.

This is but a domestic corollary– may I say, the missing domestic corollary - and concomitant of President Obama’s regionalized approach to the Afghan crisis and his attempt at broadening the international alliance supporting the anti-Al Qaeda/Taliban effort.

While I am not unmindful of the possible blowback, I would still maintain that if carefully handled, the move I suggest here can be a “game-changer” in a positive sense.

Undergirding my suggestion is the hypothesis that in the longer view of history, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan may be seen not only as an ideological or strategic move, defensive, pre-emptive, or offensive, by the USSR in a Cold War context, but as a battle by a form of modernity against a resurgence of the pre-modern or archaic. In that sense the Soviet and US efforts can be seen as part of a (civilisational?) continuum. Of course this presupposes that the Cold war itself is understood at least in part, as a fratricidal civil war within modernity; between two alternative projects, one of which won.

Let me conclude this section of my paper by signaling alarm about an “outlier”, a factor which can upset many equations. I refer to a possible Israeli attack on Iran. I believe that it is unlikely that there will be a US strike, but I also fear that Israel will launch an attack, not least with the hope of upsetting the political equation in the USA and limiting President Obama to a single term. The new Israeli administration may calculate that an attack on Iran and a retaliatory Iranian strike could create a situation in which President Obama can be pressurized to act for fear of being outflanked by the Republican Right. If this takes place, there will be ripple effects throughout the Islamic world, irrespective of which sect or tendency of Islam each society preponderantly belongs to. The USA will also find a practical problem of overstretch which will affect its ability to function in Afghanistan. This in turn may be the Black Swan event that provides the Taliban and Al Qaeda with their moment. Thus all bets are off, in the event of an attack on Iran. Will the first Black President of the United States be undone by a Black Swan event?

-Sri Lanka Guardian