Stop killing the Taliban – they offer the best hope of beating Al-Qaeda
- From: PakistanPal <pakistanpal@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:23:01 -0700 (PDT)
Simon Jenkins
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article4187504.ece
The British expedition to Afghanistan is on the brink of something
worse than defeat: a long, low-intensity war from which no government
will dare to extricate itself. With the death toll mounting, battle is
reportedly joined with the Taliban at the very gates of the second
city, Kandahar. There is no justification for ministerial bombast that
“we are winning the war, really”.
What is to be done? In 2001 the West waged a punitive retaliatory
strike against the hosts of the perpetrators of 9/11. The strike has
since followed every law of mission creep, now reduced in London to a
great war of despair, in which the cabinet can do nothing but send
even more men to their deaths.
In seven years in Afghanistan, America, Britain and their Nato allies
have made every mistake in the intervention book. They sent too few
troops to assert an emphatic presence. They failed to “hit hard and
get out”, as advocated by Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence
secretary. They tried to destroy the staple crop, poppies, and then
let it go to warlords who now use it to finance suicide bombers, among
others.
They allowed a corrupt regime to establish itself in the capital,
Kabul, while failing to promote honest administration in the
provinces.
They pretended that an international coalition (Nato) would be better
than a unitary command (America), which it is not. They killed
civilians and alienated tribes with crude air power. Finally, they
disobeyed the iron law of postimperial intervention: don’t stay too
long. The British ambassador threatens “to stay for 30 years”,
rallying every nationalist to the insurgents’ cause.
The catalogue of western folly in Afghanistan is breathtaking.
Britain went into Helmand two years ago on the basis of gung-ho, and
gung-ho still censors public debate. Yet behind the scenes all is
despair. A meeting of Afghan observers in London last week, at the
launch of James Fergusson’s book on the errors of Helmand, A Million
Bullets, was an echo chamber of gloom.
All hope was buried in a cascade of hypotheticals. Victory would be at
hand “if only” the Afghan army were better, if the poppy crop were
suppressed, the Pakistan border sealed, the Taliban leadership
assassinated, corruption eradicated, hearts and minds won over. None
of this is going to happen. The generals know it but the politicians
dare not admit it.
Those who still support the “good” Afghan war reply to any criticism
by attempting to foreclose debate. They assert that we cannot be seen
to surrender to the Taliban and we have gone in so far and must
“finish the job”.
This is policy in denial. Nothing will improve without the support of
the Afghan government, yet that support is waning by the month.
Nothing will improve without the commitment of Pakistan. Yet two weeks
ago Nato bombed Pakistani troops inside their own country, losing what
lingering sympathy there is for America in an enraged Islamabad.
Whoever ordered the attack ought to be court-martialled, except it was
probably a computer.
We forget that the objective of the Afghanistan incursion was not to
build a new and democratic Afghanistan. It was to punish the Taliban
for harbouring Osama Bin Laden and to prevent Afghanistan from
becoming a haven for Al-Qaeda training camps. The former objective was
achieved on day one; the latter would never be achieved by military
occupation.
A moment’s thought would show that any invasion that replaced the
Taliban with a western puppet in Kabul would merely restore the
Taliban as champions of Afghan sovereignty. The Americans sponsored
them to be just such a puppet in the 1980s, funding some 60,000
foreign mercenaries to join them against the Russians. Intervention
reaps what it sows.
Two things were known about the Taliban at the time and they are
probably still true. First, under outside pressure their leaders were
moving from the manic extremism of their “student” origins, even
responding to demands to curb the poppy harvest. The present Nato
policy of killing the older leaders and thus leaving young hotheads in
charge is daft.
Second, the Pashtun Taliban are not natural friends of the Arab Al-
Qaeda, despite Bin Laden being given sanctuary by the Taliban’s Mullah
Omar. Bin Laden helped the Taliban by murdering Ahmed Shah Massoud,
the Tajik leader, but that put a Tajik price on his head, which no man
wants. Then the 9/11 coup made the Taliban pariahs even within the
region.
I have yet to find reason to doubt the Afghan experts who predicted in
the aftermath of 9/11 that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had become
“unwelcome guests” in 2001 and that his days in Afghanistan, and
probably on earth, were numbered.
Seven recent books on relations between Al-Qaeda and the Taliban
discussed in the current edition of The New York Review of Books
scream one policy message: do not drive Al-Qaeda, set on crazy world
domination, into the arms of the Taliban, set only on Pashtun
nationalism. Do everything to separate them. Western strategy has done
the precise opposite.
The only policy that meets the original objective is one that supports
anyone in the insurgent areas with sufficient authority to deny
sanctuary to international terrorists. There is now plainly no way
that Nato can do this.
There is much murmuring among realists that “we” should talk to the
Taliban, as if we were Her Majesty’s Government dealing with the IRA.
The parallel is absurd. American special forces and Anglo-Canadian
units in Afghanistan are, as they jokingly admit, rather like Taliban
mercenaries, who snatch and hold towns for a while but are unable to
command local loyalty. They cannot hope to garrison every settlement.
Hamid Karzai, the outgoing Afghan president, is the only one who can
talk. He is no fool and has been attempting to do what Kabul rulers
have always done: cut deals with whichever provincial commanders
appear to control territory and can forge alliances with local Taliban
or whoever. That may not be the grand strategy beloved of western
think tanks, but it is the realpolitik of Afghanistan.
The same realpolitik applies to the other player in the game,
Pakistan, whose civilian rulers are trying to contain an army of
doubtful loyalty and seek peace in tribal areas way beyond their
control. Here Al-Qaeda has again forged a lethal alliance with the
Taliban, drawing on an inexhaustible supply of young militants from
Pakistan and abroad, as in the 1980s. The best policy would be to hurl
money at Pakistan’s impoverished non-madrasah schools, rather than
starve them and pour 80% of aid into a corrupt Pakistan army.
The Taliban’s chief objective is not world domination but a share of
power in Afghanistan. While they cannot defeat western troops, they
can defeat Nato’s war aim by continuing to build on their marriage of
convenience with Al-Qaeda, which supplies them with a devastating
arsenal of suicide bombers.
What is sure is that Al-Qaeda, as a (grossly overrated) “threat to the
West”, will not be suppressed without Taliban cooperation. This means
reversing a policy that naively equates “defeating” the Taliban with
“winning” the war on terror. Fighting in Afghanistan is as senseless
as trying to suppress the poppy crop. It just costs lives and money.
While it is implausible for the West to withdraw from Kabul at
present, the attempt to establish military control over provincial
Afghanistan is merely jeopardising the war aim. Security within the
country now depends on fashioning the patchwork of alliances sought,
however corruptly, by Karzai. It means dealing with reality, not
trying to change it with guns and bombs.
It therefore makes sense to withdraw soldiers from the provinces and
forget “nation-building” in the hope that Karzai can exert some
leverage over local commanders to separate the Taliban from the Al-
Qaeda cells in Pakistan. This is a race against the most appalling
strategic catastrophe, a political collapse in Pakistan that may open
a new and horrific front involving Al-Qaeda.
It is madness to prolong an Afghan war that can only undermine the
most unstable nuclear power in the world, Pakistan. The war is
visiting misery on millions and destroying western interests across
central Asia. As for the claim made in parliament last week that the
war is about safety on Britain’s streets, that is ludicrous.
source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_jenkins/article4187504.ece
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