Afghanistan – behind enemy lines

By: James Fergusson

The sound of a propeller engine is audible the moment my fixer and I climb out of the car, causing us new arrivals from Kabul to glance sharply upwards. I have never heard a military drone in action before, and it is entirely invisible in the cold night sky, yet there is no doubt what it is. My first visit to the Taliban since 2007 has only just begun and I am already regretting it. What if the drone is the Hellfire-missile-carrying kind?

Three years ago, the Taliban’s control over this district, Chak, and the 112,000 Pashtun farmers who live here, was restricted to the hours of darkness – although the local commander, Abdullah, vowed to me that he would soon be in full control. As I am quickly to discover, this was no idle boast. In Chak, the Karzai government has in effect given up and handed over to the Taliban. Abdullah, still in charge, even collects taxes. His men issue receipts using stolen government stationery that is headed “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan”; with commendable parsimony they simply cross out the word “Republic” and insert “Emirate”, the emir in question being the Taliban’s spiritual leader, Mullah Omar.

The most astonishing thing about this rebel district – and for Nato leaders meeting in Lisbon this week, a deeply troubling one – is that Chak is not in war-torn Helmand or Kandahar but in Wardak province, a scant 40 miles south-west of Kabul. Nato commanders have repeatedly claimed that the Taliban are on the back foot following this year’s US troop surge. Mid-level insurgency commanders, they say, have been removed from the battlefield in “industrial” quantities since the 2010 campaign began. And yet Abdullah, operating within Katyusha rocket range of the capital – and with a $500,000 bounty on his head – has managed to evade coalition forces for almost four years. If Chak is in any way typical of developments in other rural districts – and Afghanistan has hundreds of isolated valley communities just like this one – then Nato’s military strategy could be in serious difficulty.

Again, what Punjabi Taliban?

By Ahmed Quraishi

The term Punjabi Taliban was not first coined by anyone in Pakistan, including the so-called Punjabi Taliban themselves. It was coined in the United States by self-styled terrorism experts.

Analyzing Pakistan in ethnic terms is a distinctly Indian practice that flourished after 1971. It moved to the United States during the China- and Pakistan-specific US-India strategic alliance of the 1990s. It found wide currency in American policymaking circles after 9/11 as US officials and media became increasingly hostile to Pakistan and receptive to anti-Pakistan ideas, including the fantastic idea of dividing Pakistan into three states, a la Iraq. It is interesting to note how the US media and think tanks followed the same Indian areas of interest in the last three years: from the initial talk about Pashtunistan to the extensive attention to the idea of an independent Balochistan and now Punjab.

Pakistani Taliban ready for Osama’s plan

By Syed Saleem Shahzad

ISLAMABAD - After a successful series of meetings in Washington last week, the United States and Pakistan have deepened their strategic relationship aimed at broad-based military cooperation for an American victory in Afghanistan. A dialogue process has also been set up with a handpicked team of the Hezb-e-Islami Afghanistan (HIA), the second-largest force in the Pashtun-dominated south of Afghanistan after the Taliban.

United States President Barack Obama flew to Afghanistan at the weekend in a surprise visit to impress on President Hamid Karzai that effective political policy is needed to reinforce the military campaign against the Taliban-led insurgency this summer.

What the capture of Mullah Baradar says about Pakistan’s intentions

By Dan Twining

The capture of Taliban commander Mullah Baradar in a combined Pakistani-American intelligence operation in Karachi is a major development in the war on terror. This is true not only, and obviously, with reference to the military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Perhaps more profoundly, it is also true with reference to the future of U.S.-Pakistan relations. It could be a critical step forward in a long-troubled partnership, one fueled by converging perceptions of the threat of Islamic extremism. But, if part of a deal to grant Pakistan a free hand in Afghanistan once American forces withdraw in return for greater near-term cooperation to support the West’s rush to exit the region, it could presage a troubling step backward.

The CIA worked closely with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) in combined intelligence operations targeting Al Qaeda after September 11, 2001 — following a famous U.S. ultimatum to Pakistan to assist in the Taliban’s defeat in Afghanistan or share its fate, and reinforced by al Qaeda’s repeated assassination attempts against General Pervez Musharraf, the country’s military ruler at the time. But ISI has continued to enjoy intimate relations with the Afghan Taliban, which it helped create and bring to power in 1996. More recently, Pakistani intelligence officers have helped Afghan Taliban commanders outwit their American adversaries, even as ISI benefited from American material support. Indeed, Mullah Baradar was previously captured by Afghan forces in November 2001 — then released after ISI intervention, according to the New York Times.

What has changed the Pakistani military leadership’s calculus to the point that ISI has now helped capture the Afghan Taliban’s No. 2 leader? The optimist’s answer is, in a word, the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan sponsored the Taliban when it was a vehicle for Pakistani influence in Afghanistan’s Pashtun heartland. But the spillover from the Taliban’s resurgence next door helped create a monster in the form of the Pakistani Taliban, whose suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks increasingly have targeted the institutions of the Pakistani state and its supreme defender: the Pakistani armed forces.

In this reading, the encouragement provided to the Pakistani Taliban by the successes of the Afghan Taliban has changed Pakistani military leaders’ calculations about the strategic advantage they gain from their Afghan alliance. The Taliban’s resurgence in Afghanistan has emboldened a Pakistani Taliban that wants to weaken and overthrow the Pakistani state and the privileged position of the Pakistani armed forces within it. This logic, and intensified American pressure on Pakistan’s military high command, has led it to cooperate with the Americans against the Afghan Taliban leadership in a hitherto unprecedented way.

Nothing is ever as it seems on the surface in Pakistan, however. This leads to a darker interpretation of the joint operation to capture Mullah Baradar and its implications for Pakistani-American cooperation in Afghanistan going forward. President Obama’s plan for premature troop withdrawals from Afghanistan starting next summer may make it impossible for American, Afghan, and NATO forces in the near term to weaken the Taliban sufficiently to stabilize Afghanistan. President Karzai himself has said Afghan forces will not be able to secure the country for 10-15 years without foreign military and financial support.

What if Washington has cut a quiet deal with Pakistan’s military high command, granting them a disproportionate role in determining Afghanistan’s future in return for help facilitating the withdrawal of Western forces? In return for Pakistani cooperation over the next 18 months — including Pakistani military offensives against violent extremists in its tribal regions, joint intelligence operations like the one that netted Mullah Baradar, delivering elements of the Afghan Taliban for serious talks on reconciliation with the Afghan government, and continued Western use of Pakistani territory to supply Western forces fighting in Afghanistan — one could imagine a private U.S. understanding with Pakistani armed forces commander General Kayani that, once Western forces withdraw from Afghanistan, Pakistan can enjoy a free hand to resume its special relationship with the country’s post-Karzai leadership in its continued quest for strategic depth against India.

Or there could be no nefarious deal between Washington and Rawalpindi, home to Pakistan’s military-intelligence complex. Perhaps this was a unilateral CIA operation labeled a “joint intelligence operation” to protect Pakistani sensitivities over its sovereignty, an explanation consistent with President Obama’s aggressive use of CIA drone strikes against Pakistani extremists. Or maybe Rawalpindi wanted to either encourage or scupper reconciliation talks between the Afghan Taliban and the Karzai government with an eye on Pakistan’s ultimate interests in post-American Afghanistan, and thereby sacrificed Mullah Baradar to one or the other cause. Indian analysts Nitin Pai and Dhruva Jaishankar creatively flesh out these and other possibilities here.

Whatever the explanation, let us hope that Pakistan’s important capture of the Taliban’s operational commander genuinely reflects a change of heart vis-à-vis the Afghan Taliban — rather than the latest twist in the ISI’s fabled history of playing both sides in regional conflicts, all the while prospering from American largesse.

Is Peace with the Taliban Possible?

Muhammed Nawaz Khan

Going by what transpired in the London Moot of January 28, 2010, the Afghan premiership and its western allies have commonly fathomed that negotiated settlement with the fanatically purist Talibs is indeed the cooperative path out of the morass after nine years of often directionless drift. Centrality of the message is that a concerted act may wave over Afghanistan, making the insurgents to wither away with pledges reintegrating them back in the social and political fabrics by offering security, vocational training, jobs and amnesty for past crimes. Among the high profile Talib cock-ups, the US, however, is in favour of engaging mid- and low-level militants, 70 percent of whom are believed to fight for money and reasons other than ideological and may lay down arms if given a viable alternative. Fragmenting the Taliban on good and bad standards, the good probably refers to a newer generation that might be more willing to cut deals with foreign forces than the older generation, which partnered with the likes of Osama bin Laden. It is being believed that the disenchanted folks can be accommodated in the political mainstream if they renounce violence and sever links with Al Qaeda. Then there is the perennial talk of wooing moderate Taliban over to the government’s side. However, the hurdles lie ahead must be brought to light: How to identify the modes of reconciling the Pastun dissidents? Will the new Strategy work? Did the London summit on Afghanistan signal a bold new approach or offer a blueprint for the US-led coalition’s exit strategy? It is also no secret that the west wants out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible. The success is thus oscillatory and it is yet to be seen whether the US-led west could win by this process of discriminatory chicaneries, subtly fomenting discord among Pashtun Taliban in order to achieve the good objective.

It is clear that neither the Taliban nor ISAF are currently in a position to win the war in Afghanistan. What is more significant though is that the militants enjoy the upper hand right now, not the Afghan government and its international allies. Obviously, the maxima has been factored out by realizations on part of both the US-led NATO forces and the combatants, leading the former cartographers to understand that success in untangling the Afghan knot is impossible at the crossroads, likewise the latter stewardship does not feel winning the global battleground that had already witnessed motleys of the Great Game played there in different eras. In this dual-tracked compromising path way, the west is relying solely on the past imperialistic game of dissecting the Pashtun Taliban by providing incentives package of politico-socio engineering and financial backing to war weary leaders and foot soldiers, assuming that concessionary modus-vivendi could win over the brawling ideological concord. Antithetically, the Taliban is waiting out for the cut and run channel, previously exercised by the mighty US in Vietnam. With the west’s possible admission that the best it can get in Afghanistan is a stalemate followed by the foreign forces’ withdrawal, coercive violence may reappear at some later stage where the defected Afghan segments may join hands with the war-lords. If that happens, Afghanistan and the region as a whole could be back to square one. Washington formula is calculating on the possibility of talks with the battle fatigued sections of Taliban coupled by a surge in allied forces’ offensive against those unwilling to come to the negotiation table. But the question arises: can the Taliban be so shaky in a year’s time that can be dictated to from a position of strength?

The London conference is the sixth in the series of the long-term commitments and pledges to Afghanistan, as previously set out in the 2001 Bonn Agreement, in the 2002 Tokyo Conference, the 2006 Afghanistan Compact, the 2008 Paris Declaration and the 2009 The Hague Conference Declaration. The London communiqu� dangled the prospect of a longed-for peace. Once again the international community re-affirmed its support for the relevant UN Security Council Resolutions upholding the security, stability and prosperity of Afghanistan and in particular the role of the UN itself in achieving this goal. In the meantime, three strategic reviewed has been taken by President Obama. The solely reason behind is that 2009 had highly been a bad time for the US army causalities that increased even than the last year. The Afghan fraudulent election has also challenged the credibility of the UN and Washington. Then the US-European public pressure is also demanding social-civilian engineering rather than troop surge. Last week moot is merely the continuity of previous pledges and hopes.

Two new developments took place in this conference. Firstly, the Karzai’s sponsored reintegration plan and secondly the committed increase in donors’ proportion of development aid to 50 percent to be delivered through the government of Afghanistan in the next two years. But this support is conditional on the government’s progress in further strengthening public financial management systems, reducing corruption, improving budgetary execution, developing a financing strategy and government’s capacity towards the goal.

The London meeting backed the Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s plan to reintegrate Taliban – willing to cut ties with Al-Qaida, to eschew violence and other terrorist groups and pursue their political goals peacefully – and offer an honourable social status in a free and open society that respect the principles enshrined in the Afghan constitution. International allies will pledge at least $500 million for the reconciliation fund � officially known as the Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund, and dubbed as the “Taliban Trust Fund” by some. London confirmed the best, the allies now hope for is an orderly and honourable retreat, scattering alms as they leave.

The strategic community realized that some political element is missing in their Afghan paradigm, therefore they include civilian surge as an important component of the Afghan strategy. US Secretary of state Hillary Clinton had also acknowledged that most modern conflicts didn’t end with a victory on the field of battle and therefore political and development work was essential.

Analyzing the shift in policy towards accommodation, critics predict if political and softer strategy initiatives are subject to the kinetic measures then durable peace in Afghanistan will be a remote dream. The decision makers have wrong perception that they can divide the Taliban through money. This reintegration plan excludes the core combatant leadership in the engagement of political reconciliation. Nothing could be clearer than the fact that there is an ever-widening divide in the perception, interests and understanding of the situation amongst the various stakeholders in Afghanistan. The regional states have their eyes on maximizing benefits as the US reviews cutting its losses and bailing out of Kabul.

Despite the international backing to the Karzai’s sponsored reintegration plan, dichotomy is tangible between Kabul and Washington, where the latter assumes that it is up to the Afghan government to decide which Taliban leaders could be integrated, but final decisions be chalked out in consultation with the US-multilateral architectures. This influential factor can undermine the true sprit of reintegration plan. There are some who believe that an agreement could have been reached only if the US was not in such a hurry to attack in the beginning.

Afghanistan – the “Heart of Asia” and a land-bridge between the South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and the Far East – is in the sate of doldrums since nine years, facing the ‘shock and awe’ approach that envisaged the US-led allies using military power against an essentially primitive enemy to obtain its submission. Now the legitimacy of the Afghan authorities and international community will depend on their ability to establish a truly representative government through full inclusion of all the Afghan stakeholders in the political process for the lasting peace and stability not only in Afghanistan but also in the region. Forming splinter coteries among the Taliban on good and bad lines can only further deepen the prevalent ethnic rifts, thus threatening the national integrity, solidarity and regional peace.

Author is Ex-Police Officer and Research Analyst Islamabad Policy Research Institute. Email: nawazverdag915@hotmail.com

America not in ‘direct contact’ with Taliban: Holbrooke

US diplomat does not deny claims of UN special envoy meeting Taliban, calls it ‘track-two diplomacy’

MUNICH: Washington is not in “direct contact” with the Taliban, as part of its efforts to re-integrate insurgents in Afghanistan, United States special envoy Richard Holbrooke said on Sunday.

“The press, since the London conference in January, has been kind of obsessed with the idea that there are all sorts of secret talks going on with the Taliban. So I want to state very clearly that our nation is not involved in any direct contacts with the Taliban,” Holbrooke said at an international security conference in Germany.

Washington and its allies had agreed in London to support Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s efforts to persuade insurgents not ideologically committed to the Taliban or Al Qaeda to abandon fighting in favour of the prospect of jobs.

“Every Pashtun family in the south either has relatives or friends who are fighting with, or associate with the Taliban. That’s just a matter of fact, that’s just the. The majority of people fighting with the Taliban are not ideologically committed either to Al Qaeda or Taliban chief Mullah Omar and that is what the integration programme is all about… The number one issue is that anyone who wants to reconcile or reintegrate has to sever any ties, any involvement with Al Qaeda. For the majority of the people fighting with the Taliban is an easy decision. But for the leadership it may be difficult,” he said.

UN diplomacy: Reports after the London talks said that the outgoing United Nations Special Representative to Afghanistan Kai Eide had met with the Taliban leaders on January 8 at their request. But the Taliban have vehemently denied these claims.

Holbrooke has called these existing contacts “track-two diplomacy”, saying, “Of course you saw that the UN senior representative said he had contacts. That’s up to him, there have been other contacts, there is lots of track-two diplomacy.” afp

Taliban reject Karzai’s reconciliation offer

KABUL: Afghanistan’s Taliban rejected President Hamid Karzai’s latest attempt to reach out to them as “futile” and “farcical” on Sunday, but said they were open to talks to achieve their goal of an Islamic state. “This is not the first time that the Kabul regime and the invading countries want to throw dust into the eyes of the public of the world by announcing reconciliation in words and, in practice, make preparation for war,” said a statement posted in English on the Afghan Taliban’s website, alemarah.info. Karzai used a conference in London last month to repeat a call for reconciliation with his “disenchanted brothers” in the Taliban. He has since travelled to Saudi Arabia to ask it leaders for help in reaching out to the militants. reuters

Making A Virtue Of Taliban

By B. Raman

The growing Afghan fatigue is clearly discernible among the NATO powers. There is a palpable fear that the NATO forces can’t beat the Afghan Taliban. The question is no longer how to win in Afghanistan. It is how to avoid a defeat and an embarrassing withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The search for a face-saving formula is already on so that the NATO forces can contemplate an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. The objective is no longer a modern dewahabised Afghanistan. It is an Afghanistan, which will not once again become the launching pad of Al Qaeda for its attacks on Western targets.

The various proposals and ideas being aired at the London conference on Afghanistan, which started on January 28, 2010, and in its margins reflect a Western willingness to legitimize sections of the Taliban and give them a role in the governance of Afghanistan provided their return will not mean the return of Al Qaeda and they are prepared to share power with President Hamid Karzai and his associates.

The West is prepared to contemplate co-existing with an Afghanistan half modern-half Talibanised. Mr. George Bush and Mr. Tony Blair projected the “war” in Afghanistan not only as a “war” against the Taliban and Al Qaeda as terrorist organisations, but also against the medieval ideologies they represented. After the London terrorist attack of July, 2005, Mr. Blair stressed the importance of winning the war ideologically too — not merely on the ground.

If the West is now prepared to make a deal with the Afghan Taliban as an organisation or at least with elements in it which are prepared to make peace with the NATO forces, how about its wahabised ideology? Is it prepared to accept the ideology of the Taliban and face the prospect of its coming in the way of the post-9/11 goal of the modernisation of Afghanistan? If the Taliban ideology is OK in Afghanistan if it gives up violence, how can one say that it will not be OK in Pakistan and the rest of the Islamic world?

If the West is prepared to legitimise the Taliban or sections of it in Afghanistan, how can it refuse to legitimise the Pakistani Taliban and give it a role in the administration of the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan? If it is prepared to legitimise its ideology and objectives in the FATA, how can it refuse to do so in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP)? If it is prepared to legitimise the Afghan and the Pakistani Talibans, which are essentially a Pashtun phenomenon, how can it refuse to legitimise the Punjabi Taliban consisting of organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET), the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM), the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ)?

If the West legitimises the Pashtun and the Punjabi Talibans, will it not weaken the moderate elements in Pakistan and give a fresh momentum towards the Islamic radicalisation of the Af-Pak region? The trend towards the Talibanisation of the Pakistani Pashtun belt gathered force when Pervez Musharraf bought peace with the Islamic fundamentalist organisations and helped them to win power in the elections of 2002 and rule the NWFP for five years. The Afghan Taliban staged its spectacular come-back during this period helped by the fundamentalist parties ruling the NWFP and having a share of the power in Balochistan. The trouble in the Swat Valley of the NWFP started during this period.

The 2002-2007 experience in the NWFP showed how short-sighted ideas to buy peace in the short-term produce long-term damages. The US deal with the Afghan Taliban post-1964 in the hope of using it for facilitating the construction of oil and gas pipelines from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Taliban-controlled territory by Unocal, the US oil company, enabled the Taliban to strengthen its position in the Kandahar and Herat areas. The Taliban under Mulla Mohammad Omar captured power in Kabul in September 1996, and became a thorn in the Western flesh. Musharraf bought temporary peace with the Mehsuds of South Waziristan in 2005-06 when his Army faced difficulties in countering them. The peace was short-lived. The result: the emergence of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) after the commando raid in the Lal Masjid of Islamabad after July, 2007.

What the Taliban wants is not re-integration into the Afghan mainstream. It wants its re-conquest of power in Kabul so that it can resume its original mission of setting an Islamic Caliphate in Afghanistan. If the Taliban succeeds in establishing an Islamic Caliphate in Afghanistan, will an Islamic Caliphate in the rest of the Islamic world under the leadership of Al Qaeda be far behind?

There are so many questions which would require detailed analysis before the question of the re-integration of even sections of the Taliban into the Afghan mainstream can be considered. Instead of analyzing these questions and working out a comprehensive strategy, attempts are being made to work out another half-cooked strategy, which will be counter-productive. The two Af-Pak strategies worked out by the advisers of Mr. Barack Obama during his first year in office proved to be non-starters. The bleeding stalemate between the NATO forces and the Afghan Taliban continues. The international community cannot afford another half-cooked strategy, which may end up returning power to the Afghan Taliban on a platter.

Any feasible Afghan strategy should start with the question: how to neutralize the Afghan Taliban’s sanctuaries in the Quetta area of Pakistan? The US is reluctant to act against those sanctuaries. In the absence of action against sanctuaries, it is not able to make headway in its counter-insurgency operations in Afghan territory. Instead of finding some other way of putting an end to those sanctuaries, it has started toying with the idea of winning over sections of the Taliban, who may not be as radicalized as the Taliban leadership. This is not going to work.

Either you have a modern, democratic Government in Kabul or you have a Talibanised one. You cannot have a hybrid— with a mix of the modern and the medieval.

B. Raman is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet Secretariat, Govt. of India, New Delhi, and, presently, Director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai. E-mail: seventyone2@gmail.com

The race against Obama’s deadline in Afghanistan

By David Ignatius
Sunday, December 20, 2009

MATA KHAN, AFGHANISTAN

A Marine talks to youths during an operation in Helmand province in Afghanistan on Friday. (Kevin Frayer/associated Press)

Adm. Mike Mullen, the personification of American military power, is walking the streets of this dusty village in Paktika province when the deferential deputy governor, Qadir Gul Zadran, tells him: “We hope you stay here forever.”

Sorry, responds the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but that’s not going to happen. America is sending more troops to help boost security in places such as this Pashtun village south of Kabul, but they will begin leaving in 18 months. Asked later whether he had any worries about the new Afghanistan strategy, Mullen answers: “It’s just the clock. Can we move as fast as we need to move?”

That ticking clock was Mullen’s consistent companion as he traveled across Afghanistan last week to review implementation of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops. He visited a half-dozen military outposts and at each stop repeated the same message: The new strategy can work, but the challenge is huge and the time is short.

Traveling with Mullen, I had a chance to see up close the opportunities and pitfalls of Obama’s decision for a short-term escalation. The strongest impression was that the administration’s plan to begin transferring responsibility to the Afghan army and police in July 2011 is overly optimistic. If all goes well, the Afghan security forces will be stronger by then, but they will still need a lot of American help.

Let’s start with Obama’s desire to rush in the 30,000 additional troops by next summer. It ain’t likely to happen. Lt. Gen. David Rodriguez, the U.S. deputy commander, cautions that they may not all arrive until November. Mullen says that he’s confident the first 16,000 will arrive by July, but he warned a meeting of logistical planners at Bagram: “I just hope you have a Plan B. Life doesn’t turn out to be perfect.”

The logistical buildup may be the most complicated part of the surge. To transport all those troops means, among other things, tripling the number of beds at a transit base in Kyrgyzstan, adding facilities at three airports in Afghanistan and constructing new quarters around the country that are solid but not too solid.

“We’re not staying forever,” Mullen admonished the logisticians. “Whatever we’re building, I don’t want to build it for 30 years.”

Then there’s the challenge of improving the Afghan security forces. Sometimes it has a make-believe quality: At a base near Gardez, Afghan officers are giving their own PowerPoint presentations and staffing a joint operations center with banks of computers and even a screen to display the camera feeds from U.S. unmanned aerial vehicles.

But the temptation to have the Afghans mimic the American military is a mistake. As Mullen told U.S. soldiers at a base north of Kandahar, the Afghans “need to take care of their security at a level they’re capable of, which is ‘good enough.’ ” And reaching even that middling level will take a while.

Another reality check here is the corruption of the Afghan government. When Mullen held a “shura” with tribal leaders in Kandahar, they all agreed this was the No. 1 problem. “Corruption in Afghan society is like cancer,” said one bearded elder. “It has spread all over the body. It’s that bad. We must bring them to justice.” Mullen promised action, but that’s complicated by the allegations that Kandahar’s most notoriously corrupt figure is the brother of President Hamid Karzai.

“How much time do we have” to regain the trust of people in Kandahar, Mullen asked the elders. One cautioned that the fact that only half of those invited to the shura had come was a sign that “people have lost faith.”

What’s encouraging is that where the United States has added troops this year, security has improved sharply. We saw that most clearly in Nawa in Helmand province, where the Taliban’s hold has been broken by a surge of Marines. The local governor, Abdul Manaf, welcomed Mullen with a toothy smile and a big embrace, gushing: “I wish I could put flowers on your shoulders.”

Mullen was so impressed by the Nawa success story after an exuberant walk through the local market that he told the Marines: “Continue this focus on the Afghan people and I guarantee that this strategy will succeed.”

But I asked the local commander of the Afghan army, Brig. Gen. Muhayadin Ghori, whether he would be ready to take responsibility for security in July 2011, as Obama’s strategists hope. He answered: “We need more time.”

davidignatius@washpost.com

US New Strategy

Bassam Javed

Finally, the much awaited Afghan Strategy was unfurled by President Obama in a speech delivered at the United States Military Academy on 1st December 2009. In the back drop of former President George Bush’s call to arms post 9/11, Obama’s wartime address sounded like an endgame rather than a striking escalation of the US presence in Afghanistan. As expected, a surge in American Forces up to 30000 in the vital interest of the United States was announced by him to augment 68000 troops already deployed in Afghanistan. The speech, a shrewd one though, systematically progressed as the President recalled the factors that led to the present status of war in Afghanistan culminating with the recipes to chart a course for ultimate but honorable exit from Afghanistan. Besides announcing a placement of additional troops the salience of the speech has been the announcements of US intensions to withdraw from Afghanistan in three years time, a sustained ‘light’ presence of US troops’ as a sequel to the withdrawal in line with previous practices in Germany, Japan and Bosnia, reversal of Taliban gains , securing of population centres as they did during the last days of the commencement of withdrawal from Vietnam. The other salience was declared focuses on training Afghans to enable them take over the security affairs, talks with the willing Taliban, putting pressure on Karzai government to deliver and a request to NATO allies for more contributions towards American efforts in Afghanistan. President Obama also talked about Pakistan wherein he categorically mentioned Pakistan’s centrality in his bid to normalize Afghanistan. He went on to say,”….we are committed to a partnership with Pakistan that is built on a foundation of mutual interests, mutual respect and mutual trust…the Pakistani people must know : America will remain a strong supporter ofPakistan’s security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent,….”

The speech by all means was quite notable for he braced Americans for the difficult times ahead and sought to put the fight in the context of the history. The troops decision despite many recommendations for not to induct more troops that included the ones from his Vice President and many Democrats, is surly a courageous one as he embarks on a difficult and costly mission. Most importantly,the President did not give an end date beyond July 2011; the pace of extracting US Forces will depend on developments on the ground at that time. He has been scanty on clues as he left many questions unanswered like how many troops would pull out in July 2011, how many would be left behind and for how long and what is the strategy behind his exit strategy.

On the Afghanistan front, General McChrystal and his boss General David Patreus have commended Obama for giving them what they called a “clear military mission and the resources to accomplish our task”-even though they did not get the requisite number of troops that had been recommended for.

However, putting more troops carry an inherent risk of many more casualties on both sides of the border including those that would be covered in the garb of collateral damage. Same thing had happened in Vietnam. They had put in more troops prior final withdrawal and faced catastrophic consequences. The Taliban have vowed to fight this fresh influx of troops with more vigour and perseverance. Thespeech left Pakistan with many apprehensions as it seeks to discuss the hidden implications of some elements of the speech regarding Pakistan besides the echoes of mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual interests. The US actions in the region as they start following the strategy will sufficiently educate the Pakistanis on the intended mutual interests, trust and mutual respect.

One thing is for certain that with the induction of more troops and their deployment in the Pashtun dominated areas of Qandahar, Helmand etc. the Taliban would enter Pakistan and add to the instability factors of Pakistan ‘s tribal areas and Baluchistan. The induction implies that given a time table of 18 months, there will be strong military actions to achieve the aim in a minimum possible time.The President ‘s willingness to escalate war in Afghanistan has challenged his generals to do more with slightly less than they wanted and that too, much more faster to live up to their justifications . Would the buildup in Afghanistan breathe a new life into flagging eight year old war or is it that Obama has just committed what could be the biggest political blunder of his years in the office that will be unfolded in the near future and decide the fate of elections process in the US that would commence at approximately the same time as thatcommencement of withdrawal.

Why Pakistan is finding it difficult to be at home with the fresh US Strategy? As said earlier, the sensitivities of what has not been said in thespeech openly while deliberating on Pakistan , makes it ponder on the ultimate aim of this strategy. One issue that is very sensitive is the issue of Indian activities in Afghanistan against the stability ofPakistan , for which ample evidence exists and that will be put across in days to come. There are reports of un-declared efforts that are underway in the US to give some role to India in stabilizing theAfghan security. India has put in over a billion US dollars in improving the Afghan communication infrastructure, so the centrality to US Afghan strategy must keep India to that end, if it must. However, the efforts to give some role other than reconstruction and bring it on the same table withPakistan are quite worrisome. The idea of placement of Indian troops in Afghanistan to fill the void when the Western Forces leave Afghanistan and in the lead time slowly place them in the theatre would certainly be a perfect recipe for a regional disaster.

US Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said the other day that Pakistan’s focus on the East with India has to be changed to get the best out of Pakistan. In doing so he just needs to understand the Indian mindset on Pakistan and get the US State Department rolling on making India come to negotiating table with Pakistan. There have been un-necessary interference in Pakistani affairs and the debate in the Indian Parliament on Baluchistan was just bizarre. There have been irresponsible statements emanating from Indian corridors of power like General Deepak Kapoor commented that possibility of war exists withPakistan. Cold strategy they want to put in practice without calculating the forceful and matching reaction from Pakistan. There have been other threatening overtures from Indian Establishment. Obsessed as they are with Pakistan ‘s nuclear programme, the Indian media hyped the Obama’s theory of nuclear material gettable by Taliban and spent the whole day with rejoicing over the issue.

What has rung the alarming bells in Pakistan? There have been too many firsts to his credit as President of the United States with respect to Pakistan. For the very first time he publicly linked Pakistan with Afghanistan as the epicenter of terrorism. He is the first President who mentioned five times “safe heavens” across the border inPakistan. He established a link of Al-Qaeda with Pakistan ‘s nuclear arsenal saying that they are in pursuit of the same. He forgot that at every forum his heavy weights in the Administration and his generals have acknowledged many a times that the nuclear command and control inPakistan is solid and cannot be undone. The putting of idea that some elements may support extremists getting the hand on the nuclear arsenal also does not go along a visionary president that he has been titled often.

In the back drop of Obama’s speech, time has come for Pakistan when it must renegotiate its partnership with the US as the pledge has been made by the United States of forging a new and lasting relationship with Pakistan. The transit trade and share in US textile market are a couple of demands that Pakistan must place with them. On the new strategy, Pakistan needs to very carefully determine limits and red lines while negotiating the finer points in the same that may go against its interests. The need of the hour is to sit together and discuss with Americans what has not been said in theAfghan strategic speech that is yet to unfold. Let us see what the United States offers Pakistan in lasting relationship pledged by the President that will be based on ‘mutual trust, mutual respect and mutual interests.

Little Britain’s Gordon Brown

To make matters even more akin to a black comedy, we have had little Britain’s Gordon Brown suddenly taking the Blair mantle of faithfully echoing what the US says, and accusing Pakistan of being responsible for British and, presumably, NATO/US failures. The United States has managed to send more body bags home and unite disparate Pushtun factions to fight what is increasingly seen as an occupation force. So more US forces moving along the border with Pakistan will lead to more chaos. For Pakistan this is a serious issue as it will send more militants into Pakistan. We have to ensure the new US Afghan policy does not contain anything which could destabilize us further.

By SHIREEN M. MAZARI
WWW.AHMEDQURAISHI.COM

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan-Once again the cacophony of demands from the US and its allies on Pakistan has reached a crescendo.

The US is getting increasingly frustrated at its glaring failure in Afghanistan. Undoubtedly, the shadow of Vietnam must be looming larger over Washington – with demands for more troops from the military command on the ground in Afghanistan accompanied by a growing weariness with the war inside the US itself; and a confusion in the minds of the Obama Administration as to what needs to be done to turn the tide and bring “the boys” home victorious.

The ignominy of Vietnam is still writ large on the US psyche as is that last hasty departure of imperialism from that country – atop the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. As the questions grow within the US about Afghanistan and Obama’s confusion gets mired in a numbers game of how many soldiers to add to a force that cannot possibly win; an easy target for all that has gone wrong for the US in Kabul is Pakistan of course.

Never mind that the US itself blundered by allowing bin Laden to escape from Tora Bora – if that is indeed what happened; never mind that Pakistan has destroyed its own polity with thousands displaced and countless innocent citizens killed before drone attacks, suicide attacks and other forms of terrorism, for this US war; and never mind that the Pakistan Army has moved its forces from the eastern front, despite an increasingly belligerent India, to fight its own people in FATA.

All these are lost before the frustration of a superpower which has failed to study history let alone learn lessons from it.

Probably there is also anger at the far better performance of the Pakistan military in its operations despite deliberate hindrances from NATO and the US forces. Of course, the long-term socio-political fallout of the military operations in FATA have yet to be assessed, and there will be a heavy blowback unless there is visible and fast paced economic and political development put in place, but certainly for the short-term the Pakistan military has shown a better grasp of strategy and fighting ability than the occupation forces in Afghanistan!

So, for all these reasons, plus the nuclear and Islamic identity of Pakistan, we are always the popular whipping boy of the US when it needs to cover its own failures. That is why Obama is issuing threats to Pakistan while holding out carrots that are unattractive when weighed against the costs to be incurred in getting to the dangling carrots!

Now Obama has lumped US failure to get Osama at Pakistan’s door – which is as ridiculous as anything the Bush Administration had claimed. Even more absurd is the threat that US forces will move into action if Pakistan can’t deliver on Al-Qaeda! US forces have been moving all over Afghanistan as well as surreptitiously throughout Pakistan and have only managed to send more body bags home and unite disparate Pushtun factions to fight what is being seen increasingly as an occupation force. So more US forces moving along the border with Pakistan will only result in more chaos. For Pakistan this is a serious issue as it will send more militants into Pakistan, as happened at the time the bunker busters and daisy cutters rained on Tora Bora. Therefore, we have to ensure the new US Afghan policy does not contain anything which could destabilise us further. The time has come to assert our national interests first.

To make matters even more akin to a black comedy, we have had little Britain’s Gordon Brown suddenly taking the Blair mantle of faithfully echoing what the US says, and accusing Pakistan of being responsible for British and, presumably, NATO/US failures to catch the top Al-Qaeda leadership! All sorts of reasoning are being advanced for this allegation. The British have learned nothing from their history of this region nor can they accept their military’s dismal performance here as in Baghdad. Again, as in the US, in Britain also there is a growing disenchantment with the war being waged in Afghanistan especially as 2009 has been the bloodiest yet for British forces. But it makes no sense for the British to lay their failures at Pakistan’s doorstep. Not to be outdone, the EU has also grandly declared that they have to “work more on Pakistan” when they have been loathe to give even out textiles the access they are giving Indian goods into the EU market! Are our leaders really such a soft touch that these powers can be so hypocritical and discriminatory and still expect us to yield to their increasingly unreasonable demands?

In the midst of all these rantings from the failing NATO/US leaderships, our nuclear programme eventually comes centre stage and it is no different now. A leading US newspaper that tends to go by emotions rather than facts – and presumably that is why it declared a senior investigative Pakistani journalist a Taliban and showed no remorse for this grave misstatement – has now declared that Pakistan’s Nuclear Command Authority is the most important factor in Obama’s new Afghan policy! Now why should that be the case, given that nuclear weapons have little to do with the war in Afghanistan – or are we correct to assume that it is Pakistan’s nuclear programme that is the end goal of the US in this region?

Given the growing absurdities of the US and its allies in this region, especially in relation to the unending demands being made on Pakistan, with no reciprocity, it is time for Pakistan to do a major rethink of its whole cooperation with these powers. Renegotiate the cooperation with the US on Afghanistan, including terms for transit access to NATO supplies; demand an immediate end to the Indian presence in Afghanistan alongside the border areas with Pakistan and a clamping down of their covert activities from Afghan soil targeting Pakistan; throw out all the private military contractors, be they DynaCorp or Blackwater or any other; make the US access in Pakistan more transparent; get Parliament to approve all agreements with external powers relating to military and security cooperation. Finally, just as the Indians have begun demanding, we need to also demand recognition of our nuclear weapons status through membership of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as a nuclear weapon power. Some of us have been suggesting this be done through a special annexure to the Treaty, and for which there is a precedence. After laying our country’s very existence on the line for the USA’s misguided War on Terror, the time has come for Pakistan to demand rather than to continue giving in to US interests.

Published in today’s The Nation. Dr. Mazari can be reached at callstr@hotmail.com

What I Saw at the Afghan Election

By Peter W. Galbraith

Before firing me last week from my post as his deputy special representative in Afghanistan, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon conveyed one last instruction: Do not talk to the press. In effect, I was being told to remain a team player after being thrown off the team. Nonetheless, I agreed.

As my differences with my boss, Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, had already been well publicized (through no fault of either of us), I asked only that the statement announcing my dismissal reflect the real reasons. Alain LeRoy, the head of U.N. peacekeeping and my immediate superior in New York, proposed that the United Nations say I was being recalled over a “disagreement as to how the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) would respond to electoral fraud.” Although this was not entirely accurate — the dispute was really about whether the U.N. mission would respond to the massive electoral fraud — I agreed.

Instead, the United Nations announced my recall as occurring “in the best interests of the mission,” and U.N. press officials told reporters on background that my firing was necessitated by a “personality clash” with Eide, a friend of 15 years who had introduced me to my future wife.

I might have tolerated even this last act of dishonesty in a dispute dating back many months if the stakes were not so high. For weeks, Eide had been denying or playing down the fraud in Afghanistan’s recent presidential election, telling me he was concerned that even discussing the fraud might inflame tensions in the country. But in my view, the fraud was a fact that the United Nations had to acknowledge or risk losing its credibility with the many Afghans who did not support President Hamid Karzai.

I also felt loyal to my U.N. colleagues who worked in a dangerous environment to help Afghans hold honest elections — at least five of whom have now told me they are leaving jobs they love in disgust over the events leading to my firing.

Afghanistan’s presidential election, held Aug. 20, should have been a milestone in the country’s transition from 30 years of war to stability and democracy. Instead, it was just the opposite. As many as 30 percent of Karzai’s votes were fraudulent, and lesser fraud was committed on behalf of other candidates. In several provinces, including Kandahar, four to 10 times as many votes were recorded as voters actually cast. The fraud has handed the Taliban its greatest strategic victory in eight years of fighting the United States and its Afghan partners.

The election was a foreseeable train wreck. Unlike the United Nations-run elections in 2004, this balloting was managed by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission (IEC). Despite its name, the commission is subservient to Karzai, who appointed its seven members. Even so, the international role was extensive. The United States and other Western nations paid the more than $300 million to hold the vote, and U.N. technical staff took the lead in organizing much of the process, including printing ballot papers, distributing election materials and designing safeguards against fraud.

Part of my job was to supervise all this U.N. support. In July, I learned that at least 1,500 polling centers (out of 7,000) were to be located in places so insecure that no one from the IEC, the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police had ever visited them. Clearly, these polling centers would not open on Election Day. At a minimum, their existence on the books would create large-scale confusion, but I was more concerned about the risk of fraud.

Local commission staff members were hardly experienced election professionals; in many instances they were simply agents of the local power brokers, usually aligned with Karzai. If no independent observers or candidate representatives, let alone voters, could even visit the listed location of a polling center, these IEC staffers could easily stuff ballot boxes without ever taking them to the assigned location. Or they could simply report results without any votes being in the ballot boxes.

Along with ambassadors from the United States and key allies, I met with the Afghan ministers of defense and the interior as well as the commission’s chief election officer. We urged them either to produce a credible plan to secure these polling centers (which the head of the Afghan army had told me was impossible) or to close them down. Not surprisingly, the ministers — who served a president benefiting from the fraud — complained that I had even raised the matter. Eide ordered me not to discuss the ghost polling centers any further. On Election Day, these sites produced hundreds of thousands of phony Karzai votes.

At other critical stages in the election process, I was similarly ordered not to pursue the issue of fraud. The U.N. mission set up a 24-hour election center during the voting and in the early stages of the counting. My staff collected evidence on hundreds of cases of fraud around the country and, more important, gathered information on turnout in key southern provinces where few voters showed up but large numbers of votes were being reported. Eide ordered us not to share this data with anyone, including the Electoral Complaints Commission, a U.N.-backed Afghan institution legally mandated to investigate fraud. Naturally, my colleagues wondered why they had taken the risks to collect this evidence if it was not to be used.

In early September, I got word that the IEC was about to abandon its published anti-fraud policies, allowing it to include enough fraudulent votes in the final tally to put Karzai over the 50 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff. After I called the chief electoral officer to urge him to stick with the original guidelines, Karzai issued a formal protest accusing me of foreign interference. My boss sided with Karzai.

Afghanistan is deeply divided ethnically and geographically. Both Karzai and the Taliban are Pashtun, Afghanistan’s dominant ethnic group, which makes up about 45 percent of the country’s population. Abdullah Abdullah, Karzai’s main challenger, is half Pashtun and half Tajik but is politically identified with the Tajiks, who dominate the north and are Afghanistan’s second largest ethnic group. If the Tajiks believe that fraud denied their candidate the chance to compete in a second round, they may respond by simply not recognizing the authority of the central government. The north already has de facto autonomy; these elections could add an ethnic fault line to a conflict between the Taliban and the government that to date has largely been a civil war among Pashtuns.

Since my disagreements with Eide went public, Eide and his supporters have argued that the United Nations had no mandate to interfere in the Afghan electoral process. This is not technically correct. The U.N. Security Council directed the U.N. mission to support Afghanistan’s electoral institutions in holding a “free, fair and transparent” vote, not a fraudulent one. And with so much at stake — and with more than 100,000 U.S. and coalition troops deployed in the country — the international community had an obvious interest in ensuring that Afghanistan’s election did not make the situation worse.

President Obama needs a legitimate Afghan partner to make any new strategy for the country work. However, the extensive fraud that took place on Aug. 20 virtually guarantees that a government emerging from the tainted vote will not be credible with many Afghans.

As I write, Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission is auditing 10 percent of the suspect polling boxes. If the audit shows this sample to be fraudulent, the commission will throw out some 3,000 suspect ballot boxes, which could lead to a runoff vote between Karzai and Abdullah. By itself, a runoff is no antidote for Afghanistan’s electoral challenges. The widespread problems that allowed for fraud in the first round of voting must be addressed. In particular, all ghost polling stations should be removed from the books (“closed” is not the right word since they never opened), and the election staff that facilitated the fraud must be replaced.

Afghanistan’s pro-Karzai election commission will not do this on its own. Fixing those problems will require resolve from the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan — a quality that so far has been lacking.

galbraithvt@gmail.com

Peter W. Galbraith served as deputy special representative of the United Nations in Afghanistan from June until last week.

The Viper in the Bosom

by AHSAN WAHED

The US Ambassador in Pakistan has been uncharacteristically blunt in her talk with the Washington Post. Her remarks on the ‘Quetta Shura’ ( US perception of a grouping of Afghan Taliban supporting the insurgency in Afghanistan) come just when the Kerry-Lugar Bill is being called ‘peanuts’ and its conditionalities are being considered as ‘unacceptable’ for a sovereign country and the work of those who want to survive on US largesse. The Pakistan street is also concerned with the whole ‘Blackwater’ expose and in fact the US-Pakistan relationship is being viewed with a great deal of suspicion with the focus once again on the continuing Drone attacks. Pakistanis are now openly asking who the real viper is after the US ambassador spoke of ‘those who keep vipers in their bosom get bitten’. She also confirmed a divergence of interests with Pakistan and admitted that while they do not have enough information on Baluchistan it is going to be the focus of their interest.

The Ambassadors remarks come after an obviously ‘leaked’ story in the Sunday Times that hinted at ‘drone attacks in Quetta’. Quetta is the provincial capital of Baluchistan– Pakistan’s largest province that has long land borders with Iran and Southern Afghanistan the heart of the Taliban struggle against the US/NATO. The current US problem with Iran is also on the table unresolved. Is the Ambassador shifting focus away from ‘Blackwater’ and ‘Kerry-Lugar’ or is this the van guard of an attempt to bring the problems with Pakistan to a head right after US economic aid to Pakistan has been tripled? Or is this to suggest expansion of the conflict in Afghanistan to justify and support McChrystal’s demand for more troops under threat of failure or is it to cover up the total failure in Afghanistan by blaming the mythical ‘Quetta Shura’? Does this have anything to do with a military option against Iran that is being pushed by certain lobbies? Is it just a message to Pakistan to clean up its act in Baluchistan? Or is it ALL of the above?

Read Complete Article : http://pakistan-pal.newsvine.com/_news/2009/10/01/3337500-the-viper-in-the-bosom

Flawed Policies

JENNIFER ANDREW

In her marvelous book-The March of Folly-Barbara Tuchman talks of the 25 long years for which the US persisted with a flawed and disastrous policy in Viet-Nam. The torture and killings ended with a defeat for the US. Defeat at the hands of pajama and slipper clad small men whom the US soldiers contemptuously called ‘gooks’. Of course US soldiers are called ‘grunts’ probably because that is the only response they can make.

In Viet-Nam US soldiers said-’if it’s dead and if it’s Viet-Namese then it’s a Viet-Cong’ (VC or Viet Cong being the North Vietnamese whom the US was fighting). This is how the body counts were inflated and how brutality became the preferred and easy option. The question is that are they now saying in Afghanistan that-’if it’s dead and if it’s Pashtun then its Taleban’ because death, destruction and numbers killed is what dominates the US strategy in Afghanistan. This is evident from the ‘mistakes’ in Southern Afghanistan that have killed hundreds of innocent Afghans including women and children. The emphasis is on body counts, kill ratios and death and destruction graphs.

Read Complete Article : http://jenniferandrew6.newsvine.com/_news/2009/09/15/3270191-flawed-policies

The Afghanistan Abyss

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group’s concern – dead right, in my view – is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

“Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,” the group said in a statement to me. “The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

“The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,” the statement said.

The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center.

“We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,” Mr. Miller said.

Mr. Hart, who helped organize the anti-Soviet insurgency in the 1980s, cautions that Americans just don’t understand the toughness, determination and fighting skills of the Pashtun tribes. He adds that if the U.S. escalates the war, the result will be radicalization of Pashtuns in Pakistan and further instability there – possibly even the collapse of Pakistan.

These experts are not people who crave publicity; I had to persuade them to go public with their concerns. And their views are widely shared among others who also know Afghanistan well.

“We’ve bitten off more than we can chew; we’re setting ourselves up for failure,” said Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat who teaches at Harvard when he is not running a large aid program in Afghanistan. Mr. Stewart describes the American military strategy in Afghanistan as “nonsense.”

I’m writing about these concerns because I share them. I’m also troubled because officials in Washington seem to make decisions based on a simplistic caricature of the Taliban that doesn’t match what I’ve found in my reporting trips to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Among the Pashtuns, the population is not neatly divisible into “Taliban” or “non-Taliban.” Rather, the Pashtuns are torn by complex aspirations and fears.

Many Pashtuns I’ve interviewed are appalled by the Taliban’s periodic brutality and think they are too extreme; they think they’re a little nuts. But these Pashtuns also admire the Taliban’s personal honesty and religious piety, a contrast to the corruption of so many officials around President Hamid Karzai.

Some Taliban are hard-core ideologues, but many join the fight because friends or elders suggest it, because they are avenging the deaths of relatives in previous fighting, because it’s a way to earn money, or because they want to expel the infidels from their land – particularly because the foreigners haven’t brought the roads, bridges and irrigation projects that had been anticipated.

Frankly, if a bunch of foreign Muslim troops in turbans showed up in my hometown in rural Oregon, searching our homes without bringing any obvious benefit, then we might all take to the hills with our deer rifles as well.

In fairness, the American military has hugely improved its sensitivity, and some commanders in the field have been superb in building trust with Afghans. That works. But all commanders can’t be superb, and over all, our increased presence makes Pashtuns more likely to see us as alien occupiers.

That may be why the troop increase this year hasn’t calmed things. Instead, 2009 is already the bloodiest year for American troops in Afghanistan – with four months left to go.

The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.

This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.

A Meaningless Election

by Anatol Lieven

Let me say at the beginning that I do not think that the existing mess in Afghanistan at present is the fault of the Obama administration. The president inherited it from George Bush, and simply did not have time between taking power in January and the Afghan elections of this month to carry out a radical change of course. If, however, the administration fails to change course after the (predictable) debacle that these elections have become, then the responsibility for subsequent disasters will indeed rest with President Obama and his team.

The Afghan election has lessons that go far beyond Afghanistan. It illustrates the folly of relying on democracy and elections to provide solutions to complex issues of state-building, absent a whole set of other preconditions. One of these is for Washington to have a clear idea of what election results it wants, what election results are possible and what if anything it can do to influence those results.

Instead, both the Bush and Obama administrations drifted along with the Afghan electoral process, the results of which were always going to be a choice between the very bad and the absolutely disastrous; and were then going to have to explain to the American public and the publics of key U.S. allies (notably Britain) why bringing about this awful choice was worth the lives of dozens of U.S. and allies troops. It now seems likely that more British soldiers have died in Helmand province over the past four years than Afghan citizens voted there in the first round of these elections. How do you explain that to those soldiers’ parents, wives and children?

The reasons why people did not go to the polls in Helmand, despite the recent military operations to drive back the Taliban, are perfectly obvious-and should have been perfectly obvious long before the elections. They are summed up in one simple question: Would you, dear reader, risk your life and those of your family to vote for Hamid Karzai?

On the one hand, the threat from the Taliban to voters and their families was not diminished by the latest military operations because it is a permanent threat. In the perception of the people of the area-and almost certainly in reality-sooner or later U.S. and British troops will return to their bases; and then the Taliban will return to the villages and impose ferocious punishments on those who voted. On the other hand, why run this risk for President Karzai, a man for whom Western officials in private-and even sometimes in public-have nothing but contempt, and whose administration, after eight years in power, has done precisely nothing for most ordinary Afghans?

But Karzai was always going to be the good alternative in these elections (given that, unfortunately, Ashraf Ghani never stood the slightest chance of winning). The only real alternative was and is Abdullah Abdullah. His past membership in the Northern Alliance (responsible for numerous atrocities against ethnic Pashtuns in the 1990s and after the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001) makes him detested by a great many Pashtuns. His election would almost certainly lead to a new wave of Pashtun support for the Taliban, the collapse of whatever remains of government authority in many Pashtun areas, and in the long run would very likely point toward the partition of Afghanistan along ethnic lines. All this is quite apart from the fact that the election was always going to be subject to massive rigging (to be fair, by both sides), with a high probability that the results would lack real legitimacy in the eyes of many or even most Afghans.

If the United States persists in declaring that all of this notwithstanding, the elections have been legitimate and democratic, then Hamid Karzai will survive in power. But he will lead an administration that will be even more crippled, ineffective, and beholden to warlords and drug barons than it was before the elections. And as a result of Karzai’s re-election, any really new U.S. strategy for Afghanistan might have to be postponed for another five years, until the next Afghan presidential elections-which will come after the next U.S. presidential elections. If only for its own chances of re-election in 2012, this is something which the Obama administration would be very foolish to go along with.

Instead, in my view, the Obama administration should adopt the following strategy: If the legitimacy of Karzai’s victory is seriously challenged by Abdullah to the extent that the June Iranian elections were, then Washington should agree that the results lack credibility and cannot be recognized, and use this as an excuse to move from a presidential to a prime ministerial system. A loyah jirga (grand national assembly) can be called to legalise this constitutional change. A caretaker prime minister can then be appointed who would attempt to bring more conservative Pashtuns into his cabinet. If Washington decides that this is a step too far and Karzai must remain as president, his loss of authority and legitimacy should nonetheless be made the basis for forcing him to appoint a prime minister to assume most responsibility for the actual running of the government.

This should be accompanied by a move to legalise the presence of political parties in the Afghan parliament, prior to the parliamentary elections next year. The Taliban should be actively encouraged to form a political wing and to take part in these elections-along the lines of the bizarre, but in the end very helpful, system in Northern Ireland, where even at the height of the British campaign against the IRA, its political wing, Sinn Fein, remained a legal party and stood for election.

Negotiations should be opened with the Taliban high command on a peace settlement in Afghanistan, the offer on the U.S. side being the promise of an American military withdrawal within a long but fixed timetable, conditional on progressive Taliban ceasefires across increasing areas of the country. Where the Taliban does not agree to a ceasefire, military operations should continue. Pakistan should be used as an intermediary between the United States and the Taliban leadership.

In other words, the United States should pursue a strategy of talking and fighting at the same time. The goal would not be an early peace settlement or an early American and Western military withdrawal, since the first is impossible and the second would be disastrous. Rather, this strategy would recognise that it is to a great extent the Western military presence that is driving support for the Taliban in many of the Pashtun areas.

This strategy would seek both to diminish this support and engage the Taliban leadership by the promise of withdrawal, while leaving Afghanistan’s long-term political future open. Our approach to the future shape of Afghanistan could then be guided by two developments or the lack of them: The emergence of the Afghan National Army as a force which is militarily effective and-equally importantly-genuinely multi-ethnic, in the sense of fully representing the Pashtun sections of Afghanistan’s population; and reconciliation between different political and ethnic forces in the country, including the Taliban.

If these two conditions can be met in the course of a long (say five to ten years) negotiating process, we can continue to aim at some form of truly united Afghanistan. If they cannot be met, we will have to accept de facto partition along ethnic lines, even if we do not call it by this name.

Unlike the present U.S. strategy, this would involve talking to Mullah Omar and the Taliban leadership, initially through Pakistani intermediaries, later directly. The present strategy, of trying to get bits of the Taliban to surrender to the Karzai regime, is by contrast doomed to failure. After all, if there are two obvious “bits” to aim at, allied with the Taliban but not part of it, they are Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezbe-Islami party and the tribal network of Jalaluddin Haqqani and his family in Pakistani Waziristan and Afghan Khost.

But Hekmatyar and Haqqani were offered huge amounts of American money to join the Western side in the autumn and winter of 2001-2002, when U.S. power and prestige were at their height-and they refused. Why should they agree to come over now, when the United States and the Kabul regime look so much weaker? The present strategy, of trying to break off local Taliban commanders, reminds me of something Wellington said before the Battle of Waterloo, when he was asked if he expected significant defections from the French Army. He replied something to the effect, “No-one worth a damn. Maybe a couple of Marshals.”

I hope that I am wrong, but as far as I can see, sooner or later we are going to have to recognise the twin facts that the Taliban are the most important political force in the Pashtun areas, and that it is to a very great extent our presence which makes them so. This recognition most certainly should not imply a rapid and humiliating Western scuttle from Afghanistan. Equally, it should imply the abandonment of empty talk of remaining in Afghanistan for a generation, eliminating the Taliban, and building an Afghan democracy.

Anatol Lieven, a senior editor at The National Interest, is a professor in the War Studies Department of King’s College London and a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation.