Errors in Judgment
Obama seems to believe that we are not fighting a broad-based insurgency and can, therefore, defeat it quickly. It is true that the Taliban is controlling at most 15% of the Afghan territory but counties in Kandahar, Helmand, and some other Pashtun provinces, harbor tens of thousands of militants lying in wait, and they count on the support of 20-some million Pashtuns of Pakistan, including the Tehrik-e-Taliban, the ferocious Pakistani Taliban. Add the logistical backup of ISI, the blessing of the Ayatollahs (for now limited to providing arms), and you have a broadly-based, well-funded movement. Even villagers hostile to the old Taliban, will support the neo-Taliban as alternative to the dishonest police and the occupying army that has, for the past eight years, used missile-armed drones, the so-called “family destroyers”. Even those who do not believe in the writ of law the Taliban preach (founded on an extreme interpretation of the Islamic principles of jurisprudence or Sharia) defer to them nonetheless, based on fear of what will happen once the Americans leave.
After almost a decade into the fight during which commanders were given free rein to blow entire families to bloody shreds, the marines selected for deployment in urban centers are being schooled in the principle “that it is all about protecting the Afghan people”. But, who are the “people”? In a widespread counterinsurgency the enemy is the terrain. He is everywhere. How can an eighteen-year-old grunt from Iowa identify a Taliban, if he chooses to shave his beard, leave his Kalashnikov under his bed and pick up a shovel? In this war—not unlike Vietnam—the enemy will be hiding in plain sight, behind the sickly gaze of a farmer or the colorful chapan of a merchant. And he’s everywhere, or will be soon. The war in Afghanistan fits the characteristics of the neowar. Coined by Umberto Eco, the neowar is different than other armed conflicts in two major ways: “It has no front and the identity of the enemy is uncertain.” (3. In 2006 key Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, started to speak on behalf of all Afghans. Perhaps it is time to pay attention to his prophetic messages.
Another of the fundamentals President Obama is getting wrong is confusing the Taliban with al-Qaeda and other religious anti-imperialist guerrilla groups such as Hikmatyar’s Hizb-i Islami. The Taliban atrocities of the past notwithstanding, they are not purely a network of anti-Western militants. Al-Qaeda is. The Taliban are former anti-soviet mujahedeen, farmers, Pashtun clerics, tribal elders, even members of the Pakistani government. Al-Qaeda is incorrigible. The Taliban are not. But as long as they remain outside the existing political arena it is extremely unlikely that they will scale back their violent activities.
The word “surge” has become a sort of magic elixir in today’s public dialogue, based on its apparent effectiveness in Iraq. It has taken on new life in Afghanistan but it is erroneous to confuse Afghanistan with Iraq where the surge has showed decent results—the so-called “Sunni awakening—strengthened by the cooperation of local forces” The scenario does not apply to Afghanistan. With the exception of drug-dealing warlords who use USAID to finance their insatiable love for bulletproof Mercedes Benzes, we have no other significant allies in Afghanistan.
Failing to understand the wide range of regional, ethnic, and religious complexities that make Afghanistan unique is recipe for failure. Any government vying for legitimacy and popular acceptance in Afghanistan has to respect ethnic polarizations, empower and invite the tribal elders as part of a ruling elite that respects a traditional Afghan self-rule, including the “moderate” Taliban and fundamentalists who had signaled a willingness to denounce the “jihad above all else” doctrine. During the drawing of the Afghan constitution in 2003, some religious leaders, including Burhanuddin Rabbani of Jamiat-i-Islami and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf of Itihad-i-Islami, had warned against delegating too much executive power to the central government, predicting the blossoming of corruption, pervasive opium cultivation and smuggling. They were proven right.
Drawing on Qutb’s Ma’alifu al-Tarriq, the Taliban’s anti-imperialistic message is based on two simple tenets: one, they will rid the country of corrupt drug lords and Western puppets; two, they will restore order and unity—a message destined to sit well with the Afghans tired of the high and mighty Western forces, a population that is witnessing a chronic, widening gap between the rich and the poor, where the poor have no access to potable water, but the rich have, in recent years, transferred 16 billion dollars to Dubai alone for safekeeping.
Perhaps Obama believes that the Karzai government, the second most-corrupt in the world, will turn into a competent, legitimate administration to work with, one that will implement the developmental strategies necessary to turn Afghanistan into a civil, stable nation, from where no more attacks can be launched on the homeland—and all of this, in a couple of years. He seems to believe that Nancy Pelosi’s admonitory words on the “continued corruption and lack of effectiveness by the Afghan police, the need to increase the Afghan leadership role in building communities through vehicles, such as Provincial Reconstruction Teams, improving efforts to reduce poppy cultivation and crack down on drug trafficking, and so on” will make a difference. His faith is Karzai is misplaced. Out of Karzai’s twenty-four candidates for ministerial positions, seventeen were discarded by parliament due to their criminal pasts or strong ties to warlords. It is an economic truism that foreign aid fails almost always because of “absorptive capacity”, the enormous gap between noble intentions and actual results. In Afghanistan the gap is huge: only 10 to 30 percent of foreign aid is actually being spent in Afghanistan. Unless Mr. Karzai’s government is not taken out of the equation, it is very unlikely that the Afghan people can benefit from our generosity.
A true democracy derives its legitimacy from consensual power that arises from internal factors—in case of Afghanistan those would be tribal and clan allegiances. A system of government that fits Afghanistan’s socio-political framework is one in which the local authorities deal with providing essential needs such as jobs, healthcare and security, and where foreign aid disbursement and its coordination is vested in the federating units and not the central government. Macroeconomic tools that do not integrate the intrinsic problems of Afghanistan—rugged and inhospitable geography, regional tribal relations fraught with adversity, a corrupt central government, and chronic economic inequality—are ineffective. That is why our half-hearted attempt, through the National Solidarity Program, NSP, which awards grants for village-run development programs in Afghanistan, has fallen short. The average villager in Afghanistan relies on the local “authorities” to secure access to potable water, resolve conflicts, etc. We should accept a broader autonomy in the regions, resolving the rooted conflicts of territory and power, luring the fractions to the negotiating table, by offering reconstruction packages and capital resources disbursed by competent economic officers and technocrats as part of a comprehensive package that goes beyond the current framework.
3. Umberto Eco. Turning Back the Clock. New York: Harcourt 2006, p. 11.
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