By Steve Hynd
As the U.S. goes surging into Afghanistan and the Pakistani military continues its ethnic cleansing operations in Pakistan's own most unloved territories, a cautionary tale about U.S. perceptions and expectations from the London Times:
US and British officials are no doubt delighted to see tribesmen in northwestern Pakistan fighting the Taleban after years of sheltering, tolerating or supporting them. Elsewhere in the country, there has also been an unprecedented wave of public, political and even religious support for the army�s campaign in Swat, despite the massive exodus of refugees.
This appears to show that Pakistanis have at last heeded Western warnings that the militancy they face is indigenous and threatens the existence of the Pakistani state.
What is less encouraging � and less well advertised � is that a key reason for the backlash is that many Pakistanis believe the Taleban is being funded and armed by America as part of an elaborate geopolitical conspiracy.
Absurd as it may sound to Westerners this conspiracy theory, like so many others in Pakistan, seems to have taken root among even well-educated people in the political, military and religious establishments.
It was outlined recently in an interview with Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi, a respected Sunni cleric who set up an alliance of 22 Islamic groups and political parties last month with the explicit goal of opposing the Taleban.
He explained that the Taleban preached an extreme version of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam, while most Pakistanis followed the more moderate Barelvi school.
He said that many Pakistanis were outraged when the Taleban attacked Barelvi shrines, and denounced Pakistan�s constitution and democratic system as unIslamic.
Halfway through the interview, however, he suddenly added that the Taleban was also being funded and trained by the CIA, Mossad, and India�s RAW intelligence agency. Why? As part of a strategy to carve out an independent statelet in northwestern Pakistan to help to contain China�s growing military and economic power. And to capture Pakistan�s nuclear weapons.
So even when Pakistan does what the US wants, it's seen as anti- American to do so. Even as Pakistan battles its own extremists, the favored narrative complicates America's tasks of people-centric counter-insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan and wider regional diplomacy by setting any Pakistani struggle up as being against what many in the region see as America's true colonial motives there. How did that one fly under the planning radar, as it apparently has? It's a potential COIN cock-up of monumental proportions.
COIN has been described as a process of "holistic war", where the "blowing stuff up" and the "hearts and minds" must work in close to perfect harmony or fail. I've written before that the U.S. military's intitutional inertia, coupled with U.S. policymakers tendency to inflict populaist rhetoric designed for domestic rhetoric on foreigners as policy, makes sure that "hollistic" process will fail too often for even a limited COIN strategy in Af/Pak to succeed.
Here's another example of why things go wrong when translating COIN think-tank papers into reality, from security consultant Tim Lynch and regional defense and intelligence expert Joshua Foust, from the latter's post at Registan.net:
Tim Lynch just got back from Gardez, and while I think he undersells the charm of the city a bit, his main point is beautifully spot-on:
As I mentioned in my last post I do not really know what our mission in Afghanistan is. We are engaged in a counterinsurgency war but confine the troops to large FOB�s which directly contradicts our counterinsurgency doctrine. Our troops do not have sustained meaningful contact with local Afghans, cannot provide any real security to them, and due to Big Army casualty policies are forced to ride around in large multimillion dollar MRAP�s where they are subject to IED strikes which they cannot prevent because they do not control one meter of ground outside their FOBs. We also do not have the cooperation of the government of Afghanistan. President Karzai has cobbled together a coalition of Afghan power brokers and will win the upcoming election. The UN and our Department of State can make all the noise they want about a �free and fair� election but they are irrelevant because they stay isolated and unengaged in their high speed compounds. The election was decided in Dubai last month as I reported earlier. Besides Afghans have no idea what a free and fair election is � they are no more capable of conducting one than the state of Illinois. So we are fighting a counterinsurgency in support of a government who is actively hindering our efforts by not cooperating with our military, our hapless State Department, or any other organization trying to bring peace, hope, modernity and the rule of law to this once proud and beautiful country.
That almost entirely summarizes why my embed in Afghanistan earlier this year changed me from being optimistic about the war to deeply pessimistic...there is a fundamental disconnect between what we are doing in Afghanistan and what we expect to happen. And that is best exemplified by the big huge FOBs that hold far too many people compared to what needs to happen.
The London Time's article also underlines another point I don't make often enough and the interventionsits who make up the vast bulk of DC's Very Serious Person set don't make at all. It's my conviction that no-one knows how to solve the sub- continent's various problems, of which the Taliban and Islamic extremism is just the one we in the West have been concentrating on most. On top of that there's Pak/India, Pak/Iran, ethnic and religious separatist movements galore, China v India, China v USA, Hindu extremism, working class revolutionary tendencies often mixed up with religious or ethnic extremism, the upcoming religious and economic crises in Bangladesh and the knock on effect they'll have on neighbours power-politics...
It's a perfect Gordian Knot; when you tease out one bit to untangle it, another bit just gets pulled tighter, and there's no sword sharp enough to cut it. Anyone (including myself) who puts forward a solution for one tangle without mentioning how their solution would make other bits of the knot more intransigent is just blowing smoke up their reader's asses. Frankly, though, the notion that all of this can be untangled by military forces - practising counter-insurgency or otherwise - is truly worthy of the description "laughable".
No comments:
Post a Comment