By Steve Hynd
George Washington University has unveiled a series of previously unseen documents relating to the beginnings of the war in Afghanistan. War was always and entirely the only option on the table.
As current U.S. strategy increasingly pursues policies to reconcile or �flip� the Taliban, the document collection released today reveals Washington�s refusal to negotiate with Taliban leadership directly after 9/11. On September 13, 2001, U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin �bluntly� told Pakistani President Musharraf that there was �absolutely no inclination in Washington to enter into a dialogue with the Taliban. The time for dialog was finished as of September 11.�
Spencer Ackerman notes just how gung-ho the administration was:
The first document today is a State Department cable from September 13, 2001, recounting a conversation between Richard Armitage, then the deputy secretary of state, and the chief of Pakistan�s intelligence service, Mahmud Ahmed. It�s no secret that in the days after 9/11, Pakistan opted to side with the U.S. in the imminent war on al-Qaeda, with Armitage playing diplomatic go-between. But the details of how Pakistan reached its decision have never been disclosed.
Basically, Armitage very bluntly told Mahmud (as the cable calls him) how things were going to play out. Pakistan would end �all logistical support for bin Ladin.� (Alas, the cable does not expand on what �logistical support� Pakistan actually provided the terrorist network.) It would provide �blanket overflight and landing rights� for U.S. intelligence and military operations. Islamabad would even secure �as needed territorial access� for U.S. �military intelligence and all other personnel� (read: CIA). While the American people would hear much in the following decade about the need to keep U.S. boots off of Pakistani soil, Armitage�s demands show no great concern for Pakistani sovereignty. �Americans were responding to Tuesday�s attacks with unyielding anger,� the cable reads, and so Pakistan needed to make clear which side it was on.
That must have been about the time Armitage was telling the Pakistanis that they'd be bombed "back to the Stone Age" if they didn't co-operate.
Despite this, the Bush administration still got clear warnings from the Pakistani ISI that war would be a disaster. In a document dated 24th September 2001, Wendy Chamberlin, then US Ambassador to Pakistan, was told by ISI chief Mahmud Ahmed that he felt a breakthrough with the Taliban was near and that they might well hand over Osama bin Laden and others in return for not being invaded. He told Chamberlin that "a negotiated settlement would be preferable to military action" and:
Remarkably prescient of the ISI head - imagine if we'd taken his advice - but then again as CNAS blogger and analyst Amil Khan a.k.a. Londonistani tweeted today, "I remember every Mideast specialist I knew thinking everyone had taken a reality-free holiday".
Certainly, the Bush administration hadn't realised one crucial fact, admitted by Chamberlin years later in 2008:
""One thing we never understood is that India has always been the major threat for Pakistan," said former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlain, now the president of the Middle East Institute."
Caught between a threat of nuclear annihilation and the strategic reality that India was their real boogeyman, Pakistan immediately began a double game, as Spencer also notes in his post linked above.
[Another] cable, from November 13, 2002, is a report from Richard Haass, the State Department�s policy-planning director, after meetings in Pakistan with undisclosed official sources, apparently within the Pakistani Army. Haass reported that there were �limits� to Pakistan�s �total support� in the fight against al-Qaeda, which had escaped into the Pakistani tribal areas. The Pakistani Army proclaimed that it was completely aligned with the U.S.�s counterterrorism aims and is now operating in the tribal areas that it previously avoided for political reasons.
But Haass� source assured him that al-Qaeda could not constitute a safe haven in the Northwest Frontier Province or the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. �Al Qaeda presence in the area was limited to transit; it controlled no part of the FATA,� Haass was told. Tribal leaders in the area �could not shelter al-Qaeda for more than a day or two.� The diplomat replied that �We felt the scale of the challenge was far larger than [Name Redacted] believed.� Not to worry, said the Pakistanis: Only �minimal procedural differences� divided the U.S. and Pakistan on the question of crushing al-Qaeda.
... Nine years after 9/11, the U.S. has escalated a drone war into the Pakistani tribal areas to �disrupt, dismantle and defeat� al-Qaeda in its reconstituted safe havens. It has escalated the Afghanistan war substantially, tripling troop levels since February 2009, in the name of preventing al-Qaeda and its allies from returning to power in Kabul. And it still does not have the unequivocal support of Pakistan for these efforts.
If the Bush administration hadn't been so gung-ho to reach for the "big stick", had realised that the threat posed by India was Pakistan's entire reason for wishing to preserve the Taliban in Afghanistan as a guarantor of Pakistan's "strategic space", and would turn back-flips to ensure the regional staus quo, we might have had Bin Laden and the rest in custody from 2001, without an invasion and without the current sorry state of both the Afghan occupation and the regional catfight re-inflamed by that occupation. They never even gave it a try.
Heckuvva job, George!
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