Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Afghanistan: Our First Responsibility
In the January/February Foreign Affairs Barnett Rubin has summarized in excellent and disheartening detail the problems we face in attempting to stabilize Afghanistan. He asserts that we have not lost yet, but the country is still ours to lose. The importance of winning goes beyond both the welfare of the Afghan people and the maintenance of America's position in the world. He points out that NATO is now intimately involved in the effort to turn back the Taliban. If it should fail, this will not only harm the United States and NATO, but also seriously set back the effort to make NATO an accepted and viable alternative for bringing order to future situations.
While it is impossible to separate the country from its context, let us begin with the challenges that would be faced even if there were no Taliban. Rubin finds only one major effective institution -- the army. Beyond that, the police and the judicial system and local government are all highly corrupt and incompetent. The lack of any believable security and justice for the average person leads to a crushing lack of confidence that makes reconstruction almost impossible. Pervasive corruption makes the distribution of security funds a losing proposition. The only cash crop many Afghans have is opium. It has become much more important than it ever was because of the impossibility of getting more bulky products to the market. This problem is exacerbated by the high price paid for opium because other countries have been much more able to reduce production. Rubin adds that the opium problem is essentially impossible to control as long as the developed world criminalizes opium. The inevitable result of criminalization is high returns for those outside the law, a sphere in which most Afghans reside and will remain for the foreseeable future. The result of the situation is the empowering of "warlords", which we might define as persons able to act without restraint against those under them. These warlords may be the old fashioned variety or the newer Taliban leaders.
Rubin points out some basic facts that it are easy to forget. The Afghans have been living through what is now a thirty years war. He also reminds us that Afghanistan has suffered from extreme poverty for generations, and it is this poverty that makes any effort by government, before or after this war, almost doomed to failure. Governments just cannot collect the funds that would allow them to do anything outside Kabul.
Yet with all this, his interviews suggest that the people do not want the Taliban back if there is a real alternative.
The other major thrust of Rubin's article is that no insurgency has ever been overcome when there is an outside country willing to maintain a steady supply of insurgents. No matter how many we kill, there will be more. He explains that Islamabad supports the Taliban as part of a long-term strategy that we at one time seconded of opposing India at every opportunity. Strange as it may seem, Pakistan's leading class lives in constant fear that India will "do them in". In this paranoid vision, India is continually trying to squeeze Pakistan in a pincher between Afghanistan and India. All this goes back to the time of partition when some leaders of the NWFP sided with India and tried to strike out on their own by creating "Pakhtoonistan". Pakistan saw the hand of India in all this. So its intelligence services took it upon themselves to block India. In recent years this has meant supplying and training the Taliban both within the country and in Afghanistan, as well as support for similar groups in Kashmir. To Pakistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan was a disaster -- Rubin reports Islamabad considered going to war with the U.S. to preserve their Taliban ally.
All of which illustrates again that we are mucking around in an area that is almost impossible to understand, with allies and friends all mixed up together in strange relationships.
Nevertheless, Rubin echoes the Iraq Study Group's call for negotiations with Pakistan, as well as the other players. As he points out, we may not like, understand, or agree with the positions of other players, but we cannot simply ignore them. For example, the only way to get the Pakistanis to change their behavior in regard to the Taliban is to give them assurances, even guarantees, that their worst fears will not be realized if they cooperate with us. Even then, we might not succeed, but this is the only shot we have.
While it is impossible to separate the country from its context, let us begin with the challenges that would be faced even if there were no Taliban. Rubin finds only one major effective institution -- the army. Beyond that, the police and the judicial system and local government are all highly corrupt and incompetent. The lack of any believable security and justice for the average person leads to a crushing lack of confidence that makes reconstruction almost impossible. Pervasive corruption makes the distribution of security funds a losing proposition. The only cash crop many Afghans have is opium. It has become much more important than it ever was because of the impossibility of getting more bulky products to the market. This problem is exacerbated by the high price paid for opium because other countries have been much more able to reduce production. Rubin adds that the opium problem is essentially impossible to control as long as the developed world criminalizes opium. The inevitable result of criminalization is high returns for those outside the law, a sphere in which most Afghans reside and will remain for the foreseeable future. The result of the situation is the empowering of "warlords", which we might define as persons able to act without restraint against those under them. These warlords may be the old fashioned variety or the newer Taliban leaders.
Rubin points out some basic facts that it are easy to forget. The Afghans have been living through what is now a thirty years war. He also reminds us that Afghanistan has suffered from extreme poverty for generations, and it is this poverty that makes any effort by government, before or after this war, almost doomed to failure. Governments just cannot collect the funds that would allow them to do anything outside Kabul.
Yet with all this, his interviews suggest that the people do not want the Taliban back if there is a real alternative.
The other major thrust of Rubin's article is that no insurgency has ever been overcome when there is an outside country willing to maintain a steady supply of insurgents. No matter how many we kill, there will be more. He explains that Islamabad supports the Taliban as part of a long-term strategy that we at one time seconded of opposing India at every opportunity. Strange as it may seem, Pakistan's leading class lives in constant fear that India will "do them in". In this paranoid vision, India is continually trying to squeeze Pakistan in a pincher between Afghanistan and India. All this goes back to the time of partition when some leaders of the NWFP sided with India and tried to strike out on their own by creating "Pakhtoonistan". Pakistan saw the hand of India in all this. So its intelligence services took it upon themselves to block India. In recent years this has meant supplying and training the Taliban both within the country and in Afghanistan, as well as support for similar groups in Kashmir. To Pakistan, the American invasion of Afghanistan was a disaster -- Rubin reports Islamabad considered going to war with the U.S. to preserve their Taliban ally.
All of which illustrates again that we are mucking around in an area that is almost impossible to understand, with allies and friends all mixed up together in strange relationships.
Nevertheless, Rubin echoes the Iraq Study Group's call for negotiations with Pakistan, as well as the other players. As he points out, we may not like, understand, or agree with the positions of other players, but we cannot simply ignore them. For example, the only way to get the Pakistanis to change their behavior in regard to the Taliban is to give them assurances, even guarantees, that their worst fears will not be realized if they cooperate with us. Even then, we might not succeed, but this is the only shot we have.
