The Razor’s Edge

The United States seems to be losing the proverbial battle for the “hearts and minds” of the Afghans. The biggest problem was that the United States was not prepared for the post-war situation and had no plans to tackle the problems, which would arise once the fighting stopped. In Afghanistan, the United States borrowed a page from the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan and took control of the cities. However, Afghanistan is a pre-medieval society and its power structure is based on the local jigra, or the tribal council. The tribes of Afghanistan, who exert the majority of political influence in the country, do so from their bases in the countryside. The center of the political gravity in Afghanistan resides in the countryside and not in the cities. When the Americans deployed their forces in Kabul and the other major Afghan cities, they effectively undermined their own influence. By leaving the countryside, outside of the cities unguarded, the Americans created a political vacuum and then, showed an inability to fill this vacuum by venturing away from the cities and deploying forces outside of the major Afghan cities.

The cities in Afghanistan are like “islands”. Controlling cities in Afghanistan never helps the matters, because of the factors of isolation and immobility, which are generated as a result of such a policy. Even if an occupying power controls all the cities in Afghanistan, it will remain politically insignificant, because unless the occupying power has the willingness to dominate the “sea” or the countryside outside the city, its influence will only be limited to the cities and not beyond its limits. In a military sense, such a policy hints of a static mentality and though the United States has the world’s most efficient fighting capabilities, the balance of the military power, in Afghanistan, still remains with the foot soldier. Afghanistan is an infantryman’s paradise and country is naturally designed for the infantry combat; not massive infantry operations, but small-scale unit operations up to the regimental level. Air support and air operations, though, can tip the scales, but the fact still remains that air power alone cannot occupy the ground; infantry occupies the ground. Unless, the Americans are willing to deploy troops in the countryside and physically hold ground, they will not be able to occupy Afghanistan and as things stand, they do not occupy Afghanistan in the present circumstances.

Given the American penchant, it seems that the Americans are using the cities in Afghanistan as nodes, from which they seek to maintain their control. From within the cities, they venture out on their missions to “flush out” the Taliban, and to destroy them. Even if the Americans destroy any Taliban force, by not controlling the area beyond the city limits, the Americans are giving a carté blanché to the Taliban to regroup and reconstitute as a military threat to their forces. The biggest drawback of such a policy is that it takes away incentive and gives it to the enemy. Already the Americans are suffering, because not only the Taliban might stage a come back, but because the American lack of control in the countryside has resurrected the evil of the warlords in Afghanistan. The rise of the warlords has fractured Afghanistan between competing interests and this has destroyed any illusions to the fact that Afghanistan after the rout of Taliban would enter a period of “stabilization and reconstruction”. The greatest mistake the Americans undertook in Afghanistan was to believe in the dictum of a central power based structured governing Afghanistan. Afghanistan is not partial to centralized power and the nature of politics in Afghanistan is too politically diffused to agree towards one Mecca of political power in the nation.

Historically, Kabul has never exercised power over Afghanistan, because real power inside Afghanistan has always rested on the consensus of the tribes and their ethnic-centric interests. Afghanistan only understands power politics and in this case, it only understands the power of the Pushtuns lording over the nation. The United States altered this equation by giving power to the Tajik-Uzbek minority and to compound the mistake, it hoped that Afghanistan’s new political reality would merge into an effective federation. The fact still remains that Afghanistan is a medieval society, whose Byzantine politics do not cater to the political needs of a modern nation state. Traditionally, Afghans prefer autonomy in their political affairs and a healthy disdain for centralized power. Unfortunately, the United States only dealt with half of the problem; it changed the political-ethnic power in the nation, but did nothing to remove the traditional wellsprings from, which those political-ethnic powers originated. By leaving the countryside beyond the writ of its occupation, it left the traditional sources of power intact in Afghanistan and it is these traditional sources of power, which are proving to be the greatest source of instability in Afghanistan.

The present challenge to the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan comes from these traditional power centers in Afghanistan. The United States should have moved militarily against these traditional power centers in Afghanistan, and should have sought the political and military defeat of the local warlords before embarking on a political recreation of Afghanistan. Instead of defeating them and making them owe an oath of fealty towards the new regime, the United States co-opted them in the new political arrangement. In this sense, the United States ignored two caveats to the situation, which would later end up undermining its authority in Afghanistan. First; by seeking to rebuild the political edifice of Afghanistan without dismantling the old one, the United States did not realize that it was merely aiding in the resurgence of the political status quo in Afghanistan. Secondly; the United States mistook the antipathy of the Afghans and their resistance against the Taliban forces as being politically motivated. What the United States did not understand was that the Tajik-Uzbek led Afghan resistance to the Taliban was ethnically driven and though politics influenced it, it was only as a coda to the main opus.

Consequently, by failing to remove the ethnic-political power of the Afghan warlords, the United States made sure that there would an attempt to challenge the post-Taliban power structures in Afghanistan. The United States facilitated this challenge to its occupation, by ignoring the power centers located in the countryside, from where the Afghan warlords traditionally draw their political inspiration and military allegiances. The United States’ refusal to move militarily against the power of the warlords in the countryside created the unenviable reality that the United States, instead of dominating Afghanistan, simply ended up as another power faction competing for influence in the treacherous Afghan politics. The United States’ influence and power in Afghanistan is based on its control of the cities and from the cities, it is engaged in a struggle to dominate and rule the Afghan countryside, but the power of the Afghan warlords, based in the countryside, is resisting its political intentions. In other words, the United States is a direct participatory actor in the Afghan civil war and such; it can only react to the events, because via its refusal to occupy and deploy troops in the Afghan countryside, it has lost the initiative in the post-Taliban Afghanistan.

It was the culmination of these failures on the part of the United States, which allowed the warlords to directly challenge its power; the power of its protégé regime in Kabul and seek to revive their old political power hierarchies. The window of opportunity for the United States, to emerge as the effective power in Afghanistan, lasted from the fall of the Taliban in November 2001 and before creation of an Afghan government in June 2002. After June 2002, it was no longer possible for the United States to dominate the politics in Afghanistan, because the tradition of Afghan ethnic politics has overtaken the interests of the United States. The United States must have realized this and a hint of this realization could be seen in the pace of the Afghan reconstruction efforts. The speed by which the Afghan reconstruction proceeded, gave indications that the United States was reneging on its financial and political commitments, it was suffering from a “commitment fatigue” and seemed eager to extricate itself from Afghanistan. The lack of cohesion that marked the initial stages of the Afghan political and economic reconstruction efforts gave credence to Afghan political perceptions that the United States was losing interest in Afghanistan, as it did in 1989 after the Soviet Union’s withdrawal, and it would soon leave the country.

The indications, which suggested this eventuality was evidenced in the fact that United States resisted demands to broaden its military-political mandate outside of Kabul and was only interested in maintaining a status quo, which protected its interests in Afghanistan and was not interested in getting embroiled in the Afghan politics. This perception prompted the Afghan warlords to prepare for the power scramble, which would result once the United States politically vacated Afghanistan and hence, would explain their gradually increasing political and military autonomy from the government in Kabul. After all, all political barometers in Afghanistan herald the simple fact that, nearly two years after the collapse of the Taliban, nothing has improved inside Afghanistan and in fact, all indications suggest that Afghanistan is rapidly regressing towards the political and social anarchy, which predated the arrival of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hence, what is happening inside Afghanistan presently is a correlation of forces vying for political power, within a civil war. The reality of the post-Taliban Afghanistan was it has changed the ethnic power equation in the nation and therein, exists the problem. Of the ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the Pushtuns constitute about 38 percent of the population and the next major ethnic group, making about 25 percent of the population, are the Tajiks. The Hazaras make up 19 percent of the Afghan population and the Uzbeks only account for 6 percent of the population. The challenge to the existing government in Afghanistan is emanating from the Pashtuns, who are directly threatening the government of Hamid Karazi and see the Karazai government as the puppet of the Tajiks and the Uzbeks. The present round of the Afghan civil war is between the Pushtuns and the Tajiks to decide, which faction controls the geographic territory from Heart, in the west, to Kandahar to Kabul and towards Jalalabad, because this is the political heartland of Afghanistan and who ever wishes to rule Afghanistan, must control this swath of territory.

The problem arises, because historically, the Pushtuns have dominated this area, but are being challenged by the Tajiks and Uzbeks and to some extent, the Hazaras who all want to dismantle the Pushtun influence in these areas. Geographically, the Tajiks are located north-east of Kabul and Uzbeks are to the north, near Mazar-e-Sharif and Hazaras find themselves laying near the western borders with Iran, with their base in Heart. The eastern border of Afghanistan with Pakistan is dominated by the Pushtuns, who find themselves distributed across the Durand Line that demarcates the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is also the area, from which Taliban originated and in fact, still have a popular support base, which transcends the political divide between Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is at this arc that the United States and Tajik-Uzbek coalition government of Afghanistan shares a common threat perception. To the Tajik-Uzbeks and the Hazaras, the Pushtuns in these areas are more creditable threat than a possible revival of the Taliban, but to the United States, these areas represent a possible nucleus of Taliban resurgence and it is in the interests of both to deny this possibility from becoming a reality.

The political aim of both is to defeat the Pushtuns, but the “wildcard” upon which this whole enterprise rests is Pakistan, because defeating the Pushtuns in Afghanistan without inflicting a similar defeat to them in Pakistan will not solve the problem. The Pushtuns in Afghanistan can easily find sanctuary inside Pakistan, across the Durand Line, and as long as they are capable of doing this, this will present a threat to United States and the government in Kabul. Hence, the key to winning the power in the civil war inside Afghanistan rests on the ability of the United States to deny the Pushtuns the sanctuaries in Pakistan and it is for this reason, that the Pakistan army has been deployed inside the Federally Administrated Tribal Belt (FATA). The Pakistani army has entered FATA to hunt down the Taliban as per American wishes, but also to prevent the Afghan civil war from slipping into Pakistan. The consolidation of the Pakistan army’s control in FATA is to limit the effects of the Afghan civil war from taking roots inside Pakistan, because demographically two of Pakistan’s provinces, Baluchistan and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) share a closer affinity with Afghanistan than they do with Pakistan and can be rightly considered as a enclaves of Afghan influence inside Pakistan.

Hence, the United States’ demarche for Pakistan to seal its western borders with Afghanistan is undertaken with the view that if its politically created government in Kabul is to survive, the Pushtuns must not be allowed to reorganize themselves and challenge the government in Kabul. As far as Pakistan is concerned, the sealing of the Durand Line offers Pakistan the opportunity to limit the scope and effects of the Afghan civil war inside Pakistan, because in this scenario Pakistan is forced to support the United States and this means, that it is no longer capable of supporting its historic allies, the Pushtuns. This lack of support creates problems for Pakistan, because it has a Pushtun population of its own and the deployment of Pakistan army in FATA was designed to prevent the Pakistani Pushtuns from entering Afghanistan and siding with the Afghan Pushtuns in the Afghan civil war. Pakistan wishes to avoid this possibility, because if it fails to seal the Durand Line, the United States would be inclined to increase its military operations to include Pakistan’s FATA and thus, the Afghan civil war would enter Pakistan.

There is a valid argument to be made that the real reason for this is prevent the Taliban/Al-Qaeda from seeking sanctuaries in Pakistan and to contain them within areas, where they can be isolated and killed. There is no denying the fact that the Taliban enjoy a mythical reverence and popularity in Pakistan’s NWFP and the deployment of Pakistan army inside FATA is two fold; one to prevent Pakistanis from slipping into Afghanistan to support the Pushtuns, and inter alia the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, forces and secondly, to act as the anvil to the American hammer, which is seeking to destroy the Taliban/Al-Qaeda forces inside Afghanistan. The unmistakable reality is that as long as there is Taliban/Al-Qaeda resistance inside Afghanistan and as long as the Taliban/ Al-Qaeda exists, Pakistan’s NWFP will never be secured within the writ of the government of Pakistan and will continue to act as the fountainhead of Islamic fundamentalism and preaching religious intolerance within Pakistan. The only way Pakistan can tackle this problem is to help the United States defeat the menace of a militant Islam inside Pakistan first and thereby, removing its financial support mechanisms, ideological centers, sources of human resources, which encourage and feed the conflict inside Afghanistan.

Therefore, for peace to exist in Afghanistan, it is imperative that whole Taliban culture and the Al-Qaeda support for the conflict, which exists within Pakistan, must be destroyed.

However, this is a problem and the problem is manifested in the nature of the local politics of the province. The fact that the NWFP province’s ruling party is a religious minded party implies that the real source of Pushtun resistance to Kabul and the Americans is located not in Afghanistan, but in Pakistan. The religious party Mutihda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), which governs NWFP and Baluchistan, as a part of the coalition, is demographically supported by Afghan émigrés to Pakistan and the Afghans who support the MMA, wish to recreate the Taliban experience within Pakistan. As long as this reality exists, it would be very difficult to end the conflict in Afghanistan, because the MMA thrives off anti-United States and anti-western rhetoric. This rhetoric is focused towards the Afghan émigrés, who support the MMA and thus, there is a well-established linkage between the MMA and the Pushtun supporters, who also support the revival of Pushtun power in Afghanistan. Hence, the MMA indirectly supports a revisionist policy in Afghanistan aimed at over throwing the Karzai regime, because of the political expediencies of the provincial and national politics in Pakistan.

The MMA has no political platform other than the introduction of sharia or Islamic law and it advocates such a policy simply to appease the requirements for staying in power. The other political support base of the MMA is the Pakistanis, who were educated in the Wahhabi madarassas financed by Saudi Arabia. It is this group, which is the greatest threat to peace and stability inside Afghanistan and to Pakistan’s domestic political security. They are apolitical in their outlook to the extent they support the revival of the Taliban inspired regime not only in Afghanistan, but also in Pakistan and are prepared to fight for the attainment of their goals. They view the government in Afghanistan as non-Islamic and their opinion of the government of Pervaiz Musharraf, in Pakistan, is that it is a puppet of the United States. Their overall believe is that sharia can only be reinforced in Afghanistan by first imposing it in Pakistan and towards this end, they see the removal of the Musharraf government as the sina qua non of removing the United States’ and western influence from Afghanistan. The greatest threat to imposition of sharia, according to them, is the Musharraf government because it is seeking to deny them a political base inside Pakistan, from where they can wage a war of attrition inside Afghanistan.

The military led government of Musharraf himself in the Pakistani politics ironically facilitated the rise of the Pakistani Taliban group. The rise of MMA and its core constituency of the Pakistani Taliban were made possible, when the Musharraf government chose to marginalize the mainstream politically moderate, but corrupt parties in Pakistan. The vacuum, which was created by the absence of the Muslim League (ML) and the Pakistan’s People Party (PPP) and their alphabetically dysfunctional sub-political divisions, was filled by the MMA. It was filled by the MMA, because the military in Pakistan miscalculated in that sense that it could use the MMA to give the government an electoral majority. The idea was to use the MMA and their supporters to win electoral power and then allow the MMA to slip into political oblivion, but instead the MMA used the military’s fear of ML and PPP to propel itself into power, from where it would have a political support base to launch its program of implementing sharia in Pakistan as a prelude towards getting rid of the western influence inside Afghanistan. The real aim of the MMA is to defeat the intentions of the Musharraf government by seeking alliances with the ML and PPP and is to seek its ouster from Pakistani politics. Afterwards, the MMA hopes to arrive at some sort of a modus vivendi with the ML and PPP in the post-Musharraf.

The MMA in the ultimate sense is not interested in the politics of ML or the PPP, as much as it hopes to use and exploit the ML and the PPP’s antipathy for Musharraf government to aid in the furtherance of its own political aims; the implementation of a theocratic ideology and in that sense, both the ML and the PPP are seen as a hurdle, but also as necessary stepping stones towards the attainment of a politically sustainable Wahhabi theology in Pakistan. The overall aim of Wahhabism and its establishment in the NWFP is to spread it, as a doctrinal believe into the regions of Central Asia, towards Iran and into Kashmir and even into western China and thus, hope to recreate the Muslim caliphate (ummah) in the world. To most sane observers this idea might sound like utopian non-sense, but the danger lies in discounting the emotional aspect, which the ideal has in the believe value system of the MMA and its Pakistani Taliban oriented theological constituency. The MMA and its supporters are, therefore, aiming for the establishment of a “pax deo” or a peace of God in Pakistani politics. Consequently, to the MMA, national borders and national state interests are meaningless and what matter is the amorphous nature of the Muslim ummah dominating the world and accepting the sovereignty of God as its final authority.

Hence, the first step towards normalizing the situation in Afghanistan would be the removal of this political philosophy mixed within religious believe system and the only effective, long term denial of a Taliban resurgence would be to deny the MMA and its supporters their political base in Pakistan. In this sense, the Pakistani government has two options. One; to institute governor’s rule in NWFP or martial law and remove the government of MMA and to replicate something similar in Baluchistan and hold new provincial elections. This would mean giving the nascent democratic re-birth in Pakistan an untimely abortion and the question is; will the west, which would like to see democracy revive itself in Pakistan, be willing to allow this possibility. The second options is to allow the MMA to continue in power and thus, hope to prove them as politically ineffective by raising bureaucratic hurdles in their way and constitutionally them denying them dejure political status. It would seem that the government of Pakistan has opted for the second option, because it seems to be the less problematic of the two.

In the end, the political pressure on the Musharraf government, from its western patrons, will convince the government to cut short the life expectancy of the MMA governments in NWFP and Baluchistan. The reason being, that by allowing the MMA in power, the western powers will find themselves in an extremely difficult situation vis-à-vis their departure schedules from Afghanistan. There should be no doubts that the United States, given its interests, would favor the dissolution of democracy in Pakistan than risk an infinite military and economic and political commitment in Afghanistan. The United States realizes that it must not leave its efforts in Afghanistan unfinished, because that would create another political vacuum and the situation would simply revert to the conditions, which fermented the Taliban phenomena to power. However, in order to insure that survival of its political machinations in Afghanistan, it is critical that Pushtun influence and power be severely curtailed and that means limiting the Pushtuns’ access to political and traditional sanctuaries inside Pakistan, which in turn implies that MMA governments be removed from power and the support for the Pushtuns, from Taliban minded Pakistanis, be stopped unconditionally. Hence, for the United States to leave Afghanistan and have its interests protected strategically, it is crucial for it to de-Talibanize Pakistan, because the success of the United States war in Afghanistan rests on its ability to defeat the forces of political revisionism in Pakistan, which are supporting the political and military challenges to the United States interests in Afghanistan.

There should be no mistakes or doubts that the United States will allow Pakistan the luxury to experiment with implementing sharia despite the United States’ paeans to Pakistan’s contribution in the war against terrorism. The United States cannot afford to let Afghanistan regress into anarchy, because that would endlessly fuel the civil war and worse than, encourage the regional nations like Iran, Russia and India and Pakistan, to intervene in Afghanistan and seek to secure their interests. The only way that the United States can prevent the regional powers from entering the politics of Afghanistan is by making sure that their strategic interests are not threatened; in the sense, which prompts them to re-enter the Afghan politics in order to secure their national interests. Thus, the prevention of foreign interests in Afghanistan resides in the ability of the United States to neutralize the support of the Pushtuns in Pakistan and the United States will exert insufferable political pressure on Pakistan to make absolutely certain that it does not jeopardize American interests in Afghanistan. This political pressure will be applied as soon as the United States can achieve something of a political normalcy in Iraq and once that happens, its attentions will turn towards Afghanistan and eventually to Pakistan.

The fact that the United States is military engaged in deploying its forces outside the cities in Afghanistan and is expediting the movement of the Pakistani army into FATA and recently was silent on the questions of democracy in Pakistan, suggests that it has made up its minds to tackle the problem of Islamic militancy in Pakistan. The fulcrum of this policy will be the Musharraf government. The Musharraf government will be given a choice to either deal with the problems of Islamic militancy in Pakistan or be removed and since Musharraf does not enjoy domestic political support, he will have to agree to the United States’ demarche in order to keep the legitimacy of his rule in Pakistan. In the end, the experiment of democracy in Pakistan will suffer, and from this political gene splicing, there is no guarantee, what the next off spring of political creatures will emerge in Pakistan and what will be the final costs, which Pakistan will have to bear and pay in the final analysis. The future is extremely uncertain for Pakistan, but what is certain is that Pakistanis and their political establishments, military and the politicians, will be forced to learn from their mistakes. The nation will, unfortunately respond by, blindly re-enact the “place the blame” game and the perpetual rote excuses of escaping accountability will be mouthed verbatim by placing the whole debacle on an anti-Muslim, anti-Pakistan conspiracy amid cries of betrayal by its friends.

Thus, the tragedy for Pakistan will be that not only will it repeat the mistakes of the past, but also sadly, it will also not learn from them. There will be no peace in Afghanistan, as the conflict will continue endlessly and the Afghan wills suffer perpetually. The lack of peace will mean that the United States will become embroiled in the domestic politics of Afghanistan in a winless situation with the gloomy reality that it has no policy options. The United States cannot leave Afghanistan and allow the country to disintegrate into chaos and thus, risk losing its political gains since the collapse of the Taliban regime in 2001. If it opts to stay involved in Afghanistan, it will have to take sides in the Afghan civil war and make an active contribution in that war, through both its blood and treasure. What the United States is experiencing in Afghanistan is the ageless dilemma of the invaders – it is easy to invade Afghanistan, but difficult to politically and militarily pacify the country and it is impossible to leave the nation without suffering any political consequences.

The curse of Afghanistan is that any nation, which invades it, ends up paying a huge political cost in terms of its domestic policy, from which the invader never recovers. The Soviet Union’s military invasion of Afghanistan led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and Pakistan’s political invasion of Afghanistan led to the rise of militant Islam within Pakistan. What will be the final cost for the United States in Afghanistan and who will repeat the mistakes after it has left Afghanistan? Hence, the real question is not if there will be peace in Afghanistan, but who will suffer next trying to politically influence the peace in Afghanistan.