| Washington Report Archives (2006-2010) - 2009 July |
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2009, pages 22-23, 25
Two Views
Bombing “Af-Pak”: Lessons From History
Obama’s New Af-Pak Strategy
By Patrick Seale
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U.S. PRESIDENT Barack Obama has chosen to adopt a high-risk counter-insurgency strategy against the Taliban militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The choice is itself a pointer to the gravity with which Washington views the deteriorating situation in this vital theatre of war.
A clear signal of the new strategy was the sacking in mid-May of Gen. David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan considered too conventional, and his replacement by a counter-insurgency expert, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded America’s Joint Special Operations Command for five years, from 2003 to 2008.
One of McChrystal’s units captured Saddam Hussain in December 2003. He is also credited with tracking down and killing the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. More of the same cloak-and-dagger hard-hitting operations will now be expected of him.
The new strategy is said to have been adopted on the advice of Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. James Jones, Obama’s national security adviser.
Unwelcome developments across the region are challenging U.S. war aims, and are even threatening to make nonsense of America’s involvement in the war. In Afghanistan, for example, President Hamid Karzai is allying himself with notoriously cruel and corrupt warlords, no doubt in a bid to ensure his re-election next August. Among the men with whom he is said to be striking deals are Mohammad Qasim Fahim, a terrorist on America’s “most wanted” list, and Gulbuddin Hekmetyar, wanted by the United States for his links with Osama bin Laden. This is not the Afghanistan which America has sought to liberate and build.
Pakistan poses an even greater challenge. Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said on May 10 that its very survival was at risk from the Taliban. The next few weeks, he added, would be important in rolling back “this existential threat, a true threat to Pakistan’s very existence.”
What does the new U.S. strategy imply? It means, of course, being militarily agile, matching the insurgents’ hit-and-run tactics, and killing their leaders, when and where possible. But it also means the deliberate use of disproportionate force, even at the cost of massive civilian casualties.
The key idea is to make life so intolerably dangerous and harsh that the local population will desert the insurgents, and that both will lose the will to fight. That is the theory behind the strategy.
Israel adopted a similar counter-insurgency strategy in its war against Hamas in Gaza last December/January. It did not, however, have the desired effect, since Hamas remains very much in control of Gaza and may even have increased its legitimacy. The U.N. and several human rights organizations criticized Israel for the large-scale killing of civilians and the massive destruction of homes, mosques, schools, factories and agricultural land. But the use of heavy weapons against civilian targets was no accident. It was a deliberate strategy, although never officially acknowledged. The resort to disproportionate force to overwhelm the enemy, and make him despair of ever winning, is an essential aspect of counter-insurgency strategy.
What America and the Pakistan army are doing is not unlike what Israel attempted at Gaza. America’s use of Hellfire missile strikes by pilotless drones is a typical counter-insurgency technique. President Karzai has pleaded with the United States to stop the strikes because of the cost in civilian lives. “How can you expect a people who keep losing their children to remain friendly?” he asked in a taped interview with American television.
But General Jones objected: “We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back...We have to have a full complement of our offensive military power when we need it.” What he did not—and could not—say was that terrorizing and killing of civilians is part of the strategy.
Afghan sources said 147 civilians were killed by U.S. airstrikes the first week of May in the western province of Farah, and that many more suffered severe burns, as if from phosphorus bombs—another resemblance with Israel’s war in Gaza. The United States claimed the figure was exaggerated.
Under American pressure, the Pakistan army has also deliberately resorted to the disproportionate use of force, launching in May a sudden and massive assault on the Swat valley, which is said to have so far killed 700 militants. It also forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to run for their lives, thereby creating a vast and virtually unmanageable refugee problem.
To be fair, although Obama is doubling U.S. troops in Afghanistan from 32,000 at the end of December 2008 to 68,000 by the end of December 2009, he understands that military means alone will not be sufficient to defeat the Taliban. He is planning a surge in development assistance to both Afghanistan and Pakistan and he hopes to create conditions for an eventual negotiation with “moderate” Taliban.
But, in the meantime, counter-insurgency is a high-risk strategy because it sometimes has the opposite effect to what is intended. Instead of driving a wedge between the population and the militants it can bind them together in adversity. Instead of drying up the pool of jihadi recruits, it can swell their ranks.
Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have been destabilized by America’s war. The next six months will show whether the situation can be retrieved. If it cannot, there will have to be another change of strategy, perhaps something more radical like announcing a withdrawal of U.S. troops on the Iraqi model, and leaving the Afghans and the Pakistanis to work things out for themselves.
Graham Fuller, a former senior American intelligence officer, argued May 9 in The New York Times that the U.S. should recognise that its military presence in Afghanistan “has now become more the problem than the solution.” Fuller knows the area well. He was CIA station chief in Kabul and then vice chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council.
He does not think the Taliban can be separated from the fiercely nationalistic, tribalized and xenophobic Pashtuns, of whom there are more than 40 million astride the Afghan-Pakistan border. Far from bringing peace and security to the troubled region, the American occupation may be making the situation worse. He boldly advocates a U.S. withdrawal.
Obama himself has spoken of the need for an “exit strategy,” but he is not yet ready to make withdrawal the centerpiece of his strategy. He still wants to defeat al-Qaeda. He has yet to recognize that al-Qaeda is not a structured organization with its headquarters in a cave in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province. It has instead become a symbol for violent resistance to Western hegemony. In Fuller’s words, it has “metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world.”
Probably the best way to defeat the activists is to stop killing Muslims.
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East, and the author of The Struggle for Syria; also, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East; and Abu Nidal: A Gun for Hire. Copyright © 2009 Patrick Seale. Distributed by Agence Global.
Cambodia: A Sinister Precedent?
By William Pfaff
Last September, during the American presidential campaign, I wrote a column declaring that the United States had again invaded Cambodia, only this time “Cambodia” was Pakistan. President George W. Bush had ordered U.S. ground attacks on the Taliban inside Pakistan’s Tribal Territories, without Pakistan’s authorization.
That was also when Barack Obama’s foreign policy campaign platform was promising withdrawal from Iraq and military emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan, location of the “real” problem in the great war on terror.
A younger generation than mine, including senior military officers (not to speak of Barack Obama), may not know exactly why the United States and the South Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia in 1970, and what the result was. The invasion was a failure, and the result a humanitarian catastrophe.
Washington, frustrated in its war against the Communist Viet Cong in South Vietnam, which eventually included bombing on a scale greater than the bombing of Germany in the Second World War, decided it could solve its problem by an invasion to cut the Communist supply routes inside neutral Cambodia (which it nonetheless was also bombing: dropping 540 thousand tons of explosive on Cambodia over four years).
The invasion accomplished nothing except further destruction in Cambodia. It destroyed the U.S.-supported military government in Cambodia, and empowered the native Cambodian Communist resistance known as the Khmer Rouge, which eventually, in order to create a utopian society, killed some two million of its fellow Cambodians. (The later head of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale wrote of the bombing: “the emergent Communist party...profited greatly...[using] the widespread devastation and massacre of civilians [to justify] its brutal, radical policies.”)
Three years after the invasion, the Viet Cong, with its North Vietnamese allies, forced American forces to retreat from Vietnam, and by 1975 ruled the country. In Cambodia, the genocide had begun.
The invasion was occasion for Richard Nixon to declare that the invasion proved the U.S. was not “a second-rate power” nor “a pitiful helpless giant” standing by while “the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy...threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”
How long ago it seems—39 years! And here we are again. The United States, despite its plan to deploy nearly 70,000 troops this year in Afghanistan, finds itself and its NATO allies in danger of defeat by the Taliban guerrillas.
U.S. bombing, with remote-controlled “drones,” of the Pakistani Tribal Territories, where the Taliban take refuge among their Pathan [Pashtun] tribal kinsmen, has killed many people but has had no decisive effect on the fighting in Afghanistan.
American bombing inside Afghanistan is protested by Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who says the air-strikes are fast turning the Afghans against the U.S., which risks “losing the moral battle” against the Taliban. Gen. James L. Jones, U.S. national security adviser, says, “We can’t fight with one hand tied behind our back.” Karzai says, “How can you expect a people who keep losing their children to remain friendly?” Jones says of Karzai, “I think he understands that we have to have a full complement of our offensive military power when we need it.”
The former Pakistani military government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf was unwilling to send the Pakistan army into the Tribal Territories to attack the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
He is now ousted, and the civilian government led by President Ali Asif Zardari, put under immense pressure by Washington, and frightened by the success of the Taliban in operations outside the Tribal region, has agreed to the ground offensive now going on, in which Pakistani commanders are accompanied by U.S. liaison officers and air controllers.
U.S. Command in “Af-Pak” now has been transferred, in obvious urgency, to former Joint Special Operations commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal.
Will a special forces officer think that guerrillas with refuge in an inaccessible and unconquered region, amidst a tri-national ethnic population of some 40 million fellow-Pathans, can be beaten by guided bombs or Special Forces raids?
Or that an unenthusiastic Pakistani army will do the job? Or 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, when the Taliban can always refuse battle and pull back into the mountains?
Moreover, what is supposed to be accomplished by this war against the Taliban, which threatens to leave Afghanistan in ruins and to tear Pakistan apart? Do the Taliban threaten the United States? Most of them could not find the United States on a map. What have they ever done to the United States? What if the United States would just go away and leave the Pakistanis, Afghans and Pathans to settle this among themelves?
President Barack Obama says that the war will not be won by military means but by a “surge” of civilian development experts, reconstruction leaders and democracy teachers, such as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently told Congress that the U.S. is training. Will this “surge” get there in time? My own feeling is that President Obama is in over his head; and that the American military command, not knowing what else to do, is reverting to Vietnam, which most of its members were too young to experience.
William Pfaff is the author of eight books on American foreign policy, international relations, and contemporary history. Copyright © 2009 by Tribune Media Services International. All rights reserved.
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