Afghanistan (46 page)

The Pakistan Dimension

“It is impossible to sustain Afghanistan if we lose Pakistan” is how former House of Representatives speaker Newt Gingrich sees it, and he is correct.
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Pakistan’s historical relationship with Afghanistan has been, despite improvements in recent years, largely hostile. Pakistan’s relationship with the US is marked by low levels of transparency and trust, despite having been allies in the Cold War years. From Kabul, it appears that Pakistan is at the root of many of Afghanistan’s intractable problems, even those that to others may be seen to have indigenous origins.
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Unless Pakistan is stabilized and its downward spiral is turned around, Afghanistan’s war will be fueled by Pakistan’s perceptions of insecurity and waged from a sanctuary on its territory.

Pakistan’s foreign policy is still dominated by the security competition with India and Pakistan’s internal strife. The Pakistan military has spent years trying to reconcile its need for a security relationship with the US—along with China and Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s traditional allies—with its belief that the Afghan insurgents and the Pakistani groups that supported the insurgency in Kashmir are still, despite all recent occurrences to the contrary, controllable and a vital asset to Pakistan’s national security, especially with regard to India.
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The military and the security services owe much of their preeminence in the political and, increasingly, economic sphere to the perception that the nation is under an imminent external threat—mostly from India—that is aiming to use internal divisions to tear Pakistan apart; and, given the intense internal strife, it is easy for many citizens to believe this claim.

If Pakistan is not to drag down Afghanistan in this quest to assure their own security interests there and keep India out, the US and the international community need to work for better relations between the two countries. While Afghan recognition of the Durand Line as the legitimate international border would contribute to a renewed
relationship, it is not likely under the current Afghan government. It would be hard for an ethnic Pushtun Afghan head of state to be seen to have given away Afghanistan’s claims to the lost patrimony of the lands between the Durand Line and the Indus.

In its relations with Pakistan, the US needs to insist on action against the insurgency that threatens Afghanistan, not just the ones being waged at home. Until there is evidence that Pakistan is actually moving against the sanctuaries of the Afghan insurgency, how much its relations with the US can be improved is limited. Similarly, as long as the international presence in Afghanistan is dependent on bulk cargo and fuel being delivered to Karachi and trucked to Afghanistan over a tenuous 1,250-mile supply route—although some cargoes can be airlifted in and there is an effort to bring cargoes in by rail through central Asia—the pressure the US can put on Pakistan to change its policies will also be limited.
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Pakistan does not have to threaten to close the supply route. It can effectively close it at any time by deciding to tolerate insurgent action against it unless concessions are made. Pakistan effectively has tremendous leverage over US policy through the fact that, in the words of US undersecretary of defense Ashton Carter, “Next to Antarctica, Afghanistan is probably the most incommodious place, from a logistics point of view, to be trying to fight a war.”
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The US relationship with Pakistan is especially challenging in this situation. The US needs to keep Pakistan’s nuclear capability secure and safe and prevent additional proliferation to more dangerous potential threats. In the longer term, it is to everyone’s advantage for a future that sees Pakistan living in peace with India; and if this is ever to be achieved, it is likely that the US will have to be a facilitator. Until then, the US must work to counter Pakistan’s policies in Afghanistan, to make it clear to Pakistan that its national security will be better served by relying on its economic strength in Afghanistan and participating in the international effort there than continuing failed policies. The US also needs to continue to work with Pakistan’s military and security services to build a counter-insurgency capability that does more than encourage home-grown insurgents to instead take their battle over the Durand Line.

US aid and support to Pakistan will have to, first, address the
weakened state and, second, to give the US a degree of contact and leverage with Pakistan outside the military, which is something it has lacked in recent decades. American unpopularity in Pakistan makes conditions and milestones in such aid politically unpalatable, as the controversy over the Kerry-Lugar foreign aid bill in 2009 demonstrated, with the accountability provisions of the law subjected to criticism, initiated by the military, that they are an insult to Pakistan’s sovereignty. Yet US political realities require accountability, as much as this is resented by Pakistanis, if the aid flow is going to be of a size and scope that is going to have a real impact in Pakistan. The US needs assurance that its aid is being used as agreed, and verification should be done on a government-to-government basis as much as possible to meet the requirements for careful oversight and accounting and to ensure that the money is not going to the pockets of the ruling elites, as much appeared to do in the past.
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Despite all they have done to keep Afghanistan in a state of conflict, it remains that the Pakistan military is not the real enemy of the US and should be viewed as a genuine if reluctant ally, as the military, like it or not, remains the most important single institution in a country where civil society remains weak and politics has hardly exceeded the lowest expectations. American policymakers also need to make clear to their own electorate why there is a need to engage with Pakistan so closely, as Pakistan has not been presented in a favorable light by either the media or its own actions. Otherwise, withdrawal or escalation, disengaging or sending in troops to resolve Pakistan’s security problems, may appear appealing even if both are likely to prove disastrous. Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate, backed direct US military action against targets in Pakistan.
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It is not realistic to expect that the Pakistani military will believe that the US has the capability to succeed in Afghanistan if the US electorate does not also believe it. The continued cost in lives and money and the difficulty in identifying meaningful progress has made this later goal problematic.

The elections of 2008 and the series of crises leading up to them offer a potential for a turning point for what may be the best—or possibly the last—chance for democracy to flower in Pakistan. The insurgents, seemingly poised to march on Islamabad, were put on
the defensive by the military, an indication that they were willing to fight when pressed. US UAV strikes are benefiting from Pakistani intelligence targeting, indicating a renewed cooperation despite recent hostility to the campaign. Leaders willing to oppose the TTP, TNSM, and terrorists have been able to hold on to power in the NWFP and FATA and are not being pushed out.

In the long term, dealing with these threats requires the rebuilding of civil society in Pakistan. The years of military rule worsened Pakistan’s crisis of governance, weakening civil officials to the point of impotence and leading to the increasing politicization and corruption of what the average Pakistani sees as “the face” of government. Civil courts are slow and frustrating, making Sharia courts, with their cachet of Islamic social justice, often appear to be appealing alternatives. The insurgents in Swat won approval from many for their goal of putting a Sharia legal system in place in 2009, but what resulted was nothing an alim would have recognized as Sharia. Social justice elements of Islam, often neglected in recent years, have been appropriated by the insurgents to gain a degree of mass support where people cannot rely on ties of ethnicity or religious practice in the absence of a civil system. Taxation power has been used almost exclusively against those who lack the political connections to avoid it. Many have not seen the benefits of recent economic growth, but did of course feel the impact of the downturn that followed them. Rebuilding Pakistan’s state educational system, the failure of which has led to the rise of the madrassas, is often seen as the most important element of rebuilding civil society, an effort that has unfortunately received limited amounts of recent US aid; the post-2001 aid effort had focused on security-related funding, especially for military hardware. If Pakistan can do these things, then it may be easier to reconcile its policy interests with that of the Afghans and other regional players. The prospects for a better relationship with India, which, in the waning years of the Musharraf regime, seemed to only await a stronger government with greater legitimacy in Islamabad to proceed, but have since been frozen, could be a real possibility.

The threat posed by the Pakistan insurgency is not simply radical Pushtun lashkars entering Peshawar. Some action by the insurgents may
be the trigger that tips Pakistan over the edge into ungovernability, but the insurgency is not the root cause of the chaos. The military remains cohesive enough to prevent the insurgents from seizing power by force of arms. The problem is that the military’s action could then turn out to be more damaging that anything the insurgents could do directly. The insurgents may be unlikely to take control with a small well-directed minority. They may become a catalyst for wider concerns and polarization, pushing Pakistan from its current decades-long crisis of governance into ungovernability.
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In the words of Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, “we can expect a slow, insidious long-burning fuse of fear, terror and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partially unwilling, to douse.”
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“In Pakistan, all the solutions are long term but all the risks are short term,” said Dr. Marvin Weinbaum, a former State Department official.
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Pakistan’s structural and historical crises are such that a major transformation of the country and its institutions will be needed if the country is to endure. Such a transformation can only be brought about by the Pakistanis themselves, but the US can help Pakistan with its internal struggles and address the need to recreate a strong civil society. The US should aim to expand and empower democratic policies and institutions. Economic aid and security aid are both important. There is a need to rally the economic community to realize that the future of Pakistan is important to both democracy and stability. China and Saudi Arabia certainly have an interest in its stability. Convincing them that it is worth it for them to invest in this long-term process will be a challenge. Winning or losing the conflicts in Afghanistan against terrorism, insurgency, and narcotics will all be affected by Pakistan’s evolution or devolution in the next 5–10 years.

CHAPTER NINE

“
Prestige is everything in this kind of warfare.”

—C.E. Callwell (of insurgency)

“NATO’s future is on the line here.”

Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke (of Afghanistan)

“A
fghanistan is not a graveyard. It is my home. People do not live in a graveyard. You cannot equate the presence of the US and the coalition in Afghanistan today, who came to help, with those of the past, empires or otherwise, that tried to conquer or control” are the words of Afghanistan’s defense minister Rahim Wardak.
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However, to those Afghans fighting against Wardak’s soldiers and their coalition allies, the continuity between them and the would-be conquerors of the past is obvious. For them, fighting with the aid of Pakistani security services and Arab supporters is what they started against the Soviets and Communist Afghans in 1978, continued against the Islamic State of Afghanistan government in the 1990s, and have revived after 2001. There has been little incentive for them to change, and most of them apparently think that they, eventually, will defeat the coalition and the Kabul government as they defeated the Soviets and their Afghan allies.

If history has shown that “empires” do poorly in Afghanistan, it is not because Afghans are intrinsically destructive to them. Nor, despite what Al Qaeda and the Taliban may claim, should the Afghan reaction to the US presence be equated to that which has led Afghanistan to be called “the graveyard of empires.” Empires are proud, big and slow to learn, and interested in their own power and politics much more than those of the countries in which they are involved. When empires apply templates developed elsewhere to Afghanistan, they do not realize they are making bad policy decisions by default until it is too late. Empires tend to rely on armed force, which is less effective in Afghanistan in the absence of a visible center of gravity and where overthrowing and seizing state power is all too easy and consolidating and retaining power very difficult. Empires also discover that when things go bad in Afghanistan, they do so rapidly and with few potential ways to reverse a deteriorating situation. At this point, the empires tend to find that they have better things to do than invest further resources in Afghanistan and thus abandon the conflict, leaving the Afghans to face the economic and political damage. But this defeat and failure tends to follow the empires home from Afghanistan, because it was there, not Afghanistan, that defeat had its roots. The conditions that cause the empire to withdraw, whether lack of resources, will, or failure to adapt to challenging conditions, can become fatal flaws when faced with less peripheral threats. Afghanistan itself does not defeat the empires. The empires defeat themselves.
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A Divided Counter-Insurgency

The absence of a unitary strategy has meant that hard-won successes on the part of the US, coalition, Afghans, NGOs and others in each area—military, development, reconstruction, governance, the economy—have not been pulled together to build a secure nation-state. There is no US strategy that cuts across these spheres of conflicts and can reach across the borders. Coalition members impose their own restrictions on participation. Pakistan has to counter the same threats, but cooperation with integrated grand strategy that involves the US appears an unrealistic goal as long as the primacy of the Indian threat and the willingness to tolerate sanctuaries for Afghan insurgents are the most visible manifestation of a
highly nationalistic strategy that treats the US and its Afghan allies with continued wariness.