Le Monde, France

Threat of Failure in Afghanistan

By Laurent Zecchini

Translated by Bethany Kibler

February 13, 2008

France - Le Monde - Original Article (French)

The decision by Englishman Paddy Ashdown not to pursue the position of Coordinator of Action and International Aid is not good news for Afghanistan.  By using his veto to oppose Ashdown’s nomination, President Hamid Karzai illustrated both the fragility of his power and his fear of seeing the former representative of the International community in Bosnia set himself up as the western “proconsul” in the Muslim world.  To be sure, the autocratic manner in which Lord Ashdown exerted his mandate in Sarajevo suggests that Karzai’s unease was not unfounded.

But, a new international approach, one which takes into account, in a global fashion, the political, economic, and military aspects of the Afghan crisis, built on a firm determination to combat the production and traffic of opium, is exactly what is missing in Afghanistan.  Lord Ashdown would have been up to such a task.  Until only recently NATO and Western officials claimed that victory there would be laborious, but inevitable.  The suicide bombers and the Improvised Explosive Devices (IED) which had became the terror of the NATO troops in the south, were nothing but the “desperate” manifestation of a Taliban on the run.  If they don’t say this now, it’s because the Emperor has no clothes.  An American official, Richard Boucher, head of the Afghan issue for the State Department, just acknowledged this fact before the Senate: “Success is not assured.”

With shocking simultaneity, four reports by military experts recently sounded the same alarm:  without a fundamental revision of current strategy (indeed, the lack thereof) by the international community in Afghanistan,  the country runs the risk of becoming a “Failed State,” and will quickly become, if it hasn’t already, the nexus of international terrorism.  Six years after 9/11, Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden enjoy a state of quasi-impunity in the vast no man’s land between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

By calculation as much as by sheer blindness, the Unites States has for a long time leaned on the Pakistani President, Pervez Musharraf, without seeing that Musharraf would never dare to check the Islamist faction within his army, those complicit with the Taliban.  Historically, Washington has been constant in its missteps in Afghanistan.  During the Soviet period, America favored the arming of the most anti-western elements within the Mujahedeen – Gulbuddin Hekmatyar – to the detriment of the more moderate elements – Ahmad Shah Massoud.

In February 1989, when the Red Army withdrew, Afghanistan ceased to be a player in the Cold War.  The indifference of the international community was fodder for Taliban extremism.  Today, Musharraf’s regime is in rapid decline, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is the dangerous traveling companion of Al Qaeda, and the United States is discovering that the millions of dollars thrown each year at their Pakistani “Ally” have not, contrary to what they had intended, been used to fight Al Qaeda.

Indeed, Islamabad’s objectives in Afghanistan have nothing in common with Washington’s.  Even beyond the fact that the ethnic solidarity of Pashtu Afghanis and Pakistanis has always rendered the reality of a border at the “Durand Line”(contested by Kabul) illusory, Islamabad sees New Delhi’s sustained efforts to reinforce diplomatic and commercial ties with Afghanistan even more fodder for its longstanding obsession with Indian encirclement.

Pakistan’s historic desire to have a loyal regime in Kabul must only be exacerbated by the Indian game.  This, in part, explains the difficult relations between Presidents Karzai and Musharraf and Pakistan’s ambiguous policies towards the Taliban.  The United States fooled itself into believing that their financial windfall would suffice to win Musharraf’s support of their Afghan policy.

AMERICAN FRUSTRATION

The obsession of Pakistani Generals with not being supplanted, on the strategic plane, by the Indian army, ought to have convinced Washington to use its financial assistance as leverage to guide Islamabad to associating itself more clearly with US military objectives in Afghanistan.  The miring of NATO troops in the South of the country and the refusal of the majority of European capitals to dispatch more soldiers adds to the frustration of American officials.

This frustration is what explains the heavy charge recently made by the American Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, against the NATO countries.  “Most of the Europeans forces, the NATO forces, were not trained in counterinsurgency.  They were trained for the Fulda Gap,” he insisted, referring to the corridor separating East and West Germany during the Cold War.  For good measure, the former chief of the CIA accused Washington’s allies of increasing aerial bombardments, risking their alienation from the Afghan population by an accumulation of collateral damages. 

The double accusation comes at a bad time, in so far as it is directed primarily at very Atlanticist countries that are fighting in the south – Great Britain, Canada, Netherlands and Australia.  If it’s true that the NATO countries look to aerial mission to avoid direct contact with an enemy who has understood the lessons of asymmetric warfare, it is also true that the American propensity to use aerial strikes in partially settled zones has provoked fierce arguments among high-ranking British military officials.  It is certainly not certain, using the Iraqi yardstick, that the American army is in the best position to denounce the supposed inadequacy of the European armies in the Afghan mountains, and their inability to win the “hearts and minds” of the population.  At a moment when Washington, trying to avert the risk of failure in Afghanistan – which failure would strike a severe blow to the credibility of NATO – exhorts its allies to send more troops into the combat zone, Mr. Gates’ diatribe is not the best means to incite them to obey.

After the Dutch, the Canadians are threatening to withdraw their troops if they are not reinforced, and other countries, if they dare brave the displeasure of Washington, will eagerly follow suit.  In the short term, the principal risk that threatens Afghanistan is less a Taliban victory, than a NATO disintegration.