Nearly 15 years after its launch, the United States’ war in Afghanistan is still raging, making it the longest war in American history. Nowadays, the war is barely on the world’s radar, with only dramatic developments, like America’s recent drone-strike assassination of Afghan Taliban Chief Akhtar Mohammad Mansour, getting airtime. But Afghans continue to lose their friends, neighbors, and children to conflict, as they have since the 1979 Soviet invasion, which triggered the refugee exodus that brought the parents of Omar Mateen, the killer of 49 people in a nightclub in Orlando, to the US.
America’s invasion, launched by former President George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, was intended to dismantle Al Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power, thereby ensuring that Afghanistan would no longer serve as a safe base of operations for extremists. With those goals ostensibly accomplished, Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, reduced troop levels in the country, even declaring a year and a half ago that the war was “coming to a responsible conclusion.”
But, with a resurgent Taliban stepping up attacks, the war has raged on, exacting staggering costs in blood and treasure. One key reason is Pakistan, which has harbored the Afghan Taliban’s command and control, while pretending to be a US ally.
If there were any doubts about Pakistan’s duplicity, they should have been eliminated in 2011, when Osama bin Laden was killed in a military garrison town near the country’s capital. Yet, five years later, Pakistan still has not revealed who helped bin Laden hide for all those years. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has continued to shower the country with billions of dollars in aid.
The assassination of Mansour on Pakistan’s territory, near its border with Iran and Afghanistan, has exposed, yet again, the deceitfulness of Pakistani officials, who have repeatedly denied sheltering Taliban leaders. Like the raid by US Navy SEALs that killed bin Laden, Mansour’s assassination required the US to violate the sovereignty of a country that, as one of the largest recipients of American aid, should have been supporting the effort. The question is whether the US will acknowledge the obvious lesson this time and change course.
While Mansour’s killing may be, as Obama put it, “an important milestone” in the effort to bring peace to Afghanistan, it also exposed America’s policy failures under the Obama administration, rooted in the desire not to confront either Pakistan or even the Taliban too strongly. Obama’s objective was to preserve the option of reaching a Faustian bargain with the Taliban – a power-sharing arrangement to underpin a peace deal – facilitated by the Pakistani military. That is why the US has not branded the Afghan Taliban – much less Pakistan’s rogue intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) – a terrorist organization, and instead has engaged in semantic jugglery.
This approach goes beyond rhetoric. America took almost 15 years to carry out its first drone strike in Pakistan’s sprawling Balochistan province, even though the Afghan Taliban leadership established its command-and-control structure there almost immediately after the US military intervention ousted it from Afghanistan. Instead, the US concentrated its drone strikes in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, allowing the Taliban leaders to remain ensconced.
The US has even made direct overtures to the Taliban, in order to promote negotiations aimed at securing peace through a power-sharing arrangement. It allowed the Taliban to set up a de facto diplomatic mission in Doha, Qatar, in 2013. A year later, it traded five senior Taliban leaders who had been jailed at Guantánamo Bay for a captured US Army sergeant.
What the US did not know was that the Taliban’s founder, Mullah Mohammed Omar, died in 2013 in a hospital in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Omar’s death was kept secret for more than two years, during which time ISI claimed to be facilitating contacts with him.
Finally, last July, Mansour was installed as the Taliban’s new leader – and he was not interested in peace talks. It was Mansour’s intransigence that spurred the US to change its tactics. Instead of using carrots to secure Taliban support for a peace deal, the Obama administration is now using very large sticks.
But even if this approach manages to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, it will probably not be enough to secure a lasting peace deal. If the US is to succeed at ending the war in Afghanistan, it must do more than change tactics; it must rethink its fundamental strategy.
The reality is that the medieval Taliban will neither be defeated nor seek peace until their Pakistani sanctuaries are eliminated. No counterterrorism campaign has ever succeeded in a country when the militants have found refuge in another. While Obama recognizes the imperative of eliminating terrorist sanctuaries, he has failed to do what is needed.
Simply put, bribing Pakistan’s military will not work. Over the last 14 years, the US has given Pakistan more than $33 billion in aid and armed it with lethal weapons, ranging from F-16s and P-3C Orion maritime aircraft to Harpoon anti-ship missiles and TOW anti-armor missiles. And yet Pakistan continues to provide the Afghan Taliban a safe haven within its borders.
A better approach would be to link aid disbursement to concrete Pakistani action against militants, while officially classifying ISI as a terrorist entity. Such a move would send a strong signal to Pakistan’s military – which views the Taliban and other militant groups as useful proxies and force multipliers vis-à-vis Afghanistan and India – that it can no longer hunt with the hounds and run with the foxes.
Obama’s decision last October to prolong indefinitely US involvement in Afghanistan means not only that he will leave office without fulfilling his promise to end Bush-era military entanglements, but also that the US will continue to fight the war on the wrong side of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Perhaps his successor will finally recognize the truth: the end of the war in Afghanistan lies in Pakistan.
The West must hold Arab monarchs to account for spawning Wahhabi extremism
By Brahma Chellaney, Washington Times, June 15, 2016
In the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history, it is pointless to debate whether the Orlando killings constitute just an act of Islamist terror or also an act of hate directed at the LGBT community. Every act of terror springs from hatred of its target, be it a nation or government or community.
The real issue centers on the ideology that is inspiring a spate of Islamist terrorist attacks in the world. The scourge of Islamist terror is tied to Wahhabism, an insidious ideology.
Make no mistake: Wahhabi fanaticism is terrorism’s ideological mother, whose offspring include groups such as al Qaeda, the Taliban, Laskar-e-Taiba, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and Islamic State, all of which blend hostility toward non-Sunnis and anti-modern romanticism into nihilistic rage.
The only way to defeat an enemy driven by ideology is to emasculate its ideology. The West won the Cold War not so much by military means as by spreading the ideas of political freedom and market capitalism that helped suck the lifeblood out of communism’s international appeal, making it incapable of meeting the widespread yearning for a better, more open life.
Today, stemming the spread of the ideology that has fostered “jihad factories” holds the key to containing terrorism. The export of Wahhabism by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and some other oil sheikhdoms is the source of modern Islamist terror.
Yet the rest of the world — in thrall to Arab money and reliant on Arab oil and gas — has largely turned a blind eye to the jihadi agenda of some Arab monarchs. In fact, with Western support, tyrannical oil monarchies in Riyadh, Doha and elsewhere were able to ride out the Arab Spring, emerging virtually unscathed.
Saudi Arabia has faced little international pressure, even on human rights. How the Saudi kingdom buys up world leaders is apparent from the Malaysian attorney general’s claim that Prime Minister Najib Razak received a $681 million “personal donation” from the Saudi royals. Saudi Arabia has given as much as $25 million to the Clinton Foundation.
There are signs, however, that the Western attitude toward Saudi Arabia might be beginning to change. German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said recently, “We must make it clear to the Saudis that the time of looking the other way is over.” After a married couple of Pakistani origin staged a mass shooting in San Bernardino, President Obama alluded to Wahhabism as a “perverted interpretation of Islam.”
No country has contributed more than Saudi Arabia to the international spread of Wahhabism, which is gradually snuffing out more liberal Islamic traditions in many countries. Jihadism and sectarianism indeed are institutionalized in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world named after its founder, commonly known as Ibn Saud.
Saud, who ruled for 20 years until his death, brought the central part of the Arabian Peninsula under his control with British assistance in 1932, establishing a desert kingdom tethered to Wahhabism, a messianic radicalism that was considered a fringe form of Islam until oil wealth transformed the once-barren Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest country without a river.
Since the oil-price boom of the 1970s, Saudi Arabia has spent more than $200 billion on its global jihad project, including funding Wahhabi madrassas, mosques, clerics and books. Western powers actually encouraged the kingdom — as an antidote to communism and the 1979 anti-U.S. Iranian revolution — to export Wahhabism.
But the wave of new attacks serve as a reminder that Wahhabi fanaticism is the root from which Islamist terrorists draw their ideological sustenance. As Vice President Joe Biden said in a 2014 Harvard speech, Saudi and other “allies’ policies wound up helping to arm and build allies of al Qaeda and eventually the terrorist Islamic State.”
Today, with its own future more uncertain than ever, the House of Saud is increasingly playing the sectarian card in order to shore up support among the Sunni majority at home and to rally other Islamist rulers in the region to its side. Having militarily crushed the Arab Spring uprising in Sunni-led but Shia-majority Bahrain, Saudi Arabia early this year executed its own Arab Spring leader — Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr — who had led anti-regime Shia protests in 2011.
Before the execution, the kingdom formed an alliance of Sunni states purportedly to fight terrorism. The coalition included all the main sponsors of international terror, like Qatar and Pakistan. It was like arsonists pretending to be fire wardens.
According to a U.N. panel of experts, Saudi Arabia is currently engaged in war crimes in Yemen.
The Saudi royals seem to mistakenly believe that widening the sectarian fault lines in the Islamic world will keep them in power. By drawing legitimacy from jihadism and by being beholden to sectarianism, the royals could be digging their own graves. After all, fueling jihadism and sectarianism threatens to empower extremists at home and devour the royalty.
More broadly, the global war on terror cannot be won without closing the wellspring that feeds terrorism — Wahhabi fanaticism. Wahhabism is the ultimate source of the hatred that triggered September 11, 2001, and the recent string of attacks, from Paris and Brussels to San Bernardino and Orlando. Shutting that wellspring demands that the West hold Arab monarchs to account for spawning the kinds of dangerous extremists that are imperiling regional and international security.
The late Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew rightly said in 2003 that success of the war on terror hinges more on controlling the “queen bees” — the “preachers” of the “deviant form of Islam” — than on just killing the “worker bees” (terrorists). As long as Arab petro-dollars keep “jihad factories” in business, there will be suicide killers.
• Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and the author, most recently, of “Water, Peace, and War” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
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