Mohammed Ayoob
Washington’s attempt to find a resolution to the Afghan conflict militarily while continuously antagonizing Iran and chastising Pakistan is bound to end in failure.
The most recent carnage in Afghanistan last Saturday that left over one hundred people dead has once again made clear that the threatfrom the Taliban, and now increasingly from ISIS as well, is not likely to disappear any time soon. Indeed the menace seems to be growing as the Afghan regime is increasingly immobilized because of the standoff between President Ashraf Ghani and his rival Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. Instead of providing stability the agreement between the two contenders for the presidency to share power has left the government paralyzed.
The spate of terrorist attacks seems to be intensifying with the emergence of ISIS in Afghanistan as a serious challenger to the Taliban in that arena. But it is not just terrorism that is a threat to the regime. The government, despite the support of eleven thousand American boots on the ground and the Trump administration’s promise to send in an additional four thousand troops, is steadily losing territory to the Taliban and its other challengers. According to a recent report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, created by Congress in 2008, less than two-thirds of the country’s territory is under the government’s nominal control.
The Taliban has found it difficult to hold on to urban areas as their experience with Kunduz in northern Afghanistan in 2015 demonstrated. It is also true that their support is confined primarily to Pashtun-dominated areas and they have little traction among the Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek ethnic groups. But, given the multiple weaknesses of the regime, they have sufficient staying power to perpetuate a stalemate in the country and continue to make large parts of it ungovernable. As Seth Jones has put it succinctly, the Taliban are “too weak for victory, too strong for defeat.”
The increased American military presence, initially by four thousand additional troops, as promised by the Trump administration, is unlikely to make a substantial difference to this situation. This is the case because the administration and most analysts in the U.S. approach the Afghan conflict as a stand-alone issue largely isolated from what is happening in the region around it, especially from the interests and policies of its two major neighbors, Pakistan and Iran.
The administration has now begun to hold Pakistan responsible in part for the Taliban’s terrorist activities. It has also blamed Tehran for supporting the Taliban despite the unbridgeable ideological rift between Shia Iran and Sunni fundamentalist Taliban. But this is only the beginning of wisdom on the part of Washington and not a full realization of the fact that no solution to the Afghan conflict can be found unless it guarantees the fundamental interests of both Pakistan and Iran in that country as defined by Islamabad and Tehran respectively.
Pakistan has been an integral part of American calculations relating to Afghanistan from the time of the Soviet invasion of that country in 1980. It acted as the main conduit for the supply of American arms to Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet-supported government. It is true that Islamabad gained in terms of arms supply and that Washington turning a blind eye toward Pakistan’s clandestine nuclear program until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
But, by and large, the United States saw Pakistan’s value to itself as instrumental in nature. This is why American and Pakistani strategies began to diverge immediately after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. While the United States basically left Afghanistan to its anarchical fate, Pakistan allied itself with a faction of Pashtuns, mostly products of religious schools in Pakistan, known as the Taliban (literally students) that eventually came to power in Kabul in 1994 with the support of the Pakistan army.
Although Pakistan was forced to go along with the American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 because the Bush administration threatenedto bomb it into the Stone Age, it secretly continued to support factions of the Taliban and other terrorist networks engaged in fighting American forces because it considered them potential assets in terms of its Afghan policy as well as its dispute with India over Kashmir.
It is this disjuncture in U.S. and Pakistani objectives that lay at the base of severe tensions that have now surfaced dramatically in Washington’s relations with Islamabad. These tensions came to a head early this year. In his first tweet on New Year’s Day, Trump singled out Pakistan for harsh criticism. The tweet was followed by the announcement that Washington was freezing nearly all security aid to Pakistan, which amounts to $1.3 billion annually.
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