AFGHANISTAN/PAKISTAN:Barack Obama's plan to start withdrawing troops in 2011 could lead to further instability, writes MARY FITZGERALDForeign Affairs Correspondent
LONG BEFORE Barack Obama took office, a new term – Afpak – had crept into the lexicon of policymakers and analysts concerned with the troublesome lands in and around the Durand Line, the colonial-era boundary that today marks where Afghanistan ends and Pakistan begins. Here’s how Richard Holbrooke, now US special envoy to the region, explained it in March 2008: “We often call the problem Afpak . . . This is not just an effort to save eight syllables. It is an attempt to indicate and imprint in our DNA the fact that there is one theatre of war, straddling an ill-defined border.”
It is a region that so abounds with cautionary tales, from the Greeks to the Mughals, and from the British to the Soviets, that the description “graveyard of empires” has become threadbare with use. And now, more than 20 months after Holbrooke’s remarks, the ghosts of those empires past loom large over the Obama presidency, as the Afpak conundrum becomes the foreign policy issue most likely to define it. In a March 27th speech, Obama declared that the region had become a priority as he sketched the basic contours of a strategy that would include bolstering the US military and civilian presence in Afghanistan, along with fresh efforts to engage wider regional support to improve security there.
Nine months later, after much unseemly wrangling and accusations that Obama was dithering on the specifics, the strategy was recalibrated again in the shape of a pledge to deploy 30,000 more US troops, or three of the four extra brigades that had been requested by the US military commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal.
This, along with further commitments from Nato states, is expected to swell the ranks of the international military presence in Afghanistan next year to 150,000, some two thirds of which will be US forces. More than 40 nations have contributed troops to the mission, including Ireland, which has deployed seven members of the Defence Forces.
Announcing the troop increase during a speech at West Point on December 1st, Obama outlined a formidable list of objectives: denying al-Qaeda safe havens in the region; reversing the insurgents’ momentum in Afghanistan’s southern and eastern flanks; strengthening the Afghan national forces, and creating conditions for the transfer of responsibilities to the Afghans themselves.
But, for those parsing the speech in Kabul and Islamabad, one element stood out: the plan for a phased withdrawal of troops commencing from July 2011, giving those on the ground some 18 months to make substantial progress towards the ambitious stated goals.
Many wondered how the US would be able to achieve in such a paltry time what it had failed to do in the eight years since the Taliban government was ousted following the September 11th attacks. Hamid Karzai, declared president for another five-year term in November following a deeply flawed election that flew in the face of what were once much vaunted democratic aspirations for Afghanistan, has already contradicted the Obama plan by predicting the Afghan army and police will not be ready until 2014.
Several observers caution that imposing such a timeline could result in the Taliban merely waiting out the US exit, and reorganising with the aim of taking power in Kabul, as they did in 1996. This prospect only adds to the apprehensions of ordinary Afghans, torn between resentment of the foreign military presence and fear of a return to Taliban rule.
Talk of timeframes also has implications across the border, with some fretting that it reduces the chances of Islamabad cleaning up its act by completely severing links with Taliban leaders who were once allies, and who might again prove useful in forming a friendly – and malleable – government in Afghanistan after the US and Nato pull out. As regional specialist Ahmed Rashid asked recently: “Is it in Pakistan’s interest to antagonise the Afghan Taliban now, if they will be in power two or three years down the road?”
Few disagree that Pakistan’s own travails remain the gravest challenge. It is widely believed that al-Qaeda’s centre of gravity shifted over the border from Afghanistan in late 2001, with leading figures including Osama Bin Laden said to be hiding out in the badlands of Waziristan. This year the nuclear-armed state was forced to face up to the existential threat posed by the constellation of militant groups, including an indigenous Taliban, which had been allowed to flourish internally.
Suicide bombings in Pakistan have increased 20-fold since 2005, and earlier this year Taliban fighters took up positions just 60 miles from the capital. The ensuing fighting displaced more than two million people from their homes.
Islamabad claims that it has now successfully routed the Taliban in Swat and other areas of the North-West Frontier Province, and it talks of continued operations against militants in Waziristan.
However, questions remain as to whether all strands within Pakistan’s political and military establishment share the same professed strategy.
On a visit to Lahore in October, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton chided Islamabad for not doing more to apprehend al-Qaeda. “I find it hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn’t get them if they really wanted to,” she said caustically.
For its part, Pakistan still cleaves strongly to the notion that India poses the greatest threat to the region, and many within its military bristle at the perceived failure by the US to understand how deep their suspicions of Delhi run.
While the Obama administration has attempted to assuage these concerns with offers of security guarantees and greater regional co-operation with India, the US relationship with Pakistan remains prickly – a situation hardly helped by the latter’s weak government under Asif Ali Zardari, and rampant anti-American sentiment among its general public.
It all adds up to a pretty ominous picture for 2010 – a year few doubt will prove a defining moment for the now firmly entwined fortunes of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and one newly garlanded Nobel Peace laureate.