WORLD VIEW:Afghanistan and Pakistan have long been shaping up as a security disaster zone, writes PAUL GILLESPIE
‘OBAMA’S VIETNAM?” ask Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria and John Barry. “Pakistan in peril,” writes William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books. “Bloody bewilderment in Kabul,” reports the International Herald Tribune in its account of how an audacious suicide attack on the Afghan justice and education ministries killed 20 people and injured 57 on the eve of this week’s visit to the city by Richard Holbrooke, Barack Obama’s special representative to Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The Taliban certainly ensured he saw the crux of the greatest foreign policy challenge facing Obama. In Pakistan, Holbrooke visited the city of Peshawar in the North West Frontier Province just as another bomb killed a popular governor there.
He heard how the Taliban and its Pakistani allies have captured Swat after a long battle with the Pakistani army, confining women to houses, blowing up girls’ schools, silencing music and closing barbers’ shops.
This is a rich, strategic region far from the Afghan border, within three hours of the capital Islamabad, and with ready access to Kashmir.
Explaining the significance of these facts, the well-known Pakistani journalist and author Ahmed Rashid says he has never been so disheartened or depressed in his life about the state of his country. It has a vital lack of leadership politically and militarily, its political parties squabble about petty disagreements rather than dealing with this major setback in Swat, the disastrous attack on Mumbai which originated in the same area, or the rapidly deteriorating Pakistani economy.
Reviewing Rashid’s new book, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, Dalrymple, an acclaimed writer on the region’s history and current affairs, gives a graphic picture of disintegration and policy failure there.
Agreeing with Rashid’s view that after the September 11th 2001 attacks on New York and Washington “the US-led war on terrorism has left in its wake a far more unstable world than existed on that momentous day”, he writes: “The rise of Iran as a major regional power, the advance of Hamas and Hizbullah, the wreckage of Iraq, with over two million external refugees and the ethnic cleansing of its Christian population. And now the implosion of Afghanistan and Pakistan, probably the most dangerous development of all”.
What a catalogue of failure it is. Writing from Mumbai and New Delhi in the Financial Times this week, the paper’s Asia editor David Pilling asks which is the real Pakistan – the seemingly moderate one represented by its president Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s playboy widower, or the one that denies Pakistan had anything to do with the Mumbai attack and last week released Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of its nuclear programme from jail.
This matters because the US pledge to triple its aid to Islamabad means that if the money ends up with the wrong people it could be feeding the beast responsible for so much trouble in the region.
Rashid is well-known to US policy makers and met Holbrooke in Lahore this week, and recently dined with Obama, according to the New York Times. He says of Holbrooke’s appointment that “this is a complete sea change in what Pakistan is used to.
“There is a suspicion in the American establishment that the Pakistani army has found it easier to pull the wool over the eyes of the American military. It will be harder to do that with the civilians.”
Holbrooke is to make proposals on Afghanistan to a Nato summit in April. European states are in no mood to boost their military involvement in such an uncertain political venture. At the Munich security conference last weekend observers detected a strong note of practical realism in the new administration’s approach, including a readiness to talk to the Taliban. Rashid says Holbrooke must also engage with Iran on Afghanistan, where it has common interests with the US.
Afghan, Pakistani and Iranian journalists at a conference in Dubai this week were similarly concerned. The editor of an Afghan news agency in Kabul spoke of the endemic corruption and weakness of the Karzai regime, the power of regional warlords in the country, their financing of the booming opium trade, their links to neighbouring powers (including Pakistan) and the failure of the huge international aid effort to reach ordinary Afghans.
Access to the country through the Khyber Pass is now controlled by the Taliban and its allies, driving the US to make arrangements with the Russians over longer and more dangerous routes. The Taliban’s allies now control over 70 per cent of the country, bringing rough justice but better order than Karzai can. They are winning the war and gradually closing in on Kabul.
That is explained by resentment of foreign armies and regional nationalisms angered by the use of US drones to attack their villages. As Newsweek’s Zakaria puts it, many of them are “accidental guerrillas”, not fundamentalist extremists.
Zakaria argues that a radically changed strategy is required by Obama. It needs to do counter-insurgency right by making local populations feel secure. Talking to the Taliban is essential, based on a clear distinction between them and al-Qaeda, since not one Afghan was involved in 9/11.
And Pakistan must be pressured to yield up al-Qaeda, understanding that it originated in the US and Saudi-financed war against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 1980s, before being turned to advantage by the Pakistani military in the 1990s.
This was rational, since at low cost Pakistan was able to pin down the Indian army in Kashmir as well as chase the Russians out of Afghanistan. The beast then took on a life of its own.
pgillespie@irishtimes.com