Simple perhaps, scary definitely

Simple perhaps, scary definitely
By Cyril Almeida
Friday, 28 Aug, 2009 | 01:04 AM PST
The American or, as the Americans prefer, the international mission in Afghanistan is not going well. Obama has recently labelled it a ‘war of necessity,’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Americans are in it to win. -Photo by AP

When contemplating national security issues, I have learned at least one thing: proudly wear your dunce’s cap at all times. There’s a method in this madness, or studied stupidity, if you will — national security is the domain of ‘experts,’ and these experts will readily confuse the unsuspecting and uninitiated.

Military men are the worst. They’ll throw a book’s worth of acronyms and abbreviations at you faster than you can say ABC. Want to talk the mechanics of war with India? DCB, IBG, TNW, OMG, RMA, strike corps 1, two and 21, pivot corps — a slew of seemingly meaningless alphabets and arcane phrases boils down to two things. One, nuclear weapons, everyone seems to agree, are not actually meant to be used. Two, nuclear weapons have all but eliminated the possibility of a full-blown war between Pakistan and India.
‘Limited’ wars and ‘sub-conventional’ conflicts may occur, but nobody seems to know how one side’s armed forces can defeat the other side’s without bringing to an end what’s quaintly referred to as the nation state — that’s you and me and the rest of the people who inhabit this place, in case anyone’s interested.

Don’t bother asking why, then, we still need to primarily counter the Indian military threat and not the insurgents and militants and terrorists because, well, you’ll get another book’s worth of alphabets, phrases and concepts to chew on. I’m not sure yet, but it seems to have something to do with politics lagging behind reality.

Think-tankers are worse yet, followed closely by bureaucrats and diplomats. Like cutting-edge theory in social science or the humanities, a cottage industry of experts talks back and forth and produces prodigious amounts of research and papers and attends important-sounding conferences to discuss our future in complicated-sounding ways.

And yet it all boils down to some very basic things, which, basic though they may be, have an enormous impact on our lives. So with my dunce’s cap snugly on, I have tried to ponder the faltering American project in Afghanistan and what it means for the future of militancy here in Pakistan.

Let me state that there’s no love lost between the militants and me; ceteris paribus, I’d rather someone eliminated them before they eliminate me, or you. But elimination isn’t always an option, or a workable long-term solution, so we need to figure out a future in which there is less killing of everyone involved.

The American or, as the Americans prefer, the international mission in Afghanistan is not going well. Obama has recently labelled it a ‘war of necessity,’ but that doesn’t necessarily mean the Americans are in it to win.

The Americans acknowledge that things will get worse before they better, but the ‘better’ that they are targeting is all about getting the GIRoA, that’s the Afghan government, to manage things with a semblance of normality so that the Americans can exit militarily and protect their interests from afar.

It would be stupid to count out the Americans already and far from being the ‘graveyard of empires’ and the Americans’ second Vietnam, Afghanistan could yet be put into some sort of governable shape within a few years.

So with the parameters set thus, the question for the army/security establishment here is what sort of influence do we imagine retaining in the Afghanistan of the future? It is an article of faith here that we must have some influence in Afghanistan. While this is frequently couched in the facts that we share a long, porous border with Afghanistan and that there is a Pakhtun population that straddles the border, there is an even more prosaic reason: if we don’t, others will. Iran, Russia, the US, India, China — there are many countries vying for influence in Afghanistan and in a zero-sum game we can’t afford to lose out.

Conventional thinking, or the international media consensus, has it that we still fancy backing the Taliban, and as proof of our diabolical agenda the Quetta shura and Siraj Haqqani are trotted out to whack us with. In truth, though, the army high command has woken up to the reality that Afghanistan cannot revert to the Afghanistan of the ‘90s.

The army hasn’t simply put its militant minions in cold storage, waiting for the propitious moment to unleash them once again on a hapless Afghanistan. Indeed, for those willing to question gospel truths, there is legitimate doubt about whether the security establishment ever really had the degree of control over the Afghan Taliban that everyone seems to accuse it of having.

But, and this is the crucial part, while the security establishment may be amenable to negotiating a different form of influence in Afghanistan in the future, the army is not willing to seriously attempt the dismantling of the Afghan-centric militant networks here.

Why? The army’s response to the American demand is a counter-question: why should we? They aren’t attacking us, we’ve got our hands full with other militants, you guys have pots of money and tens of thousands of troops at your disposal, handle your own problems.

Morally dubious as this may be, a hard-nosed assessment cannot avoid the conclusion that were someone else in the security establishment’s shoes, they would probably do the same thing. Ignoring the fact that we have contributed enormously to the magnificent mess of militancy in the region — difficult as that may be to do — the fact is the very existence of that mess has limited our options today.

So, with one eye on our limited resources to tackle militancy and another on the political and security fallout of opening multiple fronts, no policymaker worth his salt could do everything that the Americans want.

Yet, what should trouble those of us living in Pakistan is another discernible reason for the army’s baulkiness: the army seems institutionally unable to grasp the arc of militancy, to understand the inherent danger of blowback, to realise that today’s ‘not our problem’ is tomorrow’s ‘very much our problem.’

The problem is that the army/security establishment only acts when its own interests are directly, violently, threatened. Thrice we have clamped down on militancy, and all three times the army has acted in what could be termed self-defence.

Post-9/11 we rounded up Al Qaeda militants because of the apocryphal threat of being ‘bombed back into the stone ages.’ Then after Musharraf was attacked twice in December 2003, the security forces launched a second clampdown. Finally, after the first half of 2007 and the Lal Masjid conflagration, the third phase was launched.

Now, with the Americans struggling to control Afghanistan and looking to us for help, we are essentially telling them, the Afghan Taliban aren’t worrying us, so why should we intervene?

The trouble is, the Afghan Taliban are intervening here. Hakimullah Mehsud is the new — temporary? — chief of the TTP and anyone who knows anything about that umbrella organisation will tell you that the Afghan Taliban and Al Qaeda intervened in the succession issue and brokered a peace between rival factions.

It remains to be seen whether they have done so to reorient the TTP towards the Afghan mission, but the very effort to keep it a cohesive network should be troubling because another Baitullah Mehsud could rise up and decide that the real fight lies in Pakistan after all.

So more than the militants themselves, perhaps what should worry Pakistanis is the possibility that the security establishment apparently continues to believe that a problem isn’t our problem until mayhem is unleashed here. Given what’s transpired in recent years, that is a very scary thought indeed.

cyril.a@gmail.com