Tag: Afghanistan
Memorial Day for all
I spent my high school years marching in the Memorial Day parade in New Rochelle, New York and have never lost respect for those who serve and make sacrifices in uniform. Even as an anti-war protester in the Vietnam era, I thought denigration of those in uniform heinous, not to mention counterproductive.
It is impossible to feel anything but pride and gratitude to those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Kosovo, Bosnia, Panama and Somalia during the previous decade. Nor will I forget my Memorial Day visit to the American cemetery in Nettuno accompanying Defense Secretary Les Aspin in the early 1990s, or my visit to the Florence cemetery the next year. These extraordinarily manicured places are the ultimate in peaceful. It is unimaginable what their inhabitants endured. No matter what we say during the speechifying on Memorial Day, there is little glory in what the troops do and a whole lot of hard work, dedication, professionalism and horror.
That said, it is a mistake to forget those who serve out of uniform, as we habitually do. Numbers are hard to come by, but a quick internet search suggests that at at least 1000 U.S. civilians have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. They come in many different varieties: journalists, policemen, judges, private security guards, agriculturalists, local government experts, computer geeks, engineers, relief and development workers, trainers, spies, diplomats and who knows what else. I think of these people as our “pinstripe soldiers,” even if most of them don’t in fact wear pinstripes. But they are a key component of building the states that we hope will some day redeem the sacrifices they and their uniformed comrades have endured.
I spend my working hours worrying about how to improve the performance of the pinstripe soldiers, but that should not reduce by one iota appreciation for them. These are people who sometimes go places before they are safe enough for the troops, and they stay long after the troops are withdrawn. I hope my readers will add a minute to their Memorial Day reflections for those who serve in mufti. And count the many non-Americans who support our people also in your appreciation.
PS: I wrote this yesterday and this morning found Marc Chretien’s piece in the Washington Post arguing that civilian government employees who work in war zones should be eligible for burial at Arlington. It’s not a cause I’d have invented, but he has my support.
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Afghanistan matters
I find it hard to give full credit to what David Ignatius perceives as “positive signs” in Afghanistan. There have been too many false reports in the past. But at the same time I find it hard to credit Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s pessimism and the notion, which she shares with Ignatius, that Osama bin Laden’s death somehow changes the picture dramatically:
What the Senator and the columnist share, along with most of the speakers at the CAP event, is a desire to escape Afghanistan as quickly and as harmlessly as possible.
I understand the impulse. It has already been a long and expensive slog. But what we leave behind in Afghanistan matters.
It matters not only because Afghanistan once harbored Al Qaeda, but also because the very people who today have safe haven in Pakistan might some day have safe haven in Afghanistan, from which they would be attacking a fragile nuclear weapons state. We can rely on the Northern Alliance forces that resisted the Taliban in the past to continue to do so, but they had no luck in retaking territory from the Taliban until the Americans weighed in on their side.
So Afghanistan matters because Pakistan matters. That should not however be a formula for eternal commitment of 100,000 American troops. It does mean that we should be using the time between now and the end of 2014, when President Obama has promised to turn over security entirely to the Afghans, to make a serious effort to enable the Afghan state. In state-building terms, 2014 is tomorrow, so I don’t really expect enormous progress.
But there will be no progress at all if we spend the next three years quarreling among ourselves about whether to stay that long or not. We should debate, yes, and set some goals that are realistic. But then we need to get on with serious business.
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A right-minded but (mostly) forgettable speech
It is hard for me to knock a speech whose most frequently occurring words are “region” “must,” “change,” “people,” and “rights.” There has to be something to appreciate there. The President was particularly good on Tunisia and Egypt, supporting completion of their transitions to democracy and offering economic help, mainly through debt forgiveness, trade and investment. He was better on Bahrain than I might have expected, underlining that the destruction of Shia mosques there is unacceptable (thank you Roy Gutman for your reporting on that!).
On Syria, he was so-so, appealing once again for Bashar al Assad to lead reform (fat chance) or step aside (fat chance of that too). But that is farther than Obama has gone in the past. He gave President Saleh of Yemen a push toward the exit, but it did not seem to have any real force behind it.
The President was overoptimistic on both Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming we have broken the momentum of the insurgency in the former and established multiethnic and nonsectarian government in the latter. Both may happen, but they aren’t consolidated achievements yet.
On Israel/Palestine, the President took something like Shimon Peres’ approach: focus for now on defining Palestine’s territory and ensuring Israel’s security, solve Jerusalem and refugee return later. Rhetorical support for Israel was strong, as was opposition to the Palestinian effort to get the UN General Assembly to approve statehood. But there was really nothing new. That might be the best he can do for the moment, which is not propitious.
No mention of Saudi Arabia. A bit of talk about Iranian hypocrisy in providing assistance to Syria in repressing demonstrators, but no clarion call for rebellion there. Strong on women’s rights, inter-religious dialogue and rejection of political violence. Big throughout on self-determination (Palestinians take note), values as a focus for American policy in addition to interests, universal rights and strengthening the economic underpinnings of political transition.
A right-minded but I am afraid forgettable speech.
PS: I did not anticipate when I wrote this piece quickly this afternoon the furor that has erupted over the President’s endorsement of the ’67 borders of Israel as the basis for negotiations and eventual land swaps. It is still a bit hard for me to see what other basis there would be in a “land for peace” deal, but I take the point that this is the first time an American president has endorsed an idea that many of us take for granted. Those who object need to explain what other basis there might be for the territorial solution, other than “making the land whole.”
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Endgame
Suddenly, it’s all about endgame in AfPak. The death of Osama bin Laden has precipitated a small avalanche of writing about how to get out. James Traub writes about leaving with honor. Karl Inderfurth and Chinmaya Gharekhan suggest a regional political agreement would help the U.S. extract itself. Shuja Nawaz foresees the possibility of U.S.-Pakistani cooperation against the Haqqani group, provided Islamabad and Kabul can reach a political accommodation and the sorry state of relations between Washington and Islamabad does not derail things.
A lot of this strikes me as wishful thinking. The U.S. can of course withdraw from Afghanistan as planned by the end of 2014. The question is, what will it leave behind? Can we expect the Afghan government to maintain itself? Will the Taliban take over large portions of its territory? Will they return to hosting al Qaeda? Will U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan leave Pakistan exposed to infiltration and possible takeover by extremists with a safe haven in Afghanistan? What kind of relationship will we maintain with both Afghanistan and Pakistan?
Dick Holbrooke’s heirs (literal and figurative) are portraying him as saying that it is Pakistan that really counts, not Afghanistan. Those who worry about nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation have long felt that way.
Nothing about the Pakistani state gives me confidence in its ability to meet the challenges it will face once the U.S. is out of Afghanistan. Yesterday’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the Pakistani military’s dodgy billing for its role in the war on terror suggests that we are being robbed by the people who are supposed to be helping protect us, from threats they themselves have nurtured. It doesn’t get much worse than $70 million for air defense radar to protect against an enemy that doesn’t have air assets (and what was the radar looking at during the raid on Abbottabad?). The civilian side of the Pakistani state is widely believed to be just as mendacious.
It is also hard to be optimistic about the Afghan state. While the American military sees signs of tangible progress, especially in the south, efforts to improve governance lag at all levels while the country’s main bank has fallen victim to fraud. Anthony Cordesman argues that the metrics available are not even suitable to measuring progress on “hold” and “build.”
So what do we do? The Administration argues for continuing engagement. In Afghanistan, that is a given until the end of 2014. Savvy experts like Dennis Kux see Pakistan and the U.S. as condemned to a perpetual series of strategic disconnects, but nevertheless bound together by inevitable mutual interests. In this view, our interest is making sure Pakistan is not taken over by extremists. Theirs is in extracting as much military and civilian assistance as possible. The U.S. Congress will want to subject both to some real scrutiny in this difficult budget year, but my guess is that they won’t want to risk shutting it off.
The trouble is that the bilateral approach gives Pakistan incentive to keep the extremist threat alive. It would seem to me preferable to recast Pakistan not as a bilateral problem but rather as a regional one. In this perspective, issues like the Pakistan/Afghanistan border (the Durand line), Kashmir, Pakistan/India relations more generally and the Pakistan/China relationship become more important. The U.S. is not a main protagonist on many of these issues, but rather plays a supportive role. This is where the Century Foundation (Pickering/Brahimi) report on negotiating peace got it right: any settlement in Afghanistan will require a regional approach.
The same is true for Pakistan. Inderfurth and Gharekhan are right. Pakistan faces what it regards as “existential” threats, mainly from India. It is those fears that drive its nuclear policy as well as its posture on Afghanistan. The United States cannot allay those fears, but it can help to nudge Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan into a regional effort to resolve some of the existential threats and shift all concerned in the direction of exploiting their economic opportunities, which have serious potential to incentivate resolution of the political and security issues and encourage the building of stronger states in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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Another good idea
This good idea is to improve relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan: a Kabul statement acknowledging that it regards Afghanistan’s borders as fixed and not to be changed.
What good would that do, you might ask?
Here’s the story: the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is known as the Durand line. The more than 1600-mile boundary was fixed in 1893 by agreement between Durand, the Foreign Secretary of British India, and Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. Islamabad has accepted the Durand line as the international border with Afghanistan, based on the colonial antecedent. Kabul has not.
When I was in Kabul a few years ago calling on a key aide to President Karzai, I suggested that Afghanistan might accept the Durand line as a way of improving relations with Pakistan. His answer was telling: he would not want, he said, to “foreclose options for future generations.” This is not a declaration of war, but it is a statement that suggests Afghanistan has ambitions to control the part of Pakistani territory where ethnic Pashtuns live. Pashtuns are the plurality ethnic group in Afghanistan; they live on both sides of the Durand line.
Pakistanis will often say they need a degree of control over Afghanistan to provide “strategic depth” in their conflict with India. India’s friendly relations with President Karzai were on display this week as the Indian prime minister signed a strategic cooperation agreement in Kabul. This unnerves Pakistanis, who regard the conflict with India as their major national security threat. It is an important reason for Islamabad’s now evident reluctance to do as much to counter the Taliban and Al Qaeda as Washington would like.
I don’t know two countries whose border is subject to disagreement that have good relations (please let me know if you do–I’m looking for an exception to this rule). Without an agreed (and physically demarcated) border and with a single ethnic group dominant on both sides, there is the real possibility of irredentist activity that threatens a neighboring state’s territorial integrity. Pakistani fears about Afghanistan would be significantly reduced if Kabul were to signal its acceptance of the Durand line.
So that is why it would be a good idea for Afghanistan to accept the Durand line, improving its relations with Pakistan and acquiring, as quid pro quo, stronger action against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Washington should be working hard to this end.
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Here are some bright ideas
This is OPI (other people’s ideas) day:
- Reinventing the Palestinian struggle as a nonviolent protest movement has been a good idea for a long time, but the Arab Spring may make it viable as a mass movement. It would put the Israelis in a tough spot: a harsh response would make them look like worse than your garden variety Arab autocrat. Real democracies don’t shoot at nonviolent protesters.
- Rethinking the war in Afghanistan in light of Osama bin Laden’s death was the subject of an excellent piece this morning: no evidence yet of changed attitudes among the insurgents (Biddle), but the personal connection with bin Laden was an important factor in the alliance with the Taliban. And Pakistan might stiffen its attitude toward al Qaeda presence (Khalilzad), if only to prevent further American raids.
- North Africa is Europe’s backyard. The Bertelsmann Foundation has asked eight North Africans for their views of how Europe can help the political transitions there. The resulting report makes interesting reading and reminds us that we need to follow the lead of host country nationals in thinking about how to make the Arab spring last into a more democratic summer and fall.
Still, there is a dearth of good ideas on several subjects: how to manage the U.S./Pakistan relationship in a more productive way (but see Dennis Kux’s blog post yesterday), how to hasten Gaddafi’s exit from Libya and what to do to stop the killing of demonstrators in Yemen and Syria, as well as their mistreatment in Bahrain. Anyone want to offer thoughts?
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