Daily Times

Three inferences can be drawn from the recent Ankara Conference on Afghanistan: one, no matter how many powerful nations may congregate to resolve a conflict, they cannot succeed unless the main party to the conflict, even a non-state actor — the Taliban — agrees; two, geostrategic goals cannot be achieved without accommodating regional interests; three, the US needs the regional support in its new strategy: ‘fight and talk’.

Indeed, it is the third US strategic shift in Afghanistan. The first strategy, formulated by the Bush administration, envisaged both rebuilding war-torn Afghanistan and destroying the Taliban-al Qaeda network. The underlying assumption was that fighting alone would be ineffectual, unless Afghanistan is built as a modern functional state, equipped with the required political and social infrastructures. Henry Kissinger had also advised a ‘winning of the heart and minds’ approach in the Vietnam war, which was ignored by President Johnson, causing the US thousands of casualties and the ignominy of defeat.

But the Bush strategy failed in Afghanistan not because it was flawed but because it was never implemented in substance. For example, the centrepiece of this policy — Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) in Afghanistan and in Fata — was never translated into a reality. Nor was a truly democratic and clean dispensation put in place to protect and provide for the war-devastated populace. Afghan warlords substituted the Taliban in the provinces and indulged in massive corruption and misgovernance. Billions of dollars were lost to the corrupt Karzai government and the US contractors. According to a CIA report, millions of US dollars ended up in the hands of the Taliban and were used against the US forces.

In the end, the Bush administration almost gave up on this strategy and concentrated only on building and protecting Kabul and the areas north of it. The rest of Afghanistan was left to the sway of the local warlords or the Taliban. However, the US continued to use massive force, mainly aerial, to chastise the militants crossing into the protected ‘red zone’.

As the sense of failure seeped into the American policy-makers, they vented their gall on Pakistan. General Musharraf suddenly became a target of the international media for his alleged ‘double game’ — alliance with the US and also sheltering the ‘Quetta Shura’ and the Haqqani/Hekmatyar networks operating from within Pakistan.

Come President Obama, Afghanistan’s became the only war, the Iraqi theatre being relegated to a mistaken and uncalled for ‘adventure’. A new AfPak strategy was forged to ‘disrupt, dismantle and defeat’ the Taliban/al Qaeda. Operationally, a renewed emphasis was laid on the AfPak borders, multiplying the sorties of the pilotless Predators targeting militant bases inside Pakistan’s tribal belt.

Indeed, the drones, which were operational during General Musharraf’s government, soon became the CIA’s ‘weapons of choice’ during the current democratic government, notwithstanding the unanimous parliamentary resolution passed against them. Admittedly, a number of key Taliban/al Qaeda leaders were eliminated by the drones, but hundreds of innocent men, women and children were also killed, further fanning anti-US sentiments in Pakistan.

Al Qaeda received major setbacks but the Taliban resistance never flagged, rather it solidified. Therefore, General McChrystal’s policy of ‘troop surge’, which he had used successfully in Iraq, was repeated in Afghanistan. Thirty thousand fresh troops were injected into Afghanistan and massive land and air operations were launched in the south and east of Afghanistan to inflict heavy blows to the Taliban, shatter their morale and force them to come to terms with the US. But it did not work out that way. The failure is being attached by the US to the ‘operational facilities’ provided by the ‘safe havens’ in Pakistan.

Though the Raymond Davis affair, Osama bin Laden’s killing and now the mantra of dismantling ‘safe havens’ is a sequential saga of the deteriorating Pak-US relationship, bringing it to a breaking point, both the governments are guilty of committing errors. The US ignored public opinion in dealing with the civilian and military leaderships. The Pakistani leadership misjudged US patience. The US wants Pakistan to fully commit to the US war strategy. General Kayani believes that “we have long-term interests in Afghanistan, others might have short…For short-term gains, we cannot lose [sight of] our long-term interests”.

Moreover, the US should also consider that the Pakistani state and society is under multidimensional stresses. It is increasingly sapped by sectarianism and violence; its nascent democratic machinery is incapable of both fighting a war and also continuing social and economic development (even the US cannot do it); bad governance is eroding the government’s moral authority to demand more sacrifices from a people who are already stricken with high inflation, unemployment and the energy crisis and are at their tether’s end.

Therefore, the US must not mix the government (including the military leadership) with society, if it means a successful strategic alliance with Pakistan. It must cater to the latter by making it less difficult for the people to put up with the sufferings caused by the war. Every year, one-third of the development budget is siphoned off to meet security-related expenses, in addition to bearing the huge cost of defence. It is time the US looked beyond the mutual security paradigm and helped Pakistan acquire its due place in the changing regional economic symmetry.

Likewise, Pakistan should also review its India-fixation and the so-called ‘strategic depth’ if it has to move on and grab the opportunities offered by the renewed efforts to open up the historical Silk Route, a historical commercial highway that connected India, China, Iran and the Middle East with the Mediterranean world, and beyond. The recent visit to India by the governor of Xinxiang, a Muslim majority Chinese province that is faced with an increasing Islamic identity movement, shows the direction in which the wind is blowing.

The Ankara communiqué also stresses economic cooperation in the region. The US could complement this regional economic cooperation. Thus it would remove the widely-shared perception that it wants to have a long-term presence in Afghanistan to hog the natural resources in this region. Pakistan, India and Afghanistan would also be comfortable in such a scenario just as the UK, France and Germany — traditional rivals — are in the broader European Union (EU) framework.

Ironically, Russia, China, India, Iran, Turkey and the Central Asian Republics are all on the same page on regional economic cooperation. But Afghanistan and Pakistan, both under the US yoke, are not free to exercise their options. Unless this yoke is taken off, and more helpfully by the US, neither peace in Afghanistan nor development in the region are possible.

And it is a fact that the shrewd Taliban are very well aware of. They are biding their time, knowing that just as the US is desperate to ‘save face’ in Afghanistan, the regional powers are also eager to see an early US exit from the region so that they may benefit from the vast natural resources and the geographical advantages that this region uniquely offers to them, and the world.

The writer is a lawyer and academic. He can be reached at shahabusto@hotmail.com