Daily Times

The US is in a terrible quandary. Which is: how best to extricate from its 10-year old quagmire in Afghanistan? President Obama’s announcement of a process of withdrawal, starting next month (July), only highlights this predicament. The US does not want to admit that its long military engagement in Afghanistan has been a disaster of monumental proportions in strategic, economic and political terms. Strategically, it has seriously damaged its ally, Pakistan. Parts of Pakistan are now said to be the virtual headquarters of the Afghan Taliban (for which the Pakistani establishment cannot escape responsibility), as well as the staging post for operations against NATO and the Afghan government, which, in turn, invites US drone strikes. This has made many Pakistanis even more bitter with the US than they already were. People are also venting their fury on their own government and the army for their inability or complicity in letting the US flout Pakistan’s sovereignty.

The most dramatic example was the US commando operation in Abbottabad where they killed Osama bin Laden without Islamabad having any inkling of it, until the US informed them after the successful completion of the mission. Not surprisingly, the government and the military came in for stinging popular indignation, not so much because the US killed Osama, but the impunity with which the US was perceived to have violated Pakistan’s sovereignty. At times it would seem that with the US and the Afghan Taliban fighting their battles on or through Pakistani territory, the state in Pakistan has ceased to exist.

The most damaging effect for Pakistan has been the spawning of the Pakistani Taliban, a corollary of their Afghan cousins, who are more dangerous for the Pakistani state because it is their primary target. And with attacks on Pakistani state agencies (police, army and so on), they seek to destabilise the state, overwhelm it and replace it. The weakening of Pakistan to the point where terrorists run wild and attack people and state institutions at will is an important indictment of the Afghan war. It is important to point out that Pakistan’s government and military were willing to play out the US games, without any serious thought of terrible consequences for their own country. Having gone into Afghanistan to snuff out al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan and create a stable democratic state, the US has not only destabilised Pakistan, it has also failed to achieve its objective.

At the economic level, although estimates differ about the cost of the US military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq (another by-product of the US war on terror), it could be as much as three trillion dollars to include all the costs (medical treatment of the wounded, etc) of a prolonged war. This would amount to as much as 20 percent of the US GDP. This has certainly complicated, if not contributed, to the US economic crisis that is still haunting the country.

Politically, the Afghan and Iraq wars have tended to polarise the US. There was remarkable political consensus in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which enabled the then President George Bush to not only invade Afghanistan but also follow it up with the invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the consensus started to fray when Iraq was found to have no weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the ostensible reason for attacking Iraq. And the war did not seem to be following the Bush administration’s script, with the US getting stuck in a quagmire.

And when Obama became president in 2009, he christened the war in Afghanistan as a war of necessity to hunt down al Qaeda and create a democratic and stable Afghanistan. All sorts of combinations and permutations of a mix of military strategies to successfully conclude the Afghan operations have failed. In other words, the US cannot prevail in Afghanistan militarily — a lesson painfully learnt earlier by the British in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Even the latest US strategy of putting enough military pressure on the Taliban, applied since last year with more US troops deployed in Afghanistan, is not working. They are able to explode bombs and enact suicide attacks at will, even in the most protected zones.

The US is now seeking to engage the Taliban in political talks to, hopefully, bring the war to an end. Confirming that the US is engaged in “very preliminary talks” with the Taliban, the US Defence Secretary Robert Gates, however, maintained, “…that real reconciliation talks are not likely to be able to make any substantive headway until at least this winter [because] I think that the Taliban have to feel themselves under military pressure, and begin to believe that they can’t win before they’re willing to have a serious conversation.” Another obstacle, according to Gates, was locating members of the Taliban who could credibly speak for its leadership. It might be recalled that last year a supposed Taliban commander flown to Kabul for peace talks was found to be an impostor. Therefore, in the absence of any credible confirmation from the Taliban’s top leadership (Mullah Omar, for instance), it is difficult to confirm Robert Gates’ confirmation of peace talks.

In any case, the Taliban have time and again maintained that the NATO forces must withdraw from Afghanistan before peace talks could begin. This does not look like the language of an enemy under military pressure. As for the US, it has its own conditions for the Taliban “to renounce al Qaeda, forsake violence, and adhere to the Afghan constitution”. Under the circumstances, it seems unlikely that there will be much advance during the supposed peace talks.

The point is: why would the Taliban like to help out the US with an ‘honourable’ exit when all signs point to the fact that the US cannot sustain intervention much longer due to serious military, economic and political constraints? Militarily, the US is not winning the war. And after ten years of non-result, war weariness has set in in the US. Economically, the ballooning cost of the war in a depressed economy is further compounding the US’s economic woes. Politically, with the election season setting in for the next presidential election in 2012, Barack Obama needs some kind of forward movement of the Afghan imbroglio to win another term.

The question then is: will the US quit Afghanistan like the Soviet Union? Whatever the result, it would still like to frame its withdrawal as an ‘honourable’ exit. Will the Taliban oblige? Perhaps not.

The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au