Daily Times

This time it is not in the jungles of Vietnam but the hills of the Hindu Kush that the Americans are likely to meet their Waterloo. Like in Vietnam, where they won all the battles but lost the war, so too in Afghanistan, the writing is on the wall. What was accomplished by a few hundred Americans and their local allies nine years ago is unravelling today, notwithstanding the presence of 130,000 American troops. A superpower (and not for the first time) has been brought to a virtual standstill by a few thousand antediluvian rustic vagabonds like the Taliban.

Why? Two reasons come to mind.

First, the Americans, notwithstanding doctorates from stellar universities, overlooked the one lesson that contemporary history has handed down – nationalism when pitted against foreign occupation will always prevail. A foreign army of occupation has never succeeded in winning the battle for the hearts and minds of a people.

Second, as long as the Taliban have the support of some of their fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan, they will have the critical support they require to reverse their losses. It is not a question of the Pakistan government two-timing the Americans, or facilitating safe havens. It is also not because it is Islamabad’s embedded policy to help the Taliban regain their erstwhile dominance, although it can be spun to seem so. It is inherent in the situation and as natural and permanent as is the topography of the area. It is something that any Pakistani regime can only challenge at the risk of its own survival and that of the country regardless of what Islamabad may wish, or the Americans demand.

Viewed thus, there is no battlefield victory to be had for the US. There is no anvil for the hammer, as the border can never be sealed. And that is precisely why the continued American occupation, without any effort to arrive at a negotiated peace, has convinced many here that the war is no longer about eliminating al Qaeda or containing extremism but rather about sitting atop strategic pipelines, surrounding Iran, containing China and, more so, destabilising Pakistan by forcing a weak and bankrupt government to do its bidding by pitting it against those with whom Pakistan has had equable relations in the past and whose other ambitions Pakistan can thwart by dint of its own efforts and a little help from its friends.

It is not the good sense of the administration but rather the American public that Pakistanis are now banking on to stop this pointless war, much as the Vietnamese did during the earlier, equally futile war in Vietnam when Johnson and his general, Westmoreland, like Obama and Petraeus today, were equally bent on winning. However, till the American public is stirred into revolt, Pakistan has to be careful lest Petraeus succeeds in expanding the war to Pakistan.

Petraeus needs scapegoats for the slow progress that his forces are making and has predictably alighted on Pakistan. Being more cerebral than the usual American general, he intellectualises the US occupation. He believes that ideas are more important than values. The trouble is that it is his ideas and other peoples’ values.

Petraeus’s bete noire is General Kayani. He believes that if the Taliban safe havens in North Waziristan are eliminated, he can win; and he wants Kayani to go in and clear them out. Even if Kayani wanted to, he would first have to further denude the Indian border of the army because the present force levels are insufficient for such an operation. Assuming that Kayani was to be so irresponsible, what would he achieve? At best, the dislocation of the Taliban in North Waziristan and a mite’s less pressure on US forces across the border.

In return, he would have earned the enduring hatred of the Afghan Taliban followed inevitably by a spike in acts of terrorism within Pakistan. Retaliatory action by the army would follow which, in due course, would escalate into counter insurgency operations to forestall attacks by the Afghan Taliban from across the border. Inevitably, at some point in time, this new war would further radicalise the frontier tribes, postponing for longer the much needed development effort and leading conceivably to a recrudescence of Pashtun nationalism and, thereafter, who knows? A civil war in Pakistan? And for what? To enable Petraeus to declare what would have been essentially a pyrrhic victory and to retain his laurels as a victor when he returns home? It is a ‘fool’s bargain’ which, if Kayani were to accept, he would be rightly criticised as being irresponsible.

In an article in The Washington Post last week, a fellow Pakistani columnist wondered why Kayani considers India to be “a major threat” to Pakistan rather than “militancy”. It is “mind boggling”, he concluded. The reason is simple. Until 700,000 Indian troops are poised, some within hailing distance of our borders, ready to attack Pakistan at a moment’s notice, and unless we have some verifiable agreement on the demilitarisation of borders and confidence building measures, all of which India has avoided, India is by far a greater existential threat than the Taliban militants who attack our forces in FATA and with whom we are grappling with some success. It is indeed ‘mind boggling’ to think otherwise.

It is from Washington that there now emerges the greatest threat to our security, as Mullen and Petraeus attempt to bully Kayani into taking on the Afghan Taliban or permitting US forces to enter Pakistan. Both courses of action are inadvisable, for reasons already explained, in the case of the former, and the resultant public outrage in the case of the latter.

The Taliban have to be fought by a judicious mix of military force, negotiations, socio-economic measures and by a counter ideology that has a greater appeal, and not exclusively by force. It is a war that may well be generational. Against India, on the other hand, in the absence of any signs of peace or a willingness on Delhi’s part to enter into negotiations to forge peace, force is the only deterrent. Hence, Kayani rightly views the military threat from India as his foremost concern. Not to do so would amount to a dereliction of duty.

The writer is a former ambassador. He can be reached at charles123it@hotmail.com