Daily Times

During the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the supposedly ‘just war’ in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. He pledged that he would withdraw American troops from Iraq but not from Afghanistan.

The unilateral intervention in Iraq by the Bush Administration was highly unpopular among the American electorate. Therefore, Obama’s election pledge of complete withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq struck a chord with the voters and they gave an overwhelming mandate to the ostensibly ‘pacifist’ contender during his first term as POTUS.

President Obama did manage to successfully withdraw American troops from Iraq in December 2011, but only to commit thousands of American troops and the US Air Force to Iraq just a couple of years later during his second term as the president when the Islamic State (IS) overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014.

The borders between Iraq and Syria are poorly guarded and highly porous. Therefore Obama’s policy of nurturing militants against the Assad regime in Syria for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014 was bound to backfire sooner or later.

When Obama decided to withdraw American troops from the unjust war in Iraq, he pledged that he would commit additional American troops and resources into the supposedly ‘just war’ in Afghanistan. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan spiked from 30,000 during the tenure of the Bush administration to more than 100,000 during the term of the supposedly ‘pacifist’ administration of Barack Obama

More to the point, however, when Obama decided to withdraw American troops from the unjust war in Iraq, he also pledged that he would commit additional American troops and resources into the supposedly ‘just war’ in Afghanistan. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan spiked from 30,000 during the tenure of the Bush Administration to more than 100,000 during the term of the supposedly ‘pacifist’ Obama Administration.

And now Secretary of Defence James Mattis and the National Security Advisor HR McMaster have advised the Trump Administration to further escalate the conflict in Afghanistan by deploying 3,000 to 5,000 additional troops to a contingent of 8,400 US troops already stationed in Afghanistan as ‘trainers and advisors’. This was the actual number of US troops already stationed in Afghanistan. It didn’t take into account the tens of thousands of private military contractors in Afghanistan. Though the number is around 12,000, according to recent reports.

Regardless, if more than100,000 US posted by the Obama Administration failed to achieve any long-term objective in Afghanistan, then how do Generals Mattis and McMaster expect from 3,000 to 5,000 additional troops to salvage the failed Afghan policy of the successive US administrations?

Coming back to the topic, no one can dispute the assertion that the notions of ‘just wars’ and ‘good militants’ do exist in the American vocabulary. However, after witnessing the instability, violence, chaos and anarchy in war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and Yemen, the onus lies on any interventionist hawk to prove beyond a doubt that the wars and militants that he justifies are indeed just and good.

There is a not-so-subtle distinction between a terrorist and an insurgent: an Islamic insurgent believes in something and wants to enforce that agenda. A terrorist is just a bloodthirsty lunatic who is hell-bent on causing death and destruction. The distinguishing feature between the two is that an insurgent has well defined objectives and territorial ambitions. A terrorist is basically motivated by the spirit of revenge and the goal of causing widespread fear

More surprisingly, however, if Afghanistan was an occupied country during the years of Soviet occupation from 1979 to 1988, then how did it become a ‘sovereign state’ after the American occupation of Afghanistan since 2001-onward?

Furthermore, if the so-called Afghan ‘mujahideen’ nurtured by Carter and Reagan had constituted a legitimate resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, then by what principle is resistance against the American occupation of Afghanistan reviled as ‘terrorism’?

In international politics, the devil always lies in the vocabulary that we employ. And the definition of the term ‘terrorism’ has been deliberately left undefined by Western powers to use it as a catch-all pretext to justify their military presence and interventionist policy in the energy-rich Islamic countries.

More to the point, there is a not-so-subtle distinction between a terrorist and an insurgent: an Islamic insurgent believes in something and wants to enforce that agenda. A terrorist is just a bloodthirsty lunatic who is hell-bent on causing death and destruction. The distinguishing feature between the two is that an insurgent has well defined objectives and territorial ambitions. A terrorist is basically motivated by the spirit of revenge and the goal of causing widespread fear.

After invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq, US policymakers immediately realized that they were facing large-scale and popularly-rooted insurgencies against foreign occupation. Consequently, the occupying military altered its CT (counter-terrorism) approach in the favour of a COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy.

A COIN strategy is essentially different from a CT approach and it also involves dialogue, negotiations and political settlements alongside the coercive tactics of law enforcement and military and paramilitary operations on a limited scale.

The phenomenon which is currently threatening Islamic countries is not terrorism as such, but Islamic insurgencies. Excluding al Qaeda Central which is a known transnational terrorist organisation, all regional militant groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS, al Shabab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria and even some of the ideological affiliates of al Qaeda and Islamic State, like Al Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb, the IS affiliates in Afghanistan, Sinai and Libya, which have no organizational and operational association with al Qaeda Central or the IS of Iraq and Syria, respectively, are not terror outfits but insurgent groups. They are fighting for the goals of liberation of their homelands from foreign occupations and for the enforcement of Sharia in their respective areas of operations.

The goals for which Islamic insurgents have been fighting in these regions are irrelevant for the debate in hand. But it can be argued that if some of the West’s closest allies in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait have already enforced Sharia as part of their conservative legal system then what is the basis for the US declaration of war against Islamic insurgents in the Middle East other than to manufacture consent for Western military presence and interventions?

Notwithstanding, the root factors that are primarily responsible for spawning militancy and insurgency anywhere in the world are not religion but socio-economics, ethnic differences, marginalisation of disenfranchised ethno-linguistic and ethno-religious groups and the ensuing conflicts. The socio-cultural backwardness of the affected regions, and the weak central control of the impoverished developing states over their remote rural and tribal areas.

Additionally the deliberate funding, training and arming of certain militant groups by regional and global powers for their strategic interests has played a key role.

Back in the eighties the Afghan jihadists did not spring up spontaneously out of nowhere. Western powers aided by Saudi money and Pakistan’s intelligence agencies trained and armed those ‘freedom fighters’ against their archrival, the Soviet Union. Those very same Afghan ‘mujahideen’ later mutated into al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

Similarly, during the Libyan and Syrian uprisings, Western powers with the help of their regional allies once again trained and armed Islamic jihadists and tribal militiamen against the “unfriendly” regimes of Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad.

And isn’t it ironic that those very same ‘moderate rebels’ later mutated into Ansar al-Sharia, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), IS, Al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and scores of other jihadist groups in Syria?

The writer is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism

Published in Daily Times, September 27^th 2017.