| Ander Nieuws week 6 / nieuwe oorlog 2008 |
The Washington Post
January 28, 2008
William M. Arkin
U.S. intelligence and national security officials now readily admit that al Qaeda is back, and that it together with a growing fundamental Taliban movement is flourishing in parts of Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. The simple explanation is that the growth is the result of the Iraq war and its drain on our resources, military and intellectual. The solution most favored inside and outside government in Washington is a shift in resources back to the original post 9/11 battlefield, and indeed we are already witnessing new deals being made with the government in Islamabad to bolster the counter-terror effort.
If conventional wisdom takes hold that the Pakistan resurgence is purely the product of an ill-conceived Iraq war, we will not only set ourselves on a faulty course for fighting in the future, but we will fail to understand the actual mistakes we have made in Iraq and Afghanistan, mistakes we could now repeat in Pakistan.
Here is the crisis as it stands in South Asia: We have a central Afghan government facing deepening domestic instability and a Pakistan that threatens to descend into disorder. The al Qaeda organization is retooled and resurgent.
Before the conclusion is drawn then that all that is needed is a Pakistani surge and a shift in resources back to the beginning, let's be honest about what happened in both Afghanistan and Iraq.
First Afghanistan: In late 2001, with the Taliban government in Afghanistan surprisingly and easily defeated, and with al Qaeda on the run, Rumsfeld and company, and the U.S. military particularly in the form of Gen. Tommy Franks, came to the conclusion that the "military" mission was over. So delighted were they with dodging a Soviet-style quagmire and so impressed were they with their lightning military success, they truly believed that the mop up was both minor and easy. No one at the top of the military food chain then believed that there was a long war ahead, and if anyone thought that that "war" was going to need the full participation of the non-military side of American power, no one was clearly articulating it. These were the days when Donald Rumsfeld's description of American fighting a new kind of war focused on Special Forces riding on horseback using laptops to call in air strikes not democracy and other slogans that would later emerge.
The bottom line was a poor assessment of the enemy and an error in understanding our own military achievement.
The Iraq war loomed, the original 2003 war that is, imbued with the arrogance of the easy win in Afghanistan, hampered by the Rumsfeld leadership assumption of another quick in and out, and influenced by a continuing misunderstanding of the Iraqi mind.
We might go on today that the Bush administration lied, that there were too few troops or that there was no plan for the peace, but the failure was that we didn't understand what happened in Afghanistan, and we continued to ignore that the "enemy" wasn't going to be vanquished at the barrel of a gun. In fact, quite the opposite: The more conventional military might we threw at Iraq and Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa and elsewhere -- the more forces we stuffed into the region in the Gulf states and the Caucasus - the more we activated latent forces of discontent and hatred. U.S. military forces now "occupy" a half dozen Muslim countries in the region, and I can't help but think what many see are uniforms of subjugation and killing.
Influenced by our subsequent experience in Iraq, we see al Qaeda as some specific organized force to be found, fixed and defeated. Al Qaeda, of course, is not one thing, and its manifestation in Iraq is quite different than Pakistan, just as it is different in London or Madrid. This misunderstanding originally influenced our turning our back on Afghanistan to fight in Iraq, and in deferring to Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to police his own country, even though we knew that those tribal border areas (and not Iraq) were the true wellspring of Islamic extremism.
The danger of the U.S. military becoming more engaged in Pakistan now is not only that once again we are walking into a new country and a new culture that we don't understand, but also that we are leading with our military, thus connoting, no matter how modulated and sensitive that force will be, that we are on the path to yet another occupation, yet the other irony of our back to the future strategy to focus on Pakistan is also that militarily we will hardly commit the number of forces needed to make any short-term difference.
The administration's increasingly public expressions of concern about Pakistan reflect intelligence reports of a gathering storm. Ultimately though, our best military strategy is getting out of the way and assisting Pakistan to deal with the problem. If Washington wants to put more resources into the fight, than bolster the U.S. presence at the border in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is not waiting in some trench line to fight us; they are waiting for us to blunder into yet another country so that they can once again scatter, while proving America's military crusade.
© 2008 The Washington Post Company
Original link
| Ander Nieuws week 6 / nieuwe oorlog 2008 |