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As always in the real world, President Bush faces complex decisions as he answers the challenge of a world terrorist network. For the moment, at the center of the hydra headed monster called terrorism is Osmana Bin Ladin. Not only has he shown skill and dedication to annihilating Americans, but from his lair in Afghanistan he has been diabolically clever in “institutionalizing” the process.
Afghanistan is not a place any commander would choose to fight. History has shown its tribals' skill and courage. Its terrain is an ally of those who know it intimately and a formidable obstacle to anyone who sets out to defeat either. The U.S. cannot and must not fight a guerrilla war. Humanity dictates that we not use nuclear weapons. Strikes, raids, hit and run tactics are the military order of the day.
But if we are to persevere, we must find ways to liberate the Afghan people from this monstrous barbarity. That will require perspicacity and persuasion too often missing in U.S. diplomacy in our recent past. A good deal has been said about the lessons of Vietnam. As more than one historian has told us, there may be no lessons in history. But for a small minority of us who followed “Vietnam” from his inception, the most important lesson was to be attuned to the needs — real and psychological — of the area’s people.
Afghanistan today, even by the standards of a multiethnic, multilingual, traditional society with a primitive economy, is rent with every kind of social division. A third of its people are refugees. Natural calamities have brought starvation, aided and abetted by a ruthless, ignorant and fanatical cult. It is incumbent on Washington, even as it pursues its military agenda, to put together some kind of post-Taliban regime. President Bush, responding no doubt to realists in his Administration, announced that our mission in Afghanistan would not be “nation-building”.
That would seem to rule out just this sort of task. But the most pragmatic of Mr. Bush’s advisers must acknowledge that we will not accomplish our goal without the cooperation of allies, and hopefully, friends, in the area. That includes not just those Afghans disaffected from the regime, or those who would support a better regime were it to be conjured up. But it must include the Pakistanis.
Enlisting Russia, on our terms, and the Central Asian republics to Afghanistan’s north could be important. The only organized opposition inside the-country to the Taliban is the Northern Alliance, dependent on support from these allies to the north. But they represent a limited ethnic grouping and one, that on occasion, has been antagonistic to larger groups of the population and to Pakistan.
Collaboration of Pakistan is crucial to every aspect of our goals. Pakistan not only is tied by past aid, geography, ethnicity, linguistics, and religion to Afghanistan, but it represents as much a part of the problem as the solution. Pakistan has formally joined our campaign against terrorism. But not only has it used terrorist methods in the Kashmir feud with India, but it has a strong Islamicist groupings which could topple the present regime under certain circumstances.
As noted earlier [A Sense of Asia: Pakistan Maelstrom], further destabilization in Pakistan not only would jeopardize our goals in Afghanistan, but it would create a whole new range of problems throughout the Moslem world and in India. “Fixing” Afghanistan requires doing it in such a way that what Pakistan considers its vital interests are protected. Were Pakistan’s Gen. Musharraf not able to argue that successfully publicly and inside his army, the balance might very well tilt toward a radical Islamicist regime — or chaos. That would come in a country armed with nuclear weapons.
Therefore, putting together a post-Taliban solution becomes not only an essential political concomitant of achieving our immediate goals, but one that is of utmost necessity in preserving peace and stability in the region and the world.
How to do that? One would hope that what appears to be widespread revulsion against the Taliban regime, our threat, however bellicose the response so far, to a country now wracked by 30 years of civil war, starvation, and a refugee population that can be reached, makes compromise more real than some would argue. There is the possibility of at least using the former king in Rome as a center for discussion. Washington could continue to test President Putin’s good words with additional support among the former Soviet Central Asian states for a genuinely neutral Afghanistan.
The possibility of entering another quagmire like Vietnam? Certainly it is there. But the call for a maximum U.S. effort to reconstruct Afghanistan is in the final analysis not to be denied.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.