Monday, July 21, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
When a politician tramples one’s own turf – whether it is Bush 1 misconstruing the checkout procedures at the supermarket or Obama talking about the complications of U.S. foreign policy – you always have to wonder: does he know better or is he just feeding the fish?
On July 15th in the first of what is advertised as a series of seminal addresses on foreign policy, candidate Sen. Barrack Obama made a good deal of Afghanistan and Pakistan.
What he proferred, as he has insisted for some time, is that the Bush Administration [with Sen. John McCain’s endorsement] goofed badly when it invaded Iraq and neglected the real problem in Afghanistan. It was, he says, an either or proposition: Washington should have gone with all its force against the real culprits, Osama Bin Laden and his clan, who plotted and carried out 9/11 and who may still be holed up in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Had Washington devoted the assets squandered in Iraq, goes his long mantra of what might and could have been achieved in the last decade in the world led by the U.S., then there world be no growing crisis in Afghanistan.
That brings us around to the question: is the candidate really as little versed in the complications of the problem he is describing, or are we getting a full load of political oratory – the kind that seems relatively harmless during a campaign but exacerbates or creates new problems for the incoming administration’s whoever comes to power?
Obama claims the Baghdad regime was not a threat to American security despite its dictator Saddam Hussein’s brief abortive attempt at conquest of Kuwait in 1991. Never mind that the Baghdad regime was violating the terms of the armistice agreement on a daily basis, firing on Allied aircraft, that it had earlier used weapons of mass destruction [poison gas on its own people, the Kurds], that in 1991 it had been discovered further along with developing a nuclear weapon than anticipated, that the worldwide intelligence community believed a renewed nuclear weapon development was underway, or that with Saddam threatened to dominate the Persian Gulf with its corner on the world’s supply of hydrocarbons and whole of the Middle East. Only now do we know how the already forgotten corrupt UN Food for Oil was instrumental in encouraging Saddam and his henchmen for another try at all their past goals given the country’s staggering huge potential resources.
That piece of history will be argued by better historians than Obama and McCain for a long time to come.
Meanwhile, during the last few weeks when the two American presidential candidates have been busily slashing at one another’s arguments, however superficially, a good deal has been happening in the part of the world for which Obama seems to have the answers.
American and NATO casualties are rising in Afghanistan. Were the U.S. to send the two or three additional brigades that the Senator would commit to that fight and get more help from the Europeans [for which the Bush Administration has long pleaded but Obama says he can deliver with a programmed withdrawal from Iraq], those casualties might have not been sustained. Or given the nature of the warfare there, there is no assurance they might not even have climbed with more men on the ground in combat. [It was my understanding that the Ilinois candidate’s credentials were in constitutional law, not highly mobile warfare against a guerrilla enemy on his home grounds.]
One look at an aerial map tells you how the problem begins. The more than thousand mile winding Pakistan Afghanistan border stretches through some of the highest mountains in the world, some of the roughest terrain on earth, an area thinly inhabited by impoverished tribal societies with the folkways and mores of that kind of society. It is a cliché but true that the border drawn arbitrarily by colonial empires divides tribes, ethnicities and linguistic groups. Their governance has never gone beyond their kith and kin. Even during Britain’s hundred years of undisputed domination of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, only occasionally did the writ of the Raj enter the tribal areas – and then only to smite briefly or reward niggardly.
“The insurgents we see coming across the border, and those that we are dealing with inside Afghanistan, are a diverse lot,” says Major General Jeffrey J. Schloesser, U.S.Army. Schloesser is a 32-year Army veteran who commands NATO's Regional Command-East [RC-East] since early April, having served in Germany, South Korea, Haiti, Kosovo and Iraq. He is concurrently commander of the US Army's elite 101st Airborne Division as well as the diverse NATO forces, each with its own battlefield instructions – or lack of commitment thereof.
“…[the insurgents are] a variety, not just one group”, Shcloesser points out. “It's not just the conservative, Kandahar [province]-based Taliban. You can say they share a common ideology, but sometimes even that is unclear. There seems to be a strong degree of cooperation [among them]. Some help with financing, some with facilitation to help them get across and also move weapons across the border.
“Others help train and recruit fighters not only within Pakistan but elsewhere as well. I wouldn't say that I have seen a lot of what I would call Pakistanis. I would not want to call this a large or organized movement. These are largely smaller insurgent groups and terrorists from different regions participating in this [fighting].”
But the complications of the situation only begin with the nature of the insurgents themselves. They live and function in a larger multinational environment steeped with decades if not centuries of conflict and intrigue.
Hanging over everything is the conflict between India and Pakistan, in theory principally revolving around the issue of the Kashmir region just to the east and south of the contested Afghan-Pakistan border. But the issues are over a much wider problem: the destiny of the once dominant Muslim population of the subcontinent, with India’s own Muslim minority probably bigger than the population of Pakistan, a country created out of British India as a homeland for Muslims by secular leadership.
Although relations between the two countries which have fought two and a half wars in a half century of independence are at the moment better than they have been, it is more appearance than reality. Yes, they are talking about jointly financing and building a pipeline from Iran crossing through Pakistan to India – against U.S. wishes and pressure – for bringing gas to their growing if stumbling economies.
But in the past few days, communal – Moslem majority versus Hindu minority – rioting has so convulsed Indian-held Kashmir that local government has been suspended for “president’s rule”, a New Delhi takeover of administrative functions that garrisons more than half a million Indian security forces. [The violence began over the administration of lands belonging to a Hindu temple.]
Northwest of the Vale of Kashmir, India has reoccupied an isolated air base in Ladkh, the Buddhist-majority part of Kashmir on the Tibetan plateau, in the face of a continuing rapid Chinese military buildup in Tibet. Again, India-China trade is roaring along but Beijing still has claims — and no progress has been made in lifting its threat — to much of northeastern India.
The India-China relationship is really a three-cornered dance of death with Pakistan. Only a few weeks ago, Pakistan President Pervez Nusharraf, after a visit to his “all weather” ally in Beijing, was persuaded by his Chinese hosts to drop in on their huge western province of Sngkiang, apparently to give a message to fellow Muslims. Days later Beijing announced a crackdown on Uighur, Singkiang’s Turkic natives, whom the Chinese charge are threatening to try to disrupt the August Olympic Games in the Chinese capital. The heart of the long smoldering revolt against the Chinese is in the old caravan city of Kashgar, closer to Islamabad, never mind Beijing, than to the Chinese administrative capital of Umruchi.
In Kashmir itself, India has reported a recent sharp increase in incidents along the line of control, the armistice line between so-called Azad [Free] Kashmir backed by Pakistan and the much larger Indian-controlled areas, increasingly restive with its 10 million Muslim population. If, as India insists, guerrilla crossings are fed by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence [the Indians have just officially asked Islamabad to dismantle it], there are equally strong suspicions about Indian activities. The three Indian consulates which Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai early in his administration permitted to open on the Afghan-Pakistani border have more than a little interest in the bubbling insurgencies in Pakistan’s huge western province of Baluchistan and the traditionally pro-Indian elements in the Northwest Frontier Province [now voted into the regional government].
Whatever is actually happening, of course, the rumor mills are probably even more fantastic in this part of the world than in the Near East. And in warfare as in other human activities, as so many famous strategists through the ages have argued, perception is very much part of the game.
Victory in Iraq, even were all Obama’s arguments for the Bush Administration’s mistakes accepted and proved, would be an important element in fighting the much more difficult complications of the war on the Hindu Kush, the roof of the world. Defeat through an untimely withdrawal after all the sacrifices Americans and Iraqis have made would be equally affecting.
Being “parachuted” into a war zone as a VIP isn’t the best way to get at local truths. But, hopefully, Obama will return from his travels soon to be undertaken in Europe and the Middle East a wiser man, at least aware of infinite complexities on the ground and the dangers of an micromanagement by an amateur from Washington.