Sol Sanders Archive

Wind up Iraq quickly and move on to Afghanistan with a greater effort has been the Obama solution to the problem of Islamofacism at the same time that more expansive efforts on the diplomatic front would reach out to potential allies in the Muslim world. That might include, he at first suggested, sitting down with leaders of Iran and Syria without preconditions. And it included toning down American rhetoric; his explicit turning away from BushÕs Òwar on terrorismÓ is part of this new approach as were his inaugural speech appeal to the Muslim world and an implied indictment of past U.S. policy then and in his first sit-down TV interview with an Arab language network.

Events are already modifying these initial prescriptions as they inevitably would and will continue to do so in the months ahead.

But ObamaÕs continuation of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his own cabinet appears to imply that whatever the rhetoric much of the Bush Administration planning and approach continues. Calls for additional troops and transferring American efforts in Iraq to Afghanistan were already in the Bush-GatesÕ pipeline last fall.

But Gates, too, has been for months in public statements modifying his earlier emphasis on Iraq problems in relation to Afghanistan.

"ÉThe goals we did have for Afghanistan are too broad and too far into the future," he told a congressional committee in his appearance there in his new reincarnation in the Obama Administration. Strategy now should be to define "more concrete goals that can be achieved realistically within three to five years in terms of re-establishing control in certain areas, providing security for the population, going after Al Qaeda, preventing the reestablishment of terrorism, better performance in terms of delivery of services to the people, some very concrete things." [Curious was his throwaway line that Washington had been trying to create "a Central Asian Valhalla"; curious because the Nordic mythological setting is synonymous with hallowed graves for dead warriors ø hardly what anyone in the Bush Administration had been conjuring up for Afghanistan.]

The Obama campaign oratory is being followed up in what has been announced as a proposed doubling of the size of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. U.S. commanders on the ground have all concurred for some time that the current 33,000 men are not enough. Bush had pressed the U.S.Õ European allies for additions to their 37,000 men [and to lessen their restrictive use] and perhaps others for more troops for the 15,000 additional non-NATO coalition forces.

Vice President Joseph Biden on a tour of the region just before inauguration warned that with this increased force structure and more intensive fighting there are likely to be more casualties. And Biden has echoed virtually every other observer in pointing to the probability of a long and bitter struggle to rein in the forces of asymmetrical warfare waged by foreign jihadist fighters now flocking to the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area as well as revived disparate Taliban elements on both sides of the border.

Gen. David Petraeus now heads the Central Command which in the formal structure lays out the strategy for Afghanistan [as well as Iraq]. Petraeus gets credit, probably correctly, for the improved situation in Iraq ø which right now at this writing permits peaceful and widespread participation provincial elections unimaginable only two or three years ago.

But it was not only his promotion of increased American boots on the ground, the so-called surge, but also political deals with various factions and structures for comity that has produced these results. Petraeus has implied that such combinations of force and diplomacy at the lowest level are going to be necessary for a ÒsolutionÓ in Afghanistan. Furthermore, although he never was able to do very much about the problem of Syrian infiltration on his Iraq flank, he has attacked the problem of what, again, virtually all kibitzers believe will have to be regional cooperation for progress in Afghanistan. Petraeus in January made a round of the Central Asian states to the north and west of Afghanistan in an effort to get their further cooperation in the American effort. His announcement that they -- along with Moscow -- had agreed to give him an alternate line of logistics with the two narrow funnels from Pakistan under attack, however practical they might or might not be, were important signals of this regional diplomatic effort.

But the essential element in any effective Òregional approachÓ has to be a closely coordinated effort in dealing with the tribal hideouts between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is a problem which not only has the long history of neglect by governments in the plains, but the fact that it has been used over the last century in the larger conflict between the Soviet Union, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Iranians. All those chickens now come home to roost, inflamed by the arrival of the new international terrorist movement. That completely destroys any analogy to Iraq.

Back home, the Obama Administration through Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already acknowledged this complexity with the appointment of a special envoy, Richard C.A. Holbrooke, an experienced negotiator in the Balkans. But it was an indicator of the ratÕs nest Holbrooke will encounter in any such effort when the Indians insisted that he not be listed formally as an envoy to New Delhi as a player in the Afghanistan-Pakistan effort. That is, of course, logically ridiculous for a variety of reasons: the Pakistan-Indian bilateral relationship, often on tenterhooks, is at the heart of the regional political equation.

But New Delhi was in a state of shock over just a rumor that former Pres. William Jefferson Clinton would be made an international Kashmir negotiator; for a half century IndiaÕs one cardinal principal in the Kashmir dispute has been the keep it a bilateral issue between it and Pakistan. Original UN mandates for a plebiscite are still stacked on the shelf gathering dust along with other unfulfilled international recommendations.

But other comparisons with Iraq quickly turn illusive. Baghdad has been the center of Middle East culture and great empires for centuries. The cosmopolitan sophistication of its elite ø despite the horrors of recent years ø was legendary. [One forgets that in pre-World War II, for example, the largest single ethnic group in the Iraqi capital were Baghdadi Jews who had been there for two millennia as exiles brought by the Persian conquerors and destroyers of the First Temple and who played a central role in the expansion of BritainÕs commercial empire in Asia.] Its oil and water resources give it the potential to quickly become a prosperous country.

Although Afghanistan played a prominent historical role in the exchanges between the Orient and Middle East and the West and has been the seat of ÒempiresÓ in the past, the present geography is largely an artificial political buffer, a compromise creation of the aggressively advancing Russian empire on British India. The ethnic tensions, even by the standards of the Shia, the Sunni, and the Kurds in Iraq, are monumental. It is as well-worn clichŽ by now but it is true that the demarcation between Pakistan and Afghanistan cuts right through ethnic and linguistic groupings ø and it has been the wont of Moscow, New Delhi, and Tehran to use them against any government sitting in Pakistan. The tribal areas along the border have never been ruled directly by either British India or Pakistan. Old scenarios of playing tribe against tribe, bribery and occasional punitive expeditions [not so far from those old Hollywood movies, or, indeed, Kipling] no longer work against international jihadist networks operating with massive drug funds, subsidies from Persian Gulf sympathizers, and mastery of the internet and the cell phone. PakistanÕs army has been honed to fight the Indians in the Punjab plain ø or maybe on a glacier in Kashmir ø but is no more of a match for guerrilla campaigns in some of the worst terrain in the world than the U.S. was when it entered Iraq.

Gates hints that old Bush goals of bringing a democratic regime to Afghanistan are unrealistic. That could well be a consensus within the Obama Administration within a few months when the realities of the situation become apparent to those making policy, including the President. Clinton was particularly nasty in her confirmation testimony before the Senate describing President Hamid KarzaiÕs regime.

But one has to ask if the implications of those public statements were clearly understood; surely there has been some reflection on the Bush AdministrationÕs effort to micromanage PakistanÕs politics with a shotgun marriage which failed when she was assassinated between Gen. Pervez Musharraf and a civilian politician Benazir Bhutto. In effect, one of the problems now is that Washington is dealing with a bifurcated Pakistani government of more than slightly worn civilian politicians and a military establishment which whatever its faults probably represents the only functioning national institution.

That, of course, is not the case in Afghanistan where the major undertaking is still, ostensibly, to establish military and police cadre which can exercise national power. The aim might not be democracy, or not even a strong central government. But what is the alternative? The installation of one of AfghanistanÕs several warlords, most of whom are not of KarzaiÕs majority Pushtoons but Tajiks or Uzbeks whose ties are as great across the Oxus in Central Asia as they are to Kabul?

Just as Petraeus & Co. put together a compromise with the Sunni and former Baathists who had been at the heart of the insurgency against the Americans, there is talk of bringing over the more moderate elements of the Taleban. But ÒmoderateÓ can be a very word hard to define in Muslim politics Theoretically at least, the Iraqi Baathists were secularists and modernizers. But how far, for example, can these ÒmoderatesÓ be weaned away from their misogyny which endorses acid attacks on young women only seeking schooling?

Obama, whom most observers would grant, has had good luck, is a shrewd politician, and a pragmatist, will be scratching his way through all this in the next few months. But it is clear that he has himself a war which could be just as disastrous to his immediate political game as it was for George W. Bush in Iraq.