With respect, George Will is wrong about Afghanistan
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 E-Mail this story Free Headline Alerts
Sol Sanders also writes the "Asia Investor" column weekly for EAST-ASIA-INTEL.com.
The time was the mid-60s in Saigon, in many ways the nadir of the American effort in Vietnam, in its way worse than the Embassy rooftop depaftures of 1975.
Washington had staged a military coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, the only anti-Communist leader with credentials, then had him murdered. There was a revolving door of politically incompetent military trying to run a country the Americans were also trying to micromanage.
There was the media, not exactly informed but egotistical enough for some their veterans to gloat over their "victory" over Diem. It would still be a few months before they played their second hand in misinterpreting the Tet Offensive.
And there was the rest of the American Establishment coming and going in all its glory - I will never forget a visit of well-meaning Ivy League professors from "all the disciplines", many of them never in Asia before, who came to write a book on the "Pyschology of the War".
The young man sat opposite me in one of those very good French-style [if horrendously filthy] restaurants.
I got a bevy of visitors in those days, sent by friends in the U.S., sometimes "assigned" by JUSPAO [the American government PR outfit] to an Old Hand. [I had spent a year in Hanoi more than a decade earlier during "the French War".] They sent them along to me because I was "committed" to the enterprise, but bitterly critical of its implementation - and had loudly opposed the Diem coup in word and deed.
After giving him an hour of so of my litany on the all trials and tribulations before the American-South Vietnamese effort, probably in far more detail than he had anticipated, his eyes widened and widened as my narrative ran on, I am sure, monotonously.
Finally, in sheer desperation, he said to me, "After telling me all this, how can you possibly be 'for the war'?" It was before the big American buildup in January 1965, after LBJ had struggled through his Congressional elections the November before. But I had already seen enough killing and dying and I was not, as my young visitor might have imagined, hardened to it. I never was.
It was obvious not much of what I had said had penetrated. I said: "Didn't your mother ever tell you that there would be some things in life that would be hard but you would have to do them, even if they seemed near impossible and required all your effort."
That vignette came roaring back as I heard about the noted columnist George Will writing on our Afghanistan effort and then read his missive. By and large I share what he would call his weltanschauung, what I would call his worldview.
But his recent column calling for American withdrawal from Afghanistan, I not so humbly submit, is full of misinformation and miscalculations.
I could follow him "a fur piece", as we used to say when I was growing up in the "mountings" of North Carolina. But, in the end, he fails to "close", or so I would argue.
Will makes several cogent arguments, as I read him: 1] The situation in Afghanistan is incredibly difficult, 2] the situation is deteriorating, 3] the U.S./NATO has no adequate strategy, 4] problems of the Afghanistan environment - as for example corruption - are congenital and cannot be erased by a foreign occupation, 5] increasing the American contingent would not be a solution, at least not one that could be more helpful than a long-distance attack on the problems, 5] therefore, there is no option but to withdraw, to Pakistan, and carry on asymmetrical warfare from outside against Afghanistan.
Will's message comes at the same time an old friend, long a strategist and once in power, has flown over the Hindu Kush for the first time - and is in shock. Until you have seen K2 from an airplane skirting the southern rim of Tibet, you cannot, as he says, appreciate the nature of the terrain. More than a half million men, he concludes, will not turn the tide.
But where both Will - and my friend's apparent implied argument for withdrawal - come a cropper is in the columnist's proposed solution.
It is true, as he says, that there are all kinds of possible sanctuaries for the Islamofascists around the world. And it is also a given that the U.S. cannot police them all. [Our current incapacities against the pirates off the Horn of Africa are frightening proof - and leads one to speculate how long it would be before they join hands with the jihadists.] But neither Somalia, Yemen, or for that matter, Sudan or an independent Palestine, could afford the kind of sanctuary that the Pakistan-Afghanistan region comes by, naturally.
Will says back off Afghanistan and defend the Pakistan border.
I am sorry but, frankly, that shows a total ignorance of the actual scene. The Pushtoon tribals cling to both sides of the border and, as one would have hoped everyone knew by now, the famous late 19th century Durand line which was supposed to divide the British Indian Empire and Afghanistan, cuts through the heart of the geographic, ethnic, linguistic and cultural entity.
It was not for nothing that the amateurish strategists in the Inter Services Institute, that notorious Pakistan intelligence organization, advocated an alliance with even a fanatical Muslim cult in Kabul after the Soviet withdrawal and the resultant civil war and almost total breakdown. They saw it, in their dimwitted warmap fantasies, as solving several problems with one solution: 1] the longtime and increasingly difficult British Indian solution of preserving an isolated "Indian reservation" [American not East Indian although there are footnotes to be made here too] between an Afghanistan neutral in the Great Game between Russia and the British Indian Empire. 2] The growing problem of Pakistan's either policing it directly as the British had never done or giving in to a new Pushtoonistan in the face of the increasingly failing isolation of the tribals, and 3] most of all, for "strategic depth" for the next round in the Indo-Pakistan wars [which was a little looney in itself - can one imagine the Pak army withdrawing to Afghanistan to threaten northern India?].
To believe, especially now with all the recent history, that the U.S. could stand offshore and pound Afghanistan with guided missiles and occasional Special Forces/CIA action, and keep the area under off-balance if not under control, is to believe in the tooth fairy. In fact, one can think of no better way than to set up one giant suicide bomb factory.
It is a relatively accepted fact among all the strategists, the old hands and the new whizz kids who have discovered the fools' gold of COIN [the "science" of counter insurgency], that the current mess was produced in no small measure by the earlier American abandonment of the post-Soviet Afghanistan [and Pakistan busy making a prohibited nuclear weapon and building missiles with the help of other pariah states].
Would we now seek to antagonize and grow the Islamic fanatics with an offshore bombardment and occasional puntative raids [like those, perhaps, that found Osama Bin Ladin in these mountains]? How long would it take for that to develop into a terrorist campaign from Afghanistan against Pakistan, one that in fact already exists in a small way? How long could the essentially secular feudal, political class of Pakistan emboldened by its military be able to stand up to the kind of terrorism Israel has known through out its half- century existence before fleeing to Dubai or London - or India? In fact, how long would the Pakistan military maintain those secular and non-political [among their ranks] traditions of the old British Indian Army, recruiting as they do, heavily, from Punjabi and Pushtoon-speaking Pathansas well as Punjabis? How long before all this would infect India's Muslim population, already larger than Pakistan's, bringing on civil war there? Or in neighboring Bangladesh where a recent brutally suppressed revolt of the border militia had ties to the jihadists?
To equate Pakistan, of course, one of the largest populations in the world [an estimated 180 million], with any of the other sanctuaries the terrorists might choose is ludicrous. Pakistan may be a nearly-failed state, bankrupt, a client of both the U.S. and China, locked in a fragile peace with a much larger neighbor, India, facing a low-grade insurgency in its largest province.
But Pakistan is a leading Muslim nation, a longtime prop for the Persian Gulf states, and even Saudi Arabia which has borrowed elements of its army from time to time for a little Yemen-bashing.
For another thing, the Pakistani ethnic population of Great Britain has already become a leading source of concern for international terrorist experts and fighters? Ask the counterintelligence Ms in London. What would happen to these young disaffected Anglo-Pakistanis in a world where Pakistan would be fighting for its life against a new Osama Bin Ladin - for he would certainly arise - in Afghanistan?
Yes, it is quite likely that under that kind of pressure, Pakistan might well implode? Who would get the bombs? How soon would there be a movement for reuniting Pakistani and Indian Punjab. How long before the so long predicted, "disapourous" tendencies of the Subcontinent would tear India apart, into smaller warring states, some now nuclear-clad?
Of course, as Maynard Milord Keynes said, in the long run we will all be dead. But history has speeded up. The tribal jihadists now use satellite phones for communication and DVDs for propaganda. They recruit all over the Muslim ummah from Casablanca to Zamboanga, a vast slice of impoverished, largely illiterate, and despairing 1.3 billion of the world's people. And given the wretched conditions most of the young in most Muslim countries live with, it is not so hard to see how they are successful as recent captures and raids in the tribal regions has shown.
What then is my alternative solution? I long ago gave up on predictions and "solutions". But there might be some hints at what could be done:
Throw away the COIN bibles and use good old American common sense.
Afghanistan will not be a West European democracy, not in a year, not in a decade. But it can be ruled, and ruled with less barbarity than the Taliban and its allies in the world of fanaticism and jihad. It may mean a loose multi-ethnic confederation of enlightened warlords, as it has so often been in the past, but ones who are progressive enough that they do not live [only] by blackmail and opium.
It may mean taking a neocolonial attitude toward the Kabul center; Hamad Karzai is a dud, but the old shibboleth we heard in Vietnam before 1964 that "nothing could be worse" is not valid. There can always be something worse in a broken, backward, medieval society like Afghanistan - and usually is. The Taliban proved that.
Is that possible with an Obama Administration, penned down by growing domestic economic and political problems, and a president himself and his advisers largely devotees of the infantile clichés of the 1960s leftists?
As predicted here, Obama's "famous" Cairo speech with it stretched out hand to Islam has disappeared into the mists of historical clichéd rhetoric. I doubt that one breaking the Ramadan fast at the White House with a group of Muslim friends would do it either.
But if, as he continually tells us, he has a "feel" for Muslim society, it is time that he and his amanuensis, that other Mideast expert, James Jones, begins to show the world.
One thing is crystal clear: Will's solution of the Gordian Knot did not benefit Alexander when he strode those Bactrian mountains and valleys - nor did it serve when he tried desperately to get back to Greece - and it would not serve U.S. policy and world peace and stability.