Sol Sanders Archive

Creative fixes for Afghanistan and worldwide jihadism

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Centrally directed Al Qaida, however effective in 9/11, has now ceded to regional groups and even individual “freelance” terrorists — “death by a thousand cuts”. Recruitment of second and third generation acolytes is growing in Western Europe and the U.S. — with their customized skills — as local Muslims either dissimulate or refuse to take up the cudgels against terrorism.

So long as jihadists in Afghanistan-Pakistan are not defeated, the bandwagon effect promises other sanctuaries — whether Yemen, Somalia, North Africa, wherever.

With U.S. finances in crisis, the burden of two Mideast wars becomes all the more difficult — especially since the Pentagon soon will have to turn from obsession with asymmetrical warfare to the growing conventional and nuclear menace in Northeast Asia.

Whatever his accomplishments, Amb. Richard Holbrooke’s death dramatized the failure of South and Central Asia regional strategies, his purview which common sense and history had dictated.

Afghanistan, then, is only one portion of a much larger canvas.

Sweden’s most recent terrorist episode again spotlights Europe’s growing Muslim problem. As German Chancellor Angela Merkel flatly states, “multiculturalism has failed”. Not only are jihadists locating suicide candidates among young European Muslims, but contrary to the left’s insistence on “fundamental issues” as the cause, recruits are more often than not middle-class, educated, in no way except romantically connected to “the starving masses”.

The Obama Mideast braintrusters, mesmerized by the Israel-Arab feud, see its “solution” as healing the environment nurturing terrorism. But leaked State Dept. telegrams reconfirm it as only one of many issues in the Arab/Moslem world. The growing threat from Iran preoccupies Persian Gulf and Egyptian regimes. And, in fact, Osama Bin Laden, came to “the Palestine cause” long after he set his sights on toppling the Saudis and wounding their chief ally in the West, the U.S.

As important as rooting out Afghanistan Taliban, the disintegration of Pakistan bombarded by traditional terrorist tactics is as critical. The publicity given — by such organizations as Soros-backed Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict and old Pakistani leftists — to civilian casualties from U.S. drone attacks obscures what is happening. Growing ethnic violence in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city [20 million including 5 million Pushtoon tribal migrants] and only port, bloody conflict between the Sunni majority and minority Shia, Christian atrocities, inter-tribal killing as well as heavy losses in army campaigns in the border areas, and a continuing civil war in Baluchistan, the huge, lightly populated western province bordering Iran’s troubled southeast, are undermining the country’s fragile civil society. The Bush Administration’s pressure to return to “democracy” has resulted in an incompetent, corrupt, fractured administration. All this provides fertile ground for terrorism and as important, training facilities for Western Muslim recruits. A nuclear-clad, 175-million, leading if impoverished Muslim state is hanging in the balance.

Growing U.S. public opposition to the wars risks that even though the Obama Administration has fudged earlier withdrawal deadlines, the history of the Vietnam War and France’s Algerian conflict might be duplicated: a military victory abandoned in the face of domestic political opposition.

Growing costs will become increasingly a major issue as the American economy sluggishly recovers from the 2007-8 financial crisis. There are possibilities of mitigating these by exploiting Afghanistan abundant natural resources, despite the continuing fighting. Why the Chinese moved in on one of the world’s largest copper projects ahead of American capital remains a puzzle. But mid-December saw the signing of a proposal to build a 1,000-mile gas pipeline, a longtime American oil company project, to carry Turkmenistan’s gas [fourth largest world reserves] to India and other world markets through Afghanistan and Pakistan. Washington, backed by the Japanese-dominated Asian Development Bank, countered proposals from Iran. Tehran had been offering gas to India to short circuit U.S. and UN sanctions. Success would also clinch loss of Moscow’s former monopoly and limit China’s growing access to Central Asian fossil fuels. Transit fees for both Afghanistan and Pakistan would be substantial. Kabul proposes “baksheesh” to tribals whose land it would traverse, an old British Indian concept. Just as pipelines in Algeria and Burma function despite domestic turmoil, the project may not be as farfetched as it would seem.

Such creative strategies would help pacify the tribes which Taliban exploits and integrate the region, marginally overcoming longtime political animosities. Amb. Holbrooke made little headway with this task — in no small part because of continuing Indian subversion to counter Pakistan’s agitation in increasingly bedeviled Kashmir. That enormous problem still stalks the region. But even a minor success would help get the region off the backs of American taxpayers at a time of stringent new demands to pump up the U.S. economy.

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