The Af-Pak Conflict

Hamurabi

Afghanistan: Operation Enduring Freedom

So the War in Afghanistan™ has been going on now for over 9 years. We’ve succeeded in propping up a government with zero credibility, both domestically and internationally; have been unable to exterminate the Taliban; have failed to convince the populace that siding with their own government (or the Americans) is in their long-term interests; and have now set a tentative withdrawal date of 2014 after having squandered vast amounts of American and foreign blood and treasure in yet another land war in Asia.

The original rationale for Operation Enduring Freedom was to deny Al-Qaeda a base of operations inside of lawless Afghanistan; the mountains of Afghanistan were purportedly where Al-Qaeda was able to hatch the plot to fly two planes into the Twin Towers and one into the Pentagon. While we’ve ostensibly been able to eliminate a significant number of senior Al-Qaeda leadership that was based inside Afghanistan, there’s no reason to suspect Al-Qaeda as an organization has been crippled; in fact, we know from recent events in the rest of the Arab world that Al-Qaeda is still very much active, and is still recruiting.

Another (less prominent) rationale for sending American troops into Afghanistan was to break the Taliban’s oppressive stranglehold on the population. While it is true that we have to some degree succeeded in beating back the Taliban and their extremist, repressive brand of Sharia law, there’s nothing to stop them from simply reconstituting once we leave. The Afghan army seems wholly unable to combat the Taliban on its own.

Pakistan: A Borderline Failed State Looking the Other Way

I just got back from a month-long visit to Karachi. What I saw there was very disheartening. Even moderate Pakistanis voice vehemently anti-American sentiments. Some of them feel that the west at large is part of an elaborate secular and/or Zionist plot to oppress Muslim nations and keep them from progressing economically and politically. More moderate voices feel that American/western imperialism is overreaching in its War on Terror and is compromising Pakistani sovereignty. A line I heard pretty often was, “How can they claim to be waging a ‘War on Terror,’ when they are the world’s number one terrorists?”

The backdrop to all of this is, I feel, a general anxiety about the general global march towards secularism. They see India making a lot of economic progress (though it’s realistically just ‘growth without development’), through democratic and secular means, and are threatened by it. They see China rising as a secular economic powerhouse that could potentially rival the United States in terms of global influence, and they’re threatened by it. The only explanation in their minds is a global initiative to deliberately hamstring Muslim nations. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, though; the youth in Pakistan are readily adopting western values of social liberalism and progressivism, even if in fits and starts. Basically anyone under 25 who has regular Internet access is on Facebook.

All of these tensions were manifested in the saga of Raymond Davis. Based on the information that’s come to light, Davis seems to have been a CIA operative (or contractor) inside of Pakistan who was keeping tabs on strategic installations, and possibly even doing spotting for drone attacks. It’s all fairly murky. The narrative I heard from Ahmed Kamal (a former Pakistani ambassador to the UN) was that Davis was in fact doing on-the-ground spotting for drone attacks, and the ISI (Pakistani intelligence) put two undercover agents on his tail. Davis realized he was being followed and shot both agents dead. A car coming to his aid from the American embassy in Lahore accidentally killed a third Pakistani. The wife of one of the slain men also committed suicide. Davis was picked up by the Pakistanis and placed in detention. According to the Pakistanis, they found evidence of espionage among his belongings – high-tech GPS equipment, photos of sensitive installations, etc. The White House got involved at this point, going so far as to send John Kerry to broker Davis’s release. Eventually the Americans paid several million dollars in ‘blood money’ to the families of the three dead Pakistanis, and provided all of them (17 in all) with US visas.

The official US account is that Davis was a diplomat who was accosted by robbers and was defending himself.

The Pakistani media seized on these events as manifest evidence of American hegemony and disregard for Pakistani sovereignty. The Glenn Becks of Pakistan (and there’re a lot of them nowadays) were on cable TV every night calling for Davis’s execution.

There’s a lot more ground to cover, of course, but that’s just a Crayon summation of the current state-of-play in the Af-Pak conflict. The point in making this thread is to ask: where do we go from here? Given these very adverse circumstances, is it worthwhile to keep pursuing the Taliban / Al-Qaeda in this part of the world? Was there any point to this endeavor to begin with? Does “winning” the war in Afghanistan necessarily mean American boots on the ground in Pakistan?

Robman

We kind of shat the bed in Afghanistan. If we had gone in and built them up rather then bombing them down, then the situation would be entirely different now.

Styrofoam Sammich

Yeah it seems to problem was the years spent not really doing anything there while we went off on other adventures.

Evigilant

The "War on Terror" is doomed for as long as the focus of the conflict is on terrorism. Yes, terrorism is bad, it's good that we're catching or getting the people responsible and stopping future terror; but it will always be a losing battle. Terrorism is an abstract thing, you can't hold it, you can't touch it, you can't destroy it, it's always going to exist. Everyone we catch or kill is replaced, it's never ending. They have all the time, they know the land, and they will take the losses because they know if they just wait it out, we become disinterested, we lose focus, and people stop caring. Against an entrenched enemy, we're going about it all half assed. So they'll wait it out, they'll pop up here and there and be the bogeyman. When we leave, and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done, they'll come out in force and undo everything. We won't care, we'll say we did what we could, good job chaps, we gave you the tools it's on you now Afghan.

I was talking to one of my SOF friends and he mentioned how we're the Soviets of the world, only instead of communism we're forcing democracy and capitalism. Our Iron Curtain is our military might and our rapid deployments to anywhere in the world, our Union the countries we've claimed full of our bases.

[Tycho?]

Afghanistan truely is the Graveyard of Empires. So it was true with the Soviet Union, and unless something really big changes very quickly, I think it will be true of the US of A as well.

There is no meaningful victory that can come from Afghanistan, and there never was.

Fencingsax

Where did the phrase "blood and treasure" come from, anyways? It's really annoying.

JihadJesus

Does anyone else get a serious Orwellian 'War is Peace' vibe from the war on terror? We need a new boogey man, so we find one. Of course there's no actual way to engage them let alone defeat them so we just fight a 'war' against a fluid opponent until we collectively decide we're not *that* afraid they'll manage to kill us all. Meanwhile this horrible menance that's not really all that menacing provides the necessary fear to justify spending an utterly absurd percentage of our GDP on continued military might, despite the fact that we already have weaponry powerful enough to deter anyone but the literally insane from even considering any meaningful attack upon us.

Fallout2man

Hamurabi wrote: »

The backdrop to all of this is, I feel, a general anxiety about the general global march towards secularism. They see India making a lot of economic progress (though it’s realistically just ‘growth without development’), through democratic and secular means, and are threatened by it. They see China rising as a secular economic powerhouse that could potentially rival the United States in terms of global influence, and they’re threatened by it. The only explanation in their minds is a global initiative to deliberately hamstring Muslim nations. There’s a lot of cognitive dissonance, though; the youth in Pakistan are readily adopting western values of social liberalism and progressivism, even if in fits and starts. Basically anyone under 25 who has regular Internet access is on Facebook.

There was a BBC documentary called "The Power of Nightmares" or something like that which actually summed up both the current Neocon political movement in America and the muslim extremist movement as both being based around the idea of a dogmatic rejection of liberalism and liberal values. So this really sounds par for the course. Rile people up, keep them Religious and then make them afraid that the West will cause their children to go to their plane of torment of choice for being dirty dirty heathens/unbelievers. I mean if you think about it, if you literally believed Satan would perpetually torture your children in the worst ways imaginable for all of eternity you'd want to bomb the USA too for thinking they somehow "forced your children to live sinful lifestyles" thanks to all the propaganda put out against Liberal...well...anything.

enlightenedbum

Fencingsax wrote: »

Where did the phrase "blood and treasure" come from, anyways? It's really annoying.

Dates back to at least Petrarch in the 14th Century. Popularized during Cromwell's time in England. Was in common usage by the American Revolution.

ronya

@[Tycho?]

Later commentators, pointing to the long line of invading armies that came to grief and ignominy in Afghanistan, most notably the British, have tut-tutted over the Soviets' lack of strategic perspective. This ignores the facts that many other armies have successfully conquered Afghanistan; and, probably more important from the Soviet point of view, they had long since ``been there, done that, got the seventy million subjects.'' Soviet rule in Central Asia began by crushing tribal and religious guerilla movements, the basmachi, and doing so with exceeding thoroughness. Even during the Second World War, when the Soviets' western territories (the Baltics, the Ukraine, etc.) went into open revolt, Central Asia remained obedient to Stalin. For the military planners in Moscow, the Afghan venture must have seemed very old hat indeed.

It didn't work out that way. This was not, of course, because the Soviets developed scruples, still less because world opinion turned against them, most of the usual voices of outrage being (with a few intensely honorable exceptions) conspicuous by their silence for a decade. (The French Communist Party, that famed moral authority, publicly supported the invasion.) No, the real difference between the fate of the mujahideen and the basmachi seems to have been that the Afghans were simply more determined and vicious than their predecessors had been --- and had logistical support from another superpower.

Here we come to the sowing of the dragon's teeth. US aid to the mujahideen went through the CIA. The CIA passed it on to its counterpart in Pakistan, the ISI (which doubles as the Pakistani secret police). The ISI passed it on to the political parties of exiles in Peshawr, from whom, in turn, it finally made its way, often much-reduced, to commanders inside Afghanistan. The ISI, as a matter of deliberate policy, favored the most extreme Islamist organizations it could lay hands on, plus ethnic separatists --- not because it thought these groups could form a stable government in Afghanistan, but precisely because it hoped they could not. (Recall that the frontier with Afghanistan, including Peshawr, had been disputed since before Pakistan formed in 1947.) The CIA went along, reasoning that the Islamists were the most immovably anti-communist groups available; the fact that they were also the most anti-western does not seem to have entered into their calculations. The net effect --- admirably described by Kakar, in large measure from direct observation --- was to render impotent other political groups, whether traditionalist or, like Kakar himself, nationalist, and to destroy the authority of traditional power-holders and even of jirgas, replacing them with men whose claims to power were force and fanaticism, often coupled to an astonishing ignorance of the Islam they claimed to be imposing. Of course most of the men who took up arms against the Soviets were not like that; but of course over time the balance of power shifted in favor of those who were.

from this book review

Okay, perhaps not entirely apropos, but tangentially related, I hope. It does seem implausible to suggest that Afghans were, for the Soviets, inherently more difficult to subdue than its northern neighbors, all members of the USSR.

Dis'

ronya wrote: »

@[Tycho?]

from this book review

Okay, perhaps not entirely apropos, but tangentially related, I hope. It does seem implausible to suggest that Afghans were, for the Soviets, inherently more difficult to subdue than its northern neighbors, all members of the USSR.

Well the Central Asian republics were either a) Really flat and easy to police, or b) mountainious but with less than a quarter of Afghanistans population.

Plus all of them had been under Russian domination for over a century by the 1980s, indeed it was Stalin who actually defined the central asians republics as national states (the Kazakhstan-Russia border is a wiggly line he drew for kicks, Uzbekistan got a whole bunch of former Turkmen land etc), before him things were much more fluid. The Soviets had a massive set of links with the locals, and tons of trained speakers of the various turkic langugues.

Afghanistan was somewhere completely new for the Soviets.

[Tycho?]

I'll pretty much agree with Dis on this.

On top of what he says, the Soviets insured millions of ethnic Russians or other slavs moved into the region, meaning that many of the major cities and some regions had a Russian majority, instead of the native ethnic groups. Many of the people were nomadic, and when borders were drawn they simply packed up and crossed the border elsewhere instead of fighting. WW2 (or The Great Patriotic War, as it was known in the USSR) also served to really unite the various different republics under a common cause. This helped prevent any rebel movements from getting off the ground.

That being said, there are parts of Central Asia that are, like Afghanistan, fundamentally difficult to conquer and hold. The Fergana Valley and its surrounding mountainous areas will the the source of future wars I'd bet, the Caucuses are difficult and parts of eastern China as well are tough. Mountains, combined with the frequently warlike tribes that live in mountains make them very difficult areas to hold, especially in the long term.

I don't think Afghanistan is the "Graveyard of Empires" because of something inherent to Afghans (or Pashtuns, or whomever), but instead because it is inherently difficult to occupy, and that for some reason great powers have still tried to do it. There are other places the US could have invaded that would have been similarly brutal, like Vietnam back in the day. The title fits as much due to happenstance as due to the inhabitants and the terrain.