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COMMENT: Time to quit Afghanistan? —Mohammad Jamil

President Barack Obama is facing a big dilemma. If he continues with the policy of former President Bush vis-à-vis ‘staying the course’ in Afghanistan, he is in for a drubbing not only by the American public but also by the leaders of his own party

According to the latest opinion polls, a majority of Americans oppose sending more troops to Afghanistan and a majority of Republicans and Democrats do not think the war is worth fighting at all. A poll released on Saturday revealed that a growing number of Britons also want their troops out of Afghanistan within 12 months. Some 71 percent of those questioned said they would back a phased withdrawal of British forces leading to an end to combat operations within 12 months. A total of 232 British personnel have lost their lives in Afghanistan since 2001. A NATO commander has suggested that the key to stemming casualties and achieving military success was not more helicopters but a strategy to win the hearts and minds of the local people by getting out into their communities. Recent events in Afghanistan led many to believe that the war is not winnable.

Since its ignominious defeat in Vietnam, the US seemed to have learnt the art of ‘how not to win a war’. In Iraq the US made blunders. Had the US not purged Baath Party loyalists indiscriminately from the army and administration, it would have been able to control the situation within a shorter time. In Afghanistan, the majority Pushtuns were pushed against the wall and the result was that after eight years the US, NATO and Afghan forces could not control more than 30 percent of Afghanistan, whereas 70 percent of Afghanistan is still beyond the writ of Kabul.

In response to Secretary of Defence Robert Gates’ Memorandum of June 25, 2009, Commander NATO/ISAF General Stanley McChrystal had submitted his comprehensive report on August 31, 2009, in which he had demanded an increase of at least 40,000 troops if the war was to be won. Part of the report was leaked. His disagreement with the government did not evoke much of a furore, but he was criticised when he delivered a speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies London, giving a detailed account of events and reasons for the failure in Afghanistan. He rejected calls for the war effort to be scaled down from defeating the Taliban insurgency to a narrower focus on hunting down al Qaeda, arguably ensconced in Pakistan, an option suggested by Vice President Joe Biden as part of the current White House strategy review. He rejected proposals to switch to a strategy more reliant on drone missile strikes and Special Forces operations against al Qaeda. He had gone to the extent of saying that the formula favoured by Vice President Joe Biden would lead to “Chaos-istan”.

President Barack Obama is facing a big dilemma. If he continues with the policy of former President Bush of ‘staying the course’ in Afghanistan, he is in for a drubbing, not only by the American public but also by the leaders of his own party. If he decides to pull out from Afghanistan, he will draw flak from neo-conservatives and the Jewish lobby. President Obama’s indecisiveness is obvious from his recent statement in a television interview that he has no deadline for withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan. He, however, pledged at the same time that there would not be an indefinite American occupation. President Obama is worried on another count, i.e. next year is an election year when 435 members of the House of Representatives are to be elected, along with one third of the members of the Senate and about 35 governors. He therefore does not want to send more troops to Afghanistan because the surge will provide more targets to the militants.

There is no denying that the US and its allies are stuck in a quagmire in Afghanistan, and they are looking for some scapegoat to cover up their failures. To understand the American mindset and its designs, one should recall the 1970s when the US was losing the war in Vietnam; its leadership was being pressurised by the American public and the world to withdraw from Vietnam. It thus started a propaganda campaign charging Cambodia and Laos with providing sanctuaries to the Vietcong guerrillas. They bombed Cambodia flat and destroyed the infrastructure of Laos, reportedly using napalm bombs and chemical weapons. Today, the Afghanistan war has become a very unpopular war and there is pressure from the American public to withdraw. US General McChrystal and other NATO generals have lost the war in their minds before the final defeat on the battlefield. The European Union (EU) is also recommending a political solution in Afghanistan.

Because Pakistan acted as a frontline state against Communism, which was Pakistan’s biggest mistake, without Pakistan’s support, forcing the Soviet forces to withdraw from Afghanistan was unimaginable. But for the last few years, US leaders and media have started a pernicious propaganda campaign that Pakistan’s nuclear assets could fall into the militants’ hands. The reason for the American leadership being jittery is that the economic crisis in America has brought it on the verge of at least technical bankruptcy. It faces enormous fiscal, trade and current account deficits, and this ominous situation does not allow its leadership to stretch its imperial outreach because in the ultimate analysis, economic strength determines military strength. In this backdrop, the US cannot afford another adventure and if the hawks prevail to push the Obama administration to extend its operations into FATA, this will prove a sure recipe for disaster.

Syndicated columnist George Will in one of his recent columns quoted military historian Max Hastings who said: “Kabul controls only about a third of the country — control is an elastic concept — and Afghans may prove no more viable than were the Vietnamese, the Saigon regime.” The problem is that Afghanistan never had a strong central government; it does not have industry to provide job opportunities and its entire economy is based on illegal production of poppy, which the US and NATO forces failed to stop. To top it all, corruption has eaten into the vitals of the state organs. In other words, Afghanistan has all the ‘ingredients’ of a failed state. Last year, Mike Mullen had testified to a Congressional hearing that the US is not winning the war in Afghanistan but it can. The bland truth, however, is that the US has practically lost the war, which is reflective of the failure of the world’s best ‘war machine’.

Though the US has increased its forces bringing the coalition total to 110,000, things are going from bad to worse. According to some of their own commanders, 400,000 fully equipped troops would be required to win the war. European strategists put the number around 800,000, but at the same time no nation is ready to chip in with more boots. The US should prepare an exit strategy and let the people of Afghanistan decide their own destiny. In September, as many as 56 bipartisan members of the US Congress moved a bill seeking an exit-strategy from Afghanistan. If the US stays in Afghanistan and takes sides to keep the majority Pushtuns out of the loop, peace in Afghanistan will remain an illusion.

The writer is a freelance columnist

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