Posted by Shyam Moondra
The U.S. focus on Afghanistan began in 1993 after Al Qaeda operatives exploded a bomb in the underground garage of the World Trade Center in New York that killed six people and injured 1,042. The WTC attack was followed by the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and 1998 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya that resulted in the murder of hundreds of people. In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. The Clinton administration demanded that Taliban, the rulers of Afghanistan at the time, expel Al Qaeda from Afghanistan but the Taliban refused. On September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda terrorists hijacked three commercial jetliners in the U.S. and crashed them into the twin towers of the WTC, the Pentagon, and the countryside of Pennsylvania, killing about 3,000 people. That attack led President George W. Bush to issue an order to invade Afghanistan, remove the Taliban from power, and install Hamid Karzai as the President of Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden, the head of Al Qaeda, escaped and is now believed to be hiding in the tribal area of Pakistan bordering with Afghanistan. Right after the removal of the Taliban from power, the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan were scaled down to support the war in Iraq. The vacuum created by the withdrawal of the American forces couldn't be filled by the corrupt and inept government under Karzai that led to the comeback of the Taliban. The Taliban now controls 80% of the country and they are on the offensive while the casualties of the NATO forces are mounting.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of nearly 60,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, believes that he would need at least 40,000 more troops to stop the Taliban from taking over the country. His proposed strategy combines the military actions with the rebuilding efforts to win over the support of the general population. These requests are coming at a time when the U.S. government can least afford to increase the war spending because of the balooning budget deficit.
First, let us look at the players in the Afghanistan conflict:
· The Taliban (from the Arabic word for student, “taleb") are fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, mostly from Afghanistan’s Pashtun tribes. The Taliban dominates large swaths of Afghanistan and a large part of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. They scorn democracy and consider any secular or pluralistic political process as an offense against Islam. The Taliban’s version of Islamic law, or Sharia, is deviant from prevailing interpretations of Islamic law and practice. They have been fighting foreigners for centuries – modern armies of Britain and Russia couldn't win there. They are tenacious, they know the terrain, and they can fight with limited resources. The history tells us that Afghanistan can't be governed without their support.
· Al Qaeda is a militant Islamic terrorist movement that is run by Osama bin Laden. It started out as an organized populist effort to dethrone the Saudi royal family. The Taliban, a quasi-political movement within Afghanistan, gave Al Qaeda shelter in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda trained for and planned terrorist acts around the world, mostly against the western countries and Saudi Arabia. The two movements had similar outlooks except that the Taliban's terror activities were inflicted mostly on its own citizens.
· President Hamid Karzai, by most reports, is a corrupt and inept politician, who may be involved in drug trafficking and who is believed to have stolen money from the international aid funds. Karzai is accused of winning the recent presidential election fraudulently and he is not very popular among the people of Afghanistan, especially outside Kabul. Unfortunately, the U.S. is in a bind because constitutionally Karzai is the only person the U.S. can deal with. If the U.S. exit strategy is to stabilize Afghanistan before leaving, Karzai is hardly a part of the solution.
The U.S. conflict with the Taliban did not begin because of any ideological differences, although the U.S. strongly opposes Taliban's treatment of women and their application of extreme medieval Sahira laws. The main U.S. complaint against the Taliban is that they provided a safe haven to Al Qaeda that continues to plan terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies even today.
The current situation on the ground favors the Taliban. Given that they are gaining strength, the U.S. cannot just walk away, as some Democrats are suggesting. A total withdrawal of the U.S. forces would amount to conceding defeat, which will have negative policy consequences elsewhere in the world, especially with respect to the Middle East, North Korea, and Iran. The U.S. will lose credibility and moral standing if they just pack and leave; the people of Afghanistan will suffer immensely. Besides, Osama bin Laden has not been captured yet, so if NATO pulls out, Al Qaeda will move back into Afghanistan. Therefore, withdrawing from Afghanistan is strategically a bad idea. At the same time, given the history of Afghanistan and Taliban, it's a wishful thinking that NATO could eventually win militarily. A negotiated settlement with the Taliban may be the only viable end-game. However, any negotiation with the Taliban at this juncture, when the U.S. position is relatively weak, is not advisable.
Given the way things stand today, it makes sense to go along with the McChrystal approach and send more troops to Afghanistan. After a year or so, assuming NATO is able to get the upper hand, we could then initiate negotiations with the Taliban and make a deal that incorporates the following terms:
· Change their certain attitudes – such as role of women in the society, education of women, respect for individual liberties, democracy, etc.
· Eliminate opium farms and stop drug trafficking.
· Help find Osama bin Laden and eliminate Al Qaeda.
. Do not support the Pakistani Taliban and destabiliize Pakistan. Cooperate with Pakistan to root out Al Qaeda.
· In return, the western countries and other oil-rich countries would offer financial aid – not in the form of cash but in the form of contracts to American and European companies to build roads/bridges, hospitals, schools, water treatment facilities, power stations and electricity grid, and democratic institutions (don't give cash because most of it will end up in the pockets of the Taliban rulers). The objective must be to make a difference in the lives of the people of Afghanistan.
