AfghanWire Podcast #5
Welcome to AfghanWire’s 5th Podcast, a new feature to complement our existing services. Every week we will be discussing the major news from Afghanistan, with exclusive interviews and in-depth analysis.
In Voices from Afghanistan, we spoke with Peter Bergen, author and CNN terrorism analyst, in Kabul about how he thought the so-called war on terror was going. And in Around Afghanistan with Vanni Cappelli this week, he offers an extended analysis of Pakistan and argues for its continuing relevance to any attempt to address issues in the region.
Peter Bergen is a print and television journalist, and the author of Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden. He is the CNN’s terrorism analyst and an adjunct professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has written for a host of international media outlets, including the New York Times, Foreign Affairs magazine, The London Times as well as the Guardian newspaper. We began by asking him how the search for Osama bin Laden is going.
“Well I think the search for Osama is dead as a door now. You know, there hasn’t been real intelligence on his whereabouts for a long time. I think in December of 2001, there were informed hypotheses about where he might be, but that’s quite different from real intelligence.”
We asked him how far the policy choices of the Americans during Operation Enduring Freedom (including, of course, the search for Osama), and the cooperation with specific 'warlords' and other groups, had led to the now barely sustainable situation. Had it led to a sustained fragmentation of society?
“Yeah, obviously a lot of bad choices were made, not least not putting enough troops on the ground during Operation Tora Bora, with just a handful of US special forces. And Al-Qaeda leaders including Bin Laden were able to get away. As you know, this has been historically the most underfunded peace-keeping operation that the United States has been involved in since World War II. Per capita a twelfth of what the Bosnians got after the Balkans war. You know…you get what you pay for.
“There’s a change now because the Bush administration has asked for $11.8 billion, much of that going to the Afghan National Police and Army, 2 billion of it to go to reconstruction. And now that the democrats control the house, and therefore control the money and view the Afghan war as quote-unquote the “good war”, I think that that money’s likely to happen, and that’s a good thing.”
In his recent testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in Washington, he quoted several statistics supporting his view that there is “strong support” for the Afghan central government. We asked him whether he’d stand by that statement now that he was back in Kabul.
“Well, you know, I mean there’ve been three polls taken. One was by BBC and ABC, a pretty massive poll; the other one by world[unclear].org the other one by Aegis Society and they all did countrywide assessments, and the polling results they gave was pretty similar, in that while their optimism is dipping and their faith in the central government is dipping, nonetheless there is still pretty reasonable support for Hamid Karzai and national forces.
“Now, there’s an interesting new poll by Senlis Council, which was much more targeted, polling Nangarhar province and also Helmand. And in Helmand, which is of course a Taliban stronghold, the figures were different, finding that something like 25% of the population were pro-Taliban, and in Nangarhar there seems to be much more hostility to the government, higher than in other parts of the country and less optimism. So, yes, if kind of depends where you ask the question.”
President Karzai recently revealed that he has met with delegations from the Taliban. We asked Peter about the extent to which he saw this as a positive step.
“Well I think it’s a positive step. I mean one of the most successful programmes that has happened in Afghanistan which hasn’t received a lot of attention is the amnesty programme for former Taliban members willing to lay down their arms and be vouched for by their local community, and you know literally thousands of people have taken advantage of that programme and the recidivism rate has been essentially zero.
“So yes, it’s obviously a political problem in the country, and when you have political problems it helps to talk about them, not fight about them. So I think that’s a positive development. There are certain people that the Afghan government is not going to deal with. You know, Mullah Omar and the leadership of the Taliban I think are going to face – if they are captured – will be facing some kind of trial, I would imagine, in Afghanistan. But negotiations with the Taliban in general seems like a reasonable approach.”
On a domestic political level, the formation of the United National Front offers – on paper at least – a formidable challenge to Karzai’s presidency. We asked him what implications the formation of the Front has for the country’s political future.
“I’m not really sure. A lot of these people like Fahim are former Northern Alliance folks, so it seems to be a retread of the Northern Alliance. On the other hand, I think one of the weaknesses in Afghanistan is the lack of political parties on all sides, and if people’s energies can be directed into political parties that’s better than fighting things out. So, I don’t really know what to make of it, but as a general position I think the more organisation of political parties the better, because the political problems hopefully will be resolved by politics rather than by force.”
Finally, AfghanWire heard from Vanni Cappelli, a freelance journalist who has covered conflicts in the Horn of Africa, the Balkans and Central Asia since the early 1990s. He is a co-founder and the current president of the Afghanistan Foreign Press Association.
Vanni will speak to us each week for the podcast in a regular slot entitled Around Afghanistan with Vanni Cappelli. He spoke from New York in an extended feature on Pakistan, outlining the existential nature and historical evolution of the Pakistan state, as well as the nature and historical trajectory of Pakistan’s relations with Afghanistan.
“In a piece entitled "The Hand Behind the Taliban" published on April 1st which describes an exclusive interview he had in Kabul with President Hamid Karzai, "New York Times" columnist Nicholas Kristof recounts the Afghan leader's accusations of Pakistani duplicity in the fight against terrorism in the South-Central Asian region. Expressing in stronger terms than ever an oft-repeated position of the Afghan government that the military dictatorship of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is uninterested in aiding the fight against the Taliban, Karzai even hints at the openly stated assertions of many experts that Pakistan continues to be, as it was in the past, the movement's chief sponsor.
“"The point that we are trying to tell the world is that the Taliban was a name, that there was another power behind -- a very criminally intended colonial thinking behind the Taliban movement," Karzai is quoted as saying.
“As Afghanistan braces for an expected major Taliban offensive this spring even as over the border fighting has erupted in Waziristan between Uzbek and local militants while Pakistan as a whole is the scene of civil unrest over Musharraf's summary dismissal of the country's chief justice, debate over Pakistan's role in the fight against terrorism has been renewed, and accusations such as Karzai's are gathering increasing force.
“What is the background to the claim that this "key US ally in the war on terror", as Pakistan is often called, is in fact one of terrorism's chief enablers? Is Pakistan a country which just happens to have a lot of extremists within its borders, or is there a history behind their presence there that involves state support of terror? Are these extremists in total opposition to Pakistan's state machinery, and is the country's ruling elite genuinely opposed to them? If Pakistan is an epicenter of terror, where exactly does the innermost circle lie?
“The question of whether Pakistan can or wants to be an ally of the United States and the international community in the fight against terror in general, and in the battle against the Taliban and Al Qaeda on the frontier between it and Afghanistan in particular, must proceed from a clear assessment of two realities:
“FIRST -- The existential nature and historical evolution of the Pakistani state.
SECOND -- The nature and historical trajectory of Pakistan's relations with Afghanistan.
“Clear and informed assessments of these determining realities are presently lacking in most public discourse on the issue.
“When one ponders whether Pakistan can be an ally against a particularly virulent form of political Islam, it must not be forgotten that the country itself was the first embodiment of political Islam in state form in modern times, and has for decades used the very radicals it is now being asked to fight against as proxies in its national and international conflicts.
“Founded in 1947 as a breakaway state upon the independence of India from Britain by Mohammad Ali Jinnah on the basis of the cry "Islam in danger", Pakistan's ruling elite has always sought to block social and economic change and further its international ambitions by fostering violent religious sentiment. Substantial, practical modern issues such as the degree to which the state is to be secular, the right of regions and ethnicities to self-governance, the persistence of a pervasive and brutal feudalisms, economic development, poverty amelioration, illiteracy, and the need to have good relations with neighbouring states have always been subsumed by this elite under the justification of defending Islam. And since these problems are too powerful to be so easily brushed aside, and since the Punjabis, Sindhis, Pashtun, and Baluch peoples who comprise Pakistan are not historically known for religious fanaticism, the task has always fallen to the Pakistani army and its intelligence services to foster such a tone in national life.
“The army has been ruling Pakistan or dictating its foreign policy or been in a position to resume such rule and control at the drop of a hat since General Ayub Khan's coup in 1958. Indeed it is fair to say that the city of Rawalpindi, where the military-security services complex is based, is the real capital of Pakistan, not Islamabad. The "Islam in danger" cry is central to Rawalpindi's hold on the country, allowing it to forestall economic and social change, block ethnic self-assertion, and justify its repeated military interventions in Kashmir, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan since 1947. As Pakistani scholar Hussein Haqqani has put it: "this political commitment to an ideological state gradually evolved into a strategic commitment to jihadi ideology." And it is within such a framework that Pakistan's relations with Afghanistan must be understood.
“The issue of secular nationalism vs. political Islam that led Pakistan to break away from India has always dominated its relations with Afghanistan, and in turn has assumed a central role in Pakistani strategic thinking regarding its post-1947 confrontations with India. As Afghanistan has in the past laid claim to Pakistan's North West Frontier Province, which is inhabited by the same Pashtun ethnic group that dominates southern and eastern Afghanistan, Rawalpindi has always sought to undercut agitation over this "Pashtunistan Question" by appealing to Islamic sentiment. During the Soviet--Afghan War of the 1980's this took the form of heavily backing the most extreme Pashtun Islamists, above all Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, in the belief that they could be used as proxies to dominate Afghanistan upon the Soviet withdrawal. It was further believed that such dominance would translate into "strategic depth" – as it was called – that would enable Pakistan not only to defend itself against a hypothetical attack from India, but to force India out of the disputed province of Kashmir.
“At the same time Pakistan's fostering of international jihadis during the Soviet-Afghan War, which was followed by using them in its dangerous interventions in the Kashmir rebellion and the Afghan civil war of the 1990's, must be taken to be a prime cause of the strength of radical Islam in south and Central Asia today. Indeed the fighting in Afghanistan in the 1990's, whose central theme was Rawalpindi's sabotaging of peace efforts that might forestall a victory by its successive proxies, Hekmatyar and the Taliban, was far more a case of Pakistani aggression than an Afghan civil war. When the main intelligence agency of Pakistan, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), finally secured the victory of the latter at the end of the decade, it had placed a friendly regime in Kabul for the first time since independence, at the cost of tens of thousands of Afghan lives and the destruction of much of the city of Kabul.
“In the light of this, Musharraf's sudden dropping of support for the Taliban in the face of American threats after the September 11th attacks must be viewed with extreme scepticism.
“His ostensible position as an American ally pursuing a policy of "enlightened moderation" is just the latest incarnation of the pragmatic extremism by which American military and financial support during the Cold War was used for Rawalpindi's own ends of suppressing dissent at home and engaging in aggression against its neighbours, to the ultimate detriment of American interests. The current Taliban resurgence, which is taking place with covert ISI backing, is a continuation of longstanding policies that are deeply ingrained in Rawalpindi's strategic and ideological thinking. It may be taken as the most dramatic and ironic undermining of American interests yet, as it is being accomplished with American aid and at the cost of the lives of American soldiers.
“Thus the idea of Musharraf as an American ally bravely standing against an extremist Pakistani public is farcical, as is the idea that he is the only thing standing between a takeover of the country by Islamists. Whenever given the chance to vote, the people of Pakistan have chosen parties that had a socio-economic focus, with Islamists barely breaking into double digits in the polling. But not one elected government has been allowed to fill out its term by the army. Musharraf's moderate, secular image is a facade for foreign consumption; as a product of the Pakistani military, he pursues the same political Islamic line as his predecessors, from the semi-official alliance with the Islamist parties to covert backing of the Taliban.
“The fighting in Waziristan, which seems to be a quarrel between different factions of fundamentalists such as the South-Central Asian region has seen many times in the past, is being portrayed by Musharraf and his government as a rebellion by traditionalist locals against the foreign extremists in their midst, and thus a vindication of the military's "hands off" policy in the Tribal Areas.
“Yet such assertions must be viewed in the light of Rawapindi's decades-long efforts to undermine the authority of traditional tribal elders rooted in secular ethnic culture in order to boost the position of fundamentalists.
“They are just one more way of obscuring what Pakistan has been up to in the Pashtun lands on both sides of the Durand Line dividing the countries since the 1970's.
“There is growing popular opposition to Musharraf in Pakistan, but even if a cosmetic restoration of civilian rule was to be effected, it would not break the stranglehold that the military-security services complex of Rawalpindi has over the machinery of government in Pakistan, or its intentions of pursuing its historic policies. To safeguard Afghan security and deal with the terrorist threat emanating from Pakistan, the country itself must be transformed, and the last thing one would do towards that end is to continue shoring up its military--security services complex. Rawalpindi cannot be an ally against terror because it is the root cause of the problem.
“As I wrote in my essay "Containing Pakistan: Engaging the Raja-Mandala in South--Central Asia" in the Winter 2007 issue of "Orbis", only a containment strategy that views the Pakistani military as a threat and aims to weaken it to an eventual end of securing full sovereign civilian rule in Pakistan is an answer to the continuing threat that Rawalpindi poses to its neighbours and the world.
“Such a containment policy would entail cutting off aid to Rawalpindi while pursuing cooperation on security with India and Afghanistan, with a heavy emphasis on reconstructing the latter and improving its ability to defend itself.
“So long as Pakistan maintains the paradigm that supporting violent political Islam is the only way to solve its myriad national and international problems, there will be no peace in the region. In the particular case of Afghanistan, so long as Pakistan believes that supporting Pashtun fundamentalists is the only way to solve its ethnic Pashtun question and achieve "strategic depth", there will be no peace in Afghanistan. And that will be the case so long as Pakistan is ruled from Rawalpindi, and Rawalpindi is as militarily strong as it is.”
That’s all from us at AfghanWire. A transcript of this podcast will be released onto our website shortly. Details of future podcasts will appear on the website at www.afghanwire.com. Until then, good bye.
AFGHANWIRE MEDIA BLOG
Thursday, 19 April 2007
