Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | ??????? ????? | ???? | Roepienieuws | Rupi Nyheter | ??????? | Notizie di Rupia | PAKISTAN LEDGER | ???????? ????? | Moin Ansari | ???? ??????? | DefensebriefsIntellibriefs Translate to: RSS feed: | RUPEE NEWS | October 20th, 2008 | Moin Ansari | ???? ??????? | ????? ????? |

“Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. Nobility, indeed, is always in danger. Democracy is perishable. I think the natural government for most people, given the uglier depths of human nature, is fascism. Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad.”—from Why Are We at War? Norman Mailer

Imperial hubris and vampire lust for blood and gore forces a country to invade other lands. Fear is created at home to dehumanize the “enemy”. Perpetual mimetic warfare is waged on real and perceived enemies, usually the most vulnerable ones. There is a dearth of solutoins.

Many in Pakistan believe that the United States has deceived Pakistan into conniving with Washington to bring about its own destruction: India and U.S.-supported Afghanistan will form a pincer around Pakistan to dismember the world’s only Muslim nuclear power. And some Iranians speculate that in preparation for the coming of the Mahdi, God has blinded the Great Satan to its own interests so that it would eliminate both of Iran’s Sunni-ruled regional rivals, Afghanistan and Iraq, thus unwittingly paving the way for the long-awaited Shiite restoration. Burnett R. Ruben, Ahmed Rashid in CFR October 2008.

DEFEATS IN AFGHANISTAN: Then & Now
NATO Lessons: 1880 UK defeat at Maiwand-Afghanistan
Is NATO committing suicide in Afghanistan.
NATO lessons: UK defeat at Maiwind may shed some light on today’s situation.

US teeters on the edge of swamp of uncertainty in Afghanistan.

History is on the side of the skeptics in Afghanistan, where from Alexander the Great to the Soviets, all foreign invaders have eventually been repelled By Richard Halloran Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008, Page 9

As the US begins to extricate itself from the quagmire in Iraq, it is in jeopardy of plunging into a swamp in Afghanistan that is filled with uncertainty.

Yet neither US President George W. Bush nor the candidates to succeed him, Republican Senator John McCain and Democratic Senator Barack Obama, who debated the Afghanistan issue last week, have so far articulated the US’ national interest in the landlocked Central Asian country.

The White House, however, began a belated review this week of objectives and strategy in Afghanistan.

General David McKiernan, the new commander of US forces in Afghanistan, sketched out a gloomy picture for the press at the Pentagon on Oct. 1, saying it would take “four to five years” of intervention before the Afghans could take responsibility for their internal security.

“What I have found after four months in Afghanistan is that the environment there is even more complex than I would have thought,” McKiernan said. “It’s a country where they have experienced 30 straight years of war that’s left a traumatized society and a traumatized tribal system.”

Other soldiers experienced in Afghanistan have been even more pessimistic.
Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, Britain’s senior commander in Afghanistan, said: “We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.”

Carleton-Smith, who has just finished a second tour in Afghanistan, told the Sunday Times: “We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations.” Richard Halloran Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008, Page 9

These are the problems faced by various international players as identified by Burnett R. Ruben and Ahmed Rashid.

no government in the region around Afghanistan supports a long-term U.S. or NATO presence there. Pakistan sees even the current deployment as strengthening an India-allied regime in Kabul; Iran is concerned that the United States will use Afghanistan as a base for launching “regime change” in Tehran; and China, India, and Russia all have reservations about a NATO base within their spheres of influence and believe they must balance the threats from al Qaeda and the Taliban against those posed by the United States and NATO. Securing Afghanistan and its region will require an international presence for many years, but only a regional diplomatic initiative that creates a consensus to place stabilizing Afghanistan ahead of other objectives could make a long-term international deployment possible.

More fundamentally, the concept of “pressuring” Pakistan is flawed. No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal. The Pakistani security establishment believes that it faces both a U.S.-Indian-Afghan alliance and a separate Iranian-Russian alliance, each aimed at undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan and even dismembering the Pakistani state. Some (but not all) in the establishment see armed militants within Pakistan as a threat — but they largely consider it one that is ultimately controllable, and in any case secondary to the threat posed by their nuclear-armed enemies.  Burnett R. Ruben, Ahmed Rashid in CFR October 2008.

Negotiations are taking place.

A retired Army lieutenant colonel, John Nagl, another student of wars like the one in Afghanistan, wrote in the World Politics Review: “The good news is: We are now winning in Iraq. The bad news is: We are not winning in Afghanistan. The fact is that we have not had the level of thinking about the Afghan campaign that we have about the fight in Iraq. And we need that desperately.”

US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, evidently miffed by these pessimistic views, told reporters traveling with him to Europe: “While we face significant challenges in Afghanistan, there certainly is no reason to be defeatist or to underestimate the opportunities to be successful in the long run.”

“Part of the solution is strengthening the Afghan security forces,” he said. “Part of the solution is reconciliation with people who are willing to work with the Afghan government.”
Gates suggested that the US would negotiate with insurgents willing to work with the Afghan government.

A ray of light came from another British veteran of the Afghan wars, Brigadier Ed Butler, who told a US Army historian that a tribe where he had been operating had worked out an agreement with the government in Kabul over “what the security measures would be, what the access was, who was going to govern, who would elect the chief of police and everything else.”All told, however, history is on side of the skeptics.

From the days of Alexander the Great in about 325 BC, through the Arabs, the Mongols twice, the British twice, and the Soviets from 1979 to 1989, Afghans have resisted and ultimately prevailed against foreign invaders. Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.  Richard Halloran Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008, Page 9

The founding fathers said it best

A passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitates the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, infuses into one the enmities of the other, and betrays the former into participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.” (George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796)

A modern democracy is a tyranny whose borders are undefined; one discovers how far one can go only by traveling in a straight line until one is stopped. Norman Mailer

The Bargain

Evidently, negotiations would include moderate members of the revived Taliban insurgents. A US Army colonel who led a task force in Afghanistan, Christopher Kolenda, writing in the Weekly Standard asked: “How is it that we find ourselves unable to dispatch the Taliban seven years after their downfall? Winning in Afghanistan requires us to understand the changed nature of the war we are fighting and to adapt our strategy appropriately. Simply killing militants is not enough.”

The insurgents, he said, “recruit from the vast pool of illiterate young men who see only continued poverty in the village and tribal status quo. The militants find their opportunity in the unraveling of the social and economic fabric since the Soviet invasion” of 1979.

T.X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel and student of irregular warfare, wrote: “In October of 2001, with 9/11 burned into the nation’s consciousness, the Bush administration committed the United States to rooting al Qaeda out of Afghanistan.”

Writing in the online Small Wars Journal, Hammes said after that fighting ended, “the effort in Afghanistan slipped from destroying al-Qaeda to establishing a unified Afghan state.”
The Bush administration shifted focus to Iraq, he said, and “Afghanistan became an under-funded, forgotten backwater.”Richard Halloran Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008, Page 9

The Solutions

Both Obama and McCain have called for increases in US and NATO troop strength in Afghanistan, and President George W Bush currently intends to send 8,000 more US troops to join the 34,000 who are already there before he leaves office. The NATO commander in Afghanistan, US General David McKiernan, who commands a total of nearly 70,000 troops, said last week he will need another 15,000 for next year.

But while the forces may help keep the lid on, they cannot defeat the Taliban, according to Rashid and Rubin. The article criticizes the Bush administration’s “war-on-terror” rhetoric that “thwarts sound strategic thinking by assimilating opponents into a homogenous ‘terrorist’ enemy”.

” … An agreement in principle to prohibit the use of Afghan (or Pakistani) territory for international terrorism, plus an agreement from the United States and NATO that such a guarantee could be sufficient to end their hostile military action, could constitute a framework for negotiation. Any agreement in which the Taliban or other insurgents [which] disavowed al-Qaeda would constitute a strategic defeat [for al-Qaeda],” said the two authors.
At the same time, Washington and its allies should pursue, “[A] high-level diplomatic initiative designed to build genuine consensus on the goal of achieving Afghan stability by addressing the legitimate sources of Pakistan’s insecurity … “. From Great Game to Grand Bargain, Foreign Affairs journal.Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid and New York University Professor Barnett Rubin (US eyes a ‘grand’ Afghan bargain By Jim Lobe in Asia Times)

Rashid and Burnett offer the following solutions in the October issues of CFR in 2008.

The Pakistani military does not control the insurgency, but it can affect its intensity. Putting pressure on Pakistan to curb the militants will likely remain ineffective, however, without a strategic realignment by the United States.

the establishment of a contact group on the region authorized by the UN Security Council. This contact group, including the five permanent members and perhaps others (NATO, Saudi Arabia), could promote dialogue between India and Pakistan about their respective interests in Afghanistan and about finding a solution to the Kashmir dispute; seek a long-term political vision for the future of the FATA from the Pakistani government, perhaps one involving integrating the FATA into Pakistan’s provinces, as proposed by several Pakistani political parties; move Afghanistan and Pakistan toward discussions on the Durand Line and other frontier issues; involve Moscow in the region’s stabilization so that Afghanistan does not become a test of wills between the United States and Russia, as Georgia has become; provide guarantees to Tehran that the U.S.-NATO commitment to Afghanistan is not a threat to Iran; and ensure that China’s interests and role are brought to bear in international discussions on Afghanistan. Such a dialogue would have to be backed by the pledge of a multiyear international development aid package for regional economic integration, including aid to the most affected regions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, particularly the border regions. (At present, the United States is proposing to provide $750 million in aid to the FATA but without having any political framework to deliver the aid.)

A central purpose of the contact group would be to assure Pakistan that the international community is committed to its territorial integrity — and to help resolve the Afghan and Kashmir border issues so as to better define Pakistan’s territory. The international community would have to provide transparent reassurances and aid to Pakistan, pledge that no state is interested in its dismemberment, and guarantee open borders between Pakistan and both Afghanistan and India. The United States and the European Union would have to open up their markets to Pakistan’s critical exports, especially textiles, and to Afghan products. And the United States would need to offer a road map to Pakistan to achieving the same kind of nuclear deal that was reached with India, once Pakistan has transparent and internationally monitored guarantees about the nonproliferation of its nuclear weapons technology.

Reassurances by the contact group that addressed Pakistan’s security concerns might encourage Pakistan to promote, rather than hinder, an internationally and nationally acceptable political settlement in Afghanistan. Backing up the contact group’s influence and clout must be the threat that any breaking of agreements or support for terrorism originating in the FATA would be taken to the UN Security Council. Pakistan, the largest troop contributor to UN peacekeeping operations, sees itself as a legitimate international power, rather than a spoiler; confronted with the potential loss of that status, it would compromise.

 …India would also need to become more transparent about its activities in Afghanistan, especially regarding the role of its intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing…Burnett R. Ruben, Ahmed Rashid in CFR October 2008.

SOLUTIONS FOR AFGHANS Saving the Pashtuns of Afghania from Afghanistan. Eradicating the Pashtun plight and ending occupation.

Noticias de Rupia | Nouvelles de Roupie | Rupiennachrichten | ??????? ????? | ???? | Roepienieuws | Rupi Nyheter | ??????? | Notizie di Rupia | PAKISTAN LEDGER | ???????? ????? | Moin Ansari | ???? ??????? | DefensebriefsIntellibriefs Translate to: RSS feed: | RUPEE NEWS | October 20th, 2008 | Moin Ansari | ???? ??????? | ????? ????? |