Shahzad Chaudhry

Current American thinking is rather defensive; having blasted the Taliban for all this time, it is only a sheepish return to integrating the same elements into the mainstream Afghan fabric

The US, the principal player in Afghanistan today, is stuck with a dilemma. How important is Afghanistan to its security interests? Having spent close to a trillion dollars on this misadventure, is the US any closer to achieving the objectives it must have laid out for itself when venturing into Afghanistan? How does the US satisfy a predominant global curiosity on how a superpower deals with an imbroglio as bad as Vietnam and, perhaps, Iraq to an extent? Will the world get to recognise that since the Second World War, all foreign forays by the US military have ended up in abysmal failures incongruent with the capability and capacity of the ‘lone’ superpower of some 20 years?

Consider. The ongoing NATO/ISAF/US/Afghan combined military operation in Marjah in Helmand, a 15,000 man operation, is the culmination of the desired consequence of the greatly touted American surge of 30,000 more troops, the last of which will only touch Afghan lands by the end of November, 2010. It is finding stiff resistance against the Taliban in an operation that was intended to leave the imprint of US/NATO superiority forever on the retreating Taliban, forcing on them an endearing return to the warm womb of mother Afghanistan under an imposed order. What was purported be a cakewalk has turned out to be a quirky discomfort. And yet, even if it was to be a success, it will remain only a small, insignificant blip on an otherwise wide labyrinth of a long intractable war.

Is this the American way of war? Pakistan is lectured no end on its lack of appreciation on how Counter-insurgencies (COIN) need to be fought. The Pakistanis are lamented for not owning a clear doctrine, and hence being unprepared for the type of war that is currently on in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal regions. Pakistan’s High-Intensity Conflict (HIC)-trained military is considered unsuitable for fighting a lower end Low-Intensity Conflict (LIC) without an academic grounding. And yet, somehow, shorn of an academic and conceptual guidance of a doctrinal manuscript in hand, the Pakistani military continues to do well, at least in terms of clearing the area and holding it against any recapture. Compare that to the American/NATO experience, where, with a storm of troops, commitment, acceptability and public support, they clear an area, and yet they fail to hold the same, ceding control back to the Taliban who actually remained untouched and simply melted into the shadows and crevices, forcing US/NATO to repeat this routine every once in eight years; something they pointedly term ‘grass mowing’. The sum total of the nine-year long American effort remains the same — as it was on their first day of arrival amongst the threatening rocky vales of Afghanistan.

There is something fundamentally wrong with how the US is executing its war in Afghanistan. In my mind, the failure has been in conception. First, you only fight an insurgency in your own lands; Afghanistan is not the US, and hence the US is not fighting an insurgency per se. It is a foreign force, fighting under a questionable moral authority, in someone else’s lands, against an indigenous, irregular force that is fighting to free its lands of foreign occupation. The US’s reliance hence, on the only doctrinal document amongst many US Army Field Manuals (AFMs) has tended to be an entirely misplaced and inaccurate anchoring of an armed effort. It is just not another war — it is a different war, being fought with the wrong tools.

Second, the American objective has constantly morphed. First it was al Qaeda, and when that evaporated into thin air — most having already migrated to Yemen, Somalia and possibly Europe — it was reconstituted as the Taliban. There is some truth in the US’s latest apprehension that reversion back to any Taliban order in Afghanistan can and, more likely, will enable a safe haven once again to any remnant al Qaeda effort with its ideological underpinning of combating American imperialism out of Muslim territories and imposing a specific brand of Islam. More to the point, and with increasing concern for Pakistan, it may also offer a refuge to the material and ideological repository of the TTP, which can continue to pose a stability conundrum for the state and society. It therefore becomes imperative that the US effort realigns to ensure a more integrated and secure order in Afghanistan before it relinquishes responsibility there. That may also be a worthy goal for a superpower that, till date, has been searching for a justifiable cause.

If al Qaeda should reappear in the American crosshairs once again, the means to that end must differ significantly. With the Taliban, or at least most of them, on board with the Afghan national effort to sanitise both its state and society of inimical influences from abroad, the combined US-Afghan effort to hunt the remnants of al Qaeda, and Taliban far too committed with the al Qaeda cause, may just become much more probable. Can Mullah Baradar help there? Only a changed strategy will deliver the prized objective in the end. Current American thinking is rather defensive; having blasted the Taliban for all this time, it is only a sheepish return to integrating the same elements into the mainstream Afghan fabric. Still, the Americans prefer to call any such attempt or a change of policy as ‘integrating’ rather than ‘conciliating’. Their refuge in verbal obscurantism can be best understood if one remembers it is the ‘superpower’ that is being made to change a strategy that it has executed for all these years.

So, what will Marjah deliver? I am afraid nothing much; perhaps at least one successful operation a la Pakistan’s two major operations in Swat and Waziristan, with all its accoutrements of a public announcement for all non-militant occupants to leave the area, and then the use of both heavy artillery and air power to neutralise and evict those who choose to remain in situ. To hunt al Qaeda and to reintegrate the Taliban, the strategy and tools should be those suitable for a counter-terrorism effort; the effect of neutralising the leadership is the only effective counter-effort that stops such movements in its tracks. Use of integrated military response by Pakistan is in order because it fights a full-blown insurgency against its own state within its borders, but insurgency tools to fight a counter-terrorism effort are entirely misplaced.

It is true, though, that once the Pakistani military is done with the insurgency bit in the tribal regions, it too will need to reorient itself to a major, long enduring counter-terrorism war against the extremists/terrorists in its midst; lying undisturbed at the moment in our teeming cities. That will need different tools: persistent and acutely sharpened intelligence and surveillance, well trained counter-terrorism troops mostly from police stocks equipped well with combating urban terrorism, and a societal and civil response, which will be unwilling to provide such elements hideouts in their midst. All this will need a different set of tools and a different mindset. Otherwise, like the US, we too will be fighting the wrong war.

Shahzad Chaudhry is a retired air vice marshal and a former ambassador