COMMENT: Imperial whims —Shahzad Chaudhry

A recent poll suggests more than 50 percent Americans do not place Afghanistan in their country’s top two issues, which are the state of the economy and the unemployment rate. This trend is likely to prevail and the upcoming House and Senate elections in November will further define the agenda of the politics to follow

Just three months back, Afghanistan was a pretty settled place and given Afghanistan’s predicaments of over three decades, such a state will always be relative and scarce. Consider, however, if only Afghanistan was to know the way out of its nightmares and stay on that course, it would mean an end to its multifarious plight. President Obama, after his inauguration in 2009, owned the war in Afghanistan for some inexplicable reasons, but redeemed himself well in due course in his March 2009 policy statement, narrowing the base of the US’s engagement in Afghanistan to al Qaeda, stability of Afghanistan, and eliminating safe havens allegedly sheltering al Qaeda. He ordered a strategy review with the placement of General McChrystal in June 2009, a commander who knew how to get things done. After repeated rounds of the review under his chairmanship, Obama announced in December 2009 his plans to begin a military evacuation from July 2011. All seemed well and it underlined a few important things: the Afghan adventure was ill-considered; it went poorly and had been a failure, ultimately pushing the US to extricate itself with dignity; and finally, the US’s economic and financial strain did not permit continuation of a war that was going nowhere.

General McChrystal understood his commander-in-chief’s intent well and, given the negotiated release of a reduced number of additional troops that he sought for his military mission, modified the mission instead to focus on enabling an environment of political stability for the Karzai government. Afghanistan’s neighbours too, Pakistan chiefly, were relieved by a discernible American purpose in Afghanistan. They could now easily pace their own complementary steps in tandem with the American strategy, having suffered the ravages of war in their own backyard for as long as the insurgency had prevailed. In short, the region prepared for a post-US Afghanistan.

Within the last three months, however, a few things have happened that have cast doubts on how the region might finally find solace. McChrystal spoke to the magazine Rolling Stone and ended up losing his job. The president had to appear assertive and at the same time provide a new leader for the Afghan mission without compromising the mission’s pace. General David Petraeus was thus nominated to meet the challenges in Afghanistan. Importantly, the removal of McChrystal opened up spaces at the policy level where all those sidelined till now by McChrystal’s strong presence, Holbrooke et al, found a new lease of life in the Afghan process. The more the voices in Washington that trumpet their version of the policy, the more the uncertainty. Presently, a perceptible hiatus has developed in the US’s Afghan policy and it is underscored by a clearly noticeable fog of inactivity and deafening silence, as the US readjusts to the changing power-play of its various actors. In the meanwhile, the region is left to the run of events, which lie in the hands of various militant groups.

Why is that so? General Petraeus seeks a decisive military victory, once again little realising that once on the downslide of the sinusoidal power curve (that determines a campaign’s intensity factor), it takes time, renewed effort in terms of both quantum of force and soldierly zeal, and a certain momentum to find victory. Sadly, on all three counts, Petraeus and his forces are on the dwindling side of things. There cannot, therefore, be a military turnaround. The US is below the power curve in Afghanistan and the military mission perforce must be wound down and predominance given to the political option.

There is a supporting opinion emerging on Afghanistan in the US. A recent poll suggests more than 50 percent Americans do not place Afghanistan in their country’s top two issues, which are the state of the economy and the unemployment rate. This trend is likely to prevail and the upcoming House and Senate elections in November will further define the agenda of the politics to follow. The president is widely being perceived as indecisive and the people are dubious about his handling of Afghanistan. He is being pushed on all sides presently — financing the health bill, a huge cumulative deficit, a stagnant economy, and the pressure to infuse a second stimulus — a losing proposition if the November elections go the Republicans’ way. There is a growing impression that the president is all bluster, sometimes not even that, and little action.

How may he react to all of this? A statesmanlike option would be to accept his mistakes of discarding the unpopular Iraq war and ending up owning the Afghanistan war. Better appreciation of what the campaign had delivered till then in clear definable objectives would have helped him reject this one too. When faced with a losing proposition, it helps to recognise the problem early on, concede to failure even if it resides within the system, and avoid feeding it any further by inducting more resources. It is obvious that Obama chose to play the halfway house game and ended up even weaker. Can he redeem his better sense now or will he keep listening to his generals, none of whom will ever tell him that the cause is lost, at least in military terms?

The absence of a clear policy on Afghanistan once again relegates the entire region to uncertainty. It may well be a deliberate ploy. All this while, Pakistan’s own war against insurgency continues unabated — the only sustained military action in the region. The Americans are seeking their own pace to ramp up for the much-touted Kandahar operation. And, even there what one might get is ‘a government in the box’. If there is something instructive in all this, it is the repeated reference of the US policy-makers to the internationalisation of the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba threat. Similarly, both Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus have indicated efforts to define the Haqqani group as a UN declared terrorist group. All this will increase pressure on Pakistan to intensify its war against the groups fighting the American presence in Afghanistan. It would be useful for Pakistan to develop a blueprint of the likely US course of action, both political and military, and seek to engage them on converging areas of interest. Negotiating peace in the region should be our underlying concern, and ensuring that a proposed resolution structure is not only realistic, but adequately covers the interests of all parties. We must take the lead in such an initiative as Afghanistan’s prime neighbour, which has sacrificed enormously and continues to suffer while the conflict persists.

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