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A new journey in search of the Taliban

The hidden tensions within the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation boiled over recently when in an unusual move United States Secretary of Defence Robert Gates hit out publicly about NATO’s record in Afghanistan. Mr. Gates told The Los Angeles Times: “I’m worried we’re deploying [military advisors] that are not properly trained and I’m worried we have some military forces that don’t know how to do counterinsurgency ope rations... Most of the European forces, NATO forces, are not trained in counterinsurgency; they were trained for the Fulda Gap” [NATO’s Cold War battle lines in Germany].

NATO politicians expressed surprise and indignation. But the time is overdue for the blame game. The war in Afghanistan is deteriorating. On December 11, 2007, at the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Afghanistan, Mr. Gates admitted sombrely, “If I had to sum up the current situation in Afghanistan, I would say there is reason for optimism, but tempered by caution.”

Mr. Gates warned that the NATO mission “has exposed real limitations in the way the alliance is, or organised, operated and equipped. I believe the problem arises in a large part due to the way various allies view the very nature of the alliance in the 21st century.” The U.S. Defence Secretary again spoke forcefully at the meeting of NATO Defence Ministers in Edinburgh, Scotland, on December 14. But “no one at the table stood up and said ‘I agree with that,’” he later lamented. On January 15, the Pentagon underscored its displeasure by making a unilateral deployment of 3,200 troops to Afghanistan.

The NATO powers’ reluctance to commit more troops to Afghanistan is the point of discord. Beyond policy disagreements regarding the war’s objectives and its conduct are profound. Anti-war sentiments are rising in Europe. The Germans do not want their troops to fight in Afghanistan. There is a similar mood in Canada. The 1,600-strong Dutch contingent, deployed in the volatile Uruzgan province in southern Afghanistan, proposes to pull out by autumn.

Mr. Gates’ criticism draws heavily from a recent study authored by the U.S. general who commanded the forces in Afghanistan from October 2003 till May 2005, Lieutenant General David W. Barno, in the prestigious journal Military Review. General Barno is an influential voice in the U.S. defence community, which insists that U.S. counterinsurgency strategy produced positive and dramatic results until NATO was inducted in late 2006. The U.S. criticism is that NATO uses heavy-handed methods. [The European countries say just the opposite.]

As General Barno put it, “With the advent of NATO military leadership, there is today no single comprehensive strategy to guide the U.S., NATO, or international effort.” Consequently, he says, the unity of purpose — both inter-agency and international — has suffered and unity of command is fragmented, and tactics have “seemingly reverted to earlier practices such as the aggressive use of airpower.”

Some of the U.S. criticism is valid. The Afghan people’s tolerance for foreign forces is diminishing. NATO narrowly focusses on the military dimension of the war. Thirdly, the focus of the war is no longer the Afghan people but the “enemy.” Hamid Karzai’s government has proved ineffectual in countering corruption, crime, poverty, and a burgeoning narcotics trade. Consequently, the public confidence in President Karzai has eroded. Indeed, NATO is no longer seen by the majority of Afghans as the designated heir to an originally popular international effort, but as a marauding foreign force.

Somewhere along the line, there had to be mud-slinging. Yet the fact cannot be obfuscated that NATO inherited a dysfunctional war. By end-2006, it was no longer winnable. When the alliance’s Defence Ministers gathered in the Dutch seaside resort of Noordwijk last November to commemorate the first anniversary of NATO in Afghanistan, a crisis atmosphere prevailed.

There were no offers of major reinforcements by the member countries. Germany, France, Italy, and Spain insisted they were constrained by their national caveats guiding deployment of troops on non-combat roles. There were different interpretations about the war doctrine itself. The result has been a sort of ‘Balkanisation’ of Afghanistan, as Daan Everts, the outgoing civilian representative of the NATO Secretary General in Kabul, admitted to Al Jazeera in an extraordinarily frank interview recently. “You have a little ‘German Afghanistan’ in the north, an ‘Italian Afghanistan’ in the west, ‘Dutch Afghanistan’ in Uruzgan and a ‘Canadian Afghanistan’ in Kandahar, and so on. Geographically we [NATO] have been fractured, but also sectorally with equal ineffectiveness — like giving the justice sector totally to the Italians, counter-narcotics to the British, the police to Germans, anti-terrorism to Americans,” Mr. Everts said.

In such a mess-up, Lord [Paddy] Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon is due to arrive in Kabul shortly as the United Nations’ super envoy. Lord Ashdown — former Royal Marine commando and Special Forces officer, Liberal Democrat leader, Member of the House of Commons, European Union’s High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina during 2002-2006 — was hugely successful in restoring order to the notoriously violent Balkan country torn apart by ethnic cleansing.

But Afghanistan has been untamed in history. All indications are that Lord Ashdown has sought to be the main point of contact between President Karzai’s government and the international forces, the European Union policing mission, and the U.N. contingent, apart from co-ordinating the Afghan reconstruction efforts. The chances are that the blame game is going to accelerate. The Afghan government resents being bypassed. Inter-agency coordination is a delicate job, rarely successful in such a context. Lord Ashdown is a forceful personality. Least of all, Washington simply does not know how to be self-effacing.

But then, Lord Ashdown’s real mission may lie elsewhere, namely, in addressing the core issue of the accommodation of the Taliban. No doubt, the Taliban’s exclusion has been a major reason why the Afghan and Pakistan problems came to be joined at the hips. Pashtun alienation is a central issue. The Taliban represents Pashtun aspirations. As long as the Pashtuns are denied their historical role in Kabul, Afghanistan cannot be stabilised and Pakistan will remain in turmoil. In an interview with the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said, “There should be a change of strategy right away. You [NATO] should make political overtures to win the Pashtuns over.”

This may also be the raison d’etre of U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon’s thoughtful choice of a Briton as his new special representative. Lord Ashdown is just the right man to walk the nylon tightrope connecting New York, Washington, London, Riyadh, Islamabad, and Kabul, which remains invisible to the naked eye. Britain grasps the Pashtun problem. It realises that the induction of U.S. Special Forces into the Pakistani tribal areas, or the custodianship of Pakistan’s nuclear stockpile, or an Al-Qaeda takeover in Pakistan is not quite the issue today.

Therefore, President Musharraf’s coming four-day visit to London from January 25 assumes critical importance. The success of the British [and Saudi] mediation in Pakistani politics will impact on Afghanistan. The former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, has begun calibrating his stance. Reconciliation between President Musharraf and the Sharif brothers leading to the formation of a national government in Pakistan, could pave the way for a leadership role for Mr. Nawaz Sharif, who is arguably the sole politician today capable of climbing the dangerous platform of Islamist nationalism and reaching out to the Taliban and its followers inside Pakistan. The Sharif brothers could be invaluable allies for the Pakistani military — and for NATO.

The U.S. strategy’s real failure happened, in fact, in the 2003-05 period prior to NATO’s arrival in Afghanistan. That was a crucial phase when the window of opportunity was still open for a course correction by inviting the Taliban to join an intra-Afghan dialogue and reconciliation. The extreme emotions of 2001 had by then begun to ebb away.

On the contrary, the U.S. presidential election of 2004 became the priority for the White House and the “war on terror” turned out to be a milch cow in U.S. politics. An enemy in the Hindukush was useful for the Republican Party campaign, while resonance of the booming guns in Afghanistan’s staggering mountains made a good backdrop for election rhetoric against a war veteran such as John Kerry. Most important, the showcasing of Mr. Karzai in Kabul’s presidential palace helped display Afghanistan as a success story.

The slide began by mid-2005 as the embittered Taliban began regrouping. As the year progressed, as Mr. Everts and many others pointed out, the Iraq war “sucked the oxygen away from Afghanistan.” Britain is now called upon to salvage the Afghan war. NATO at best will be a sleeping partner. The Hindukush is all set to be Lord Ashdown’s show. He wields the U.N.’s imprimatur. He enjoys the White House’s confidence. He is well versed in the logarithm of the European Union’s fragmented politics. But, essentially, he will take counselling and directions from London, which will, of course, closely co-ordinate with Riyadh and Islamabad. It will be a pleasure to watch as he gingerly sets out, searching for the Taliban in the Khyber Pass. Among his attributes, Lord Ashdown is a gifted polyglot who speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and many other languages. Maybe he already speaks Pashto.

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