Rhetoric and reality in the Afghan conflict

As the Pakistan-US strategic partnership all but unravelled in the storm of recriminations unleashed by the Raymond Davis affair, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a notable address to the Asia Society, on February 18, to refocus attention on the broader themes of the conflict in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s role in it and Washington’s game plan for a peace process built upon the current campaign to degrade the power of the Taliban. The backdrop to her carefully crafted text was not just the gory drama in distant Lahore but the different perceptions and policy prescriptions on Afghanistan and Pakistan reflected in studies pouring out of American think tanks and media. She seemed to think that an essentially upbeat, if also cautiously realistic, statement about the state of play would help paper over the growing dissensions.

Clinton had no misgivings about the strategy and its three mutually reinforcing tracks — “three surges”, namely a military offensive against al Qaeda and the Taliban; a civilian campaign to bolster the capacity of Afghanistan and Pakistan to “undercut the pull of insurgency”; and an intensified diplomatic push to bring the Afghan conflict to an end. The three surges were a part of the vision for transition that would see troop reductions begin in July 2011 and end in 2014, based, of course, on “conditions on the ground”. Clinton decided not to talk about the spread of insurgency to new areas, or the fact that it was beginning to cut across ethnic lines. Instead, she asserted more than once that total victory was eluding the coalition because “the tribal areas along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan remain the epicentre of violent extremism”.

Clinton’s remarks about Pakistan were highly significant. “It is no secret”, she said, “that we have not seen eye-to–eye with Pakistan on how to deal with these threats (from safe havens and enablers in Pakistan) or on the future of Afghanistan.” Pakistan, she counselled “will have to respect Afghan sovereignty and work with Afghanistan to improve regional stability”. She also said the she would not “sugar-coat the fact that the Afghan government has, from time to time, disagreed with our policies”. Obviously, differences with Pakistan are not merely on tactics but also at a strategic level. In fact, Washington’s strategy has issues both with Kabul and Islamabad, its putative beneficiaries. Surely there is something amiss somewhere: There is an underlying ambivalence in the policies of the major stakeholders — the gap between altruistic rhetoric and self-serving hidden objectives.

Afghanistan has a strange way of frustrating the calculations of external actors. In recent times, the Soviet Union met with a disaster there; the United States has little hope of an outright victory in the ‘long war’ from which it cannot extricate itself without compromising its grand design for the region. India had no interest in the decade-long Afghan resistance to the Soviet Army but seized the opportunity, contested by Islamabad, to piggyback on Washington and extend its strategic outreach to Afghanistan and Central Asia and, simultaneously, outflank Pakistan. New Delhi’s Afghan project casts a shadow on the India-Pakistan ‘peace process’ as well as on the ‘Pakistan-US strategic dialogue’. Iran walks a tight rope to balance its fear of substantial US and Nato power in its backyard and its unstated ethnic and sectarian preferences in a post-conflict Afghanistan. Chastened by its bitter experience, Pakistan has greatly scaled down its ambition, though it cannot forget its need for a basically friendly government in Kabul. It has made headway in establishing its new credentials with Afghan President Karzai and, today, Islamabad and Kabul may have more mutual trust than either of them enjoys with Washington.

Washington applies selective metrics in claiming success in all the tracks spelt out by Hillary Clinton in her address. But the gains in Helmand and Kandahar were made by concentrating the bulk of military and financial resources there; the Taliban have reacted by increasing their presence in areas in the north and west where the coalition has a light footprint. The new insurgencies are beginning to cut through ethnic divisions. Nato and the US remain under-sourced to replicate the kind of deployment in the southern provinces in any other sector. The Taliban are expected to use different tactics in the coming spring months to destabilise and terrorise urban centres, a tactic Pakistan is familiar with. Progress in the ‘Afghanisation’ of security is well short of claims made by General Petraeus. At the political level, the difficulties highlighted by the Afghan presidential and parliamentary elections have not been resolved. Notwithstanding the optimistic leaks about secret talks with the Taliban, the outlook is fuzzy; more so because of a desire in Washington to filter Pakistan out of the enterprise.

Secretary Clinton described Pakistan as ‘pivotal’ during her Asia Society speech. But evidence mounts that this pivotal relationship is prone to frequent mismanagement. First, Washington judged it by how fast the Pakistan Army could be thrown into combat in North Waziristan. Then came the spat when Pakistan closed its border to protest a gratuitous Nato attack across the border. Now the murky Raymond Davis affair has brought, albeit briefly, threats of multidimensional reprisals from the United States. The cumulative impact is a widespread perception in Pakistan that its relationship with the US continues to be a transactional one, devoid of any enduring strategic content. In the US, lack of instant compliance by Pakistan is almost universally regarded as confirmation that Pakistan is an unreliable ally.

Back to the drawing board, the two sides need to acknowledge that they still need to harmonise their ideas on the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan and that it will be decided, first and last, by the will of their people. They, the people, will not be reconciled to being mere pawns in a larger strategic contest. Washington’s interests in this part of the world have to be accommodate the national interest of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. The task needs clarity as well as transparency.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 10^th, 2011.