The receding tide of war

Millions watch across the world when US President Barack Obama makes one of his keynote policy addresses. These speeches are seldom the place to look for truth but their unrivalled eloquence often reveals a new direction and, on careful examination, the principal reasons underlying the policy shift. Obama’s speech announcing the beginning of the promised drawdown of forces in Afghanistan is likely to evoke memories of Gorbachev in Vladivostok. The historic disclosures made by the beleaguered Soviet leader, who wanted nothing more than an honourable exit from a disastrous war, did not become a major input in a long overdue policy review in the Pakistan foreign office because, foreign minister, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, did not allow it. Pakistan paid a huge price for that failure. Despite a substantial cost in blood and treasure, the US does not face a disaster but Obama has asserted his leadership well in time and said: “America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home”. Embedded in his speech are messages that Pakistan will miss only at its own peril.

Let us first recapitulate the basic facts. Obama will pull out 10,000 troops by the end of this year. Another 20,000 troops and 3,000 support staff will leave next summer when Washington hosts a major conference of allies in Chicago. There would still be 68,000 troops left, out of which 25,000 may be stationed indefinitely in Afghanistan under an arrangement being negotiated with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The process should terminate in 2014 unless something dramatically adverse happens to delay it.

The backdrop that Obama presented to his people is a mixture of fact and fiction. He had to say that America is drawing down from a position of strength. He cited the attrition of al Qaeda leaders, the serious losses suffered by the Taliban and, above all, the elimination of Osama bin Laden to substantiate his claim. But he was not in denial of the fact that many important dimensions of the nation-building project, of which the surge was the sword arm, have faltered. He hoped that Afghans would be able to build an alternative to the war economy. America, he said, had spent a trillion dollars on war in the last decade; he has thus implicitly cautioned Kabul about future constraints. Peace, he said, is achievable and the quest for it has to be led by the Afghan government, with those who want to be a part of a peaceful Afghanistan, and break from al Qaeda, abandon violence, and abide by the Afghan Constitution.

Pakistan runs like a subtext in the address even though it is not mentioned frequently. This is where interpretations will flow freely and what Pakistani policymakers must grasp candidly. The permanent US military presence in Afghanistan would be linked in no small measure to the threat from Pakistan. The first stone has predictably been cast by The New York Times’ David Sanger. Islamabad’s angry reaction to the Abbottabad raid, writes Sanger, “makes it more urgent than ever that the United States maintain sites outside the country to launch drone and commando raids against the militant networks that remain in Pakistan and to make sure that Pakistan’s fast growing nuclear arsenal never falls into the wrong hands”. He quotes Bruce Reidel, a retired CIA officer, to the effect that the US needs a base to strike targets in Pakistan. “The geography is simple: You need to do that from Afghanistan.”

As far as one can see, the present Pakistani coalition will return to power in the next election. President Asif Ali Zardari has successfully shifted politics from a process of fulfilling peoples’ aspirations to a back-door calculus of vested interests exploiting national resources together. Nawaz Sharif has failed to show the imagination needed to reassert the national will. The present rulers talk, without a care in the world, of a long war. The ‘base in Afghanistan’ will become the thin edge of the wedge unless Pakistan’s political class understands the fast emerging situation in the region. We refused to read Gorbachev; let us not fail to read Obama. The war that is receding in Afghanistan should not find its new axis in Pakistan.

Published in The Express Tribune, June 27^th, 2011.