The hope-losing tweet

Foreseeable hostile environment in Afghanistan does not match the responsible political end to the war Trump seeks


Muhammad Ali Ehsan September 15, 2019
Thousands gather in Kabul for Afghan peace meeting. PHOTO: AFP

Alice in Wonderland is an American animated film produced by Walt Disney Productions. In the movie, Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, “Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?” The Cat replies, “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”

The Doha Peace Process covered a very long distance. Nine sessions of negotiations between the US and the Taliban indicated that the Americans had finally decided “which way they ought to go in Afghanistan?” — The only way was the one that led to peace and the Doha Peace Process was the route that was taking the Americans there, but President Trump’s tweet has suddenly halted that process in its tracks.

Doha created hope. The American President’s “walking out of the peace process” tweet has created fear. Where to go now from here? The Cat’s reply is apt and very pertinent, “depends a good deal where you want to get to”. I don’t think that the Americans have still figured out what kind of a war they fight in Afghanistan — political or military? Afghanistan always suffered from a political crisis, it is the Americans that viewed it as military problem and turned it into a military crisis.

What precede military strategy are political estimates. Those American estimates were wrong in Vietnam and they were pretty much wrong in Afghanistan as well. Former President Obama was a three-year-old toddler when then President Johnson tried to “speed up his tortoise of success in Vietnam” by increasing the troops deployed there from the existing 23,000 to 184,000 in 1965. Forty-four years later (2009), President Obama also did the same — increased the troops in Afghanistan to as high a number as 130,000 (including the troops contributed by the coalition forces). Richard Holbrooke, who was appointed as the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan (SARP) by Obama in January 2009, kept reminding the president about how the US was committing the same mistakes it had committed in Vietnam, but as the president believed that Vietnam was “too much in the past”, not only did he not lend him his ears but gradually distanced himself from the adviser also. The intense nine Afghan Policy Review Sessions of the NSC that were presided over by President Obama in 2009 over a time of ten weeks, discussed everything and anything about how to win the war in Afghanistan. But the only thing that was not discussed was politics — it is said that the whole review process ignored politics. Holbrooke, who won peace in Bosnia-Herzegovina through the Dayton Peace Agreement, didn’t have his way in Afghanistan and it was only a year after his death in December 2010 that the Americans engaged in peace negotiations for the first time in Afghanistan.

Sadly, in the same year (2011), the head of the Afghan High Peace Council and ex-president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani, was assassinated by a suicide bomber, the responsibility of which was claimed by the Taliban. Peace efforts have since then dragged on for eight years and Doha was the closet that we came to reaching an agreement.

Pulling American troops out of Afghanistan is a Trump dream and his promise to the people of America. The peace agreement with the Taliban is the “troop’s pullout enabler” and if it is so, then the question is what persuaded President Trump to pull out of the peace process? Obviously a “war termination assessment” must have been carried out and the report presented to the President. Such a report evaluates the accomplishment of goals that were set out before the commencement of the war. The core goal was disrupting, dismantling and defeating al Qaeda which the Americans were able to achieve. But it is the other accompanying goals of the Afghan War which have eluded achievement and which will have an overbearing effect on the reluctance of the Americans to withdraw from Afghanistan, which must have a corruption-free, credible and competent, and a people’s representative government. Only such a government can guarantee the neighbouring countries and the West that it will not become a base from where attacks can be planned and initiated against them. The Americans spent a lot of sweat, blood and treasure to train the Afghan national security forces. But while handing over the war to the Afghan government, will the Americans be confident that this force without their support will be able to hold the ground against the attacking Taliban? One of the goals that the American military wanted to achieve was to clear the Taliban from the strategically critical terrains and weaken the insurgency so that when the Afghan forces took over the war fighting responsibilities without American presence, it could sustain the deadlocked war and work to improve upon the security conditions. That hasn’t happened and the Taliban continue to remain a dominant force which, minus a political representation and role, will continue to act as a spoiler in the Afghan political process.

The foreseeable hostile environment in Afghanistan does not match the responsible political end to the war that President Trump seeks. A “reactionary US President” is not what the Afghan crisis needs today. The world looks up to an American president who is committed to removing all obstacles that prevent a broad-based reconciliation in Afghanistan. The road map to success in the country is only through peace negotiations. If the American military strategy didn’t work in Afghanistan then why should the political strategy also fail?

The Afghan presidential elections are to be held by the end of this month under high security threats. A US-Taliban peace agreement would have borne well for these elections with the US announcing a withdrawal date and the Taliban pledging to shun violence. A very good recipe for Afghan politics — but that hasn’t happened.

President Trump must revive the peace process. He must give the Afghan people hope. The distance from the Afghan heartland to his tweeting mobile is massive and sometimes the grand decisions he takes are far away from the reality on ground. It’s not the death of one American soldier, but the death of many other innocent people that may follow and can only be prevented if the US President resolutely remains committed to the peace process. Peace must be given a chance. That’s the only hope.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 15th, 2019.

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