The missing pencil

Talks with Taliban must form part of a joint US-Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy, and may be extend the same to al Qaeda.

I came; I fought; I bungled; I tried to rebuild; I bungled even more; I got bogged down; I want to get out; I need victory; heck, I don’t even need victory; I just need something, anything which can be called victory.

Sounds familiar? It is, in a nutshell, the story of the US venture in Afghanistan. If you don’t believe me, read Bob Woodward’s account of President Obama’s wars. Read also Woodward’s account of the trip to Kabul and, specifically, to Helmand with former national security adviser General James Jones. “Did anyone understand this war?” he asks. No. No one did then and no one does now.

Reason? All analyses, official and unofficial, talk about how to finish off the enemy. Mission statement: “Disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda”. In between there was Iraq, part of the grand strategy to reconfigure the Greater Middle East. Then there was the right war, as opposed to the wrong one in Iraq. The right war has also got confused. Initially, al Qaeda was to be defeated and the Taliban were to be denied a return to Afghanistan’s politics. Protect-the-people counterinsurgency was the centrepiece of the first review. Now we have the counterterrorism strategy document. Al Qaeda has to be defeated still but perhaps there is merit in talking to the Taliban.

Troops are difficult to find and the effort is becoming cost-prohibitive. There’s also something terribly wrong with the COIN (counter-insurgency) theory. It looks great on paper. Everyone knows what should be done. But the moment the theory is applied, the ground seems to defy the basic postulates of COIN. Why do you think the COIN theory was coined by losing militaries?

Many years ago, I mentioned in one of the despatches an apocryphal tale. When the Americans decided to go into space, they encountered the problem of writing in a gravity-free environment. Normal pens wouldn’t work, so they set about manufacturing one that could, spending years and millions in the process. Decades later, when détente allowed some interaction between the US and the Soviet Union, a visiting American delegation of scientists asked their counterparts in Moscow how they had managed to overcome the problem of writing in space. One Soviet scientist smiled and said: “We used a pencil!”

The tale is instructive. Quite often it pays to look for the straight and easy solution. At least that’s what William of Ockham thought. So we have Occam’s razor, which tells us that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity. And pray, what does that mean here? Primarily that someone needs to figure out the causes and not just exclusively focus on fighting the effects.

In October 2009, at a day-long conference on regional security, I told its American participants that villagers in many places in Pakistan still used wells for drinking water. Sometimes, animals, like stray dogs, fall into a well. Because we are generally stupid, rustic people, we try to get the dead animal out, which is of course one reason capitalism doesn’t thrive here; nor do think-tanks. The American solution would be to ignore the dead animal but treat the water by spending a lot of money and time. That approach works well for the survival of strategic thinkers and the vast Washington bureaucracy. But it is vastly inferior to the simpler solution of getting the dead animal out.

Of course, no one is starting with a clean slate and all actors have to put up with the consequences of previous decisions and actions. But the point is that it makes no sense to look at al Qaeda as a hate creed without any political/geopolitical agenda. Today, the US has come round to talking to the Taliban. That’s sensible. This strategy will also test the maturity of the Taliban leadership. They will have to prove that they want Afghanistan to return to peace and are prepared to soften the terribly rough edges of their literalist creed to become relevant to the politics of that country.

A similar strategy of accommodation needs to be adopted towards al Qaeda, even as it remains vital to degrade al Qaeda’s ability to strike and kill people. What is important is to ensure that moderates remain moderates and conservatives do not cross the line towards extremism. That requires understanding the nature of ressentiment in the Muslim world. Operational strategy alone, even when effective, cannot address the larger questions.

Already, the situation in our region is unfolding in ways that could begin to undermine efforts towards a peaceful exit of American forces from Afghanistan. Focusing on Pakistan to divert attention from the unsuccessful war in Afghanistan, as the US now seems to have decided, could threaten a desirable outcome. Without a cooperative strategy, the endgame will get very messy.

Talks with the Taliban must therefore form part of a joint US-Pakistan-Afghanistan strategy. Currently, we have the useless tripartite framework which, in the absence of a broader US-Pakistan strategic dialogue, has become a mere formality. Then there is the bilateral Pakistan-Afghanistan track. That too, seems, to be going nowhere. Kabul itself has an inner track with the Taliban which it accuses Pakistan of sabotaging (Mullah Baradar’s continued incarceration is a case in point); finally, we now have the US-Taliban track mediated by the Germans.

While the Americans seem to have briefed Islamabad and Kabul on the ‘progress’ so far, the distrust between Pakistan and the US threatens the entire strategy. There are also differences among different bureaucratic actors within Washington. The Pentagon wants at least two more fighting seasons while the CIA thinks its drone campaign can effectively degrade the al Qaeda/Taliban leadership. As Ahmed Rashid has written, those opposed to the dialogue in Washington and Kabul could go beyond leaking stories to the press to actually sabotaging the entire process.

President Obama doesn’t have a full handle on the situation and that is more worrisome. Add to that the standoff between Pakistan and the US, and we have the beginnings of a volatile situation. The strategy of talking to the Taliban is sensible. But in the absence of a broader approach, it could backfire by becoming a bone of contention among competing actors.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 12^th, 2011.