An endless ‘endgame’

Any plan precipitating intra-Afghan conflict as part of anti-Taliban strategy will jeopardise reconciliation process.

The much awaited 2014 is already there. The US may be planning its Afghan exit by the end of this year but there are no signs of Afghan peace visible anywhere on this ill-fated region’s horizon. Perhaps, Henry Kissinger was right. Four years ago, he had predicted that “America cannot withdraw from Afghanistan now, but neither can it sustain the strategy that brought us to this point”. To him, the fundamental issue in Afghanistan was not so much how the war was being conducted but how it was to be ended. No wonder, the Afghan endgame has arrived with no end in sight yet.

Henry Kissinger saw the Afghan reality in its true character. In his view, Afghanistan is a nation, not a state in the conventional sense, and any exit strategy must be based on the historic reality that the writ of the Afghan government has traditionally been confined to Kabul and its environs, leaving the rest of the country to be run by local warlords or tribal influentials as almost semi-autonomous regions configured largely on the basis of ethnicity, dealing with each other by tacit or explicit understandings. Historically, for reasons of its difficult geography and multiple ethnicities, the country has rarely been able to achieve a strong central government.

Kissinger questioned the practicality of America’s traditional anti-insurgency tactics in seeking to create a central government in Afghanistan and help it extend its authority over the entire country and, in the process, bring about a modern bureaucratic and democratic society. He knew this strategy just could not work in Afghanistan. The country is too large, the territory too forbidding, the ethnic composition too varied, the population too heavily armed. Now to expect President Hamid Karzai to create a modern central government within a given time frame is just not realistic. Given the structure of this society based on personal affinities and tribal traditions, the demand for him to deliver in a matter of months is beyond his capacity.

On its own part, other than the scheduled 2014 military withdrawal, Washington also doesn’t seem to have any dialogue strategy, much less a peace plan to end the Afghan war that in the first instance was a wrong war to start. It forced the Afghan Taliban out of power but never defeated them. Twelve years later, it is looking for a ‘strategic stalemate’ in which it can withdraw but not entirely. It plans to leave behind a certain size of military presence as a training-cum-counterterrorism mission. Those familiar with Afghan history know what it means for any foreign presence on its soil, no matter under what arrangement or nomenclature.

No military occupation for an indefinite period has ever worked in Afghanistan. The US presence in this case is bound to complicate the post-2014 scenario. Instead of staving off the possibility of collapse of the Afghan government or a likely large-scale civil war, it might, in fact, sustain the Afghan Taliban motivation to continue fighting. Also, different theatres of war require different approaches. Iraq’s ‘Anbar’ blueprint will not work in Afghanistan. Any plan that precipitates intra-Afghan conflict as part of an anti-Taliban strategy will seriously jeopardise the reconciliation process and throw this ill-fated country in another fratricidal civil war. It would be a dangerous mistake, which will not be without grave implications for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The people of both countries have suffered for too long in protracted Afghan conflicts and now genuinely deserve peace. They know durable peace in Afghanistan will come only through reconciliation of all Afghan factions with no selectivity or exclusivity. It is also important that the transition process does not ignore the Afghan demographic reality and is not weighted in favour of or against any particular ethnic group. The process will have to be Afghan led, i.e., the Afghan government and the various Afghan groups in particular, the Afghan Taliban.

Among outsiders, the US as the occupation power and Pakistan because of its known historic links with the Afghans and also being home for decades to a large Afghan refugee population do have a combined key role in encouraging the reconciliation process and stabilisation of Afghanistan in the post-2014 phase. The continuation of the conflict hurts Pakistan the most other than Afghanistan itself. It is, therefore, in Pakistan’s interest to have a stable Afghanistan and its policies, including whatever leverage it can have with the Taliban, must be directed towards that objective. But Pakistan can only use whatever influence it can wield in nudging the Afghan parties to agree to dialogue and cannot force the outcome.

The Afghans must be the final arbiters on their domestic governance issues. The Afghan government will also have to reset its functional mode and improve governance, limit corruption and augment the rule of law to sustain Afghan public support for any political process. An Afghan settlement will need to be negotiated in an atmosphere of mutual trust and credibility. This could be guaranteed only if the whole peace process is conducted under UN auspices with the involvement of P-5 and Afghanistan’s bordering countries, which have direct stake in Afghan peace.

As the Afghans approach an agreement on their governance arrangements, the UN should directly engage the neighbours in the region and the broader international community in a parallel track on regional security, economic cooperation and post-conflict peace-keeping operation. The international community should provide for measures supporting a counterterrorism capability during the transition period. It is also important that the regional countries do not use the territory of Afghanistan for destabilising activities in third countries.

Regional rivalries can easily stoke the fires of conflict with regional contenders easily reaching out to rival factions within Afghanistan and fuelling the internal conflict that has now already spread to Pakistan. Again, it would help our interests if through a regional or international arrangement or understanding these rivalries are contained. To ensure neighbouring countries’ security concerns, a precisely negotiated guarantee of Afghanistan’s ‘non-alignment’, including positive and negative security assurances backed by the UN Security Council, would be needed.

A peace settlement must contain international guarantees based on the UN Charter’s purposes and principles, for the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan, with solemn mutual undertaking by all neighbouring and regional countries to respect the principle of non-interference in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. International resources will also be crucial to sustaining a peace settlement and should be contingent on Afghans honouring the accord. To secure a stable Afghanistan, there is a need for sharp focus on Afghanistan’s economic and social development, including trans-regional development.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 18^th, 2014.

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