The Afghan dilemma

At the end of Afghan war, we still have no idea who is going to be victor. One hopes it is not chaos or more violence.

In his State of the Union address last month, President Obama said that by the end of this year, America’s longest war will finally be over. He said that when he took office, nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all US troops were out of Iraq and over 60,000 troops from Afghanistan had returned home. According to him, “now with Afghan forces in the lead for their own security”, US troops have moved to perform a support role, with a small force of American and Nato troops to remain in Afghanistan to carry out a follow-on training-cum-counterterrorism mission.

He made it clear that for now, “our relationship with Afghanistan will change but one thing will not: our resolve that terrorists do not launch attacks against our country”. After 2014, he said, we will support a unified Afghanistan as it takes responsibility for its own future. As these assurances are still reverberating, there are signs of uncertainty over the status and size of the planned support mission to stay behind in Afghanistan. It seems that Washington is already reviewing its withdrawal plans because of President Karzai’s refusal to sign the Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) that would have provided legal cover to the status of US troops remaining in Afghanistan beyond 2014 for the mission called Resolute Support.

Apparently, the review became necessary because Washington no longer considers Karzai as part of the solution and is now looking beyond the presidential election to have the BSA sealed. With continuing political uncertainty on whether or not foreign troops will remain in Afghanistan after December, plans are now being drawn up to deploy a force through this summer that is large enough to assume the envisaged post-2014 role and is also small enough to withdraw at short notice by the year-end if no deal for an enduring presence is reached. Maximum flexibility is being kept in dealing with both contingencies: either continue with the desired level of military presence in Afghanistan at the end of the year or also be ready for an abrupt force majeure, zero level option.

The revised military plan shows that the US is seeking to minimise its reliance on Karzai, whose refusal to sign the BSA and his recent anti-American statements have upset Washington policymakers. As pressure tactics, US officials have been indicating that if Karzai doesn’t relent, President Obama may ask the military to initiate planning for a complete troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is clearly a pragmatic recognition that Karzai may not sign the BSA and even after the presidential election in April, there is no guarantee that the new president will sign it.

On the Afghan political scene, with no single candidate poised to get over 50 per cent of the vote, a second round looks likely, which means that the new government might not even be in office before August. Most presidential contenders are reluctant to take a public position on the BSA for fear of alienating themselves during the election campaign, in which Karzai is seen to be upholding a strong nationalistic position. Obviously, Washington cannot afford to remain hostage to an unclear state of affairs and has to keep itself ready for all eventualities. Even with additional time that it gains (or perhaps loses) in the hope that the next president will seal the deal, it remains vulnerable to the vagaries of its Afghan dilemma.

Also, there are differences within the Obama Administration over the future approach. Vice-President Joe Biden is a known advocate of complete military withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Should the post-2014 military presence become indispensable, he is arguing for a far smaller presence than the military establishment at Pentagon led by Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel would like to see. The CIA opposes a complete pullout because it requires continued use of Afghan air bases for drone strikes in Pakistan and for responding to a ‘nuclear crisis’ in the region. Obama is carefully weighing the situation before his final decision.

In this murky scenario, what comes out clearly is a basic lesson of military history that Washington ignored in the Afghan war: you don’t start a war unless you know how to end it. The US invaded Afghanistan on the pretext of 9/11, waging an unrelated ‘war on terror’, which is now seen only as a ‘strategic and legal perversion’. It forced the Afghan Taliban out of power but never defeated them. Twelve years later, while seeking an exit from Afghanistan, it is only looking for a ‘strategic stalemate’ in which it can withdraw but not entirely. It plans to keep a sizeable military presence under the cover of a ‘counterterrorism’ mission. Those familiar with Afghan history know what it means for any foreign presence on Afghan soil, no matter under what arrangement or nomenclature.

Continued foreign military presence in Afghanistan is bound to complicate the post-2014 scenario raising the spectre of domestic political strife in the country, with ominous implications not only for the Afghan people but also for Pakistanis, who have suffered for too long and cannot afford any more cataclysms. Peace in Afghanistan and Pakistan is long overdue. Both have been victims of two long wars and cannot take any more proxy wars. They know that the current Afghan war was never an end in itself. It was all about the hidden stakes in this vast region in China’s backyard, where a larger power-driven great game is already on.

With impending withdrawals this year, it seems, the process of change in Afghanistan has begun. But what kind of change do we expect at the end of this long war? An ominous uncertainty looms large on the horizon. Again, if history is any lesson, things never remain static. They keep changing as the world and its dynamics do by the inevitable process of change that is always inherent in the rise and fall of power. And traditionally, the rise and fall of power mostly followed long wars. The known examples in recent history are those of the Napoleonic Wars, World War I and World War II. It was the victors in each war that installed a peace to preserve the gains they had made. But at the end of the Afghan war, we still have no idea who is going to be the victor. One hopes it is not chaos or more violence.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 15^th, 2014.

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