Making sense of Af-Pak ambiguities

US President Barack Obama has talked about the war in Afghanistan on December 16 with a growing background noise of American public opinion asking him to bring the troops home in short order. He had asked his National Security Staff (NSS) last year to lead an assessment of the war effort and was served a summary of it. He says he will not peg America’s security on results of opinion polls; but he will have to lean on Republican support if he wants to carry on and, in return for doing that, he may have to relent on some of the pet Democratic programmes at home.

He thinks his strategy on Afghanistan is on track and that the war is not yet unwinnable, though he conceded that it may take him long to win it. The policy review was focused on the effects of his troop-surge policy and his verdict was: “Today, al Qaeda's senior leadership in the border region is under more pressure than at any point since they fled Afghanistan nine years ago. Senior leaders have been killed. It's harder for them to recruit … it's harder for them to plot and launch attacks. In short, al Qaeda is hunkered down.”

The document put before President Obama said that the Taliban had suffered a reversal too: “Progress had been made in some areas in Afghanistan, notably with tactics such as the killing of local Taliban leaders and in weakening the insurgents' grip in the south of the country around Kandahar.” Therefore, he said, the start of the US troops withdrawal in 2011 was on track as the US tried to consolidate the gains it had made so far. The US National Intelligence Estimates, made by CIA and 15 other agencies, however say that the chance of success against the Taliban was limited “unless Pakistan tackled the insurgents' safe havens on its territory”. To this, we would also like to add the caveat that a close reading of the review suggests that the Americans will not end their presence in Afghanistan even after 2014, which is the time by which the transition to the Afghans is to be completed.

President Obama said Pakistan was aware of the threat the Taliban terror posed for the country but “progress has not come fast enough” and that he “will continue to insist to Pakistani leaders that terrorist safe havens within their borders must be dealt with”. The military opinion was less pessimistic but it, too, insisted on more cooperation from Pakistan. Hence, Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen’s latest insistence to Pakistan that it “do more” by attacking North Waziristan.

The Americans can leave Afghanistan with good conscience if the Taliban are reduced to not being able to overthrow the post-withdrawal government in Kabul. They think this will be possible if Pakistan sorts out its approach to the problem. On the Pakistani side, the people have been made to think like the American people: get out because this war cannot be won. But Pakistani opinion says much more than just that. It questions the motivation of the war and wants it to end in defeat. The official line, made hostile by the perceived American softness to Indian presence in Afghanistan, indicates much more than that.

In fact, ‘official’ Pakistan is not only not interested in ‘doing more’ it wants to maintain the capacity of the Taliban to resist America, force it to leave Afghanistan and later to change the status quo in Afghanistan in Pakistan’s favour to counter India’s strategic outreach in Afghanistan. Politically, it is no longer possible for anyone to support the American policy. In fact, political parties are veering towards opposing American policy to retain public support. The popular line is: this is not our war; if the Americans leave, things will get back to normal; and terrorism experienced by innocent citizens in Pakistan is actually organised by America in tandem with India and Israel.

Strategies are not unfolding in a vacuum of information. Pakistan itself is flush with facts that do not buttress the current policy of waiting to see the Americans leave and then hoping to get the Taliban to do the right thing by us and take on the Indians in Afghanistan and make them run as they did in 1996. The stark fact is that the state has lost its writ in most of Fata, much of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and much of Balochistan.

Should Pakistan go on denying that al Qaeda is not located on its soil? General (retd) Pervez Musharraf has exploded this myth twice, once in his article in Newsweek and the second time in this newspaper (on December 15) saying: “Al Qaeda which has a presence in the mountains of Fata, though in small numbers, needs to be evicted”. The US insists that Pakistan remains its most important partner in the region as far as the war in Afghanistan and against terrorism is concerned. This plays out differently in Pakistan than what most outsiders may think.

It leads most analysts within the establishment to conclude that America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America, which means that Pakistan can do two things: resist American policy of fighting terrorism or dictate its own policy of forcing India to vacate Afghanistan and return to an antebellum Afghanistan where Pakistan calls the shots. What does not enter the calculations of these analysts is: does Pakistan need American aid and IMF assistance with any less intensity than America needs to get Pakistan to fight terrorism?

The last time there was a face-off between America and Pakistan, the latter won, which must have strengthened the thinking of the establishment. Pakistan achieved this victory over America when trucks carrying Nato supplies were torched in Pakistan. The Americans backed off and apologised. But the US policy review says drones remain a winning tactical device and insist that Pakistan go into North Waziristan and oust the ‘foreign’ Taliban from there. Pakistan can defeat America in Afghanistan, which means America will go home, but Pakistan will have surrendered itself to the forces of chaos for achieving this very dubious victory.

There are ambiguities about Afghanistan on both sides, in the American and Pakistani thinking. But sitting next to it, Pakistan is more vulnerable to what will follow the American exit. And its readiness to face the consequences of its Afghan policy is much in doubt.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 20^th, 2010.