WITH the stage set for secret talks in Qatar between the United States and the Taliban, US President Barack Obama’s strategy for a phased exit from war-ravaged Afghanistan is now being couched in nice-sounding terms that hide more than they reveal.

In seeking a Faustian bargain with the Taliban, Obama risks repeating US policy mistakes that now haunt regional and international security.

Since coming to office, Obama has pursued an Afghan strategy that can be summed up in three words: surge, bribe, and run. The military mission has now entered the “run” part, or what euphemistically is being called the “transition to 2014.”

The central objective is to cut a deal with the Taliban so that the US and its NATO partners exit the “graveyard of empires” without losing face. This approach – aimed more at withdrawing forces as soon as possible than at ensuring enduring peace and regional stability – is being dressed up as “reconciliation,” with Qatar, Germany, and the United Kingdom getting lead roles in facilitating a settlement.

Yet what stands out is how little the US has learned from the past. In critical respects, it is beginning to repeat its own mistakes, whether by creating or funding new local militias in Afghanistan, or by striving to come to terms with the Taliban. As with the covert war that the US waged in the 1980’s in Afghanistan against Soviet military intervention, so, too, have short-term interests driven US policy in the current overt war.

To be sure, any leader must work to extricate his country from a protracted war, so Obama is right to seek an end to this one. But he was not right in laying out his cards in public and emboldening the enemy.

Within weeks of assuming office, Obama publicly declared his intention to withdraw US forces from Afghanistan, before he even asked his team to work out a strategy. A troop surge that lasted up to 2010 was designed not to rout the Taliban militarily, but to strike a political deal with the enemy from a position of strength. Yet, even before the surge began, its purpose was undercut by the exit plan, followed by a publicly announced troop drawdown, stretching from 2011 to 2014.

A withdrawing power that first announces a phased exit and then pursues deal-making with the enemy undermines its regional leverage. It speaks for itself that the sharp deterioration in US ties with the Pakistani military has occurred since the drawdown timetable was unveiled. The phased exit encouraged Pakistani generals to play hardball. Worse, there is still no clear US strategy on how to ensure that the endgame does not undermine Western interests or further destabilise the region.

The US envoy to the region, Marc Grossman, has already held a series of secret meetings with the Taliban. Qatar has been chosen as the seat of fresh US-Taliban negotiations in order to keep the still-sceptical Afghan government at arm’s length (despite the pretense of “Afghan-led” talks), and to insulate the Taliban negotiators from Pakistani and Saudi pressure.

All of the US strikes have occurred farther north, in Pakistan’s tribal Waziristan region, although the leadership of the Afghan Taliban and of its allied groups, like the Haqqani network and the Hekmatyar band, is not holed up there.

Like the US occupation of Iraq, the NATO war in Afghanistan will leave behind an ethnically fractured country. Just as Iraq today is, for all intents and purposes, ethnically partitioned, it will be difficult to establish a post-2014 government in Kabul whose writ runs across Afghanistan. And, just as the 1973 US-North Vietnam agreements were negotiated after the South Vietnamese regime was shut out of the talks, the US today is shutting out the Afghan government, even as it compels President Hamid Karzai to lend support and appears ready to meet a Taliban demand to transfer five incarcerated Taliban leaders from Guantanamo Bay. These negotiations, in which the US is seeking the creation of ceasefire zones to facilitate its forces’ withdrawal, can only undercut the legitimacy of the Karzai government and bring the Quetta Shura back to centre stage. But Afghanistan is not Vietnam. An end to NATO combat operations will not mean the end of the war, because the enemy will target Western interests wherever they may be.—KT

Mohammad Jamil

SINCE the deterioration of relations between America and Pakistan, writers in the opinion pages of international media have been suggesting America that instead of relying heavily on Pakistan as a supply corridor, the United States should expand its cooperation with Russia, which has been playing an important role in military transit to and from Afghanistan. Had Russia not been wary of the Taliban during its stint in government, it may have supported the Afghan insurgency to make Afghanistan another Vietnam for America to avenge its defeat in 1980s. Afghanistan was the site of a nearly decade-long struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, when the former had facilitated jihadis from all over the world to fight Soviet forces, and was instrumental in the demise of the Soviet Union. Russia however does not want that America should leave Afghanistan without destroying Taliban fighters and terrorists hook, line and sinker. At the same time, Russia does not like to see America having a permanent foothold in Afghanistan, because it could impede Russia’s efforts to negate its decisive influence in Central Asian republics.

It is more than two months since Pakistan closed the two key border crossings into Afghanistan used for supplies to NATO troops. In view of the strained relations between Pakistan and America after last year’s Raymond Davis episode and US Navy Seals attack on Abbottabad compound, America had been working on alternate routes and kept the supplies flowing, but the cost has been enormous rather prohibitive. ABC news, quoting a Pentagon official said “the cost of supplies to NATO/ISAF troops in Afghanistan is now $104 million a month, against cost of $17 million to transport supplies through Pakistan”. In other words, the increase is 512 percent in monthly costs resulting from Pakistan’s shut down of the border crossings at Torkham and Chaman shortly after a NATO air strike in late November that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers at Salala border post. The American movers and shakers must be ruing for being so arrogant and neglectful of Afghanistan’s objective ground realities since their invasion and occupation, which has become an Achilles heel for a respectable end-game for them there. Now it is a matter more of an honorable exit rather than alternate routes for supplies to NATO forces.

U.S. military planners expanded ground supply route known as the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), coursing its way through Russia and the former Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan, but these routes were already the main entry point for non-lethal supplies for NATO in Afghanistan. NATO has two main transportation routes via the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), which connects Baltic and Caspian ports with Afghanistan via Russia, Central Asia and the Caucasus: the NDN North and NDN South. The NDN North transit route initiates in Latvia, crosses through Russian territory and enters Afghanistan via the Afghan-Uzbek border. Richard Weitz, director of the Center for Political-Military Analysis at Hudson Institute, in a treatise wrote: “Even before the latest incident (attack on Salala border post), Western governments had sought permission for the reverse flow of transit along the NDN so that their forces could exit through the former Soviet republics rather than Pakistan, where they’d be more vulnerable to retaliation by the Taliban and its Pakistani allies”.

The fact remains that supplies to NATO through NDN are also vulnerable, as the Taliban has its pockets in North, South, East and West. After the demise of Soviet Union, Russian influence had waned. However with petro-dollars flowing in especially as a result of phenomenal increase in petroleum prices, Russia’s dependence on west has declined; and it has been able to reassert in the region and enhance its influence in the world. Secondly, there is no free ride like Pakistan, as Central Asian republics charge for the transit facility. Thirdly, they do not allow transport of military equipment like tanks and lethal weapons through their territories. Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, recently stated: “It’s not in Russia’s interests for NATO to be defeated and leave behind all these problems.... We’d prefer NATO to complete its job and then leave this unnatural geography.” But Russia has to understand that if the US and NATO troops decimate or make the Taliban ineffective; or in other words ‘complete the job’, the US would maintain a contingent of few thousand troops plus a strong air force base in Afghanistan to meet any eventuality and to pose a palpable threat to Russia.

As a result of its leadership’s monumental stupidity, America is now in a pickle, with their peace foray with the Taliban turning into an intractable dilemma for them. The venture has run into problems which probably they had not even imagined of. Their erstwhile-pampered Afghan minorities – Tajiks, Uzbaks and Hazaras that were pitted in a fierce civil strife with the Taliban before their ouster by the US-led foreign armies, are furious with them for keeping them out of the parleys, even threatening to take to the gun again if Taliban are brought into the power structure. They have taken exception to opening of Taliban’s political office in Qatar and insist that any peace talks’ venue has to be within Afghanistan, not outside. For his part, Karzai too is very sour for being kept out of the loop, whereas he had expected to be at the foray’s centre. The Americans with their peace wand have thus veritably walked into a minefield of uncertainties, all of which they could have avoided had they kept in mind the Afghan polity’s sensitive and deeply-held ethnic and tribal fault-lines. It really is so stupefying that they could be so ignorant of these slippery slopes when they were no stranger at all to Afghanistan or its people.

*The writer is a senior journalist and freelance columnist

Email: mjamil1938@hotmail.com

Syed Faisal Ali

FOLLOWING the controversial and much-hyped campaign against corruption led by septuagenarian social activist Anna Hazare, the phased polls in five Indian states have begun. From people on the streets to analysts in research centres, all are keenly watching for impact of this movement on the results of the assembly elections.

No doubt, Hazare has brought corruption to the fore and sooner or later the government of the day has to take effective steps to rein in this monster. But at the same time the movement has left many pertinent questions unanswered.

India ranked 87 in Transparency International’s index on corruption in 2010, behind rival China and polls show corruption vies with the high cost of living as the No.1 issue of concern to general public.

All the more so when hallowed national institutions have come under a cloud, especially after former Supreme Court Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, currently heading the National Human Rights Commission, has been implicated in numerous corruption scandals.

The anti-corruption movement has snowballed into one of the biggest challenges in decades not only for the ruling Congress party, but also to others who are championing it — now. Some call it India’s own Arab Spring and parallels have been drawn between Delhi’s Jantar Mantar rallies and Egypt’s Tahrir Square, but things are quite different in India.

No doubt, Hazare has touched an emotional chord of an angry and frustrated India. But remember, Indians have routinely voted out governments and in that sense the anti-graft movement is different from those sweeping the Middle East.

While no one expects an Egypt-like overthrow in the world’s biggest democracy, a galvanized and frustrated middle class and the mushrooming of social networking sites combined with an aggressive private media may be transforming India’s political landscape.

“Democracy means no voice, however small, must not go unheard. The anti-corruption sentiment is not a whisper — it’s a scream. Grave error to ignore it,” Anand Mahindra, one of India’s leading businessmen and managing director of Mahindra Group, wrote on Twitter.

This tweet has substance, in that any reasonable and rational voice in an elected democracy needs to be heard. And Hazare’s rallying call against the most venal of action has hit home into the hearts of every Indian, who has at some time or another been a victim of graft. The government too realized the seriousness of the issue after weeks of protests. Their fervent hope that this was just another flash in the pan and would disappear without a trace was misguided. The Parliament finally gave in to the demands of Hazare.

The lawmakers agreed to incorporate the three main demands of the anti-corruption activist of bringing the prime minister, lawmakers and bureaucrats under the purview of the proposed anti-graft law.

This is without doubt a huge victory for Hazare, who has been eagerly embraced and lustily cheered on as the “second coming” of Mahatma Gandhi by the media and the middle class. The fact that it is the “second coming” of Gandhi is debatable.

The public sentiment on the issue of corruption has been so overwhelming that political parties, including the Congress, would have resisted the activist’s virtual diktats at their own peril. Though people worldwide have taken to the rallying call of this modern-day Gandhian, there are skeptics who believe Hazare has set off an alarming precedent.

They ask, whether any rally that can bring in the numbers be worthy of their support. They also ask whether this bulldozing tactics of twisting the government and people’s arms into believing in “their” cause is correct.

A call against democracy or against the country’s secular fabric by a horde of citizens and netizens could be the next step in this “collective uprising.” Will mob rule be the only pivotal point in pushing the agenda, or will the rule of the land prevail. Support for personal causes could then be the next move in the changing Indian “democracy.”

No doubt, Hazare and his fellow travellers successfully and shrewdly tapped into and exploited public anger over inaction on graft. The fact that the campaign was urban driven, with many people from the minorities and Dalits failing to be impressed by the “collective call,” was due to the fact that graft being a problem that is further removed from them, as they battle their own devils in India.

The fact that babas and yogis joined the Hazare bandwagon reveals the type of people trying to gain political and personal mileage from the anti-corruption movement. Theirs is a single-point agenda — promoting themselves.

The media too played a singular role in this whole saga. All were quick to praise the Hazare movement without delving into the deeper cause of the malaise. That should have been their job. Also, ironically, when the babas and yogis were out in force, not one of the media — both print and digital — had the gumption to look into the sudden thrust to limelight of these babas, both in their personal capacity as well as their business capacity.

The Hazare show raises other troubling questions. Even if the much debated anti-corruption law and the institution of Lokpal comes into being, is it really going to prove the magic wand that would rid India of the cancer of corruption gnawing at its vitals? Many doubt it. Graft runs like blood in the system. One watchdog, however powerful, cannot cleanse the body politic.

What India needs, or for that matter any other country, is an all-out, long-term, effective and sustained national movement to fight the scourge. In a country where nothing moves or happens without a bribe, it’s naive to assume that populist antics demanding instant solutions and results would deliver the nation.

The most disturbing aspect of the whole business is the tendency of a handful of people to force their “solutions” and laws down the throat of a billion strong democracy and its representatives, using emotional blackmail —hunger strike — and political coercion by using the mob.

Remember, what distinguishes India from many of its neighbours is its amazing democratic experience defying great odds. The Indians must not allow anything or anyone to undermine this extraordinary achievement.

The Hazare hysteria had its own disturbing aspect. It literally had turned into a circus. Both the Congress-led government and civil society groups perhaps should share the blame for this state of affairs. Their daily and hourly slugfest under the constant media glare, accusing each other of all sorts of conspiracies, chicanery and treachery left a billion plus nation baffled and bewildered — whether it needs democracy or “mobocracy”? Is it fight for democracy or demagoguery?