Updates

Update from AIJAC

May 12, 2011
Number 05/11 #03

This Update focuses on additional, under-reported features of the killing of Osama bin Laden last week.

We lead with noted Canadian Muslim reformer Irshad Manji, who while congratulating US President Barack Obama, takes issue with his statement that  bin Laden was “not a Muslim leader.” She insists that bin Laden and his followers do represent a real interpretation of Islam, and the only long-term solution is to challenge that interpretation “relentlessly and visibly”. She goes on to argue that the key to doing so is not “moderate Muslims”, who merely wish to preserve the status quo, but Muslim reformers who will actively re-interpret problematic elements of the Islamic canon and revitalise the once powerful Muslim tradition of critical thought. For this important look at the struggle within Islam following bin Laden’s death, CLICK HERE. A recent seminar involving some Indonesian Islamic scholars trying to provide the sort of reform Manji advocates is discussed here. More on the wider struggle in the Muslim world of which bin Laden was only one part comes from noted Israel counter-terrorism expert Boaz Ganor and American columnist Charles Krauthammer.

Next up is some additional comment on the Pakistan conundrum from a top American foreign policy expert who recently spent considerable time in Pakistan, Walter Russell Mead. Mead argues that the killing of bin Laden was in many ways a disaster for Pakistan, dealing a body-blow to the  US-Pakistan relationship on several levels. He goes on to explore Pakistan’s other alliance options – principally China and Saudi Arabia – and proposes a tough US policy to deal with “what, to American eyes, looks like a dangerous and delusional imaginary world” that Pakistan’s security forces live in. For this informed and thoughtful argument from a major foreign policy thinker, CLICK HERE. An excellent history of the complexity of US-Pakistani relations comes from Lawrence Wright, writing in the New Yorker. Meanwhile, Max Boot, another foreign policy expert, has more on US policy options vis-a-vis Pakistan.

Finally, there seems little doubt that the death of bin Laden has intensified the debate about the ongoing coalition war in Afghanistan. The final piece in this Update, by journalist author and thinktanker Peter Bergen, tackles this debate head on from a position of great knowledge about both history and current events in Afghanistan. After reviewing the genuine past and ongoing difficulties in Afghanistan, Bergen demonstrates genuine signs of progress now, and makes a strong case that a continued coalition effort there is in the interests of Afghanis as well as the US and its allies. To read this longish but valuable essay in its entirety, CLICK HERE. An additional good piece on Afghanistan comes from Max Boot.

Readers may also be interested in:

• A video in which the always insightful Barry Rubin discusses the implications of bin Laden’s death.
• Photos of protests by bin Laden supporters in several countries.
• Some additional comments on the claim that killing bin Laden was illegal – see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Plus some interesting speculation – what would have happened if bin Laden had been take alive?
• Some more comment on the broader scope of the “Arab Spring” movement from veteran British journalist Con Coughlin and scholars Martin Kramer and Gilles Keppel speaking at the Washington Institute. Plus comment on bin Laden and the Arab Spring from academic and former US official Paul Wolfowitz.
• More good analysis and opinion on the Egyptian situation, and Egypt’s changing foreign policy is here, here, here and here. Meanwhile, more on leading Egyptian Presidential contender Amr Mousa from Barry Rubin.
• Additional comment on the international reaction to the ongoing violence in Syria is here, here, here, here, here and here. (It is worth noting that after a concerted international campaign, Syria is dropping its bid for  membership on the UN Human Rights Council, despite the fact that it was very likely to win it.).
• Dr. Jonathan Spyer argues that past hopes for a “Syrian option” for Israel were illusory.
• AIJAC’s Dr. Colin Rubenstein comments in the Australian Jewish News on the death of bin Laden.
• Tuesday was Israel’s 63rd Independence Day, which, according to tradition, followed Israel’s Memorial Day on Monday for those killed in past wars. AIJAC’s Arsen Ostrovsky has some thoughts about Israel’s anniversary, and the elements of the Israel story that go beyond democracy and a Jewish homeland, but provide concrete international benefits.
• Additional good comment on Israel at 63 (with a population of 7.74 million) is here, here, here, here and here. Some comment related to Israel’s memorial day is here and here. 
• AIJAC’s Arsen Ostrovsky and Sharyn Mittelman comment on the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement.

 

---

Islam Needs Reformists, Not ‘Moderates’

Bin Laden’s followers represent a real interpretation of Islam. Why don’t more Muslims challenge it?

By IRSHAD MANJI

Wall Street Journal, MAY 7, 2011

President Barack Obama should be applauded for his risky—and lonely—decision to take out Osama bin Laden. But in announcing bin Laden’s demise, the president fudged a vital fact. Echoing George W. Bush, he insisted that al Qaeda’s icon “was not a Muslim leader.”

But this is untrue. Bin Laden and his followers represent a real interpretation of Islam that begs to be challenged relentlessly and visibly. Why does this happen so rarely?

“Moderate” Muslims are part of the problem. As Martin Luther King Jr. taught many white Americans, in times of moral crisis, moderation cements the status quo. Today, what Islam needs is not more “moderates” but more self-conscious “reformists.” It is reformists who will bring to my faith the debate, dissent and reinterpretation that have carried Judaism and Christianity into the modern world.

Sounding the call for reform is no way to win a popularity contest in the Muslim community. After the 2005 London transit bombings, I delivered a radio commentary disagreeing with Feisal Abdul Rauf, the moderate American imam who later fronted the campaign for an Islamic center and mosque near Ground Zero. He had issued a statement about the London terror strikes, assuring journalists that according to the Quran, “Whoever kills a human being…it is as if he has killed all humankind.”

“Not quite,” I explained with regret. “The full verse reads, ‘Whoever kills a human being, except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all humankind” (my emphasis). For the British jihadis, I went on, “villainy in the land” describes the boot prints of U.S. soldiers in Iraqi soil. This otherwise humane Quranic passage gives aspiring holy warriors a loophole to exploit.

I closed by suggesting that moderate Muslims join moderate Jews and Christians in admitting to the nasty side of all our scriptures. The following week, a Muslim acquaintance emailed me. Peeved that I would “go after moderate Muslims,” she curtly counseled me to “wash laundry in the backyard”—that is, to discuss our internal affairs privately.

But what takes place among Muslims affects countless lives outside the fold, so our business is everyone’s business. When it is “moderates,” not extremists, who treat you as a traitor for advocating liberal democratic values, something has corrupted the moderates themselves.

That something is identity politics. Even in the seemingly tolerant Muslim communities of America, the politics of identity stands in the way of reinterpretation and reform. Akeel Bilgrami, a philosopher at Columbia University, makes an elegant distinction in this regard. Moderate Muslims, he observes, are so consumed with Western imperialism that they have distracted themselves from dealing with the imperialists inside Islam—Muslims who dominate, censor, injure and murder fellow Muslims.

Bin Laden and his disciples epitomize this crowd. But you do not have to be murderous to be an obstacle to reform. I will never forget the Muslim man in New Jersey who flaunted his moderate credentials by leading an interfaith dialogue group, yet who, behind closed doors, revealed a purist’s insularity. On the letterhead of his interfaith initiative, he presented me with a list of phrases and paragraphs to be banned from my 2004 book, “The Trouble with Islam Today.”

“You want my publishers to edit out these thoughts?” I asked, incredulously.

“Oh, yes,” he confirmed. “Otherwise, you’re like a fascist.”

Prof. Bilgrami chalks up the defensiveness of moderate Muslims to their fear that openly criticizing other Muslims “would amount to a surrender,” the ultimate abdication of group honor—and thus identity—to a contemptuous West. But, as Prof. Bilgrami astutely points out, the reverse holds true: The final triumph for colonizers is the Muslim habit of denying and deflecting our internal dysfunction. Avoidance strips Muslims of the ability to be introspective and, therefore, free. Moderate Muslims throttle the very moderation to which they claim to be devoted.

Of course, identity politics is not exclusive to Muslims. Many moderate Christians criticized Dr. King for causing “tension” in their ranks. Dr. King shot back that he and his followers “merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.” The same goes for Muslim reform in our own day.

It is time for those who love liberal democracy to join hands with Islam’s reformists. Here is a clue to who’s who: Moderate Muslims denounce violence committed in the name of Islam but insist that religion has nothing to do with it; reformist Muslims, by contrast, not only deplore Islamist violence but admit that our religion is used to incite it.

Notice that I say “used.” Islam is being manipulated. That is why Muslims should acknowledge the awkward passages of our own holy book and reinterpret them—publicly. The Quran, I believe, encourages this: It contains three times as many verses promoting critical thought as opposed to blind submission.

How can we reinterpret the Quranic passage that allows Muslims to kill “as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land”? For starters, we must stress that more Muslims are being slaughtered by other Muslims than by anyone else. To fight “villainy in the land,” then, we have to repel the violent ideology of some of our fellow Muslims.

Drawing attention to Muslim-on-Muslim violence is essential to deflating the grandstanding of bin Laden’s sympathizers. This counternarrative deals in reality while doing justice to a loving God. Muslims need to share it with the young people in our communities. And other Americans, including U.S. presidents, should expect us to share it.

—From “Allah, Liberty and Love” by Irshad Manji, to be published June 14 by Free Press. Copyright © 2011 by Mosaic Media Inc. Printed by permission.

Back to Top
————————————————————————

High Noon in Pakistan

 Walter Russell Mead

“Via Meadia” blog
May 8, 2011

The taking of Osama was a defeat for Al Qaeda.  It was a disaster for Pakistan.

The Assassination in Abbottabad was a strategic catastrophe for the military rulers of this slowly and painfully failing state.  On the one hand, it leaves the reputation of Pakistan as an effective partner against fanatical terror groups in ruins.  The debate in Washington and around the world now is whether the Pakistani state is in league with Al Qaeda or whether it is so weak, divided and incompetent that rogue factions within the state have escaped all control.  The rich intelligence haul the US gathered in Osama’s lair will help the US learn more about Osama’s protectors in Pakistan; in the meantime it is transparently clear that whether incompetence or malfeasance is more to blame, the government of Pakistan cannot safely be trusted — by anyone, on anything.

The argument for a continued US-Pakistani alliance took a body blow.  If Pakistan can’t or won’t help us with the capture of Osama bin Laden, what possible justification does the alliance have?  Arguably, the two people who have done the greatest damage to American interests in the last twenty years have been A. Q. Khan, ringmaster of the nuclear proliferation circus that helped countries like North Korea, Libya, Syria and Iran advance their nuclear ambitions, and Osama bin Laden.  What country produced one and sheltered both?

From the ISI/military point of view, trust is not just a problem when it comes to relations with the US.  The Pakistani military has to have foreign patrons; without foreign aid it cannot pretend even to itself to be a serious competitor to India.  India is too big, and Pakistan is too small, too unstable, too divided by bitter internal fault lines, too poorly developed and too incompetently governed to hold its own without outside help.

As US-Pakistan tensions rise, the Pakistanis have looked to China as an alternative great power backer.  The Pakistani argument to China is that Pakistan offers an offset to India that makes it harder for India to challenge Chinese influence in southeast Asia and elsewhere.  Pakistan can also offer China friendly ports close to the vital oilfields of the Middle East and also a useful land route for trade and power projection.

This is not an unattractive proposition, and China is already in business with Pakistan, providing foreign aid and promoting growth in bilateral trade.  The value of China’s aid to Pakistan is hard to estimate, but trade between the two countries is worth about $8.7 billion.  (US military and economic aid to Pakistan last year totaled almost $4.5 billion and US-Pakistani trade was worth $1.6 billion.)  Additionally, China provides material and financial assistance for Pakistan’s nuclear program; during a visit to Pakistan in December 2010, Wen Jiabao and Pakistani officials finalized plans for the construction of a one gigawatt nuclear reactor in Chashma, making it the third and largest reactor in Pakistan.  China’s agreement to provide nuclear materials to Pakistan despite Pakistan’s nuclear program and poor record on proliferation was seen in Pakistan and elsewhere as a counter to the US-India agreement.

But for the Chinese, who have so far flirted with Pakistan but never come close to giving the Pakistanis the support they desperately crave, there are three very big catches.  First, Pakistan looks as bent on self-destruction to China as it does to everyone else in the world; why put your money on a such a weak horse?

Second, if China becomes the partner of Pakistan’s dreams, it wrecks its relationship with India and drives India into America’s arms.  A closer relationship with Pakistan might be necessary for China in the event that the US and India developed a tight alliance aimed against China, but China’s best strategy now is to prevent the US-India relationship from turning into an anti-China alliance.  Flirting with Pakistan makes sense as a way to keep both Washington and Delhi on their toes, but anything more would be a costly mistake.

And third, there are the same questions of competence and trust that give Washington pause.   Can Pakistan really be trusted on the subject of ‘Islamic’ terror?  The Pakistani defense establishment is totally fixated on maintaining links with terror groups and radical groups to advance its interests in both Afghanistan and India.  China doesn’t like this very much; none of the great powers with interests in Central Asia have much sympathy for Pakistan’s desire to strengthen radical Sunni groups.  But if Pakistan showed that it was willing and able to use this weapon selectively — to tolerate and even promote terror groups aimed at India while cracking down ruthlessly and effectively on any Muslims crazy enough to dream of fighting for their co-religionists in western China — then maybe, just maybe, Pakistan and China could cut a deal.

But the Abbottabad imbroglio calls Pakistan’s good faith and its ability into question.  Will Islamabad really suppress, murder and betray Uighur Muslims who want to bring jihad to their homeland, or will Pakistani weakness, incompetence, religious fanaticism and/or corruption mean that Pakistan will provide sanctuary and perhaps more to China’s deadly enemies even as it takes China’s cash?  On the evidence of Abbottabad, few Chinese foreign policy analysts will propose trusting Pakistan.  Nice words, candy and flowers on its birthday, but little else.

The attack on Abbottabad was not just a blow to Al Qaeda; it was a direct blow to the heart of Pakistani self confidence.  Pakistan puts a lot of faith in its nuclear bombs.  ISI types in Pakistan believe that US mistrust of Pakistan is so deep that the US is looking for an opportunity to take control of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal.

The strong likelihood that somebody powerful in Pakistan was helping Osama makes the (far fetched) scenario of an American nuclear snatch more frightening to Pakistan.  If the US concludes that Pakistan is a state sponsor of terror with close links to Al Qaeda with nuclear weapons and a long record of bad behavior on proliferation issues, the desire to separate those weapons from unworthy hands could become very strong.

The Abbottabad raid demonstrates two things that have shocked the Pakistani security establishment to the core: that the US in pursuit of supreme national interests is willing to send military forces into the heart of Pakistan’s territory and security zone — and that we have the capacity to do so at will.  A. Q. Khan may be sleeping a little less soundly and may well have moved all his thumb drives to a more secure location.

India, of course watched the raid closely.  India, a victim in the past of Pakistan-supported terrorist violence, has the same concerns about Pakistani nukes and terror groups that Washington does.  After observing the mysteriously powerful Stuxnet computer worm in neighboring Iran, and now shocked by American ability to move forces at will, the Pakistani security establishment is now coming to terms with some profoundly unsettling realities. Already, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir has warned India off an Abbottabad-style raid aimed at the accused perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

The US is tightening the screws on this unsatisfactory ally.  So far as it goes, that is good.  Senators Bob Corker and Ben Cardin have been calling for the US to go farther — to stop aid to Pakistan.

But even that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter.  The US and Pakistan have had a long relationship, but the love has long since gone out of this bromance.  Our interests are likely to diverge much more radically than at present as the US exit from Afghanistan draws closer.

Many of the most important details of the US-Pakistani relationship are only known by a handful of officials.  That is inevitable when sensitive matters like counter-terrorism and nuclear weapons come into play.  This means that outsiders are not going to get many of the vital nuances of one of the most delicate and difficult dances in the diplomatic world.  But it does seem clear that the US now needs to muster all of its energy, resources and will for a strategic battle to determine the future parameters of our relations with Pakistan.

We are going to have to get tough.  The Pakistani security establishment lives to a very large degree in what, to American eyes, looks like a dangerous and delusional imaginary world.  As I’ve written before, Americans (and virtually everyone else in the world who looks at this question) sees Pakistan locked into a profoundly dysfunctional combination of misguided security ideas and comprehensive domestic failure.  Pakistani strategists embrace these seemingly destructive policies out of some very deeply-held beliefs and in response to what they see as existential questions of national identity and cohesion.  They will not be lightly diverted from this long-established and cherished course, however suicidal, and as is often the case with people whose goals are unrealistic, they are accustomed to very high risk strategies and brinkmanship.  Defeat after defeat by India, progressive deterioration of the domestic security climate and the utter collapse of political morality in what passes for the governing class in Pakistan have not forced a reevaluation.  Charm and appeals to sweet reason by American officials and emissaries won’t do it either.  Neither will humanitarian aid: the suffering of ordinary Pakistanis has little impact on the elite, and in the short to medium term public opinion in Pakistan is so anti-American and so politically marginal that we could die of old age waiting for spending however generous to change our image in Pakistan enough to change the politics of the relationship.

I favor generous and long term assistance to Pakistan as part of a long term relationship — assuming that the country is willing to stop running toward the abyss and to start moving, however slowly, in a more promising direction.  But we should not deceive ourselves that civilian aid buys much goodwill with what is, under a thin and increasingly unconvincing veneer of civilian rule, a military government on all security matters.

When it comes to changing Pakistani policy, aid however generous for schools and hospitals Pakistan’s rulers don’t care much about matters less than a credible threat that Pakistan could face an active US-led alliance from which it is excluded and which might even actively seek to frustrate its interests on key issues.

To get our relationship with Pakistan on the right track, the Obama administration is going to have to assemble and develop some serious threats.  Sending the Seals to Abbottabad is a nice shot across the bow, but more will be needed.  The administration is going to have to look at a broad range of options that stretch from adding some new dimensions to US-India relations and engaging more directly with more neighbors about the future of Afghanistan to additional operations like the Abbottabad raid where intelligence suggests appropriately important targets can be found.  On the other hand, the administration needs to develop a crystal clear and specific vision for what we want from Pakistan and what we will do if and only if we can secure it.

This matters.  The administration’s ability to put its relationship with Pakistan on a clear path will go far to determine both the speed at which we are able to leave Afghanistan and the nature of the post-US situation there.  More, what is at stake in both Afghanistan and Pakistan is still America’s security at home.  President Obama clearly understands that defending Americans from 9/11 style attacks remains the most important item on his job description.  Getting Pakistan right is a must.

In this negotiation the Americans will do better if we have coordinated our approach with the Saudis — they, next to China, represent Pakistan’s best hope of a replacement partner should the US alliance cool even further.  The Saudis are widely believed to have helped support Pakistan’s quest for what some call the ‘Sunni bomb’; Pakistanis are ready and, if suitably paid, willing to support embattled Sunni Arab sheikhs against restive Shi’a subjects.  From the Saudi point of view, Pakistan’s 169 million people and nuclear arsenal look like reliable allies against Iran if US support should prove unreliable and one suspects that Pakistani contingency planning for a crisis with the US includes some assumptions about Saudi help.

The US needs to address this.  The Obama administration can’t make geography go away; the Saudis can and should have a relationship with Pakistan based on mutual interests and strategic need.  But the Pakistan card goes up in value as the US card falls: the Obama administration needs to improve its relationship with the Saudis and clear up any misunderstandings about where we stand on the question of Saudi security.  The Saudis may be religiously radical by some standards, but as long as they believe in the strength of the US umbrella they are conservative geopolitically.  There are all kinds of reasons (including the restraining influence that Saudi money can have on radical clerics) to make sure the Saudis understand the depth of the American commitment to their survival.

We have another card to play, I suspect.  Some of the information the Seals acquired in Abbottabad is likely to show that under Pakistani protection Bin Laden continued to plot and scheme against the Saudis.  Pakistan has betrayed everyone, including the Saudis.  Nobody likes this kind of behavior; Pakistan has burned more than one bridge. 

The much feared and long delayed moment of truth in US-Pakistan relations is almost upon us.  Nobody outside the government can really know all the important factors here, but the Obama administration is unlikely to develop a satisfactory relationship with Pakistan unless it is ready, willing and able to face a complete rupture.  As long as Pakistan perceives that Washington is desperate to keep the relationship alive, it will play games.

Perhaps we truly have no choice; in that case the US must continue mushing on as best we may.  But Pakistan is a weak and vulnerable state, wracked by internal dissension, ethnic rivalries and the guerrilla secessionist movement in Baluchistan.  It is high time that the US began looking carefully at the alternatives to its alliance with Pakistan and taking some of the initial steps to ease what may be a necessary and inevitable transition to a new alignment in the region.

One hopes those steps would bring some badly needed sobriety to the strategic culture of Islamabad.  This may well be our only hope now of changing Pakistan’s behavior.  In any case, basing our policy on comforting lies that we tell ourselves because we are too afraid to face bitter truths is not a good move.

The promise to focus on Pakistan was one of the hallmarks of President Obama’s 2008 campaign.  The raid on Abbottabad shows he is still on the case.  Every American should wish him and his team well as they prepare for even tougher choices ahead

Back to Top
————————————————————————

The Crossroads

Can we win in Afghanistan?

Peter Bergen

The New Republic
May 4, 2011 | 12:00 am

The death of Osama bin Laden will raise the inevitable question: What are we still doing in Afghanistan? The answer, of course, is that the mission in Afghanistan is about something bigger and more ambitious than eliminating Al Qaeda’s leaders—most of whom, in any event, are probably living in Pakistan, as bin Laden was when the United States finally tracked him down. No, the mission in Afghanistan isn’t about killing Al Qaeda members. It’s about stabilizing the country so that it can never again serve as the hotbed of extremism that it was until 2001, with all of the attendant national security and human rights problems that resulted.

But that in turn raises other questions: Is it worth prolonging a war that has stretched on for nearly ten years for that broader goal? And perhaps the most difficult question of all: Even if that goal is worth fighting for, is it actually achievable?

Over the past few years, a consensus has formed in Washington that the answer to that last question is a resounding no. For years, war in Afghanistan has been portrayed as a hopeless failure. The government in Kabul, we have been told, is corrupt and predatory. The Afghan army is a mess. Tribal loyalties trump national loyalties. The Taliban is gaining in strength.

All of this rendered a decision made by President Obama last autumn rather odd—at least on the surface. Obama had long promised that American troops would begin leaving Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. As Vice President Joe Biden had explained: “In July 2011, you’re going to see a whole lot of people moving out. Bet on it.” But then, over the course of a week in November, the White House announced a major reversal of course: A large-scale troop presence would remain in Afghanistan for an additional three years, until 2014.

Only a handful of journalists seemed to realize the magnitude of the news. For its part, The New York Times characterized the new approach as “a change in tone,” a curious label for several more years of war.

But while Americans barely seemed to notice, people in Kabul certainly did. In December, a few weeks after Obama’s announcement, I met with Hedayat Amin Arsala, a courtly senior minister in the Afghan government and a confidant of President Hamid Karzai. We were seated in a basketball-court-sized office adorned with a massive chandelier in a nineteenth-century building in central Kabul. Arsala had been dismayed by Obama’s initial plan to begin withdrawing in 2011. “I was not very happy with it,” Arsala recalled, choosing his words carefully. “It gave the impression to the opposition that if they stick to their guns a little longer, they might be able to succeed after that.” Arsala, reflecting the views of many Afghans both inside and outside the government, expressed relief that Obama was now reversing himself. In fact, he hoped the American president would go even further, and hammer out a long-term agreement with Afghanistan so that American troops could remain in the country into 2015 and beyond. “Between now and 2014, we will be working on this together with the United States,” he told me. A range of other American and Afghan officials confirmed that such an agreement is currently being worked on.

Then came this month’s killing of Osama bin Laden—and while Americans rejoiced, many Afghans were, according to the Times, worried that the successful operation would hasten the departure of American troops. “This should not be used as a justification for premature withdrawal,” warned one former Afghan official.

What is going on here? First, Obama had concluded that a war which was widely believed to be failing was in fact still worth prosecuting. Then, Afghans had made it known that they were relieved the United States would be sticking around. Now, in the wake of bin Laden’s death, they were reminding the United States that they expected it not to renege on this promise. Is this a case of a stubborn American president—unwilling to admit defeat, egged on by Afghan allies—doubling down on a completely failed enterprise? Or is it possible that the Afghanistan war is actually succeeding?

 

Major Jim Gant of the Army Special Forces is a rangy, intense Pashto speaker with tattoos of Chinese characters on his right arm. Like many of his fellow Special Forces officers in the field, Gant sports a shaggy beard and wears an Afghan scarf loosely wrapped around his neck. He has been at the forefront of an unlikely transformation in counterinsurgency tactics, so much so that he’s been nicknamed “Lawrence of Afghanistan.” Gant’s rise to prominence started in late 2009, when he published a paper on the website of Steven Pressfield, a novelist and military veteran. The article was called “One Tribe at a Time,” and it drew on Gant’s experiences as a Special Forces team leader working with a Pashtun tribe—the Taliban’s historical base is among the Pashtuns—in eastern Afghanistan in 2003. Based on his experiences, Gant advocated that small units of autonomous Special Forces embed with Pashtun tribes and train them to fight the Taliban.

While most policy papers languish on desks or hard drives unread, Gant’s paper ricocheted around the upper echelons of the military. It even reached General David Petraeus, who called the paper “very impressive, so impressive, in fact, that I shared it widely.” After that, the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets, stepped back from “door-kicking” missions and instead began to advise and build up local forces. In what the U.S. military has termed “Village Stability Operations,” members of the Special Forces now live among the Pashtun tribesmen in remote areas where insurgents once had unfettered freedom of movement. The goal is to help train community militias, known to the U.S. military as Afghan Local Police (ALP). At present, the government of Afghanistan has authorized 10,000 ALP militiamen; American officers believe that the number will eventually rise to something more like 24,000.

Getting the ALP approved by Kabul required a significant concession from Hamid Karzai, who had feared that arming tribal militias might rejuvenate the warlordism that has plagued Afghanistan since the early 1990s. To address Karzai’s concerns, the ALP is administered by the Afghan Ministry of Interior, and everyone admitted to the program has to submit to biometric scans. On the ground, militia candidates are vetted by local village councils.

This December, at a base near Kabul, I bumped into Gant at a meeting with some senior Special Forces officers. Gant said he was pleased with the progress and noted that in the Pashtun language the community forces are known by the word Arbakai, a traditional term for forces that secure their own area. “The Taliban are very threatened by this,” Gant said. “It’s taking their safe haven away.” Other experts I spoke with affirmed that the community policemen have created “security bubbles” that didn’t exist before.

If Gant’s approach sounds familiar, it should. That’s because it draws on the same principles as the counterinsurgency tactics that worked for Petraeus in Iraq. Ultimately, the effort in Afghanistan will either succeed or fail based on the counterinsurgency practices, like Gant’s, that Petraeus has put in place. I recently got to see Petraeus—who took over the Afghanistan mission last year, and has just been nominated by Obama to head the CIA—in action during a briefing at the International Security Assistance Force headquarters in Kabul. When he walked into the briefing room, it was precisely 7:30 a.m., and a bevy of generals and a couple dozen staff officers immediately stood up. He hurriedly motioned for them to sit down and images began to be projected onto screens around the room. Some screens showed the weather in various parts of Afghanistan, others the numbers of American soldiers recently killed, and others maps of insurgent activity. Over secure videoconference lines, commanders from around Afghanistan gave status updates about their sector of the war, with Petraeus alternately quizzing, cajoling, and complimenting them. The only interruption came toward the end of the briefing, when a scuffle broke out over a recalcitrant goat. A group of officers had dragged the hapless animal, a Navy mascot, into the room in honor of the upcoming Army-Navy football game. “Thanks fellows,” said Petraeus, sounding slightly impatient. “That was really cute.”

Counterinsurgency is often misunderstood as being mostly about winning “hearts and minds”; and, as Gant’s program shows, there’s certainly an element of that. But, at the most basic level, it’s really a set of common-sense precepts about how to avoid being hated while simultaneously applying well-calibrated doses of violence—that is, killing people. The importance of killing to counterinsurgency is an unpalatable truth that often gets disguised with Orwellian neologisms such as “kinetic operations,” but Petraeus clearly understands that reaching “hearts and minds” goes only so far on its own.

As a result of stepped-up operations, many of the Taliban’s longtime safe havens in Helmand and Kandahar have been eliminated, according to the U.S. military. Of course, the Pentagon has reason to give optimistic reports; but I was struck to see that the International Council on Security and Development, an organization long critical of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, is also echoing this assessment, based on its own on-the-ground research.

Meanwhile, operations by Delta Force and Navy Seals have decimated the ranks of mid-level Taliban commanders. This March, Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee that, in a typical three-month period, 360 insurgent leaders were killed or captured. (According to a number of observers, the average age of Taliban commanders has dropped from 35 to 25 in the past year.)

On the administrative front, Petraeus has managed to put a stop to particularly senseless policies. At its worst, the Afghanistan conflict has been sustained partly by a contracting system under which U.S. funds take a perverse path from Afghan contractors to Taliban leaders. That is, a fair portion of the money paid out by Washington for a given project, such as the construction of a road, has made it into the pockets of insurgents in exchange for not attacking that road. Petraeus has put in place new contracting guidelines to try to tame this problem.

Petraeus also appears to be making progress in standing up an effective Afghan National Army. Currently, the army is the most well-regarded institution in the country, with approval ratings over 80 percent. While Tajiks are overrepresented in the officer corps, and Pashtuns from the south of the country are grossly underrepresented among the rank and file, overall, the army is ethnically balanced, retention rates (while hardly stellar) are rising, pay rates went up two years ago to $140 per month for a raw recruit (the average yearly income in Afghanistan is less than $400), and the army is on track to reach its November 2011 end-strength goal of 171,000.

 

But will all these changes in military strategy actually lead to long-term victory in Afghanistan? Unfortunately, anyone observing the country learns to live with alternating feelings of hope and despair. As heartened as I often felt when seeing the military progress, I found the corruption of key Afghan politicians to be deeply depressing. More significantly, the war is exacting a steep cost in American lives. Since Obama took office, some 890 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan. That’s around 60 percent of the total who have died there since the war began in the fall of 2001.

Most of the eastern provinces remain infested with insurgents, as do provinces near Kabul such as Ghazni. The so-called “reintegration” process, in which Taliban foot soldiers lay down their arms and reenter their communities, is largely moribund. Data from Indicium Consulting shows that incidents involving insurgent IEDs, small arms fire, rocket, mortar, and suicide attacks have more than doubled in recent years, from around 8,000 in 2008 to more than 17,000 in 2010. Efforts at striking deals with the Taliban have led nowhere. The most promising discussions occurred last year between the Karzai government and senior Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour—except that “Mullah Mansour” turned out to be a crafty Quetta shopkeeper who had spun a good yarn about his Taliban credentials in order to make some quick money. Meanwhile, official meetings held between Afghan officials and Taliban representatives in places like the Maldives to discuss “reconciliation” have produced nothing. One sardonic Afghan official offered me a simple reason for why the parties had agreed to meet for negotiations. “Everybody wanted to go to the Maldives,” he said.

When I was in Kabul, I asked a small group of leading American counterinsurgency experts if they could think of a case in which an insurgency was defeated under circumstances like the ones we see today in Afghanistan—where insurgents enjoy a safe haven, the government is corrupt, and a third-party military force is intervening on the side of the corrupt government. The experts could not think of a single example. I found just as little solace in How Insurgencies End, a rigorous RAND study, published last year, of 89 insurgencies fought around the world since World War II. Insurgents who have enjoyed a sanctuary have won almost half the conflicts where there was a clear victor. In countries with less than 40 percent urbanization, insurgents have won about three-quarters of the time. And pseudo-democracies, such as Afghanistan, have a particularly poor record of defeating insurgencies, because they neither have the stomach for total repression nor the capacity to offer accountable government. They lose about 85 percent of the time.

Then there is Pakistan, which has, to put it mildly, not always been a helpful player in Afghanistan. The Pakistani army has long sought a pliant Afghan state on its western border to balance its Indian neighbor to the east—a doctrine known as “strategic depth”—and it believes the Taliban served this purpose fairly well. Today, Pakistan’s economy is in bad shape: Its inflation rate hovers around 15 percent, and annual growth has fallen from 7 percent to 2 percent, which cannot remotely sustain what will be in 2015 the world’s fifth-largest population. Simultaneously, Pakistan is spending an astonishing 17 percent of its budget on defense and only 3 percent on education. All of these indicators are bad news for Pakistanis, but they’re also bad news for Afghans: In the long run, an unstable Pakistan means an unstable Afghanistan, since the border between the countries is basically ungovernable, and extremists can so easily drift back and forth.

And yet, against this parade of depressing facts, one must balance some other realities. It helps to begin with some historical context. For all of Afghanistan’s problems, the country has come a long way since I first began visiting it almost two decades ago. I first came to Kabul in 1993, when it was a patchwork of vicious ethnic militias fighting block-to-block, Mogadishu-style. Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar was routinely unleashing barrages of hundreds of rockets that had an unfortunate habit of landing on the heads of innocent Kabul civilians rather than on his enemies. I saw boys as young as ten fighting alongside the militiamen. Travel at night anywhere at all was out of the question, and brigands of all kinds roamed the countryside kidnapping and thieving at will. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans died, and even more fled the country.

I next visited the country in 1997, a year after the Taliban had seized power. The streets were now quiet, and all women were covered from head to foot. Fierce, black-turbaned Taliban “vice and virtue” enforcers roamed around the cities, enforcing their ordinances in fast-moving pickup trucks, stopping to harass, beat, or arrest men whose beards were of improper length or women whose feet were visible. One day, I saw a man crumpled on the street as a Taliban enforcer beat him with a stick. The man had failed to pray at the appointed hour. Days in Taliban Afghanistan passed unbearably slowly. There was nothing to do, no place to go. There were no sounds of music, no films, no entertainment. The economy was in free fall. Kabul was a ghost town, with only 500,000 inhabitants left. The rest had fled. Streets were nearly devoid of cars. My only glimpses of women were when they flitted through the empty streets like wraiths dressed in blue burkas. When I stayed in Kabul in the winter of 1999, I was the only guest in the only functioning hotel in town, an Intercontinental that had long ceased to have anything to do with the brand. There was no heat or hot water, nor were there any telephones. I was lucky to have one of the few rooms with windows that remained intact from the war. When I visited Taliban cabinet officials, we would sit shivering in unheated rooms in their ministries while they told me what a misunderstood man Osama bin Laden was.

Today, Kabul has three million inhabitants. There are restaurants and bars and social venues—and people are friendly. (Among journalists, the guilty secret is that working in Kabul today is sort of, well, fun.) A decade ago, 9 percent of Afghans had access to basic medical care. Today, 85 percent do. Under the Taliban, about one million kids (almost none of them girls) were in school, whereas now about seven million children are being educated (more than one-third of them girls, with the proportion rising). Before the U.S. occupation, a telephone system barely existed in Afghanistan. Today, one in three Afghans has a cell phone. Afghans once had access to no media outlets apart from the Taliban’s Voice of Sharia radio network. Now there are, in the words of the BBC, “scores of radio stations, dozens of TV stations and some 100 active press titles.” More than five million Afghan refugees have returned home. Kabul has become so crowded with cars and people that the city’s pollution is statistically more lethal than the war.

Afghanistan’s economy is also booming. Thanks to the improvements in security provided by the United States and NATO, GDP growth between 2009 and 2010 was a strong 22 percent. That’s just the start. According to a thorough study released earlier this year by the Pentagon, an estimated $900 billion worth of mineral deposits is waiting to be unearthed in Afghanistan, including enough lithium to make the country a world leader in raw materials for batteries. The Chinese have already paid $3 billion for the rights to a copper mine near Kabul, and last year JP Morgan put together a $50 million deal for a gold mine in northern Afghanistan. No wonder, then, that 70 percent of Afghans told pollsters for the BBC late last year that their country is now going in the right direction. (By comparison, in a New York Times/CBS News poll released in April, 70 percent of Americans said the United States is going in the wrong direction.) It’s also why Afghans give surprisingly high marks to the U.S. military, even after nearly a decade of often bungled occupation: 68 percent favorable, according to a BBC/ABC poll released in January 2010. (By contrast, a 2007 BBC/ABC poll in Iraq found that only 22 percent of Iraqis supported the U.S. military presence in their country.)

It’s true that overall security has deteriorated recently in Afghanistan, but much of that is due to stepped-up military operations. This is what happened at the start of the surge in Iraq. Afghanistan also remains a safer place than countries such as Russia or Mexico, where political conflict and criminal violence kill proportionately more people. Residents of New Orleans are five times more likely to be murdered today than Afghan civilians are likely to be killed in war.

Even the unhappy RAND study on the success of insurgencies contained some encouraging findings. One of the most important is that when a government has a significant force superiority ratio (9:1 or greater), it “correlated strongly with success” in defeating insurgents. The projected end strength of the Afghan army and police is 375,000, and the Taliban is around one-tenth of this size. That’s not including all of the outside military forces that are also involved on the side of the Afghan government. What’s more, according to the RAND study, “[c]ontrary to conventional wisdom, insurgents do not win by trying to simply outlast the government. In fact, over the long run, governments tend to win more often than not.” While the long run can be all too long—it took more than four decades for the Colombian government to effectively defeat the FARC—the fact remains that time is working against the insurgents, especially with the new lengthening of the U.S. commitment.

 

Although the White House’s pledge to remain in Afghanistan appears to be firm, calls to pull out have been increasing. One striking example of the new emerging consensus came out earlier this year, when George W. Bush’s ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, wrote in Foreign Affairs that “Washington should accept that the Taliban will inevitably control most of the Pashtun south and east”; he advocated de facto partition of Afghanistan as “the best available alternative to strategic defeat.” The plan was merely the most extreme expression of a now-common sentiment amongst the U.S. foreign policy establishment: Let’s just get it over with.

Partition or withdrawal sound simple and alluring; but Blackwill and others don’t seem to fully grasp the problems with such proposals. For one thing, with whom would we negotiate a partition? The so-called “moderates” in the Taliban reconciled with the Afghan government long ago. The remaining Taliban fighters have splintered into several groups, each more extreme than the next. And why would the Taliban honor their side of the bargain? Deals between the Pakistani government and the Taliban in Waziristan and in Swat were merely preludes to the Taliban establishing brutal “emirates,” regrouping, and then moving into adjoining areas to seize more territory.

The human costs of partition or withdrawal would be horrific. When the Taliban took control of the Pakistani tourist destination of Swat between 2008 and 2009, they imposed a reign of terror, beheading policemen and leaving their bodies to rot in public, burning down schools for girls, and administering public lashings to women accused of adultery.

And, finally, there are the strategic costs. Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, but Al Qaeda still exists, and there is no reason to believe that a reconstituted Taliban government would be any less hospitable to Al Qaeda than the Taliban rulers of the 1990s. After September 11, Mullah Omar lost everything to protect bin Laden, and since then he has said nothing to distance himself from that fateful decision.

Of course, just because it would be preferable to succeed in Afghanistan does not mean we actually can. But, when I look at the hopeful signs that are starting to emerge from the country, and when I consider these indicators in tandem with the likely consequences of a hasty exit, I do think the wise choice now is for the United States to stay. In war, perceptions tend to lag behind reality by a considerable distance. In Afghanistan, our efforts were widely thought of as successful for several years after things had clearly begun to deteriorate on the ground. Today, it appears that we have the opposite problem: improvements on the ground that are widely dismissed amid a narrative of defeat.

Staying in Afghanistan isn’t the politically obvious decision: The war is going to remain controversial, and it’s going to be criticized from both the left and the right. Arguably, it could even imperil Obama’s reelection. Still, the president has made his choice and he appears to be sticking with it. This, I am convinced, is good for Afghanistan. One day, I hope, we’ll also realize that it was good for the United States.
 

Peter Bergen is a contributing editor for The New Republic and the author of The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al-Qaeda. This article originally ran in the May 26, 2011, issue of the magazine.

 
Back to Top