Getting lost in Afghanistan

SUSHANT SAREEN

It’s 10 years of the ongoing war in Afghanistan. As the US-led NATO forces prepare the ground to throw in the towel, the situation in the region remains as critical as ever. And, it’s unlikely to change until the Pakistan problem is sorted out

 

Afghanistan, it is said, lies at the crossroads of the world. It is a place where the world, or should we say history, takes a turn. The wisdom underscoring this pithy observation is once again staring the world in its face. But expediency is forcing the foreign players involved in the Afghan Buzkashi to close their eyes to the horrendous repercussions of either abandoning or even handing Afghanistan to the Taliban-led consortium of Jihad International.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan is preparing the ground to throw in the towel. A curious cocktail of misplaced and mindless liberalism, punctured imperial hubris, grave strategic miscalculations and mistakes, and spiralling economic and political costs have led to a drastic lowering of objectives set by the US-led international effort in Afghanistan. From a time when the international forces had taken upon themselves to do whatever it took to reorder the Afghan society and polity and rid it of the malevolence of the radical, obscurantist and barbaric Taliban and their affiliates, to now when all that is being sought is that the Al Qaeda is not given sanctuary and Afghanistan doesn’t become a base for terrorism against the West, it has been quite a comedown.

Sure, with their economies in a tailspin and public support for the war in Afghanistan plummeting, it is quite natural for the Western countries, particularly the US, to try to cut their losses and expenses in the bottomless pit called Afghanistan and to devote their energies and divert their resources to take care of their homelands. But if they think that by abandoning Afghanistan or letting it descend into chaos, they will be able to ensure their own prosperity and security, they have got another thought coming.

One thing is certain: If the Islamists win in Afghanistan, it will serve as a shot in the arm for their global ambition (and God-ordained duty) to spread their virulence in every part of the world. Anyone who doubts this only needs to read the literature published by the Islamists. The choice before the West is, therefore, clear: They can either fight and win this war in Afghanistan (and of course, the root of the problem — Pakistan), or they can fight this war, with all that it will entail — car bombs, IEDs, suicide bombers, fidayeen attacks, and what have you — in the streets of their own countries.

The fate that awaits Pakistan in the event of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan is probably going to be even worse than death. Of course, when one says this, one presumes that Talibanisation is not something that enamours the Pakistanis. This is perhaps a fallacious presumption given both the mindset that pervades large sections of the Pakistani populace, and the fact that the real rulers of Pakistan — the military — view the Taliban and their assorted Islamist allies in Pakistan (some of which like the Sunni extremist Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan are merrily massacring Shias without any let or hindrance) as their best bets to install a ‘friendly’ Government in Afghanistan.

While the rest of the world, and even some sensible Pakistanis, would label a Talibanised Pakistan as a ‘failed state’, most Pakistanis, including many in the Pakistan Army, would probably welcome such a dispensation as the pinnacle of political achievement and the fulfilment of their desire for an Islamic utopia. If at all the Pakistanis have a problem with the Taliban, it is not so much with the Taliban worldview (which many Pakistanis identify with) as with the Taliban terror tactics and the fact that some of the Taliban are not willing to follow the orders of the patron — the Pakistan Army.

Cut through the verbiage of Pakistani spin doctors who, even as they try to beguile the international public opinion by presenting a reasonable face (some of it genuine, most of it contrived), are at the same time playing upon the international community’s fears of a nuclear-armed, Talibanised Pakistan, and it is quite apparent that the Pakistani establishment has put all its eggs in the Taliban basket. Although the Pakistanis never stop reminding the world of the sacrifices they have made in the ‘war on terror’, there has never been any cogent answer to the mother of all questions: If Islamabad’s interests are served by keeping the Taliban option alive, then what sort of a war is Pakistan fighting against the Taliban? The answer really is plastered all over the place: The Pakistanis are not fighting against the Taliban and their affiliates who are targeting the ISAF and Afghan troops in Afghanistan from their bases and sanctuaries inside Pakistan; they are only fighting those Taliban who are targeting Pakistan.

The sort of double-game and double-speak that the Pakistanis indulge in has been best described by none other than the former Taliban ambassador to Islamabad, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who writes in his autobiography: “Pakistan… is so famous for treachery that it is said they can get milk from a bull. They have two tongues in one mouth, and two faces on one head so they can speak everybody’s language; they use everybody, deceive everybody.”

Sample this: Pakistan’s Army chief Gen Ashfaq Kayani was quoted last year as saying: “We cannot wish for Afghanistan anything that we don’t wish for Pakistan (read Taliban)… We want a strategic depth in Afghanistan but do not want to control it.” Last week, however, he was reported as telling the All-Party Conference in Islamabad that the Haqqani network has never created problems for Pakistan and with the Americans planning to leave Afghanistan there was absolutely no reason for Pakistan to change its friends into foes. This then begs the question from the Americans that if indeed the ‘bad guys’ function as ‘friends’, if not ‘a veritable arm of the ISI’, then aren’t the Americans fighting in the wrong country (Afghanistan) and also allying with and relying on the wrong country (Pakistan)?

Regardless of whether it is muddled strategising, treachery, foolhardiness or even that typically Punjabi proclivity for self-destructiveness born out of hostility and enmity (pull down your neighbour’s house even if the walls of your own house collapse) — it is probably all of these — the Pakistani military establishment has succeeded in one thing at least: Getting sucked into the Afghan vortex. In the process, it has bankrupted its economy, impoverished its people, ruined the international image of its country, torn apart the social fabric of the society, and got saddled with a dysfunctional political system. But these hardly matter to the generals. For the tin hats in Pakistan’s armed forces, this is collateral damage — a cost that must be borne in pursuit of their grandiose strategic objectives. The irony, however, is that instead of Afghanistan providing Pakistan with strategic depth, it is Pakistan that is now providing the Taliban with ‘strategic depth’.

For public consumption at least, the whole ‘strategic depth’ doctrine has been given a more benign interpretation. It is officially no longer about reducing Afghanistan into a client state, much less treating it like the fifth province of Pakistan, but only about having a ‘friendly’ and ‘not hostile’ Government in Afghanistan. But the instrument being used by Pakistan for achieving its strategic objectives — religious extremism and radicalism — promises to turn the ‘strategic depth’ into a ‘strategic black hole’ for Pakistan. Even though many in the Pakistani establishment are extremely wary of getting dragged into the Afghan quagmire, this is now inevitable.

Driving Pakistan’s policy is its paranoia of real and imagined Indian influence in Afghanistan. The problem is that its maniacal obsession to counter Delhi in what it sees as its own backyard so that it is not caught in a nutcracker situation by India is actually getting Pakistan caught in the Afghan snare.

In other words, Islamabad’s hostility towards Delhi is directly proportional to its getting sucked in deeper and deeper into the ‘graveyard of empires’. This, paradoxically, not only gives India a leverage and control over Pakistan’s Afghan policy but also pretty much puts it in the driving seat in terms of deciding how badly it wants Pakistan to get burnt in Afghanistan.

Until a few weeks back, India was content to use its enormous soft power to earn goodwill of the Afghan people. Compared to the malign influence of Pakistan which could only give death and destruction to the Afghans, India exercised a benign influence — building roads, schools, hospitals, power projects, dams, helping in capacity building and institution building. Mindful of the limitations imposed by geography, India preferred to ride piggy-back on the Americans. As a result, instead of formulating its own strategy, Delhi was toeing the line set for it in Washington. But with the Americans all set to leave, these political and diplomatic constraints are slowly but surely being cast aside. India seems to have understood that soft power alone is not enough, even less so in a setting in which the future course of events are being decided by hard power. The first significant step in the direction of exercising some hard power options was taken on October 4 with the signing of the Afghanistan-India Strategic Partnership Agreement, under which Delhi has agreed “to assist, as mutually determined, in the training, equipping and capacity building programmes for Afghan National Security Forces”.

No doubt, this agreement will serve as a red rag for the Pakistanis who are bound to go all ballistic over India’s involvement with the building up of the Afghan security forces. The Pakistanis had themselves been trying hard to get such a role to play. But the Afghans, despite paying lip service to using Pakistani training facilities, were extremely reluctant to go down this path. India, on the other hand, had been showing reluctance (partly under US pressure and partly on account of the pusillanimity of the Government which wanted to assure Pakistan of its benign intentions in Afghanistan) to taking on the training and equipping of the Afghan security forces and had avoided acting on Afghan requests to play a more active role in the military field. That India has now agreed to bare its fangs is a sign that it will henceforth adopt a more independent policy in Afghanistan.

For this thanks are due to the Pakistanis, who in anticipation of controlling the ‘endgame’, suddenly and perhaps prematurely shifted the gears of terrorism in Afghanistan to a new high. Not only were high-profile assassinations carried out — President Hamid Karzai’s brother, the mayor of Kandahar, and most recently former President Burhanuddin Rabbani — there were also major attacks on American targets (the US embassy in Kabul and the US military base in Wardak). The idea behind these attacks was to force the pace of the so-called peace process. Apart from the Pakistanis, the muddled and often dubious as well as duplicitous US policy in Afghanistan, including efforts to strike deals with notorious terror groups like the Quetta Shura and the Haqqani network, has also forced a rethink on India which doesn’t want to be left in the lurch when the Americans leave. But it will be neither enough nor practical for Delhi to act alone. It will have to use diplomacy to forge a wider regional alliance with countries like Iran, Russia and Central Asian states, all of which have crucial stakes in Afghanistan, to counter the baleful influence of Pakistan and its Islamist proxies in Afghanistan.

For their part, the Afghanistan Government, too, seems to have lost patience and trust (if ever there was any) with Pakistan. President Karzai’s new approach of stopping all negotiations with the Taliban and to now talk only with Pakistan is a clever way of saying that it makes more sense to talk to the principals rather than the proxies. By putting the onus on the Pakistanis, what he is effectively doing is asking the Pakistanis to either demonstrate their control over their proxies and if they are unable to do so then asking them what they are bringing to the table that they should be given a central role in the ‘endgame’. If the Pakistanis bite the bait, they will prove the charge against them that they are running the Taliban. There is also an outside chance of a wedge being driven between Pakistan and the Taliban by making the former a party in the talks. If, however, Islamabad doesn’t bite, then the odds are that it will respond by unleashing even more murder and mayhem in Afghanistan. This in turn will harden the positions inside Afghanistan among the anti-Taliban forces and also put greater pressure on the international community to address the root of the Afghan crisis — Pakistan.

In the final analysis, until the Pakistan problem is sorted out, there will never be any peace in Afghanistan. More importantly, not taking effective action — diplomatic, economic, and even military — to change Islamabad’s behaviour is not going to halt its march towards Talibanisation. Quite to the contrary, the more the world tolerates Pakistan’s dalliance, even alliance, with the Taliban, the more it ensures that Islamabad will end up being Talibanised. Afghanistan is, in this sense, only a sideshow. The real nightmare will begin when Pakistan falls under the sway of the Taliban. If anything, it is not what the Pakistanis are doing to the Afghans that should worry the world, but what the Afghans will do to the Pakistanis that should be the focus of attention.

– The writer is Senior Fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation, and Consultant, Pakistan Project, IDSA

A decade of neo-colonial war in Afghanistan

By Peter Symonds

Yesterday marked a decade since the US and Britain launched military operations against Afghanistan, initiating a bloody and protracted war of neo-colonial conquest. The war has been a disaster for the Afghan people and a tragic waste of the lives of American and allied soldiers. It has profoundly destabilised regional and world politics.

In its statement of October 9, 2001, the World Socialist Web Site editorial board condemned the US-led assault on Afghanistan and exposed the Bush administration’s claims to be conducting a “war on terror” to defend the American people against Al Qaeda. The statement identified Washington’s real objective as the transformation of the country into a permanent US base of operations to extend its hegemony over the adjacent energy-rich region of Central Asia.

In a prescient warning, the editorial board observed: “Were the US to oust the Taliban or kill bin Laden and wipe out what Washington calls his terrorist training camps, the realisation of these aims would not be followed by the withdrawal of American forces. Rather, the outcome would be the permanent placement of US military forces to establish the US as the exclusive arbiter of the region’s natural resources. In these strategic aims lie the seeds of future and even more bloody conflicts.”

The eruption of US militarism marked by the war on Afghanistan has escalated unabated over the past decade. To compensate for its waning economic position, American imperialism has repeatedly wielded its military might to undermine the interests of its European and Asian rivals. The US exploited the 9/11 terrorist attacks as the pretext to implement long-prepared plans for the invasion first of Afghanistan and then Iraq.

In proclaiming its doctrine of pre-emptive war, the Bush administration asserted the “right” to wage war against any perceived threat to the US, thus providing the justification for the untrammelled use of military force in any corner of the globe. This doctrine, maintained and extended under the Obama administration, violates international law and the basic principles established in the Nuremburg trials, which convicted Nazi leaders for waging a war of aggression.

The war on Afghanistan has been accompanied by the militarisation of American society and sustained attacks on democratic rights and basic legal principles. The Bush administration repudiated the Geneva Conventions and established the Guantánamo Bay prison camp for the indefinite detention of “enemy combatants” in flagrant disregard of both international and American law. The US killing of alleged “terrorists” has culminated in the extrajudicial murder of an American citizen—Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki—in Yemen last month.

Under the banner of the “war on terror,” the Bush and Obama administrations have developed the Department of Homeland Security as the nucleus of a vast police state apparatus that will increasingly be used against anyone, at home as well as abroad, regarded as a threat to the present social order.

The impact of the war in Afghanistan has been catastrophic. Having armed and financed Islamist militias including the progenitors of Al Qaeda in its holy war against the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul in the 1980s, the US turned on its erstwhile allies. Three decades of war have left Afghanistan one of the world’s most backward and impoverished countries. Far from establishing democracy, the US-led coalition has propped up the widely-despised regime of President Hamid Karzai, which rests on a repugnant assortment of warlords, drug barons and tribal militia leaders.

UN figures released last year estimated that 9 million Afghans, or 36 percent of the population, lived in absolute poverty, and a further 37 percent existed on an income only slightly above the poverty line. Only 23 percent of the population had access to clean drinking water and a mere 24 percent of Afghans above the age of 15 could read and write.

The country had the second highest maternal mortality rate and the third highest rate of child mortality in the world. The injection of around $35 billion in international funding between 2002 and 2009 only exacerbated the social chasm that is all too evident in Kabul, where the poorest of the poor survive by scrounging in the refuse outside the palatial mansions of the wealthy elite.

To terrorise a hostile population, the US military has used the barbaric techniques developed in Vietnam and other neo-colonial wars—arbitrary detention, torture, assassination, night-time raids and indiscriminate air strikes. According to the Brookings Institution’s Afghanistan index, 2,735 US and Coalition troops had died as of September 29 of this year.

No precise count of Afghan civilian deaths exists. Estimates put the figure at more than 10,000, but the actual figure is certain to be far higher. A decade of foreign occupation has left a legacy of bitterness and hatred that provides a constant stream of recruits to the Taliban and other anti-occupation forces.

Likewise, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have generated broad popular opposition in the US, its immediate allies and countries around the world. But this sentiment finds no expression within the political establishment in any of these countries.

Political lessons need to be drawn from the collapse of the global antiwar protests against the invasion of Iraq in 2003—the largest internationally coordinated demonstrations in history. That anger and opposition was steered by the various pseudo-radical organisations that dominated the protests into support for the 2008 election campaign of Obama.

Far from being an “antiwar” president, Obama maintained the US occupation of Iraq and “surged” American troop numbers from around 30,000 in early 2009 to the current level of nearly 100,000 to fight the “good war” in Afghanistan. Obama’s drawdown of US forces in Iraq and escalation of the Afghan war represented no more than a tactical shift by the American ruling elite in the prosecution of its interests. Moreover, by recklessly extending the conflict into the border areas of neighbouring Pakistan, the Obama administration has dangerously destabilised not only that country, but the precarious strategic balance throughout South Asia and beyond.

The ex-lefts and pseudo-radicals who hailed Obama’s election have since become the cheerleaders for new imperialist wars of aggression. These middle-class outfits shamelessly jumped on the bandwagon in promoting NATO’s bombing of Libya as the new “good war” for democracy against the dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Just as in Afghanistan and Iraq, the NATO powers are seeking to install a pliable client regime in Tripoli to assert their domination of the country’s energy resources and turn the country into a strategic base of operations against the revolutionary movements in neighbouring Tunisia and Egypt.

The root cause of imperialist war lies in the profit system. The deepening global crisis of capitalism is propelling the ruling classes into a class war against the living standards of working people at home and economic and ultimately military conflict against their rivals abroad. A mass antiwar movement must be revived, but that is possible only on the basis of a new political perspective—the independent mobilisation of the working class in a unified struggle based on a socialist and internationalist program to abolish capitalism and its outmoded nation-state system.

God’s soldiers: Pakistan army’s ideology

 

PRAVEEN SWAMI

AP   Pervez Musharraf described the 2002 Green Book, the volume recording the deliberations of Brigadier Zia and his brother officers, as a “valuable document for posterity.”

Little-studied internal Pakistan army debates help understand just what the institution wants for itself and for the country it rules.

In the autumn of 2002, at the end of a murderous 10-month stand-off with India provoked by the Jaish-e-Muhammad’s attack on the Parliament House in New Delhi, a small group of mid-level Pakistan army officers set about debating its lessons.

The overarching strategic lesson of the 2001-2002 crisis, wrote Brigadier Muhammad Zia, was clear: the West had come to the determination that “a nuclear (and Muslim) Pakistan has to be kept in control, lest it leads the Islamic world towards the formation of a new and powerful economic and military bloc in competition with or antagonistic to the western alliance.”

He then outlined Pakistan’s strategic response. “India is highly volatile on its internal front due to numerous vulnerabilities which, if agitated, accordingly could yield results out of proportion to the efforts put in.” Pointing to Kashmir, the northeast and Punjab, he suggested these faultlines could be employed as an “offensive option against India.”

General Pervez Musharraf, military ruler, described the 2002 Green Book, the volume recording the deliberations of Brigadier Zia and his brother officers, as a “valuable document for posterity.”

It is: Pakistan’s continued tactical patronage of jihadist groups operating against Afghanistan, India and the West is derived from the system of ideas outlined in the Green Books, records of the Pakistan Army’s internal deliberations. The ideas underpin the chain of events which have taken Pakistan ever closer to the abyss since the late 1970s.

Last month, Admiral Mike Mullen, outgoing Chairman of the United States’ Joint Chiefs of Staff, submitted a written testimony asserting that “extremist organisations serving as proxies of the government of Pakistan are attacking Afghan troops and civilians as well as U.S. soldiers.” He alleged that the Haqqani network, the most powerful of the Taliban’s constituent forces, was in fact “a strategic arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI).”

Nothing he said was startling as experts, journalists and the U.S. intelligence community have known as much for years.

Ever since 9/11, the U.S. has hoped that the right forms of engagement and incentives will persuade Pakistan’s army to change course. The Green Bookscast light on why this strategy has failed and will continue to fail.

Pakistan and the jihadist project

Six years ago, in a book published just before he became his country’s ambassador to the U.S., politician-scholar Husain Haqqani recorded that the Pakistan Army’s jihadist project was “not just the inadvertent outcome of decisions by some governments.” Instead, he argued, the Pakistani state’s use of Islam “gradually evolved into a strategic commitment to jihadi ideology.” TheGreen Books explain just what this strategic commitment entails.

The historical genesis of the Pakistan Army’s jihadist project is well known. Following colonial military thinkers like Francis Tuker, who headed the British India’s eastern command at the time of independence, Pakistan’s strategic community believed that India would collapse under the weight of its ethnic-religious strains.

From 1947-1948, Pakistan’s intelligence services thus conducted what Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru described as an “informal war”— a campaign of aid to secessionist insurgencies, in which clerics and religious ideology often had a key role.

Pakistan’s political élite also came to increasingly rely on the clerical class for legitimacy.

In 1956, the country’s first constitution declared Pakistan an Islamic republic — a notion unknown to classical theology — and mandated that no laws repugnant to the Koran and Hadith be passed.

Later, General Ayub Khan excised the prefix “Islamic” from Pakistan’s name, but nonetheless appointed a council of clerics to guide the state. His successor, the hard-drinking General Yahya Khan, allied with Islamists in Bangladesh and Kashmir. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in turn, bowed to clerical pressure, pushed forward with anti-minorities measures and declared Islam the state religion.

General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq oversaw the full bloom of this process: influenced by the ideas of Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Mawdudi, and inspired by the triumph of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, he set about rebuilding the state and the army with jihadist ideology at their core. The new model army Gen. Zia-ul-Haq built was principally concerned not with defending the state’s frontiers against its adversaries, but with reinventing Pakistan itself.

Commodore Tariq Majid laid out a road map for this new model army in the 1991 Green Book. He wrote: “the Islamic state, apart from the standing forces, keeps a volunteer force of the people and employs the other lot of able-bodied manpower to strengthen the other elements of the military system during wartime.” His “volunteer force of the people” would, in time, evolve into the ISI-backed jihadist networks Pakistan now sponsors.

Brigadier Saifi Ahmad Naqvi, writing in the 1994 Green Book, provided doctrinal flesh to this project. He began on the premise that “Pakistan is an ideological state, based on the ideology of Islam.” Therefore, “the existence and survival of Pakistan depend upon complete implementation of Islamic ideology in true sense. If the ideology is not preserved then the very existence of Pakistan becomes doubtful.” This, in his view, made the Army “responsible for the defence of the country, to safeguard [its] integrity [and] territorial boundaries, and the ideological frontiers to which the country owes its existence.”

Brigadier Muneer Mahmood explained, in 2002, why Pakistan needed to patronise jihadist groups. Pakistan was being cast as the “torch-bearer of the Muslim ummah [nation] by the biased western media and Jewish lobby.” In time, it was “likely to be the target of these forces.” Even though the prospect of a “conventional war between India and Pakistan appears remote, the environment [therefore] looks ripe for a LIC [low-intensity conflict] confrontation.”

Even as Pakistan became increasingly mired in counter-insurgency operations in the northwest after 2002, elements within its officer corps harboured substantial misgivings about the project. In 2008, for example, Brigadier Waqar Hassan Khan argued in the Green Book that “the superpower’s entry into [the] Middle-East and West Asia [sic] was not possible without a Pearl Harbour; 9/11 was either created or supported to be labelled as the second Pearl Harbour.”

“Now,” he asserted, “it has come in the open that people have been missing the jungle for a tree; the so-called Pakistani Taliban was a bogey created by RAW, MOSSAD, and probably the U.S.-led coalition to keep the Durand Line on fire and destabilise Pakistan internally to achieve the ultimate objective of undermining the only nuclear Islamic state on this earth.”

Major-General Muhammad Ahsan Mehmood, then-Director General of Weapons and Equipment, wrote a companion-essay explaining why Pakistan ought not to aid the U.S.’ anti-jihadist campaign.

Pakistan’s counter-insurgency commitments, he insisted, raised an “issue of legitimacy.” “If a section of society,” he wrote, “is not convinced about the moral standing of the task and a general perception on the similar lines also exists among the masses, it seriously erodes the performance of the military, which gets affected by the societal pressures. Military operations inside one’s own country make it fundamental that the troops feel just and fair with regards to the operations being undertaken and popular support of the masses exists. Unless it happens, no amount of training, motivation and technology differential will deliver.”

Pakistan’s army simply could not, this line of argument suggested, engage in a war against jihadist militia it had fathered without undermining the foundations of its own legitimacy.

Less than six months before Admiral Mullen’s dramatic testimony, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton certified that Pakistan had demonstrated a “sustained commitment to and is making significant efforts towards combating terrorist groups.” Pakistan, she wrote, had ceased support to “extremist and terrorist groups, particularly to any group that has conducted attacks against the United States or coalition forces in Afghanistan.”

Islamabad had also helped, Ms Clinton wrote, in “preventing al-Qaeda, the Taliban and associated terrorist groups, such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, from operating in the territory of Pakistan, including carrying out cross-border attacks into neighbouring countries.”

Her empirically ill-founded declaration enabled the U.S. administration to continue funnelling aid to Pakistan, even as its army paid proxies to kill American troops.

Notwithstanding the furore provoked by Admiral Mullen’s testimony, little is likely to change: in Washington, D.C., continued engagement is seen as the least-awful of a basket of bad choices.

Insanity, Albert Einstein is believed to have said, consisted of doing the same things again and again, but expecting different results. The Pakistan army’s jihadist commitment is not merely a tactical tool to project influence or win legitimacy: it is, instead, the paradigm through which the institution comprehends the world and seeks to shape it. The jihadists the U.S. hopes to bribe and cajole the Pakistan army to abandon are in fact soldiers of the nation the institution seeks to build — a dystopia that dollars, ironically enough, will continue to underwrite.

Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji requesting American military support for the Lebanese army

Qahwaji Heads to U.S., to Request Weapons for Army

by Naharnet Newsdesk

Army Commander General Jean Qahwaji is expected to travel to the United States on Monday where he is scheduled to hold talks with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, reported the daily An Nahar on Saturday.

A prominent military source told the daily that the visit is aimed at “requesting military support for the Lebanese army, as well as providing it with weapons and logistic equipment.”

No conditions have been set over the Lebanese army regarding the members of the delegation heading to the United States or the visit’s agenda, added the source.

U.S. Ambassador Maura Connelly had reiterated on Tuesday that the Obama administration expects from Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces to fulfill their commitment to implement U.N. Security Council resolution 1701, the U.S. embassy said in a statement.

During talks with Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn, the ambassador repeated the U.S. government’s support for and assistance to the Lebanese army.

The embassy said Connelly and Ghosn discussed Qahwaji’s upcoming visit to the U.S. at the invitation of Dempsey, a further indication of the strong partnership between the U.S. and Lebanon.

Afghanistan and Central Asia: Will the Region Need Saving After the Americans Leave?

Afghanistan and Central Asia: Who will save the region after the Americans leave?

Ferghana

October 7 the Russian Foreign Ministry representative said the U.S. should curtail its military presence in Central Asia after the withdrawal of foreign troop contingent inAfghanistan . ”When the completed anti-terrorist operation in Afghanistan, where U.S. armed forces will come out of the country, and there will be no need for their supplies, then the U.S. military presence should be minimized and the whole of Central Asia. We insist on this “- quoted by ITAR-TASS, the Deputy Russian Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin , who spoke on October 7 in the State Duma of the Russian Federation.

The diplomat said this, answering the question related to the presence inKyrgyzstan, the U.S. air base “Manas”, which in 2009 became known as the Transit Center (TSC). He noted that “the presence of U.S. base in Kyrgyzstan is an agreement between the two countries. This is a sovereign independent state law – to conclude the relevant agreement. “

Nevertheless, the Russian Foreign Ministry statement on the need to care the U.S. from Central Asia can be viewed as a signal to countries in the region of the undesirability of their rapprochement with the West. It is not excluded that it is due to fears that the U.S. and NATO troops can return to base in the Uzbek city of Khanabad (K-2), where they remained until 2005.This seems quite realistic in the light of convergence, as demonstrated recently by the Presidents of Uzbekistan and the U.S.: September 28, in a phone interview, Barack Obama and Islam Karimov, announced plans to continue “an open and meaningful political dialogue” and expressed interest in further enhancing the Uzbek-American Partnership ” based on mutual respect and partnership. “

Recall, the U.S. president expressed his appreciation for Uzbekistan to assist in resolving the Afghan problem, and after him and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that “Uzbekistan has proved useful in ensuring the supply route of the North and in support of U.S. efforts to restore [the economy], its southern neighbor. “ Note also that the week before the U.S. Congress lifted the restrictions on providing military assistance to Uzbekistan.

- Russian politics, it seems to me very seriously embraced the call sign for Barack Obama Uzbekistan Islam Karimov. And not in vain, – the chief editor of “Fergana”, the director of “Central Asian Information Center” Daniil Kislov . - Because of this – to head the U.S. Central Asian dictator sent kisses – has not happened for several years. What does this telephone conversation, when you consider that one of the objectives of cooperation with Uzbekistan, the U.S. press calls the alleged transfer of manpower, that is – the military? I recall the troops, as opposed to gasoline and food, the U.S. Army does not transport by rail: only by air or safer. Therefore, in light of the promise of Kyrgyz Prime Minister Almazbek Atambayev closure in 2014, the Transit Center in Bishkek airport “Manas” can be assumed that the United States yesterday began looking for a new alternative airfield. They can easily become an Uzbek Khanabad, which the Americans are actively used until 2005. But after American troops will be withdrawn from Afghanistan (although still no one knows exactly, would happen if at all), this airfield is the base of a bilateral agreement with Uzbekistan may well remain in place. So that a replica of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister addressed not only to overseas partners, but to a greater extent – Tashkent – believes Daniel Kislov.

Shaking his finger Uzbekistan, Russia is ready to knock his fist on the table, demanding the U.S. withdraw from Central Asia. At the same time, Russian experts herald a renaissance after the departure of the Taliban NATO. As the military commentatorRIA Novosti , Konstantin Bogdanov , history of Afghanistan slowly returns to a decade ago, in September two thousand and one, the Taliban once again perceived as a regional political force. This is implicitly recognized today, the tenth anniversary of entry of U.S. troops and Afghan President Hamid Karzai , saying that the Afghan government and NATO have failed to provide security in the country.

So, when the West leaves the IRA, who will defend the southern borders of Russia and Central Asian republics of the projected invasion of the Islamic radicals?

- I do not think that the Americans defending the southern borders of CIS countries in Central Asia – said “Fergana” editor in chief of Russian journal “Problems of the National Strategy” Azhdar Kurtov . - From my point of view, Afghanistan has repeated a situation where you type in Afghanistan Soviet troops the Americans in tandem with the Inter-Services Intelligenceof Pakistan (ISI) created a system of radical Islamic opposition in the face of the Mujahideen, to undermine the power of the Soviet Union. They succeeded, but failed another. They hoped that they would keep the Mujahideen on a short leash, but they are out of American influence, have created a kind of global Islamic radicals Internationale, one of these branches of the Mujahideen was formed in “Al-Qaeda” and drew their weapons against their founding fathers.

The Taliban also appeared with the U.S. and the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan: so sudden appearance on the political scene of Afghanistan powerful, armed with modern weapons and the ideology of the movement could not do without proper intelligence. Americans probably hoped to achieve some of their political goals. The Taliban captured in Afghanistan a short time, except for some northern provinces, but just as the Mujahideen, they came out of the submission. And then the Taliban’s ideological affinity, and “Al Qaeda” has led them to known contacts in vylivshimsya September 11, 2001. In fact, the invasion of the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan – the fix their own mistakes, not the protection of Central Asia, – the expert believes.

As the October 7, former commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan (2009-2010) General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. launched the war in Afghanistan with the simplistic notions about the country and still do not know how to end the protracted military conflict. In his view, reports Radio Liberty , the United States and its NATO allies have not done half of their goals. According to McChrystal’s daunting task is to create a legitimate government enjoying the confidence of the Afghan people and to resist the Taliban. This problem, obviously, will not be solved with Karzai, who said that he would retire in 2014. That is, in the year in which the United States and NATO have set a full withdrawal from Afghanistan, its military contingent.

- From my point of view, the Americans are interested in such care, which did not resemble the situation would end the Vietnam War, when they departed quickly from Saigon, leaving all their allies and puppet, in fact, the regime of South Vietnam, when military helicopters evacuated the embassy staff – Recalls Azhdar Kurtov. - This option is leaving Afghanistan would be the defeat of power, which now expects to maintain its status as the sole superpower on the planet. So the Americans are trying all ways to be adjusted to its policies, mitigating the impact of this care, the most diverse state, and Russia, including, but even more so – the states of Central Asia.

In part, they succeed. Thus, in recent years, with American assistance had been established transport links betweenTajikistan and Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, is laid-known northern route of supply of goods to coalition troops in the IRA.

- Can Russia, if he wants to take on the Americans in Afghanistan and successfully execute?

- According to recent reports, over the past ten years the U.S. has spent in Afghanistan, $ 450 billion. This is only the financial costs of Americans. Besides them, there was a contingent of allies. The Germans spent, for example, the $ 17 billion. Now if all these sums add up, will absolutely fantastic value costs. Modern Russia, and especially the countries of Central Asia, such costs can not afford – notes Azhdar Kurtov.

In his view, the Americans deliberately caused the problem around the southern borders of the CIS directly at the borders of Central Asia – just as they created problems during the implementation of international duty by the Soviet military in Afghanistan.

- Create a problem and at the same time to offer assistance in its resolution – either directly by the presence of troops at military bases, or councils, or various programs and so on – this is a corporate style of American politics. And what this style should play along? Unfortunately, the situation now is not the best. I do not think that Russia, with its problems, and especially the countries of Central Asia, among which there is no unity, including in matters of military-technical and military-political cooperation, directed outward – even if you combine their efforts, will oppose something effective attempts by extremists to spread their influence in the region of Central Asia. I repeat, the problem created the Americans, they simply modify their policies in this region. And Americans play along Russia absolutely no reason – says the source “Fergana”.

- Whatever it was, until U.S. and NATO retard the attention of the Taliban, do not give them special carousing.What will happen to the region when they leave?

- Any war should end the world. In this sense, I do not share the view of some Russian experts, saying that any talks with them should not be – said Azhdar Kurtov. - But if there are opposing parties, you want a peaceful solution to the problem, and this should be put at a table of all participants, including the most radical. That is, if you can not destroy them by force. Obviously, the power fails, the Americans did not destroy any remnants of “Al Qaeda” or the Taliban, under which Russia referred to these extremist, radical Islamic forces.

Yes, there is a threat, but what are the alternatives? Is there not in this clever idea? Once the Soviet Union in the arms race, which began know who burned all their resources. Now we are asked to enter into the same river: one more time to spend huge money on some line of resistance. Already offered to get involved in Afghan affairs openly, Russia urge not just to help the Karzai government transfer free party vehicles, the seeds had already been done for many years, but also to send its troops into Afghanistan to replace the departing troops out of Americans. This is unacceptable.

I believe that as long as there is no reasonable options. Let the Americans continue to negotiate, if I really want to, with these representatives of the radical currents.

Russia does not make sense to get into the story yet and for this reason: who gets the economic benefits of all this zavarushka? By the way, not Americans. U.S., NATO soldiers shed blood, and contracts, most tidbits as, say, the development of copper-ore deposits, are Chinese. Some shed blood, and other financial licking foam.

The current situation shows that the U.S. is not omnipotent, the limits of power in this power exists, and that in this region of the world, as this compound is the Middle East and South Asia, the Americans can not cope even with the goals and objectives that they themselves have set. They lose the new, rising and getting stronger every year superpower – China. And the U.S. has nothing really to oppose this can not.

The question arises: whether to oppose something that Russia? Is not it better to use it well-known Chinese proverb about the monkey that sits on a hill and looks down on the fighting tigers? I think that the latter is still better than burning the remains of their resources, which we do and so little on the goal unattainable in the real modern world distribution of forces.

- Why is Russia so insists on folding the American military presence in the region?

- In 90 years at the turn of the century, Americans and their allies in the North Atlantic alliance has successfully transformed the geopolitical space on the western borders of Russia, the part that used to be called Eastern Europe. Much of these states was just accepted into the NATO alliance’s military infrastructure, despite all sorts of arrangements have been close to Russian borders, which increased the risks and threats to Russian security. That is, the western United States have transformed the question differently, and now they are transforming the approach the borders of the former Soviet Union since the south-west, as evidenced by events in the Middle East, the Arab wave of revolutions, and persistent attempts to eliminate the current government in Iran ( Now blow directed against Syria, but it is clear that this is only because Syria – one of the last predrubezhey precisely in order to then implement tougher sanctions against Iran.) And Afghanistan – it’s south, is the third stage. So, of course, much of the Russian political elite considers the presence of U.S. and NATO in the region as a threat to its national interests and military security.

- And yet, your prediction: when the Americans leave Afghanistan, the situation in the region deteriorate further?

- I’m not sure it will be so. In the end, even if China is better than these matters, if he has such a desire, than Russia. It must always be weighed against their wishes and their capabilities, as told in the famous movie.

Feruza Jani

The international news agency “Fergana”

Obama Blows Russian Reset–Kremlin Asserts Its Rights In Central Asia

Russia rejects US presence in Afghanistan after UN mandate expires

 

MOSCOW (Xinhua) – Russia will not agree to US military presence in Afghanistan after the expiration of a UN Security Council mandate, Russian envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin said Friday.

Rogozin told Russian reporters said the United States is pursuing the same tactic in both Afghanistan and Libya by offering training for armed forces of those countries in NATO standards.

“This is only a pretext for preserving their military presence in those counties,” Rogozin said.

“This is something we have never agreed with. Afghanistan should be free from foreign interference in its internal affairs, and therefore the coalition forces should only perform the duties mandated by the UN Security Council in 2001,” he added.

Also on Friday, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin said Moscow will insist on scaling down the US military presence in Central Asia after its counter-terrorism operation in Afghanistan is completed.

“The point is that when the counter-terrorism operation in Afghanistan is over, when American armed forces leave this country, and the need to send supplies to them becomes irrelevant, we will insist that the American military presence in Afghanistan and Central Asia must be scaled down,” Borodavkin told a meeting of the Russian State Duma, or the lower house of the parliament.