[Peace-discuss] Sit Rep from AfPak

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The following is from Tariq Ali.  --CGE]

It’s been a bad autumn for Nato in Afghanistan, with twin disasters on the 
political and military fronts. First, Kai Eide, the UN headman in Kabul, a 
well-meaning, but not very bright Norwegian, fell out with his deputy, Peter 
Galbraith, who as the de facto representative of the US State Department had 
decreed that President Karzai’s election was rigged and went public about it. 
His superior continued to defend Hamid Karzai’s legitimacy. Astonishingly, the 
UN then fired Galbraith. This caused Hillary Clinton to move into top gear and 
the UN-supported electoral watchdog now ruled that the elections had indeed been 
fraudulent and ordered a run-off. Karzai refused to replace the electoral 
officials who had done such a good job for him the first time and his opponent 
withdrew. Karzai got the job.

Karzai’s legitimacy has never been dependent on elections (which are always 
faked anyway) but on the US/Nato expeditionary force. So what was all this 
shadowboxing about in the first place? It appears to have been designed in order 
to provide cover for the military surge being plotted by General Stanley 
McChrystal, the new white hope of a beleaguered White House. McChrystal seems to 
have inverted the old Clausewitzian maxim: he genuinely believes that politics 
is a continuation of war by other means. It was thought that if Karzai could be 
painlessly removed and replaced with his former colleague Abdullah Abdullah, a 
Tajik from the north, it might create the impression that an unbearably corrupt 
regime had been peacefully removed, which would help the flagging propaganda war 
at home and the relaunching of the real war in Afghanistan. For his part, 
Abdullah wanted a share of the loot that comes with power and has so far been 
monopolised by the Karzai brothers and their hangers-on, helping them to create 
a tiny indigenous base of support for the family. Did the revelation that Ahmed 
Wali Karzai was not simply the richest man in the country as a result of 
large-scale corruption and the drugs/arms trade, but a CIA agent too come as a 
huge surprise to anyone? I’m told that in desperation Nato commissars even 
considered appointing a High Representative on the Balkan model to run the 
country, making the presidency an even more titular post than it is today. Were 
this to happen, Galbraith or Tony Blair would be the obvious front-runners.

Citizens of the transatlantic world are becoming more and more restless about 
the no-end-in-sight scenario. In Afghanistan the ranks of the resistance are 
swelling. The war on the ground is getting nowhere: Nato convoys carrying fuel 
and equipment are repeatedly attacked by insurgents; neo-Taliban control of 80 
per cent of the most populous part of the country is recognised by all. Recently 
Mullah Omar strongly criticised the Pakistani branch of the Taliban: they 
should, he said, be fighting Nato, not the Pakistan army.

Meanwhile the British military commander, General Sir David Richards, echoing 
McChrystal, talks of training Afghan security forces ‘much more aggressively’ so 
that Nato can take on a supporting role. Nothing new here. Eupol (the European 
Union Police Mission in Afghanistan) declared several years ago that its 
objective was to ‘contribute to the establishment under Afghan ownership of 
sustainable and effective civilian policing arrangements, which will ensure 
appropriate interaction with the wider criminal justice system’. This always 
sounded far-fetched: the shooting earlier this month of five British soldiers by 
an Afghan policeman they were training confirms it. The ‘bad apple’ theories 
with which the British are so besotted should be ignored. The fact is that the 
insurgents decided some years ago to apply for police and military training and 
their infiltration – a tactic employed by guerrillas in South America, 
South-East Asia and the Maghreb during the last century – has been fairly 
successful.

It’s now obvious to everyone that this is not a ‘good’ war designed to eliminate 
the opium trade, discrimination against women and everything bad – apart from 
poverty, of course. So what is Nato doing in Afghanistan? Has this become a war 
to save Nato as an institution? Or is it more strategic, as was suggested in the 
spring 2005 issue of Nato Review:

     "The centre of gravity of power on this planet is moving inexorably 
eastward … The Asia-Pacific region brings much that is dynamic and positive to 
this world, but as yet the rapid change therein is neither stable nor embedded 
in stable institutions. Until this is achieved, it is the strategic 
responsibility of Europeans and North Americans, and the institutions they have 
built, to lead the way … security effectiveness in such a world is impossible 
without both legitimacy and capability."

Whatever the reason, the operation has failed. Most of Obama’s friends in the US 
media recognise this, and support a planned withdrawal, while worrying that 
pulling troops out of both Iraq and Afghanistan might result in Obama losing the 
next election, especially if McChrystal or General Petraeus, the supposed hero 
of the surge in Iraq, stand for the Republicans. Not that the US seems likely to 
withdraw from Iraq. The only withdrawal being contemplated is from the main 
cities, restricting the US presence to the huge air-conditioned military bases 
that have already been constructed in the interior of the country, mimicking the 
strongholds of the British Empire (minus the air-conditioners) during the early 
decades of the last century.

While Washington decides what do, Af-Pak is burning. Carrying out the imperial 
diktat has put the Pakistan army under enormous strain. Its recent 
well-publicised offensive in South Waziristan yielded little. Its intended 
target disappeared to fight another day. To show good faith the military raided 
the Shamshatoo refugee camp in Peshawar. On 4 November I received an email from 
Peshawar:

     "Thought I’d let you know that I just got a call from a former Gitmo 
prisoner who lives in Shamshatoo camp and he told me that this morning at around 
10 a.m. some cops and military men came and raided several homes and shops and 
arrested many people. They also killed three innocent schoolchildren. Their 
jinaza [funeral] is tonight. Several people took footage of the raid from their 
cell-phones which I can try to get a hold of. The funeral of the three children 
is happening as I’m typing."

How could this end well?

6 November

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n22/tariq-ali/short-cuts