Roots of Copenhagen Failure: Nature Does Not Recognize Nations

Bo Ekman
STOCKHOLM: On the evening of December 18, 2009, an increasingly shaky world order came to the end of the road. Seventeen years of climate negotiations – via Kyoto – had collapsed. The photographs documented the leaders’ despair, tormented by their inability to deliver the deal they knew the world needed. The so-called “deal” reached by the US and five developing nations was a fig leaf to cover the collapse – an impossible political solution to a geophysical problem. Unless the interconnected, systemic nature of the challenge we face is recognized, there will be no turning back from the disaster.

In my view, the Copenhagen process had no chance of success. If historian Barbara Tuchman were alive today she would have added another chapter to her book, "The March of Folly," on humanity’s capacity for collective follies throughout history. Copenhagen provides yet more evidence that the current constitutional regimes are incapable of resolving global problems. The financial crisis showed this, as did the failure of the biodiversity conference, Doha trade round and the whole host of issues.

Unless the interconnected, systemic nature of the challenge we face is recognized, there will be no turning back from the disaster.


The world today works as tightly interwoven, interactive and trans-boundary systems with power organized piecemeal, split among individual nations, emerging through historical accidents and political developments. The continual struggle of nations to assert their own interests ends up hurting common interest. We presume that conflicts are to be resolved in negotiations, which are ultimately based on sovereignty postulates. It was the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 that gave birth to the order built on the principle of national sovereignty. But no world order lasts forever. Its legitimacy lasts only as long as it delivers a balance of power, growth, and is good at solving problems. The current regime, formulated after World War II, has proved ineffective as globalization moved some of the prerequisites for solutions to the supranational level.

In no other area is this clearer than on the environment and climate change. The biosphere is itself a planetary, adaptive, interactive, constantly changing and self-regulating system. It is an indivisible whole. Nature does not logically divide into nations. You cannot fix the seas alone, the forests on their own or the atmospheric CO2 balance, or the interaction between biodiversity and ecosystem productivity on their own.

Nature does not logically divide into nations.


The negotiating process on climate issue, shaped by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), had the impossible task of finding a solution to an extremely complex geophysical and ecological problem by getting 192 nations to agree, based on everyone's own national interests, goals, means and to share responsibilities for actions for years to come. But had 192 nations reached the "perfect agreement," it would have lacked the financial supervisory authority, or powers of enforcement over those nations in case of their non-compliance. Instead the negotiators tried to solve the wrong problem: to reach the political compromises which would primarily secure the hegemonic interests of the major powers. But to avert climate change, actions must be taken based on the ecological system conditions, not according to the relative bargaining power of nation.

In fact all of the UN environmental conferences and conventions have demonstrated the ineffectiveness of the current approach to solving global systemic problems. Kyoto became a paper tiger, torn apart by short-sighted lack of mutual solidarity among nations. Of some 500 international agreements, only a handful are followed to the letter. A nearby example for Sweden is the Baltic Sea, a drainage basin fed by the waters of fourteen countries. Four international treaties are in force to protect the sea from oxygen depletion caused by runoff from agriculture and pollutants from shipping and other sources, though with mixed result from the late intervention.

The problem is more fundamental. For a couple of centuries, science and learning have been characterized by a reductionist method. Man has sought to know more about increasingly narrower and fragmented phenomenon. That’s why we say that the devil is in the details. But the financial crisis and environmental crisis revealed that the real devil is in the system. Most important is to understand the whole picture, how things are interconnected. It is only then that we can shape or repair the system for safety and resilience.

But the financial crisis and environmental crisis revealed that the real devil is in the system.


It is thus an absurdity that leaders should rely on their very own national scientific advisers. Ecosystems are not national, but a large part of the research is. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) consisting of thousands of scientists from all over the world (set up in 1988) was a promising initiative. But its scientific credibility has been questioned along with its political neutrality. The recent decision by the United Nations and IPCC to establish an independent review by the Netherlands-based group of fifteen national academies, the InterAcademy Council, is a welcome attempt to restore the panel’s scientific integrity. This international scientific review will likely uncover a number of deletions from the original Summary for Policymakers at the insistence of non-scientist governmental officials. But it should also show the recent sensationalized irregularities in the 2007 report, such as the conclusions on the Tibetan glaciers that did not source back to peer-reviewed research, were discovered by IPCC scientists themselves, an indication of a well-functioning, ongoing scientific inquiry.

The reality of an interconnected and interdependent world has rendered current constitutional maps outmoded. The world does not have the mechanisms needed to solve today's major challenges. Therein lies the growing danger for conflicts and war. In the field of economics, the financial crisis showed that current institutions and regulatory frameworks were not sufficient to predict or manage the financial risks that the intensification of global dependencies had created. The political grouping, the G8, became the G20. But it is an informal grouping, not rooted in democratic foundations, comprised of the twenty most important industrial and emerging-market countries. The G20 does not have close contact with an electorate or local opinion. The G20 also sees the problem only from one, but of course, very important point of view, namely to foster cooperation on global economic stability and to strengthen the international financial architecture.

The reality of an interconnected and interdependent world has rendered current constitutional maps outmoded.


National boundaries inevitably set limits for political solidarity. If the world were a single country, it could never operate politically with the gaps, inequalities, exploitation of man and nature which are today’s reality. The international system's imperfection in relation to today's reality is at the heart of tomorrow's conflicts. This came to the surface in Copenhagen.

President Roosevelt convened his closest confidants the week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, on December 7, 1941. He asked them to begin thinking immediately about how the world should be structured for peaceful coexistence in the peace to come. He took a pro-active responsibility for the future. Therefore, the debacle in Copenhagen should be taken for what it actually is, the collapse of already bygone institutions and mechanisms to reach agreement. The world now needs new configurations that secure economic growth, social stability and ecological re-stabilization in a relentlessly, globalizing world. The task is enormous. And one that no nation can do alone.The important question to ask is not what went wrong in Copenhagen, but how a democratically grounded order will be formed in this new world. It is time for answers to the question: How on earth can we live together with nature?

Bo Ekman is Founder and Chairman Tällberg Foundation. This essay is translated and adapted from the piece first published in Dagens Nyheter.
Yaleglobal Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/roots-copenhagen-failure-nature-does-not-recognize-nations

Pakistan and the Afghanistan End Game – Part II

Ashley J. Tellis
WASHINGTON: As the search for stability in Afghanistan intensifies, the threat of violence and a wider conflagration is growing. In an effort to secure a dominant position in Afghanistan and blunt India’s rise, Pakistan has mobilized militants and terrorists on both sides of its borders. While the Afghan Taliban fighting US and NATO forces continue to enjoy Pakistan’s support, Islamabad has exchanged its previous policy of supporting anti-Indian insurgencies with that of supporting terrorist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which mounted the deadly assault on Mumbai in 2008. With tension persisting between the two South Asian rivals, this tactic not only increases the prospect of major war between New Delhi and Islamabad, but, given Lashkar’s growing reach, could have global consequences.

The disruption of the India-Pakistan peace process, which has remained frozen since the Mumbai attack, is due principally to Pakistan’s unwillingness to bring to justice the Lashkar leadership, which has enjoyed the support of the country’s powerful intelligence organization – Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). After almost two decades of punting, many Pakistanis today – academics, policy analysts, and even officials – concede that fomenting insurgencies within India has been a main component of Pakistan’s national strategy. But that late admission comes long after Pakistan’s military establishment moved to replace its failed strategy of encouraging insurgencies with the more lethal device of unleashing terrorism.

The disruption of the India-Pakistan peace process is due principally to Pakistan’s unwillingness to bring to justice the Lashkar leadership.


Since its formation in 1947, Pakistan has sought to stir up insurgencies within India. The earliest efforts in 1947-48 centered on provoking insurrections in Jammu and Kashmir in hopes that an internal rebellion would permit the seizure of this disputed state. These efforts failed miserably: through three major conflicts with India, the people of Kashmir stayed loyal to New Delhi. After Pakistan’s defeat in the 1971 war, Islamabad attempted to stoke other secessionist movements, this time not for any territorial gains but merely to avenge its humiliation. But this effort too was beaten back by the Indian state. Finally, in 1989, when the first genuinely Kashmiri uprising against New Delhi broke out, Islamabad quickly threw its support behind the insurgents who were led by the secular Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF). This revolt, however, was quickly overpowered by the Indian Army by 1993 – and the defeat forced the momentous change in Islamabad’s strategy.

Flushed with confidence flowing from the success of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Pakistan sought to replicate in the east what it had managed in the west, namely, the defeat of a great power larger than itself. Using the same instruments as before – radical Islamist groups that had sprung up throughout Pakistan – Pakistan’s ISI pushed into Jammu and Kashmir for the first time in 1993 with combat-hardened aliens tasked to inflict large-scale murder and mayhem.

Through this act, Pakistan’s traditional strategy of fomenting insurgencies finally gave way to a new approach, namely, fomenting terrorism (an instrument that most Pakistanis still refuse to acknowledge). No longer would Pakistan rely on dissatisfied indigenous populations to advance Islamabad’s interests; rather, vicious bands of Islamic terrorists, most of whom had little or no connection to any existing grievances with India, would be unleashed indiscriminately to kill large numbers of civilians.

Flushed with confidence flowing from the success of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Pakistan sought to replicate in the east what it had managed in the west.


From 1996, these attacks were deliberately extended at ISI’s behest throughout India and of all the myriad terrorist organizations involved, none enjoyed greater state support than Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). LeT has now sprung to international attention because of the bloodbath in Mumbai in November 2008, but the group has been active in South Asia since 1987, first in Afghanistan and thereafter in India.

Of all the terrorist groups ISI has sponsored over the years, LeT has been especially favored because its dominant Punjabi composition matched the primary ethnicity of the Pakistani Army and ISI; and its puritanical Salafism undergirded its willingness to engage in risky military operations throughout India. Many in ISI are deeply sympathetic to LeT’s vision of recovering “lost Muslim lands” in Asia and Europe and resurrecting a universal Islamic Caliphate through the instrument of jihad.

Although Pakistani propaganda often asserts that LeT is a Kashmiri organization moved by the Kashmiri cause, it is nothing of the kind. The 3,000-odd foot soldiers who man its fighting ranks are drawn primarily from the Pakistani Punjab. Indian intelligence today estimates that LeT maintains some kind of presence in twenty-one countries worldwide with the intention of supporting or participating in what its leader Hafeez Saeed has called the perpetual “jihad against the infidels.” Consequently, LeT’s operations in and around India, which often receive the most attention, are only part of a large pastiche that has taken LeT operatives and soldiers as far afield as Australia, Canada, Chechnya, China, Eritrea, Kosovo, Oman, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and even the US.

Washington has now reached the conclusion that LeT represents a threat to America’s national interests second only to Al Qaeda and in fact exceeds the latter by many measures.


Given the organization’s vast presence, its prolific capacity to raise funds worldwide, and its ability to conduct militant activities at great distances from its home base, LeT has become ISI’s preferred instrument for its ongoing covert war with India. This includes the campaign that Pakistan is currently waging against the Indian presence in Afghanistan and against US counterinsurgency efforts in that country. Active LeT operations in Pakistan’s northwestern border areas involve close collaboration with Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network, and Jamiat al-Dawa al-Quran wal-Sunna. Thanks to these activities and others worldwide, Washington has now reached the conclusion that LeT represents a threat to America’s national interests second only to Al Qaeda and in fact exceeds the latter by many measures.

Based on this judgment, President Barack Obama has told Pakistan’s President Asif Zardari that targeting LeT would be one of his key conditions for a renewed US strategic partnership with Pakistan. Thus far, however, the Pakistani military, which still rules Pakistan even though it does not formally govern, has been non-responsive, preferring instead to emphasize the threat India supposedly poses to Pakistan – thereby implicitly justifying ISI’s continued reliance on terrorism – while demanding further US assistance. Such a demand is intended to inveigle the US into Pakistan’s relentless competition with India. The military’s dismissal of Obama’s injunctions regarding LeT are driven at least partly by its belief that all US warnings are little other than special pleading on the behalf of India.

The Pakistani military has no interest in dismantling any terrorist assets that it believes serve it well.


Since assaulting India has become a quite satisfying end in itself, the Pakistani establishment has no incentive whatsoever to interdict this group. To the degree that ISI has attempted to control LeT, it is mainly to prevent excessive embarrassment to its sponsors or serious crises leading to war. But outside of these aims, the Pakistani military has no interest in dismantling any terrorist assets that it believes serve it well.

Military leaders in Rawalpindi have thus not only failed to understand that American concerns about LeT derive fundamentally from its own growing conviction that the group’s activities worldwide make it a direct threat to the US, but they also continue to harbor the illusion that their current strategy of unleashing terrorism will enervate India, push it out of Afghanistan, and weaken US stabilization efforts there. Such a strategy is designed to make Islamabad the kingmaker in determining Kabul’s future. This too promises to become one more in the long line of cruel illusions that has gripped Pakistan since its founding.

Ashley J. Tellis is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the author of “Reconciling with the Taliban? Toward an Alternative Grand Strategy in Afghanistan.”
Yale Global Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/pakistan-and-afghanistan-end-game-%E2%80%93-part-ii

Taliban Arrests Have Halted Early Talks, Former Envoy Says

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
KABUL, Afghanistan — The former top United Nations official in Afghanistan said that recent arrests of high-ranking Taliban figures by Pakistan had severed important secret communications between the Taliban and the West meant to foster peace negotiations.

Kai Eide, the former special representative in Afghanistan for the United Nations secretary general, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Friday that, for the past year, the United Nations had been quietly involved in early discussions with the Taliban in Dubai. He said those talks were upended by the arrests of senior Taliban leaders, including the group’s second in command, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in February.

Mr. Eide, who stepped down earlier this month, said the arrests undermined efforts to start talks and to build trust that are necessary for substantive peace negotiations.

“The Pakistanis did not play the role that they should have played,” he said in the interview, which he confirmed to The New York Times.

There has been a swirl of often contradictory reports about the arrest of Mullah Baradar, and a wide range of American and international reactions to it. Some American officials have welcomed Pakistan’s new enthusiasm for hunting down Taliban leaders. Others have questioned Pakistan’s motivations in detaining Mullah Baradar, who was open to early discussions about peace negotiations.

On Friday, the spokesman for Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry, Abdul Basit, said Pakistan was committed to an Afghan-led process of reconciliation with the Taliban, according to Reuters. “Any other contentions, we believe, are a misrepresentation,” he said.

Mr. Eide’s emphasis on talks with the Taliban seems to underscore growing differences between the United States and some of its allies over the timing of negotiations.

The United Nations and Western European countries increasingly agree that ending the war in Afghanistan will require internationally supported agreements with the Taliban and that discussions need to start immediately. The Americans support negotiations on a slower timetable that would enable military operations to weaken the Taliban so they would be more vulnerable at the bargaining table.

The clearest enunciation of the European view was made by the British foreign secretary, David Miliband, who laid out a road map to negotiations with the Taliban in a speech earlier this month at M.I.T. He said the United Nations could serve as a neutral meeting ground for parties who distrusted one another.

Mr. Miliband did not eschew military efforts, but suggested focusing instead on setting conditions for negotiations. Mr. Eide’s overtures, which he described in the BBC interview as “talks about talks,” were an initial step in that direction.

Although Mr. Miliband ruled out discussions with those committed to Al Qaeda’s brand of militancy, he strongly endorsed an effort to reach out to almost everyone else, and without any preconditions. “Dialogue is not appeasement,” he said.

Mr. Eide and others said that Afghan government figures had already reached out to the Taliban. Other interlocutors have also been involved, including Saudi Arabia, which has hosted some initial discussions, according to senior members of the Karzai government.
N.Y.T

US general: Gay Dutch soldiers caused Srebrenica massacre

Ian Traynor, Europe correspondent
A senior US officer and former Nato commander sparked outrage in the Netherlands today by declaring that gay soldiers in the Dutch military were one of the reasons for the Srebrenica massacre, the worst act of mass murder in Europe committed since the second world war.

The Dutch government and military responded with anger and contempt after General John Sheehan, a retired marine corps officer who was Nato's supreme commander at the time of the 1995 atrocity, told a US Senate hearing that gay soldiers in the military could result in events like Srebrenica.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran the Bosnian Muslim enclave under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers and killed 8,000 Muslim males, making the event a traumatic national disgrace for the Dutch.

Following recent remarks from Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, that Europeans had gone soft, Sheehan argued that changes after the end of the cold war had reduced Europe's appetite for combat.

"They declared a peace dividend and made a conscious effort to socialise their military – that includes the unionisation of their militaries, it includes open homosexuality. That led to a force that was ill-equipped to go to war," he said.

"The case in point that I'm referring to is when the Dutch were required to defend Srebrenica against the Serbs. The battalion was under-strength, poorly led, and the Serbs came into town, handcuffed the soldiers to the telephone poles, marched the Muslims off, and executed them. That was the largest massacre in Europe since world war two."

He added that the Dutch chief of staff had told him that having gay soldiers at Srebrenica had sapped morale and contributed to the disaster.

"Total nonsense," said General Henk van den Breemen, the Dutch chief of staff at the time. The Dutch embassy in Washington dismissed the US officer's argument as worthless, Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister said that it was not worth commenting on, and the Dutch defence ministry voiced incredulity.

"It is unbelievable that a man of this rank is stating this nonsense, for that's what it is," said the ministry.

"Scandalous and not worthy of a soldier," added Eimert van Middelkoop, the Dutch defence minister.

The UN war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia in The Hague – where the Dutch government sits – has found that the mass murder in Srebrenica was an act of genocide, the only one in Europe since the Holocaust.

Sheehan argued that openly allowing homosexuals in the military was part of a post-cold war "socialisation" process in Europe that had concentrated on peacekeeping in the belief that Germany would not attack again and that Russia was no longer a threat.
the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/19/gay-dutch-soldiers-srebrenica

Pakistan and the Afghanistan End Game – Part I

Ahmed Rashid
LAHORE. After the failure of high level talks between India and Pakistan over their long running disputes, both countries are now locked in an escalating proxy war in Afghanistan. If no solution is found to reconcile Pakistani and Indian interests in Afghanistan, the coming months might see stepped up terrorist attacks against Indians in Kabul and the return of militants infiltrating Indian Kashmir from Pakistan. The fact that in recent weeks a large number of Taliban operatives have been captured in Pakistan signals an intensified struggle over the fate of Afghanistan rather than a winding down of the conflict.

With Afghan President Hamid Karzai seeking negotiations with the Taliban, some of whom Pakistan distrusts, along with India increasingly concerned about the Pakistan-backed Taliban coming to power in Kabul, the conflict is reaching a new stage of intensity. Even as an intensive US and NATO military offensive against the Taliban is underway in southern Afghanistan, neighboring states are already considering the Americans as good as gone and preparing for an end game scenario with old rivalries renewed.

The fact that in recent weeks, a large number of Taliban operatives have been captured in Pakistan signals an intensified struggle over the fate of Afghanistan.


While Pakistan charges India with undermining Pakistani influence in Afghanistan, India fears that Pakistan is preparing the ground for pro-Pakistan elements from the Taliban to negotiate with Kabul, in an attempt to force India out of Afghanistan after US forces start a slow withdrawal in July 2011. Meanwhile, a year after Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) carried out Mumbai attack they are yet to be brought to justice. Against this backdrop, Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries met in New Delhi (25 February ) but failed to make any progress. Just a day later a suicide squad in Kabul hit two hotels, killing 16 people including 7 Indian civilians and two Indian army majors. Three days later the Afghan government accused LeT of being responsible for the Kabul attack.

In a series of briefings to the Pakistani and foreign media, Pakistani generals have portrayed India as seriously threatening Pakistan, using its embassy and consulates in Afghanistan to harbor, train and fund Baloch separatists who are waging an insurgency in Balochistan province, trying to undermine Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan and even for backing elements of the Pakistani Taliban. Tensions heightened after four Pakistani workers were gunned down in Kandahar in early March by unknown assailants. The Pakistani media has accused the Indian consulate in Kandahar of organizing the attack.

Pro-military commentators have risen to the occasion demanding that as Pakistan now faces a two front situation, India should be pushed out of Afghanistan by the Taliban or as a pre-condition which the US must accept, if and when peace talks between the Taliban and the Kabul government are held.

India was seriously rattled when the US and NATO agreed at the January 28 London conference on Afghanistan to begin “re-integrating” Taliban fighters.


India was seriously rattled when the US and NATO agreed at the January 28 London conference on Afghanistan to begin “re-integrating” Taliban fighters and field commanders and lavishly funding a peace package for them. President Karzai went much further by demanding ‘reconciliation’ with the mainstream Taliban led by Mullah Mohammed Omar. India was aghast at the unanimity of the international community which is tiring of the war in Afghanistan, as India has vociferously opposed any dialogue with the Taliban.

India sees the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda working closely with anti-Indian groups based in Pakistani Punjab, such as LeT who have begun to re-infiltrate into Indian Kashmir to restart the guerrilla war which has been dormant since 2004. Even US officials say that Punjabi militants are increasingly fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Although Karzai has declared that “Afghanistan does not want proxy war between India and Pakistan,” India’s real concern is that Pakistan appears determined to position itself center stage of any dialogue between the Taliban and Kabul. The ISI recently arrested key Afghan Taliban leaders who have been engaged in talks with representatives of the Karzai administration without Pakistan’s ISI being involved.

Senior US officials in Washington say the initial arrest of the powerful second in command Taliban leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar in Karachi in early February was accidental – after the CIA discovered the location of a meeting of Taliban commanders where Barader was found. The ISI arrested him and then decided to bring in all his supporters resulting in more arrests. Kabul’s request that Barader be extradited was refused. Despite repeated requests, US officials have been given only limited access to question Barader and even less access to question other arrested Taliban.

India’s real concern is that Pakistan appears determined to position itself center stage of any dialogue between the Taliban and Kabul.


However despite his significant sanctuary in Pakistan, Barader was at odds with the ISI talking independently to Karzai’s representatives without taking the ISI into confidence and instead enlisting the help of Saudi Arabia. Over the past twelve months Saudi Arabia has been intermittently involved in helping the two sides hold informal talks that so far have not led to real negotiations, although they have the potential to do so. The Saudis, although close allies of Pakistan, had also appeared willing to keep the ISI out of the dialogue.

The Obama administration is still far from accepting the idea of negotiating with the Taliban leadership and US officials were annoyed with Karzai after the London conference for raising the issue, but the ISI and the military are now forcing the pace to have a three way dialogue between Kabul, Islamabad and the Taliban, while also pushing the US administration to accept such a dialogue and agree to a major role for the ISI.

India has now embarked on a diplomatic offensive to counter Pakistan’s growing role, sending National Security Adviser Shivsankar Menon to Kabul in early March and the Foreign Minister S.M.Krishna to Iran in coming weeks. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s hastily arranged trip to Afghanistan this week underlined Tehran’s keen interest in the Afghanistan endgame. India has asked Karzai about his secret negotiations with the Taliban and how India can play a role. At the same time India appears to be wanting to rebuild the alliance with Iran, Russia and the Central Asian Republics that opposed the Taliban in the 1990s and supported the non-Pashtun Northern Alliance.

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s hastily arranged trip to Afghanistan this week underlined Tehran’s keen interest in the Afghanistan endgame.


Missing as yet from this complicated maneuvering is the US administration which will have to decide soon on supporting Kabul-Taliban talks, if it is not to see its military and economic development offensives in Afghanistan be undermined by growing regional rivalries. Also missing from the equation is Pakistan’s civilian government which has been bypassed in the foreign policy decision making by the military and the ISI. It is well known that the much weakened President Asif Zardari would like to improve relations with India and Afghanistan and encourage trade and investment, rather than foment a new set of regional tensions.

However a too overt Pakistani role is likely to be rejected by Karzai, by Afghanistan’s non-Pashtuns and civil society and even by many Taliban who are tired of fighting and would like to end their dependence on Pakistan.

Any sign of excessive Pakistani influence in Afghanistan would immediately prompt a reaction from India, Iran, China and the Arab Gulf states, which could include backing anti-Pakistan proxies in Afghanistan making it even more difficult for Afghanistan to achieve peace and stability.

Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author, most recently of "Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia."
Yaleglobal Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/pakistan-and-afghanistan-end-game-part-i

Man Versus Afghanistan

By Robert D. Kaplan
We were there to fight, to do PT, to eat, to sleep, then to fight again. There was no big-screen TV or other diversion in the barracks. It was a world of concrete, plywood, and gun oil, and it was absolutely intoxicating in its intensity and unlike anything that existed in the British military.” So recollected retired Lieutenant Colonel Richard Williams of the elite British Special Air Service, concerning the worst days in Iraq. In December 2006, Williams told me, there were more than 140 suicide bombings in Baghdad, a level of violence that he likened to the Nazi Blitz on London. In December 2007, there were five. “General McChrystal delivered that statistic,” a feat that not even the recent bombings in Baghdad can detract from. In Iraq, he went on, General Stanley A. McChrystal raised the “hard, nasty business” of counterterrorism—of “black ops”—to an industrial scale, with 10 nightly raids throughout the city, 300 a month, that McChrystal, now 55, regularly joined.

Williams did not discount the decisive Sunni Awakening, the surge of 20,000 extra troops into Iraq, or the deployment of troops outside the big Burger King bases and deep into the heart of hostile Iraqi neighborhoods. But he insisted that the work of the special operators commanded by McChrystal was also pivotal.

And, Williams added, there was never any question that they would succeed.

“Doubt,” T. E. Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), is “our modern crown of thorns.” The Special Operations forces that McChrystal led in Iraq were not so afflicted, despite a home front—especially a policy nomenklatura in Washington—that by 2006 had given up on the war. McChrystal, whom Williams called “the singularly most impressive military officer I ever served with,” has never submitted to fate. His oft-documented physical regimen—running eight miles a day, eating one meal a day, and sleeping four hours a night—itself expresses an unyielding, almost cultic determination.

Last December, in a spare, homely office in Kabul that felt like the business-class lounge of a bad airline, McChrystal recalled his Iraq experience for me: “I remember”—he pauses—“we had a meeting in Balad [an air base north of Baghdad] in the spring of 2006, where we asked ourselves, ‘Have we already lost, and are too stubborn to admit it?’ After all, the military is hard-wired to be optimistic, so there is a danger of not being realistic. Well, we decided that we hadn’t lost. By then we had [Abu Musab al-] Zarqawi in our sights. We could smell him. We also felt, in those dark days, that we could break and implode alQaeda. We in JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] had this sense of … mission, passion … I don’t know what you call it. The insurgents,” McChrystal went on, “had a real cause, and we had a counter-cause. We had a level of unit cohesion just like in The Centurions and The Praetorians,” 1960s novels by Jean Lartéguy about French paratroopers in Indochina and Algeria. “It was intense,” McChrystal said, scrunching his already deeply carved face. “We were hitting alQaeda in Iraq like Rocky Balboa hitting Apollo Creed in the gut.”

I asked whether the situation in Iraq in 2006 was bleaker than Afghanistan now.

“Look, this isn’t easy,” he sighed. “Afghanistan for years got worse and worse, and the coalition sometimes lagged behind the reality of the situation.” Because the country is so decentralized, he explained, it is extraordinarily complex, with a different tribal and sectarian reality in each district. But then he ticked off ways the war could be won. “The insurgency is only fundamentally effective in the Pashtun belt. The critical part of the population is where the water and the roads are. People near water are more important economically: along the Helmand and Kabul rivers. You secure these areas, and you take the oxygen out of the insurgency.” He continued, talking about developing a corps of Afghan-area experts within the United States military akin to the American “China hands” of the early and mid-20th century, and “British East India Company types” who went out for years and learned the local languages. His command sergeant major, Mike Hall of Avon Lake, Ohio, said that when McChrystal selected his team of generals and colonels to come with him to command the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in June 2009, he more or less told them to “get out of the deployment mentality—that they would be in-country for 18 months, two and a half years, for the duration, however long it took to win.”

McChrystal believes that the “ideological piece” of alQaeda is “truly scary”: that a new brand of totalitarianism—alQaeda the franchise—is running amok and motivating small secretive groups around the world, and that victory in Afghanistan is necessary to deliver a “huge moral defeat” to it.

McChrystal’s resolve is part of a larger, deeper story. Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has repeatedly employed its military, wisely and unwisely, as a weapon against fate and inevitability. In that capacity, the military has become the principal protagonist in an intellectual debate, raging since antiquity, that pits individual moral responsibility against determinism—the belief that historical, cultural, ethnic, economic, and other antecedent forces determine the future of men and nations. McChrystal, the commander of American and NATO troops in an Afghanistan that is tottering on the edge of chaos, is both the supreme and most recent symbol of that struggle.

The ur-text for a philosophical discussion of the role of the U.S. military in the post–Cold War era is Isaiah Berlin’s 1953 Oxford lecture, “Historical Inevitability,” in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, environment, and ethnic characteristics determine the direction of world politics. Berlin reproaches Arnold Toynbee and Edward Gibbon for seeing “nations” and “civilizations” as “more concrete” than the individuals who embody them, and for seeing abstractions like “tradition” and “history” as “wiser than we.”

In the 1990s, the Balkans were a classic case of setting determinists and realists, who were dissuaded from military intervention because of Yugoslavia’s often bloody history and its questionable strategic importance, against liberal internationalists and neoconservatives, who favored intervention because they opposed giving Yugoslavia up to fate, especially in light of the Holocaust. My own book, Balkan Ghosts, was attacked as deterministic, and was misused as an argument against intervention in 1993, when it first appeared, even as I supported intervention in print and on television. The fact that I wrote a book about a bloody ethnic history and favored intervention was no contradiction: only the most difficult human landscapes require intervention in the first place, and when one does intervene militarily, one should always do so without illusions. Winston Churchill’s geographical and cultural portrait of Sudan in The River War (1899), which was next on McChrystal’s reading list when I saw him, is full of determinism, yet Churchill nevertheless favored intervention there.

The Balkan interventions, however belated, stopped the ethnic cleansing, did not lead to military quagmires, paid strategic dividends, and in so doing appeared to justify the idealistic approach to foreign policy. Indeed, the 1995 humanitarian intervention in Bosnia changed the debate from “Should NATO exist?” to “Should NATO expand?” Our 1999 war in Kosovo, as much as the attacks of September 11, 2001, allowed for the expansion of NATO to the Black Sea. It also led to the toppling of the Yugoslav strongman Slobodan Milošević. In the aftermath, realists and determinists seemed vanquished; to be called either one back then was practically an insult.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, to which I subscribed, had Balkan antecedents. In fact, some intellectuals agitating for intervention in the Balkans had earlier railed against President George H. W. Bush for not sending U.S. troops the extra few hundred kilometers to Baghdad in 1991 to depose Saddam Hussein. For those Gulf War idealists, finishing the job in Iraq against a regime that had killed, directly and indirectly, several times more people than would Milošević’s, was in keeping with the Balkan passions of the era. In 2003, the idea of regime change in Iraq appealed to those willing to do anything to defeat the deterministic forces of geography and ethnic and sectarian differences, and to those who thought that the American military power evident in the Balkans, particularly air power, had rendered such forces moot, paving the way for universalist ideas to triumph over terrain and history.

So what began in the mid-1990s with a limited, American-dominated air-and-land campaign in the western, most-developed part of the former Ottoman Empire led less than a decade later to a mass infantry invasion in its eastern, least-developed part. In March 2004, I found myself in Camp Udairi, in the midst of the Kuwaiti desert. I had embedded with a Marine battalion that, along with the rest of the First Marine Division, was about to begin the overland journey to Baghdad and western Iraq, replacing the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division there. Lines of seven-ton trucks and Humvees stretched across the horizon, all headed north. A sandstorm had erupted. An icy wind was blowing. Rain threatened. Vehicles broke down. And we hadn’t even begun the several-hundred-kilometer journey to Baghdad that, a few short years earlier, had been dismissed as easy to accomplish by those who thought of toppling Saddam Hussein as merely an extension of toppling Slobodan Milošević. In that environment, only a fool would suggest that deterministic elements like geography no longer mattered.

And on February 22, 2006, when Sunni alQaeda extremists blew up the Shiite alAskari Mosque at Samarra and unleashed a fury of intercommunal atrocities, American troops seemed powerless before primordial hatreds. The myth of an omnipotent U.S. military—born in the Gulf War, battered in Somalia, then repaired and burnished in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo—was for the moment undone, along with the idealism that went with it. Ethnic and sectarian differences in far-off corners of the world, seen in the 1990s as obstacles that good men should strive to overcome, now loomed as factors that should have warned us away from military action.

The debate does not end there. In late 2006 and early 2007, as Iraq was crumbling and ethnic atrocities reached Balkan dimensions and threatened to rise to those of Rwanda, much of the Washington establishment, especially the realists, called for scaling back or withdrawing our military mission. President George W. Bush did the opposite. He did not succumb to fate. Those supporting him were few, but they included neoconservatives, who essentially argued that human agency—more troops and a new strategy—could triumph over vast impersonal forces, in this case those of sectarian madness. Part of that new strategy, which worked beyond all expectations, was, as we know, McChrystal’s industrial-level approach to counterterrorism. Yet that is not to say the struggle against fate in Iraq was worth it. The ultimate cost—in more than 100,000 American and Iraqi lives (and perhaps many more), more than a trillion taxpayer dollars, and untold amounts of squandered diplomatic capital—is a strong argument in favor of less zeal and more determinism. Some may say that President Bush could have changed his strategy and his generals earlier than he did and incurred fewer casualties as a result. But one can play the counterfactual game to no end, and still be stuck with how the war has actually turned out.

To treat every country as an empty slate full of hopeful possibilities is risky: what is doable in one place may not be in another. As the philosopher Raymond Aron suggests, we must pursue an ethic rooted in a hesitant determinism. We need to recognize obvious developmental differences between peoples and regions, but not oversimplify, and leave our options open. We cannot in every instance struggle unconditionally against fate, even though we have a military that will do so if so ordered.

And thus we confront Afghanistan: a country whose citizens have a life expectancy of 44 years and a literacy rate of 28 percent (far lower among women), and only a fifth of whose population has access to clean drinking water. Out of 182 countries, Afghanistan ranks next to last on the United Nations’ Human Development Index (just ahead of Niger). Iraq, on the eve of the U.S. invasion, was ranked 126th; its literacy rate hovered around 70 percent. Afghanistan’s problems on a developmental level are not only more profound than Iraq’s, but vaster in scope, as Afghanistan encompasses 30 percent more land. Consider, also, that 77 percent of Iraqis live in urban areas (concentrated heavily in Baghdad), so reducing violence in Greater Baghdad had a calming effect on the entire country; in Afghanistan, urbanization stands at only 30 percent, and so counterinsurgency efforts in one village may have no effect on another.

Moreover, whereas Mesopotamia, with large urban clusters across a flat landscape, is conducive to military occupation, Afghanistan is, in geographical terms, hard to even hold together. Cathedral-like mountain ranges help seal divisions between Pashtuns and Tajiks and other minorities, even as comparatively few natural impediments separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, or from Iran. Looking at a relief map, one could easily construct a country called Pashtunistan—home to the world’s 52 million Pashtuns—lying between the Hindu Kush mountains and the Indus River and overlapping with the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. The Afghanistan-Pakistan border is in reality no border at all but, in the words of Sugata Bose, a Harvard historian, “the heart … of an expansive Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic economic, cultural, and political domain that [has] straddled Afghanistan and Punjab for two millennia.”

Afghanistan emerged as a country of sorts only in the mid-18th century, and a case can be made that with the slow-motion dissolution of the former Soviet empire in Central Asia, and the gradual weakening of the Pakistani state, a historic realignment is now taking place that could see Afghanistan disappear on the political map: in the future, for example, the Hindu Kush could form a border between Pashtunistan and a Greater Tajikistan. The Taliban—the twisted result of Pashtun nationalism, Islamic fervor, drug money, corrupt warlords, and, now, hatred of the American occupation—may be, in the view of Selig Harrison, the director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy, merely the vehicle for a grand transition that a foreign military run by impatient civilians back in Washington can do little to deter.

Yet another reality points to an entirely different conclusion. The dispersal of Afghanistan’s larger population over greater territory than Iraq’s is basically meaningless, British Army Major General Colin Boag told me: because 65 percent of the population lives within 35 miles of the main road system, which approximates the old medieval caravan routes, only 80 out of 342 districts are really key to military success. Afghanistan is not some barbaric back-of-beyond, but the heart of a cultural continuum connecting the cosmopolitan centers of Persia and India. In fact, Afghanistan has been governed from the center since the 18th century: Kabul, if not always a point of authority, has been at least a point of arbitration. Especially between the early 1930s and the early 1970s, Afghanistan experienced moderate and constructive government under the constitutional monarchy of Zahir Shah. A highway system on which it was safe to travel united the major cities, while estimable health and development programs were on the verge of eradicating malaria. Toward the end of this period, I hitchhiked and rode buses across Afghanistan. I never felt threatened, and I was able to send books and clothes back home through functioning post offices.

There was, too, a strong Afghan national identity distinct from that of Iran or Pakistan or the Soviet Union. Pashtunistan might be a real enough geographic construct, but so, very definitely, is Afghanistan. As Ismail Akbar, a writer and analyst in Kabul, told me: “Thirty years of war and Pakistani interference have weakened Afghan national identity from the heights of the Zahir Shah period. But even the mujahideen civil war of the early 1990s, in which the groups were split along ethnic lines, could not break up Afghanistan. And if that couldn’t, nothing will.”

Afghans were so desperate for a reunited country after the internecine fighting of the mujahideen era that they welcomed the Taliban in Kandahar in 1994 and in Kabul in 1996, as a bulwark against anarchy and dissolution. Afghanistan, frail and battered over the years, is nevertheless surprisingly sturdy as a concept and as a cynosure of identity.

Stanley McChrystal’s job is to serve as the deus ex machina for the rebirth of that modestly well-functioning mid-20th-century Afghan state, and for Afghanistan’s fade-out from the front pages—the definition of victory in our imperfect world. McChrystal, the hybrid product of the übermacho Rangers and Special Forces subcultures within the U.S. Army, is now the philosopher’s weapon against those vast impersonal forces of history and geography, and, I might add, the agent of deliverance from our post-9/11 mistakes in Afghanistan. Because by our own disastrous actions—by our own agency, in other words—we ourselves, in a process Tolstoy explains well in War and Peace, have helped contribute to fate. Not that McChrystal sees himself as fitting into the “great man” theory of history—another form of determinism, it can be argued. He told me that he merely sees opportunities where others don’t.

“Afghanistan was a cakewalk in 2001 and 2002,” says Sarah Chayes, former special adviser to McChrystal’s headquarters. “We started out with a country that hated the Taliban and by 2009 were driving people back into the arms of the Taliban. That’s not fate. That’s poor policy.” We enabled an administration, led by Hamid Karzai, that is less a government than a protection racket, in which bribery is the basis of a whole chain of transactions, from small sums paid to criminals at roadblocks in the south of the country to tens of millions of dollars smuggled out of the Kabul airport by government ministers. The myth is that the absence of governance in Afghanistan creates a vacuum in which the Taliban thrive. But the truth, as Chayes explains, is the opposite. Karzai governs everywhere in the revenue belt, synonymous with Pashtunistan, in the south and east of the country: the Taliban succeed in these very places, not because of no governance but because of corrupt and abusive governance.

Referring to the evolution of the former mujahideen commanders into gangster-oligarchs under Karzai, an Afghan analyst, Walid Tamim, told me: “Warlords like Rabbani, Fahim, Sayyaf, and Dostum have all been empowered by Karzai and the U.S. government. Why is [Taliban leader] Mullah Omar any worse than these guys?” Ashraf Ghani, the country’s finance minister from 2002 to 2004, explained: “The core threat we all face is the Afghan government itself. About two-thirds of revenue is lost to abuse. This isn’t like corruption in Indonesia, where money is stolen but things still get built; here it is all looted, because the warlords are insecure about what may come next in Afghan politics.” Even as American officers talk publicly in bland clichés about partnering with and improving the performance of the Karzai government, the grim reality of Afghan public life is distinguished by corruption, criminality, and poverty.

I knew and wrote about Karzai in the 1980s, when he was a representative in Peshawar of the pro-Western mujahideen faction of Sibghatullah Mojaddedi. Mojaddedi had very little military presence inside Afghanistan; he and Karzai were no threat to anybody. Karzai had impressed me as personable, enlightened, sensitive, and, now that I think about it over the distance of time, weak. I genuinely liked him. But alas, he is said to be bored by actual governance. As Ghani points out, “He is not an organization man with the requisite management abilities,” and thus he lacks the skill to build a popular power base like the one the late Afghan Communist leader Babrak Karmal was able to build in the late 1970s and early 1980s, or even like the one the Soviet puppet Najibullah built later on. And without a power base of his own, and with the Americans distracted since 2003 by Iraq, Karzai has had few others to rely on but the warlords and his own knee-deep-in-graft family.

The Soviets may have been occupiers, but they were truly interested in Afghan governance in terms of the advice they gave and the puppets they chose—unlike the United States, obsessed as we have been with hunting alQaeda. Karzai is “unsalvageable,” according to a senior Western official I talked to. Moreover, Afghanistan is so “broken and shattered,” as he put it, with no human capital to staff the ministries, and with the worst accretion of bureaucratic habits from the Soviet, mujahideen, and Taliban eras, that if this were the 1920s, Afghanistan, with all its history of unruly independence, would be an obvious candidate for trusteeship, with a great Western power being granted a mandate for it. But this is the early 21st century, and so we have to accept the myth of Afghan sovereignty. Thus, our imperial-like burden is coupled with the absurd (by 1920s standards) task of showing demonstrable results by the planned drawdown in 15 months, in order to legitimize what will be, in effect, a long-term trusteeship.

To accomplish this gargantuan mission, we have stood up the doctrine of counterinsurgency, the rough military equivalent of liberal internationalism, moral interventionism, and nation-building rolled into one. Counterinsurgency’s core goal is to protect and nurture the civilian population—the center of gravity in postmodern war—and psychologically and physically separate it from the insurgents. Culturally sensitive troops build schools and dig wells for the villagers, even as they train and mentor local forces to fight the enemy, and strive to monopolize the use of force in a given space.

Counterinsurgency is not new to the U.S. military—indeed, it dates back at least to the Philippine War more than a century ago—but its lessons were repeatedly forgotten by the U.S. Army over the course of the 20th century. To make sure that doesn’t happen again, the Army and Marines cooperated on a Counterinsurgency Field Manual, published three years ago. Remarkably, its introduction was written by a former director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Sarah Sewall. In it, she notes that the manual “challenges much of what is holy about the American way of war,” for it directs U.S. forces to “make securing the civilian, rather than destroying the enemy, their top priority.” But what is the counterinsurgent to do, given that in an era of total war as waged by radical Islamists, distinguishing between combatant and noncombatant is often impossible? The answer, according to Sewall, is to “assume more risk.”

In order to be a more effective weapon of war, American ground forces are therefore becoming more like armed relief workers. They will still train to kill, they will continue to kill in counterterrorism operations, and they will be prepared to kill in more-traditional kinds of interstate war that might erupt in the course of the new century. For the moment, however, American troops will incur more casualties in the service of idealist interventionism, in a place far less developed than either the Balkans or Iraq.

But just as some liberal idealists supported intervention in the Balkans but opposed it in Iraq (correctly, as it turned out), some liberal idealists are skeptical of the mission in Afghanistan. Probably the most incisive critique of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was written by Rory Stewart last July in the London Review of Books. Stewart is the former director of Harvard’s Carr Center and a prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate in the United Kingdom. He has run a nongovernmental organization in Kabul, and is the author of the masterful travel work The Places in Between (2004), about walking across Afghanistan. He is both a humanitarian and an Afghan-area expert. Yet he feels that the professed U.S. mission in Afghanistan, which assumes counterinsurgency as a “moral obligation,” is itself a form of determinism: we automatically assume a solution in a wickedly diverse and complicated country where no solution of the kind we foresee is likely to be had. As he put it,


There are no mass political parties in Afghanistan and the Kabul government lacks the base, strength or legitimacy of the Baghdad government. Afghan tribal groups lack the coherence of the Iraqi Sunni tribes and their relation to state structures … Afghans are weary of war but the Afghan chiefs are not approaching us, seeking a deal. Since the political players and state structures in Afghanistan are much more fragile than those in Iraq, they are less likely to play a strong role in ending the insurgency.

Meanwhile, Stewart goes on, “the Taliban can exploit the ideology of religious resistance that the West deliberately fostered in the 1980s to defeat the Russians.” But at the same time, he says, the ethnic-Pashtun Taliban are unpopular, even as the ethnic-Hazara, -Tajik, and -Uzbek populations are wealthier and more powerful than they were in the 1990s and will resist Taliban attempts to take over their areas. Even if the Taliban did overrun a major city, they are unlikely to repeat the mistake of the 1990s and shelter alQaeda. In short, the Taliban are neither as easily defeated nor as dangerous as we like to think. Forget about state-building or counterinsurgency, he implies, which remains “the irresistible illusion.”

McChrystal and his team are burdened by Stewart’s misgivings. Contemplating failure for a moment, McChrystal told me, “We’ll know it when we won’t be able to move our troops around.” McChrystal had Stewart to dinner to talk about his article. “He’s got a different point of view,” McChrystal said, uncharacteristically struggling for words. “I just think that Afghanistan has been a country and that the pieces can be put in place to make it work.”

“Look,” said Sir Graeme Lamb, a former British Special Air Service commander and McChrystal adviser, “we don’t have a grand design [as Stewart thinks]. We’ve been doing this kind of thing in Iraq, the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Africa, and other places for a long time, and we’re comfortable in these thresholds of complexity and chaos. We’re the men ‘in the arena,’ to take a line from Theodore Roosevelt. We will adjust the positions of authority on the battlefield in 2010 so that good things can naturally emerge.”

Furthermore, McChrystal’s team has problems with Stewart’s analysis. Major General Michael Flynn, McChrystal’s intelligence chief, views the Taliban less benignly:

“Like the rest of us,” Flynn told me, “Mullah Omar is a decade older and wiser than he was on 9/11. He has restructured his political organization to give it more staying power, if in fact it gets back into power. In the meantime, they are killing us with IEDs [improvised explosive devices] the way the mujahideen killed the Soviets with our Stinger missiles. This is a vastly harder enemy than in 2001. They’re better than even the Eritreans were [in the 1970s and 1980s]. They absolutely know insurgency doctrine and are spread throughout the country, including the north, in order to disperse us, which they are succeeding at.” Unlike Stewart, Flynn believes that if we left Afghanistan, the Taliban might well be able to triumph over non-Pashtun groups.

Not only are McChrystal and his team determined to battle against fate in the form of the Taliban, but they do so in the firm belief that they will get Afghanistan onto the crooked and murky path of development. “We know what success tastes like, from Iraq; we’re a team that has won national championships,” declared Flynn, who was with McChrystal in JSOC. In The Story of the Malakand Field Force (1898), about the struggle to stabilize what is today the Afghanistan-Pakistan borderland, Winston Churchill posits that a great nation has three choices: to turn a country like Afghanistan into a replica of British parliamentary democracy, which he says is clearly impossible; to withdraw completely, which he says is also impossible; or to work with the tribes and the material at hand through a variety of means. McChrystal, who told me he was halfway through the book, agreed that the third choice—Churchill’s choice—is really the only one we have.

What does it mean to work with the tribes, Churchill-style; what does it take to overcome the geographical and human terrain here? The story of Colonel Chris Kolenda, of Omaha, Nebraska, is instructive. Kolenda, a West Point graduate with the sharp-eyed, comforting manner of a family physician, commanded the 1st Squadron of the 91st Cavalry from May 2007 to July 2008 in northeastern Afghanistan, on the border with Pakistan. When Kolenda’s 800-soldier battalion arrived, armed violence was endemic. Coalition headquarters in Kabul blamed a Pakistan-based insurgency. “The conventional wisdom was wrong,” Kolenda told me. “Almost all of the insurgents were locals who fought for a whole variety of reasons: they were disgusted with ISAF, as well as the government in Kabul; their fathers had fought the Soviets and now the sons were fighting the new foreigners.”

Then there was the “psychodrama of interethnic and clan frictions,” abetted by the fractured mountainous landscape. The area was populated by Nuristanis, Kohistanis, and Pashtuns, all of whom harbored disdain for the Gujars, migrant farm workers from over the border, who, in their eyes, were “not real Afghans.” (So much for the argument that there is no Afghan national identity.) The Nuristanis, in turn, were divided into the Kata, Kom, Kushtowz, and Wai clans. The Kom were split into hostile and well-armed groups whose current divisions stemmed from the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, when some of the Kom backed the radical forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, known as the HIG, or Hezb-i-Islami-Gulbuddin, and other Kom sub-clans were loyal to the moderate National Islamic Front of Afghanistan. The Kata, meanwhile, were generally loyal to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (“Army of the Righteous”), which carried out major attacks against India from bases in Pakistan. The Pashtuns themselves were divided in some cases, on account of blood feuds, into five elements.

Kolenda apologized to me for “getting down in the weeds,” but explained that until he’d learned who was who, and who was fighting whom, his battalion couldn’t make progress and escape the cycle of ferocious firefights that had characterized the first three months of its deployment. “People were often giving us tips about bad guys who weren’t really bad guys, but simply people from another faction with whom the tipster had a score to settle.”

Overlying all of these divisions was a society atomized by three decades of warfare: indeed, because of Afghanistan’s short life expectancy, most people in Kolenda’s area of responsibility had known nothing but fighting all their lives. The landed aristocracy of elders that once functioned as the social glue had dissolved; in its place came a violent lower class of young men, disaggregated by clan and ethnicity, battling for a hazy idea of justice. The Taliban had been gone from power for seven years. The 17-year-old fighters here barely remembered their benighted rule, and now saw anti-government groups as the good guys against the foreign occupiers.

Finding the right elders and providing them with seed money that would help them regain control of their young men was painstaking labor. You couldn’t just build a school or dig a well: a new school in one valley could enrage people in the next. Money was often doled out only after violence by the locals stopped. “Then they built the school,” Kolenda said, repeating an Afghan proverb: “If you sweat for it, you’ll protect it.”

With a little peace and development, the hard core of the hydra-headed insurgency, including elements of the HIG and the Taliban, could no longer hide in plain sight, and “we nailed them,” Kolenda said. You couldn’t afford to lose one firefight. Yet when you were not eyes-on-target, you had to show restraint. Kolenda told me about one junior noncommissioned officer who made sure his soldiers did not step on a farmer’s field once they had spread out on open ground. This sounds easy, but such mundane yet critical actions go completely against the grain of high-testosterone young soldiers bred on hunting and chewing tobacco and wanting to be an Army ranger all their lives in order to fight.

By the time Kolenda’s battalion was redeployed out of Kunar and Nuristan, violence had dropped by 90 percent. His battalion didn’t need a Dairy Queen or other amenities to keep their spirits up. As Sergeant Major Mike Hall told me, “If you’re down-range and focused, time goes fast. That is what good morale is all about.”

The measures that Kolenda told me about were not the gold standard. They were merely the minimum required to overcome the forces of geography and history; and they had to be replicated throughout southern and eastern Afghanistan, where each battalion encountered a different mix of clan and sub-clan rivalries.

The coordination of more than a score of such battalions, not to mention 45 Army Special Forces A-teams, Marine special-ops units, and so on, all involved in some aspect of counterinsurgency, is less the job of McChrystal than that of Lieutenant General David M. Rodriguez, like McChrystal and Kolenda a West Point graduate, who heads the ISAF Joint Command. If the military coalition in Afghanistan were a newspaper, think of McChrystal as the editor in chief and Rodriguez as the managing editor. McChrystal, atop ISAF, is, as he said, focused “up and out,” dealing with big-think strategic planning, daily interactions with NATO and other members of the 44-country coalition in Afghanistan, the United Nations, the Afghan National Army and National Police, President Karzai, and the ministers of interior and defense, as well as with training indigenous forces and restructuring detainee procedures—that is, exploiting captured Taliban sources, while not mistreating them, and gradually getting America out of the detainee business altogether. Above all, McChrystal has the task of military coordination with Pakistan in the hunt for high-value targets in the borderlands.

Rodriguez, meanwhile, is focused “down and in,” on the day-to-day operations of ISAF, on the deputies of the relevant ministries, the district governors, provincial councils, border police, individual Afghan army units, and so on. Rodriguez, a six-foot-four-inch, gangly, gentle giant with a shock of short salt-and-pepper hair, is the real implementer of President Obama and McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy.

The shame is that Rodriguez’s three-star command didn’t even come into existence until late 2009: before that, previous commanders such as Generals David McKiernan and Dan McNeill had to combine the two jobs. As a result, neither job got done as well as it should have. Given the demands of both positions, McChrystal isn’t the only one who sleeps just four hours a night; the same could be said for Rodriguez, and for Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry. Flying to Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif with Eikenberry and Rodriguez, respectively, I noticed how they sleep on planes because they essentially have two back-to-back workdays in each 24-hour period: the line-up of briefings and meetings all day long and the tsunami of emails that arrive after dark once Washington, nine and a half hours behind, gets to work.

Rodriguez flew up to Mazar-e-Sharif to listen to Afghan security forces report on what they had been doing for the past few months. In his quiet, unassuming manner, Rodriguez relentlessly questioned the Afghan officers about the Taliban’s shadow governments and justice system, the integration of local militias into the security forces, improvements on the ring road connecting Mazar-e-Sharif with Herat in the west and Kabul in the east, and the threat level in Kunduz and Baghlan. The Afghans responded with briefs about the extortion of farmers by the HIG in Baghlan and by the Taliban in Kunduz, and about how the enemy was able to attack highways and supply lines coming from Central Asia and erect an alternative tax system, even though it had no permanent bases. Because of problems with translation from Dari to English, the meeting went on for hours.

“This process is slow and painful,” Rodriguez admitted to me afterward. “If we did everything ourselves, it would be quicker, but we wouldn’t leave a legacy. Because the Afghans are deeply involved in all these operations, they own it. For a Soviet-inspired army to talk about rural redevelopment as they did in that meeting is an incredible thing.” Rodriguez told me he constantly flies around to the regional commands for such briefs, bringing with him a train of high-ranking American and Afghan officers and Kabul ministry officials. On this trip, Rodriguez immersed himself with two key Afghans: army Chief of Staff Bismullah Khan and Lieutenant General Sher Mohammad Karimi, head of army operations. (Karimi is from Khost, by the Pakistan border, the lair of the insurgent leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, and so for very personal reasons, he wants Haqqani “eliminated.”)

The idea is to put the American and Afghan military leaders, as well as low-ranking commanders, down-range together socially, and create a flat, fast organization. As with a similar effort in Iraq, top-down guidance from high-ranking officers gets bottom-up refinement from captains and sergeants. To wit, Rodriguez’s operations center is a vast hangar-like building with no walls or partitions, very much evoking a newsroom environment. “It is an atmosphere in which you error towards sharing what you know,” said Navy Commander Jeff Eggers, a McChrystal adviser.

“I learned at JSOC,” McChrystal explained, “that any complex task is best approached by flattening hierarchies. It gets everybody feeling like they’re in the inner circle, so that they develop a sense of ownership. The more people who believe that they are part of the team and are in the know, the more you don’t have to do it yourself.” As Brigadier General Scott Miller, who runs the Afghanistan-Pakistan Coordination Cell at the Pentagon, told me about McChrystal and Rodriguez’s philosophy: “Decentralize until you’re uncomfortable, then scrutinize, fix, and push down and out even further, to the level of the sergeants.” Precisely because of the commander’s ability to reach down to the junior noncommissioned officers, a flat military organization puts—in the words of one admiral I interviewed—“performance pressure on everybody.”

This show of organizational dynamism points to a ground truth: despite the awful toll of casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the near-breaking of the Army through the strain on soldiers and their families because of long and dangerous deployments, American ground troops are emerging nearly a decade after 9/11 as a force that is even more organizationally and intellectually formidable than it was after the Berlin Wall collapsed, when the United States was the lone superpower. Army and Marine Corps company commanders, for example, can lead in a conventional fight and, as Kolenda’s experience showed, also bring order to chaotic tribal and ethnic messes, all while they communicate effectively up the bureaucratic chain (a skill they began to hone before 9/11, in the Balkans). And these officers have mastered what is, in fact, the colonial technique of partnering with indigenous forces molded in their own image. Rodriguez’s command is a culmination of this whole experience.

But the very dominance of the U.S. military can lead to a dangerous delusion. For the time being, the American media and policy elite are focused on whether U.S. forces can achieve substantial results in 15 months, even though it is a truism of counterinsurgency that there are few shortcuts to victory and you shouldn’t rush to failure. Nevertheless, U.S. forces quite possibly will have quelled some significant part of the anarchy in southern Afghanistan by then: this is the sort of challenge our troops have become expert in. Yet that might only lead to mistaking artificial progress for lasting governance. The very prospect of some success by July 2011 increases the likelihood that U.S. forces will be in Afghanistan in substantial numbers for years. In effect, the proficiency of the American military causes it to be overextended. British Major General Richard Barrons, a veteran of the Balkans and Iraq now serving in Afghanistan, told me he learned during the most depressing days in Baghdad that “the long view is the primary weapon against fate.” If you are willing to stay, you can turn any situation around for the good. But that is an imperial mind-set, with its assumption of a near-permanent presence, which today’s Washington cannot abide, even as its own strategy drives toward that outcome.

At the core of a withdrawal strategy is the building of the Afghan army and police force. In charge of this effort is Lieutenant General William B. Caldwell, who, like McChrystal and Rodriguez, is a 1976 graduate of West Point, and like them was transformed by the “band of brothers” belief system forged in Iraq. There, as a spokesman, Caldwell “saw us go from the depths of despair to ‘this is going to work.’” He added, “I have a young family, and this will be the third of five Christmases I will be away from them. I did not have to be here, but I absolutely believe in this mission with Stan.”

I challenged Caldwell about reports of 90 percent illiteracy in the Afghan security forces. He answered: “The recruits may not know how to read, but they are incredibly street-smart. They’re survivalists. Basic soldiering here does not require literacy. We give them a course in how to read and issue them pens afterwards. They take tremendous pride in that. In Afghanistan, a pen in a shirt pocket is a sign of literacy. We’re three or four years behind Iraq in building an army, but if the ground situation improves, like in Iraq, political and media pressure will dissipate, and that will buy time.”

A deal with the insurgents constitutes another part of a withdrawal strategy. While becoming more organizationally formidable since 9/11, the Taliban have also modified their behavior. Mullah Omar has sent out a directive banning beheadings and unauthorized kidnappings as well as other forms of violent and criminal activity, according to both Al-Jazeera and ISAF officials. “In a way, we’re seeing a kinder, gentler Taliban,” said both Commander Eggers and General Flynn. Moreover, in working with the tribes in the spirit of Churchill’s Malakand Field Force, Flynn, the intelligence chief, went so far as to suggest that the insurgent leaders Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar are both “absolutely salvageable.” “The HIG already have members in Karzai’s government, and it could evolve into a political party, even though Hekmatyar may be providing alQaeda leaders refuge in Kunar. Hekmatyar has reconcilable ambitions. As for the Haqqani network, I can tell you they are tired of fighting, but are not about to give up. They have lucrative business interests to protect: the road traffic from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to Central Asia.” Lamb, the former SAS commander, added: “Haqqani and Hekmatyar are pragmatists tied to the probability of outcomes. With all the talk of Islamic ideology, this is the land of the deal.”

Again, the resemblance to the 1980s is telling, with leading anti-Soviet combatants like Haqqani and Hekmatyar central to the military equation, and a partially irrelevant Karzai: today ISAF officials talk quietly about working around Karzai by dealing directly with the ministries of interior and defense, and with the offices of the provincial governors, all of which they are fortifying with Western advisers.

The possibility of reaching an accommodation with some insurgents against others, as elusive as it may be, suggests how nonlinear the future is, and how deterministic a linear perspective can be. As in Iraq, surprises lie in store, and they might even be good ones: in so many places in Afghanistan, I saw the raw potential of this country. Despite a deadly, intimidating geography of steep and icy peaks that seem to stretch into infinity when seen from the air, in Afghanistan’s cities I encountered many an intellectual in a cold room with boxy furniture, passionately seeking to move beyond ethnic politics to a democratic, liberal universalism. They reminded me of the civil-society types I had met in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, in cities that, like Kabul, stank of lignite in winter. Then there was Herat, an old Silk Road nexus in western Afghanistan, which, despite 30 years of war, had changed remarkably for the better since I had last seen it, as a backpacker in 1973. Back then it was a ramshackle, Wild West town with barely a paved road. Now it is a sprawling, bustling city with malls, on the same level of development as many places in central Turkey that I knew from the 1980s: an improvement replicated in Mazar-e-Sharif, Jalalabad, and other urban areas here, with Kandahar being the striking exception. “Despite 30 years of war,” McChrystal said, in his office, rubbing his eyes from lack of sleep, “civilization grows here like weeds.”

Now the American military is about to bear down hard on Greater Kandahar, where Taliban- and Karzai-affiliated warlords hold considerable sway. “We will get to about 33 percent of the Afghan landmass in the next 15 months or so, affecting 60 percent of the population,” Rodriguez assured me. Once again, we might be poised to overcome the vast, impersonal forces of fate, even as we contribute to our own troubled destiny as a great power.

the Atlantic

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/03/man-versus-afghanistan/7983/

Afghan Tribal Rivalries Bedevil a U.S. Plan

By ALISSA J. RUBIN
JALALABAD, Afghanistan — Six weeks ago, elders of the Shinwari tribe, which dominates a large area in southeastern Afghanistan, pledged that they would set aside internal differences to focus on fighting the Taliban.

This week, that commitment seemed less important as two Shinwari subtribes took up arms to fight each other over an ancient land dispute, leaving at least 13 people dead, according to local officials.

The fighting was a setback for American military officials, some of whom had hoped it would be possible to replicate the pledge elsewhere. It raised questions about how effectively the American military could use tribes as part of its counterinsurgency strategy, given the patchwork of rivalries that make up Afghanistan.

Government officials and elders from other tribes were trying to get the two sides to reconcile, but given the intensity of the fighting, some said they doubted that the effort would work. At the very least, the dispute is proving a distraction from the tribe’s commitment to fight the Taliban, not each other.

In return for the tribe’s pledge, the Americans are offering cash-for-work programs to employ large numbers of young people from the tribe as well as small-scale development projects, according to Maj. T. J. Taylor, a public affairs officer.

The one initial worry was that the Taliban might try to drive a wedge between different factions within the tribe, which includes about 400,000 people. The land dispute may have done that work for the insurgents.

Questions for Shinwari tribal elders this week about whether the pact against the Taliban still stood went unanswered as the elders turned the conversation to their intratribal struggle.

“We promised to work with the government to fight the Taliban,” said Hajji Gul Nazar, an elder from the Mohmand branch of the Shinwari tribe. He added, “Well, the government officials should have taken care of this argument among us before the shooting started.”

“We are the same tribe, and we are not happy killing each other,” he said. “The provincial police chief and the governor should have taken care of this issue.”

The dispute began about 10 days ago when the Alisher subtribe of the Shinwari laid a claim to land also claimed by another branch of the tribe called the Mohmand. The disputed area covers about 22,000 acres near the Pakistani border and about 20 miles from Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar Province.

Staking their claim, the Mohmand set up tents on the land, according to tribal elders. The government called on both sides to hold a peaceful discussion among tribal elders, known as a shura.

The Alisher repeatedly asked the Mohmand to remove their tents from the disputed land. After more than a week of discussion and no sign that the Mohmand were budging, the Alisher called the police.

The police arrived and began to remove the tents, infuriating the Mohmand, who became even more infuriated when the Alisher began to help the police knock down the tents. When some members of the Alisher began to burn the tents, the Mohmand attacked the Alisher, firing rocket-propelled grenades, mortar launchers, machine guns and AK-47 semiautomatic rifles, according to local commanders and Afghan border police officers, who did not wish to be quoted by name.

Several Alisher elders alleged that the police had helped the Mohmand.

“We heard that Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai and the local police chief gave arms to the Mohmand,” said Babarzai, a well-known Alisher poet in the area, who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. “We spent all of yesterday burying our dead. Now there are many widows in our tribe.”

The government of Nangarhar Province denied the accusation. “Gov. Gul Agha Shirzai would never do anything like that,” said his spokesman, Ahmadzia Abdulzai. “Our goal is always to bring the tribes together.”

A deputy interior minister arrived from Kabul on Thursday with several other dignitaries from the capital to attend funerals for those who were killed and to encourage peace.

Elders from the Khogyani, another local tribe, met with 100 elders from each of the feuding subtribes to participate in a a peace shura to defuse tensions.

“I don’t think the shura will work,” said Hajji Gul Nazar, a Mohmand elder who was not able to attend the shura. “The Alisher have lost people and have so many wounded, and lots of their tents were burned by our people, and motorcycles were burned, and cars. They must be waiting to take revenge on us.”

A NATO service member was killed by the explosion of an improvised explosive device on Thursday in southern Afghanistan, according to a NATO statement.

In Khost Province in eastern Afghanistan, Taliban fighters ambushed a security detail for a road construction project between Khost and Gardez, killing a South African security guard and his Afghan driver, said Sakhi Jan, an Afghan in charge of the project. A South African and an Afghan were also injured.


Afghan employees of The New York Times contributed reporting from Jalalabad and Khost, Afghanistan.

N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?th&emc=th

Pipe Dreams Come True

Energy: New oil and gas routes spell the end of post-Soviet political wrangling

Cold War tensions between Russia and Europe will persist as long as the Cold Warenergy infrastructure stays in place. However, a lattice of new pipelines should make relationships more civlilized.

Cold War pipelines are still in place, but a raft of energy infrastructure deals and the launch of several important new routes signal major shifts in thepost-Sovietoil and gasnetwork.Russia’s imperialistic hold over producers in Central Asia—inherited from the Soviet Union in the form of oil and gas pipelines—has been broken. A new gas pipeline running from the gas-rich republic of Turkmenistan to China is a game changer and joins an oil pipeline snaking from oil-rich Kazakhstan to China that is already in operation.

The Kremlin’s response has been to build more pipelines, also headed east. The result of this emerging lattice of pipelines is that energy relations in the regionwill become more civilized as competing routes will force both buyer and seller to put market interests first and politics a definite second.

On December 14, 2009, China's President Hu Jintao joined his Turkmen counterpart, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, toinaugurate the new TransAsian pipelinethat allowsenergy-hungry China to tap Central Asia's copious supplies of gas.

“The new pipeline marks an economic power shift to the benefit of three Central Asian countries and China and to the detriment of Russia,” said Philip H. de Leon, the publisher of OilPrice.com.

The TransAsian pipeline cost $6.7 billionto build and is the first gas pipeline out of the Caspian Region that runs east, linking Turkmenistan’s massive gas basin with China’s West-East Gas Pipeline. The pipeline will carry up to 40 billion cubic meters (bcm)of gasby 2013, accounting for half of China’s gas needs.

China’s growing importance in the region has gotten the attention ofthe Kremlin: Prime MinisterVladimir Putin signed a deal that promises to deliver 68 bcm a year to China through two new pipelines starting in Siberia.These pipelineswill provide China with the other half of the gas it needs. The Russian deal represents an abrupt about-face for the Kremlin, which has traditionally been very wary of its eastern neighbor.

Pipelines are intensely political beasts when they are in the planning stage, but once constructed they are the geopolitical equivalent of marriage.

The Turkmen gas pipeline follows on the heels of a new Kazakh oil pipeline to China that rounds out the new eastward-looking energy transport infrastructure. The first phase of the Kazakh oil pipeline went into operation in July last year and a second phase will link Kazakhstan’s rich Caspian oil resources to China.

The two Chinese pipelines have raised the ante in the energy game for Russia and broken its monopoly on the transport of oil and gas to customers out of the region in Western Europe. However, the Kremlin is striking back by beefing up its own energy transport infrastructure.

Underpinning the annual clash between Russia and Ukraine is the fact that Russia is forced to send about 80 percentof its gas to Western European customers through Ukraine.

Russia has proposed two new routes that run to the north and south of Ukraine to diversify the supply routes: The Nord Stream runs from Northwest Russia to Germany and the South Stream runs from Southern Russia under the Black Sea to Turkey. Much of Western Europe was cut off from crucial gas supplies when Russia clashed with Ukraine over unpaid gas bills. Futurebattles with Ukraine over money will be just that and 2009 should be the last time European countries faced the prospect of being cut off from their gas heating in the depths of winter.

With the gas transport problems well in hand, the Kremlin has turned its attention to rounding out the oil pipeline infrastructure. Like the Russian gas pipes that will now run both east and west, Putin relaunched a new and ambitious Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean (ESPO) oil pipeline that will run from Siberia to Russia’s Pacific coast.

The 4857-kilometer ESPO pipeline is by far the longest and most expensive of all the pipeline plans. Strategically it will allow Russia to deliver oil directly to the whole of the Pacific Rim and significantly diversify Russia’s customer base. Construction of this anaconda of a pipe was begun in April 2006, but the project has only recently regained momentum.

The success of the pipeline will depend on the currently untouched oil resources thought to exist in Eastern Siberia; serious exploration of the region will begin this year.
W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-adv/advertisers/russia/articles/business/20100223/pipe_dreams_come_true.html