The War We Don't Understand

It's been happening gradually for years, but Afghan president Hamid Karzai's increasingly anti-Western rhetoric is starting to be noticed.

Had there been sufficient troop levels at the beginning of the war, and had the resources there not been diverted to the Iraqi sideshow, none of this might have happened. Karzai was never a true partner in the war because we simply never let him be. He's been treated as a non-factor in his own country and now he's becoming the 21st century's Ngo Dinh Diem.

Because of the lack of force on the ground, NATO has had to overly rely on air power to keep the Taliban at bay. Unfortunately, bombing tends to kill as many or more innocent civilians as it does bad guys. And as the historian Gwynne Dyer has said on the topic, "killing someone's relatives tends to upset them." The reliance on air power may in fact be producing as many insurgents as it kills.

As the president of a nominally sovereign state, this has been politically damaging for Kazai. One of the primary things that any electorate expects from its leaders is the avoidance of bombing. Karzai can't give this to his electorate, although, in fairness, no Afghan can.

Then came last year's contested presidential election, which the international community, and the United States in particular, raced to involve itself in. The Americans, who have a difficult enough time holding elections in Florida and Minnesota, demanded the impossible: a corruption-free Afghanistan.

Corruption is a way of life in Afghanistan. It always has been and it always will. Most of the time we fail to understand that Afghanistan isn't even a country in the way the concept is usually understood. Rather, it is a collection of mutually antagonistic tribes that are enclosed by borders drawn to demonstrate that it isn't Pakistan, Iran or the former Soviet Central Asian Republics. That's the full extent of Afghanistan's statehood.

There are two constants in the history of experimenting with a strong central government in Afghanistan; it has always been imposed by foreigners, and it has always failed. In fact, the longest period of Afghan peace and stability was under the reign of King Mohammed Zahir Shah, who was little more than a figurehead of national unity, while the work of governance was done at the provincial and tribal levels.

The 1973 communist coup against King Zahir Shah upended that arrangement and the country never recovered from it. The centralized control imposed by Moscow disintegrated into civil war and has more recently been replaced by centralized control imposed by Washington. Except Washington isn't as good at it as Moscow was and the country started falling apart again within four years of its liberation from the Taliban.

The United States has never really known anything about Afghanistan. It was surprised by the Christmas 1979 Soviet invasion, and the anti-Soviet jihad that the CIA funded was ultimately controlled by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence agency. After 9/11, the Bush administration bought the loyalty of assorted Uzbek and Tajik war criminals and drug dealers who served as an American proxy army and, later, as the de-facto government of Afghanistan.

What the Bush and Obama administrations never seemed to understand is that the Afghan people are almost afraid of Uzbek monsters like Abdul Rashid Dostum as they are of the Pashtun Taliban. Meanwhile, truly frightening people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who will likely play a significant role in a post-NATO Afghanistan, allied themselves with the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Karzai is so furious at being ignored and having the institutionalized corruption in his government by the Obama administration, that he is asserting his independence from Washington and has begun negotiating with Hekmatyar, although his Hezb-i-Islami faction are Islamists of the first order. That isn't of great importance at this point, since Washington increasingly sees a deal with Hekmatyar as an honourable way out of Afghanistan by President Obama's 2011 deadline.

Much more important is Karzai's continuing shift toward India, which has an agenda of its own in Afghanistan. It's only when you understand that, that you truly begin the real war in Afghanistan. And that's a war that has real implications for the West as a whole, but has been ignored for thirty years now.

For over a century, Afghanistan was ground zero in what became known as the Great Game, a battle for influence between Britain and Russia in Central Asia. Central Asia was the pathway for both powers to England's highly strategic Indian colony. The British wanted to protect it at all costs, and the Russians more than anything wanted to encroach on it. Neither side won, thus making Afghanistan "the graveyard of empires."

Although the players have changed, the Great Game continues in Afghanistan. This time, India and Pakistan are battling to influence the strategically important Afghanistan.

Most Americans believe that the Afghan terror-training camps were established to strike the United States, which isn't exactly true. After the anti-Soviet jihad, the Islamists, allied as always with Pakistan, sought to liberate Indian occupied Kashmir. It isn't a coincidence that instances of terrorism in Kashmir skyrocketed in 1990, just as the Soviets were completing their withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Pakistan always viewed Afghanistan as their "strategic depth." In the event of an invasion from their much larger Indian enemy, the Pakistanis figured that they could retreat into Afghanistan and fight the Indians from there. That's why the ISI fought the Soviet occupation as much as they did. Any Soviet threat to Islamabad could be easily contained by Pakistan's allies, China. But the occupation of Afghanistan by the Indian-friendly Soviets threatened Pakistan's strategic depth philosophy.

The Carter and Reagan administrations meanwhile managed to convince themselves that arming Islamist terrorists was somehow "fighting for freedom," rather than enabling Pakistani military contingencies against India. Afghanistan was never a vital interest to the United States. However, it is to Pakistan what Canada and Mexico are to America.

The United States and NATO don't understand this, but Karzai does, which is why he's been involved in a rhetorical war with Pakistan since assuming office in 2002. The Karzai government has welcomed tens of millions of dollars of Indian aid and hundreds of infrastructure contractors that they West would be strategically better off providing. Karzai has also allowed New Dehli to establish a long string of consular offices along the Pakistani frontier. The Taliban, almost certainly aided and directed by the ISI, has responded by attacking Indian contractors and diplomats at every opportunity, murdering scores of them.

Unsurprisingly, India is arguing for a continued NATO presence in Afghanistan, since that protects their interests. While Afghan-based jihadis might attack the United States from time to time, their primary purpose is the liberation of Kashmir's Muslim population from Hindu India's occupation.

It's hard to argue with the Jihadist argument as it relates to Kashmir. In the aftermath of India's 1947 independence and partition, the United Nations called for a plebiscite in Kashmir that would allow them to decide their own future. The Kashmiris could decide to join India, join Pakistan, or achieve outright independence.

New Dehli, understanding that the majority Muslim Kashmiris would never willingly become part of India and sees Pakistani annexation or independence as strategic threats, has refused to allowed any Kashmiri referendum for over 60 years. Indian security services have also employed tactics in their zone of control that come uncomfortably close to genocide.

Unless and until the Kashmir issue is resolved, which would likely create the conditions necessary for a peace treaty between india and Pakistan, Afghanistan is always to going to have a Jihadist presence that will at least threaten the West. Pakistan will continue to rely on its doctrine of strategic depth and sponsor anti-Indian (and, incidentally, anti-American) terrorists in Afghanistan until it has a reason not to.

That's where the Bush administration wasted a magnificent opportunity. In 2008, the United States decided to legitimize and reward New Delhi's nuclear weapons program, which was every bit as illegal as Iran's current program is. Sadly, Washington did this unconditionally, instead of linking the deal - which India desperately wanted - to some movement on a Kashmir settlement.
It was the worst strategic blunder in American foreign policy in decades, worse than even the Iraq war. India has had its weapons program legitimized, it continues to expand its influence in Afghanistan, and it is more intransigent than ever on the Kashmir question, upon which Afghan peace ultimately relies.

Worse, it has increased Islamabad's paranoia regarding American intentions to unprecedented levels. Large segments of Pakistan's national security apparatus now sees the United States as little more than an agent of New Delhi. So long as that's the case, Islamabad will continue to support the Afghan Taliban as it fights their Pakistani cousins, rather than seeing the phenomenon as a trans-national Pashtun movement, which it actually is.

Central Asian Islamists barely know that New York City exists, let alone know how to find it on a map. They have no interest in attacking America once America leaves Afghanistan. But as long as Kashmir remains an issue, they will accept and welcome the support of Arab jihadi movements such as al-Qaeda that very much want to continue its war with the West.

Nothing will stabilize South and Central Asia as much as a Kashmir settlement. Once that happens, Afghanistan becomes nothing more than the sorry fighting ground of a civil war between illiterate ethnic factions it has been for centuries. It won't be a democracy and women are going to continue to be persecuted there, but those things are going to happen anyway. We can modernize their infrastructure, but we're dangerously deluded if we think that we can modernize the attitudes of an ancient civilization that doesn't want to be modernized.

Not only do Western policy makers not understand Afghan history and culture, they don't seem to want to. And that's okay. The West doesn't have a national security interest in girls being education, as admirable a goal as that might be. However, we do have an interest in defusing the geopolitical time-bomb that's ticking away in Central and South Asia.

Settling Kashmir is much more important than resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Shiite Iran is developing nuclear capability, in large part to counter the neighboring Sunni bomb Pakistan has to hedge the threat from Hindu India. If you eliminate Indo-Pakistani tensions, Iran might feel less threatened, although the continuing march to war by the United States and Israel isn't helping.

Just as we don't understand the part Kashmir plays in Afghanistan, we don't recognize how the Pakistani bomb concerns Iran, which in turn threatens Israel. An Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty might neutralize Hezbollah and Hamas, but it doesn't address Iran's security interests from the east, particularly given recent Pakistani-sponsored terrorist incidents against Iranian Baluchistan. Both China and Russia are seeking influence in Tehran, just as Kabul is moving toward Tehran and New Delhi to block Islamabad's security concerns.

Meanwhile, Washington, Brussels and Jerusalem are playing the Great Game blindfolded. We're fighting a war that we don't understand, and those wars rarely end well.