‘The Afghanistan Review’

A Juncture to Set the Policies Right,
an Opportunity to Redeem the Past Blunders

By: Sharif Ghalib
Toronto, January 2, 2008

The United States and NATO made an announcement, early last week, of conducting a broad review of operations in Afghanistan.

The announced review is largely perceived to have been stimulated by the persistent resurgent violence of considerable intensity across east and southern provinces, stemming from stepped-up cross-border subversive activities by the Taliban.

The upshot has led to increasing realisation among the US and NATO allies of the ferocity of the situation, and thus the need to re-examine their approach, to-date, toward the mission in the country.

“Insurgent violence is at its highest level in Afghanistan since U.S.-led forces ousted the Taliban after the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States. Suicide bombings, for example, have climbed 30 percent in some areas”, U.S. military has been quoted explaining reasons for the decision.

US officials further revealed that the review would encompass a wide range of the campaign by the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, even so, some officials also forewarned against drawing any parallel to that of the scale of last year’s sweeping review of the war in Iraq by the US.

As a matter of fact, a glance at the year-round declining security trend bestows a picture-perfect justification for the re-examination of the situation, as a great many within and outside Afghanistan hold the perception that the country stands at a tipping point.

However, irrespective of its scale and scope, the real utility and efficacy of any review would solely rest upon the genuine intents by the international community to redress some of its fundamentally flawed approach toward the situation.

Yes, there is an unequivocal common recognition of the ceaseless Taliban insurgency and cross-border terrorist onslaughts across large swaths in the sought and east of the country, as much has been said about it as the existing external factor which continues to account for much of the feeble state of security. Notwithstanding there are also an awful lot of other factors in terms of the approach by the international community with nexus to different fronts, which have contributed to the exacerbation of the overall situation demanding a change of course now.

Above and beyond all else comes the notorious role played by the Pakistani Junta and the ISI. For almost four decades now, Pakistan has been engaged in outright state-sponsored campaign of subjugation in Afghanistan through relentless, unremitting and unabated pursuit of an aggressive and interventionist policy shrouded with systematic and flagrant lies, deception, cheating, falsification, perversion and distortion of the plain facts and realities to the Pakistani public and to the international community as a whole, guised by an ostensible dilemma, all naively aimed at acquiring a ‘strategic depth’ against likelihood of a war with the neighbouring India.

The subversive recourse adopted as a means for achieving the stated objective, at times creeping in nature, became fully naked and out in the open after 1994 when the Taliban mercenaries crafted by Pakistan’s military intelligence under the stated ‘demographic and geographic interests’, blatantly touted by the recently over-night-turned-plain clothes-Musharraf, were dispatched into Afghanistan along with scores of Pakistani paramilitary units and ex-army officers.

However, the wishful ‘strategic depth’ dogma pursued by Musharraf Junta not only failed to materialize in Afghanistan, but in fact miserably miscarried, backfired and ended in fiasco as Pakistan itself started to being gradually bogged down into terrorism and anarchic frenzy, which manifested itself in full swing with the latest assassination of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister and the chairperson of Pakistan Peoples party, Benazir Bhutto.

Forty years on, today, whilst Afghanistan has survived the utter cruelty and sheer brutality in the hands of a sadistic neighbour, who sought to turn a proud Muslim nation already preyed upon, in vein, by a Super Power, suffering gruesome human toll with manifold maimed and handicapped, immeasurable collateral and material damage and millions in refugees, into subservience, Pakistan for its part -- thanks to the short-sighted, egocentric, self-centered and tactless Junta and the ISI -- now bears witness to the near end-results of that grotesquely erroneous doctrine. The disquieting situation in which Pakistan is being gripped -- scoffingly dubbed by many as a ‘strategic ditch’ -- is the virtual translation of Pakistan’s chronic wrongful policies vis-à-vis Afghanistan, let alone the deep-seated resentment and indignation Pakistan has earned amongst all ethnic groups of Afghanistan as a nation, whom otherwise could have been seen as a fraternal neighbour of strong historical bonds.

With a view to the above, the time is ripe for the international community to re-visit its rules of engagement with Pakistan over Afghanistan. Six straight years into the peace process in Afghanistan, it is simply preposterous if the international community still chooses to go on with its perpetuated appeasement policy toward Pakistan, for whatever reason, and turn a blind eye to the physical infrastructure, recruiting and training centers and hideouts of terrorism within its territory, and the steady flow of logistical and organizational support it provides to the insurgency.

Enough has been said of the resurgence of militancy in Afghanistan and of Musharraf’s correlating intriguing posturing over the past six years. Let’s call a spade a spade. The root cause of the dragging problems in Afghanistan lies in Pakistan, as repeatedly spelled out by President Karzai. And the Pakistani Junta remains overtly complicit by playing both the fire fighter and the arsonist. No more and no less.

Pakistani Junta must realize that the ‘strategic depth’ dashing pipe dream in Afghanistan is an imperative of the past as the prospects of the phantom war with India, for that matter, seem inconceivable. Besides if the Talibanization of Afghanistan is to serve containment of the domestic religious and nationalist backlash within Pakistani society, as occasionally implied, it no longer presents the rationale for the stance, for the most part because Pakistan have both the ultra religio-nationalist phenomena already at its doorsteps as a boomerang, which would have to be recognized as tangible ground realities and managed within the context of regional and global cooperation. Furthermore, if the current line of policy to destabilize Afghanistan is having to do with the border dispute over the Durand Line, then the two countries must demonstrate mutual sincerity, political maturity and gusts to convene serious negotiations under the supervision of international community and through holding referendum and/or national plebiscite in their respective nations aimed at bringing the issue to a peaceful resolution.

That said, Pakistan has been generously given the benefit of the doubt over its activities in Afghanistan for decades, and clearly the time has come that the international community must deal with Pakistan firmly and resolutely and make the Junta halt its overt and covert support for the insurgency in Afghanistan, end the cross-border militant incursions, and verifiably dismantle all terrorist camps inside Pakistan once and for all. Otherwise, as President Karzai emphatically has said time and again, the international community must take the war to the actual sources of terrorism.

Secondly, the selective mindset and duplicitous methodology with which the international community behaves toward the very dynamics of the political set up and the overall process would have to change.

Six years into the process, it has become obvious now that the widely perceived politically motivated term ‘war lord’ having been frantically used, over-used, misused, abused, you name it, has lost meaning and vitality in the eyes of the nation. The application of the term, apart from the random individual manipulation against political opponents, at times has made its way to derisiveness whereby Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and certain government officials, for one reason or another, are all on the record conveniently finding common ground with the term while referring to particular political opponents.

With much of the security situation in shambles, the international community has reached a critical juncture to come to terms with realities and let go of the double standard and duality, open up and embrace an inclusive, balanced and all-encompassing approach toward all moderate peaceful political forces across Afghanistan. In this context, the international community must recognize it joined the theatre of the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan in late 2001, virtually half a decade after it had started and was being waged in full swing by the indigenous Afghan national resistance forces comprising all ethnic groups of the country single-handedly and with enormous sacrifices.

The international community must rise to the opportunity, now and before it is too late, and reach out to all the forces, those loyal to the government, to the constitution and the overall process, willing and capable to render their spontaneous and sincere services as part of the methodical state apparatus and in the spirit of national unity to sway, motivate, and rally the general public around the democratically-elected government of President Karzai, aimed at improving the situation and breaking the prevailing vicious cycle of terror and violence against the people of Afghanistan and providing conducive environment for the vital rehabilitation, reconstruction and development of the county to continue. Make no mistake the process has already attracted enough enemies, left and right, and we need not further alienation and poking many more to turn enemies.

Thus it is time that the international community must move beyond the erstwhile chapter of ‘war lords’ and a part from the real war lords bring into focus rather other lords; the squanderers of donor funds to the helpless people of Afghanistan, the embezzlers of development projects’ accounts and finances and the plunderers of public wealth and property, the lords of drugs and of the scandalous rampant corruption within the government. The pretentious self-defined pundits whom, having spent six years, are yet out of touch with their people and the core realities of the country and who always tend to be a party to the recycled distractive inter-ethnic and sectarian squabble detrimental to the national unity and the strategic well-being of the county. The bellicose revisionists who opt for bridging 4-decades of history in Afghanistan through attempts to create rift and wedge amongst the people along ethnic, linguistic and regional lines vying for political expediency, while at times even blaming President Karzai for alleged soft-handedness against their select targets. Deeds that run utterly counter to the very stipulations enshrined in the country’s adopted constitution and indeed to the essence of the collective efforts by the international community for a democratic, indivisible and pluralistic Afghanistan.

And finally, the international community must re-assess its posturing and the conduct of policy with respect to expanding the physics of the political structure in Afghanistan.

The international community must work cohesively and in close collaboration with the government of Afghanistan including the country’s elected parliament, with due transparency, in its bid to pursue negotiations with all those rank and file combatants, who are willing and ready to lay down their arms, break with their past and come to political fold in good faith and without any pre-conditions, pledging allegiance to Afghanistan’s constitution in its entirety, with the sole aspiration to re-integrate into the society and pursue a peaceful life.

The international community must strictly adhere to its commitments and obligations to the inviolability of the sovereignty of the elected government of Afghanistan and the sanctity of its constitutional duties before the Afghan nation in dealing with the state affairs.

Deal-makings and resort to extra-territorial practices modeled on obsolete, démodé and anachronistic formulations -- at odds with the statehood of the country and inconsistent with the geo-political and socio-strategic realities of the present-day Afghanistan -- would only lead to the loss of faith of the people in the government and erosion of the legitimacy of the system.

Let’s be mindful of the fact that after all we are living in the 21st Century, the epoch of social and political consciousness of the masses and nations, as contemporarily bore witness to the historic paradoxes from the former Soviet Union to the Balkans.

Indeed the situation in Afghanistan requires a review. But a review must sanction fresh perspectives and altered modus operandi so as to lead us to the desired end.

End.

Sharif Ghalib served at the UN for ten years, and was the first Afghan diplomat to negotiate the establishment of full bilateral diplomatic and consular relations between Afghanistan and Canada at resident-embassy level. He opened the Embassy of Afghanistan in Ottawa in late 2002 and served as the country’s Charge d’Affaires, a.i., and Minister Counselor until 2005.

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