By Arif Rafiq
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the plight of the Afghan woman was a minor, but important part of the narrative that shaped the US-led war in Afghanistan. Girls, for the first time in years, headed to schools, and women — at least in Kabul — were able to move without the blue shuttlecock burqas that symbolised their bondage under the Taliban.
So it is with great irony that this week, one of the worst ever for coalition forces in Afghanistan, foreigners were killed in Kabul by a suicide bomber who was neither male nor linked to the Taliban. The perpetrator was a young woman affiliated with the Hezb-i-Islami (HIG) militant group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a bitter foe of the Taliban and former US proxy who on 9/11 was self-exiled in Iran.
The pragmatic Hekmatyar is a weather vane, indicating the trajectory of conflict in Afghanistan and the ever shifting domestic and regional power game. His role in the Sept 18 bombing shows that the insurgents have the upper hand, their fight against the United States and Kabul government will continue, and Afghanistan is headed toward a messy, full-scale civil war.
Hekmatyar is the ultimate hedger. During the 1990s, he was at one point taking cash from both Iran and Pakistan. Today, his group is allied with his former Taliban enemies and is back in cahoots with the Pakistanis — it continues to dominate Pakistan’s Shamshatoo refugee camp and operates freely in Peshawar — after having been dumped by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence for the Taliban in the mid-1990s. Yet, out of all the insurgent groups, HIG has been most inclined to negotiate with Kabul. It in fact has a prominent network of fellow travellers in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet, a network consisting of people who have left Hekmatyar’s branch of Hezb-i-Islami but still speak of him with reverence. A leading HIG negotiator now says that the peace talks are dead. And in a small-scale but ominous reminder of the chaotic intra-mujahideen war of the 1990s, recently HIG fighters have led so-called local uprisings against the Taliban. Warlordism still rules.
What’s in store for Afghanistan is more war. The most perilous scenario is a renewed, full-fledged civil war — total conflict with every faction for itself. Many, including people in Kabul, Washington, Islamabad and Rawalpindi, will be responsible for the carnage that could follow. But it is indisputable now that the Obama administration’s once-vaunted “AfPak” strategy is a massive failure.
Osama bin Laden is, of course, dead. His killing and the rescue of General Motors were crudely displayed together at the Democratic National Convention as President Barack Obama’s greatest achievements. A vigilant drone campaign has depleted Al Qaeda’s core. Many commanders have fled for greener pastures in the Arab heartland, where the next great jihad could begin.
But the jihad in South Asia continues despite the Obama campaign’s celebratory chants. Al Qaeda affiliates and partner groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan — including the Haqqani network and a variety of Pakistani Taliban groups — remain resilient. The region is on fire, and growing instability creates a potential habitat for groups that will challenge regional security and, perhaps down the road, past the current US election cycle, the American homeland.
Beyond Al Qaeda, the US president has achieved little of strategic importance in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is incorrect, if not disingenuous, when he says that the Taliban’s momentum has been “blunted.” The Taliban’s spear is sharp as ever. Last week, on September 14, it cut through Camp Bastion, one of the most secure foreign bases in Afghanistan. There, in a complex attack that cost $10,000 or $20,000 at most, it destroyed six jets valued at up to $180m. The ratio of cost to achievement of the $100bn-a-year war in Afghanistan is indefensible, though it must be said that the president, with his emphasis on “nation-building here at home,” recognises this uncomfortable fact.
The US surge is over. All troops brought into Afghanistan after December 2009 will have returned home by the end of this week. But the Taliban surge has just begun. Attacks on coalition forces by Afghan security personnel — the Taliban are responsible for a small, but probably growing number of these — are on the rise. The Taliban reintegration campaign — designed to bring low-level Taliban into the fold — is working, but in an unintended way, with the penetration of the Afghan security forces by Taliban infiltrators.
The local militias raised by coalition forces and Kabul are a motley of opportunistic, quasi-jihadi criminals on temporary leave. The training programme has been put on hold due to the rising green-on-blue attacks. The most crucial element of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy — the transition of control to Afghan security forces — has been effectively suspended with the pause in joint coalition-Afghan operations.
And what of Afghanistan’s civilians? The country’s weakest are perilously vulnerable. Recall this past winter, when young children froze to death in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Kabul, just miles from the “splendors” (iced lattes, expensive carpets, child sex slaves, and more) enjoyed by Kabul’s overnight millionaires and war-contractor expats. Afghan officials responded only after being shamed by New York Times reports on the spate of dying children. Meanwhile, in Helmand and Kandahar provinces — the heart of Obama’s surge — nearly 30pc of children suffer from acute malnutrition. They and thousands of IDPs are the invisible faces of this surge, lost amid the president’s indifference and the callous selfishness of Afghanistan’s power elite.
Neighbouring Pakistan has been both victim and culprit in this debacle. Pakistan’s historical support of jihadists — a lot that murders American, Afghan and Pakistani civilians and soldiers — has pushed the country toward strategic death. The generals in Rawalpindi are morally responsible for this cancer that is eating Pakistan from within and threatens its neighbours. And this is well-known. What few recognise, however, is the massive destabilising impact of continued conflict in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Millions have fled violence in Pakistan’s northwest, contributing to thousands of Pashtun migrants pouring into Karachi, settling in informal settlements in the crowded megacity, and putting its ethnic, economic and political fault lines under great stress. Since 2008, thousands have died in ethnic and political violence in Karachi, and the number grows every year. Obama’s war is not the sole contributor to Karachi’s ethnic violence, but it is an unrecognised cause of its uptick.
Remarkably, a president who ran on campaigning that Afghanistan was the good war and that Pakistan was an even greater challenge has been inattentive to these two wars. There is a noticeable absence of presidential leadership and resolve. The ambitious surge announced in 2009 was time-limited, telegraphing to the Taliban that they just had to outlast limited American patience. The next year, the Obama administration downgraded its goals for Afghanistan.
Wp-bloomberg
