It fails to take into account the complexity of the Afghan situation – and is reminiscent of the Soviet justification for prosecuting an unsuccessful war in Afghanistan in the 1980s.
The Soviets rationalised invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, saying that they were fighting ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘terrorists’. However, on February 25, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev finally described the Soviet adventure, begun in late December 1979, as a ‘bleeding wound’, signalling that the then USSR was involved in an unwinnable war. Even so, it took another three years for him to withdraw the forces and accept a humiliating defeat.
Two decades later, the US and its NATO and non-NATO allies, with some 150,000 troops on the ground – 50 per cent more than the Soviets ever deployed – face a similar predicament in Afghanistan.
They have not lost the war, but they are nowhere near achieving their original goal of transforming Afghanistan into a stable, secure and democratic state. Afghanistan continues to suffer from poor governance, corruption, ethnic, tribal and sectarian divisions and a narco-economy.
Interference by its neighbours, especially Pakistan, elements of whose powerful military intelligence agency (ISI) continue to support the Taliban, has also enabled the Taliban insurgency to strengthen and expand.
The security situation has never been worse since the inception of the US-led intervention nearly nine years ago. Even the capital, Kabul, is subject to periodic horrific suicide and car/truck bombings and frequent kidnappings and killings.
Meanwhile, the strategy pursued by the US and its allies has proved deeply inadequate. President Barack Obama’s population-centric strategy is to protect the Afghan people in main urban centres.
But it has so far failed to make the majority of Afghan people warm to the government in Kabul – or to its international backers.
Many Afghans view the presence of foreign forces as supporting President Hamid Karzai’s corrupt and dysfunctional government rather than making a difference to the life of ordinary Afghans, most of whom are still poverty-stricken.
Together with the fact that the NATO allies are actively looking for an exit strategy sooner rather than later, this has generated a political-strategic vacuum that the Taliban and their supporters have exploited.
They have been able to widen their circle of recruitment, especially among fellow ethnic Pashtuns.
The militia and its associates feel so confident now that they have no good reason to respond positively to Karzai’s policy of reconciliation and selective power sharing – a policy that is strongly endorsed by the US and its allies, despite the repeated condemnation of the Taliban as a terrorist group.
As far as the Taliban leadership is concerned, time is on their side and power will be theirs sooner or later.
Despite all this, Afghanistan is not terrorism central as the Australian government and many of its Western counterparts claim when justifying continuing the mission in Afghanistan.
Whatever the heinous nature and methods of their opposition, the Taliban, or for that matter their closely associated groups – the Hezbi Islami of the former maverick Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalalludin Haqani network – have not evidently engaged in any act of terrorism outside the Afghan theatre of conflict.
The movement’s links with al-Qaeda do not appear to be strong any longer either.
The CIA director announced recently that no more than 50-100 al-Qaeda operatives exist in Afghanistan. Surely, this is not a number that could warrant the level of military activity in which the US and its allies have engaged in Afghanistan.
The fact is that it is neighbouring Pakistan that has been the main actual and inspirational source of Muslim extremism and terrorism in south Asia.
The country not only has its own growing Taliban movement and other extremist groups, but has also nurtured the Afghan Taliban.
The ISI was originally instrumental in forging an alliance between al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. This was all part of a strategy to use radical Islamism as an instrument of foreign policy in promoting Pakistan’s regional influence over India and Iran.
If Australia and its Western allies want to fight terrorism emanating from Afghanistan, it is imperative for them to focus more on Pakistan militarily than on Afghanistan. What Afghans need most is structural political reforms, institution building, a relevant ideology of national unity and reconstruction to provide them employment and improved living conditions, and therefore human security.
It would be the best way to contain the Taliban’s resistance.
Amin Saikal is professor of political science and director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University.
This article was first published here by The Age.
Professor Saikal describes the case for Australia’s staying the course in Afghanistan as ‘flimsy at best’. Responding to the death of another Australian soldier, Prime Minister Gillard recently said that we needed to stay the course to prevent another Bali bombing. This is a good example of that flimsiness. The first Bali bombing took place on 12 October 2002, about twelve months after the Taliban had been overthrown. Of all the participants in that bombing, I have found only one, the late Dr Azhari, who trained in Afghanistan when the Taliban were in power. He attended a short, al-Qaeda-run course in Kandahar in 2000, and seems to have had almost no contact there with the Taliban. As far as I know, all the other participants were trained in either Pakistan or Afghanistan before the Taliban came to power and indeed even before the movement was born. Noordin Top was never in Afghanistan. The man the Prime Minister should be condemning as the facilitator of the Bali bombing is the anti-Taliban MP and former warlord, Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who was reportedly the target of an assassination attempt last year. Abdullah Sungkar, Jemaah Islamiyah’s founder, forged an agreement with the Arabic-speaking Sayyaf (whose name was later adopted by the Philippine terrorist movement), for Indonesians to undergo military training at his facilities, particularly his academy in Pakistan’s Kurram agency. It was the mujahidin resistance to Afghanistan’s communist government and its Soviet patrons, resistance supported by the US, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, that paved the way to the Bali bombing.
Professor Saikal states that,
“They have not lost the war, but they are nowhere near achieving their original goal of transforming Afghanistan into a stable, secure and democratic state”
My question is: by what criteria are we measuring a “win” or “loss” in Afghanistan?