The Afghanistan of today remains a nightmare.

Since Soviet withdrawal in 1989 and the collapse of its protégé regime in 1992, three different ideological groups have laid claim to rule consecutively: Islamist Mujahideen, who humbled the Soviet power with the full support of the US and its allies; the Taliban, who marginalised the Mujahideen and established their own savage theocratic rule with the weight of a US ally, Pakistan, behind them; and the so-called democrats under the leadership of Hamid Karzai, who came to power shortly after the US-led intervention.

The Karzai government has been propped up and maintained by the US and its allies ever since. With the injection of some 150,000 foreign troops, thousands of non-military personnel and billions of dollars spent on security, governance and the reconstruction of Afghanistan, even some senior American officials on the ground now admit that there is no certainty about the future. As one has put it, ‘the glass is half empty’ and ‘everything is reversible.’ Why is this so?

Lying at the heart of the problem is that both the Afghan state and society have become corrupt and dysfunctional.

After nine years in office now, President Karzai, once a figure of hope, is set to go down in history as an ineffective leader. His repeated promises to improve governance and the rule of law, enhance democratic practices and institutionalise politics, bring about economic and social development, and minimise corruption and heal Afghanistan’s divisions have all failed.

In order to remain in power Karzai has promoted the politics of patronage, nepotism, corruption and disregard for the rule of law. He has aided, protected and enriched a circle of family members and cronies to secure a dominant share in the political and business spheres. He has not hesitated to violate the Constitution and the law for his own ends. This has included personal intervention to secure the release of jailed corrupt officials and criminal figures, and pandering to strongmen — popularly referred to as ‘warlords’ — useful to him, as in the 2009 rigged presidential election.

Ethnic identity and division have always been an issue in Afghanistan. But the issue has never been as pervasively politicised as it is today, thanks to Karzai’s aims of dividing his political opponents.

Afghanistan’s largest ethnic cluster is Pashtun, about 42 per cent of the Afghan population. The remaining population is composed of various non-Pashtun groups. Karzai and many of his cohorts are Pashtuns. So are the Taliban, although they belong to a rival tribe. Whilst the non-Pashtun groups have remained largely peaceful, the current conflict is essentially an inter-Pashtun struggle between the Karzai government, and its foreign backers, and the Taliban, supported by Pakistan.

Karzai cultivated Hazara leaders for manipulative purposes, but this has now generated a serious impasse for him. He now views with great trepidation the rising power of the Hazaras (about 10 per cent of the population) and some other non-Pashtun ethnic groups, especially the Panjshiris. The latter played a critical role in US operations to topple the Taliban regime. One of their leading figures, Dr Abdullah, emerged as the main challenger to Karzai in the 2009 presidential election. Karzai is now particularly perturbed by the non-Pashtuns’ capturing of almost two-thirds of the Lower House seats in the September 2010 parliamentary elections.

Following the election, he engaged in all kinds of devices, including intimidating the Independent Election Commission (whose head has been Karzai’s appointee) by seeing that members of the Commission were arrested for fraud, and requesting the Supreme Court set up a Special Court to examine the election results. Karzai’s likely objective is to either stack the numbers of his fellow, compliant Pashtuns in the Lower House; or declare null and void the results of the election, funded to the tune of $150 million by the US and some of its allies.

Karzai has stressed the importance of maintaining an ethnic balance in the parliament as justification for his maneuverings, but many regard this to be highly anti-democratic. Under domestic and international pressure, he finally opened the new parliament on 20 January 2011, but maneuverings have not stopped. Karzai’s high-handed politicisation of ethnicity has sharpened ethnic divisions more than ever. Now even his own ministers in cabinet meetings operate and gather in ethnic groups, with little concern for cabinet solidarity and national unity.

And now Karzai is desperately keen to bring on board some key Taliban and their supporters, and to pursue a policy of underhanded dealings with Islamabad, to support his failing presidency.

There is no question that the Obama administration will start scaling down US forces from mid-2011. The administration can no longer afford it. US allies are set to follow suit. Washington has come to the same conclusion as Moscow did more than two decades ago: it is involved in an unwinnable war.

But the Karzai government shows no capacity to handle Afghanistan by itself, even if the Taliban insurgency is quelled. Afghanistan is in mortal danger of breaking up into various feuding ethnic enclaves, with the country’s neighbours backing such groups in pursuit of their conflicting interests. Afghanistan’s future looks extremely bleak, possibly worse than that of Iraq. The US and its allies inherited a mess that is Afghanistan and may leave it as such at the cost of more misery and bloodshed for the Afghan people.

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 and author of Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006).

This is an abridged version of an article  published in The Canberra Times and The Age.

1. Afghanistan: what way forward?
2. Afghanistan: a British nightmare?
3. Afghanistan: It is time for Karzai to step down

The war in Afghanistan is not only unwinnable, it is the wrong war.

Australia’s military involvement in Afghanistan has become the most costly foreign policy action since the Vietnam War. With 17 soldiers killed already and about 150 wounded – many of them crippled for life – as well as billions of dollars spent, the government’s rationale, supported by the opposition, that we must stay on course there to defeat terrorism is flimsy at best.

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.

1. Pakistan risks ethnic strife
2. The battle for Pakistan
3. Afghanistan: what way forward?

The battleground for President Barack Obama to fight al-Qaeda and its supporters in the Muslim world is wider than that his predecessor faced. Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq are no longer the only main fronts. Added to them are Somalia and Yemen, where al-Qaeda has gained unprecedented strength. The President says he will use all elements of American power to deal with the situation, but what are the implications of this for his desire to improve relations with the Muslim world?

The Afghanistan conflict has now become Obama’s war. He has promoted it as morally right, justifying his recent decision to boost American troop deployment from 68,000 to 100,000, as part of an early exit strategy. Yet he seems to be cognisant of the fact that to achieve this objective, the nuclear armed but volatile Pakistan needs to be transformed from a source of extremism and terrorism into a sustainable, stable democratic state.

Both Afghanistan and Pakistan suffer from corrupt governance. Without dealing with this problem, which will need to be largely on the basis of structural domestic reforms rather than interventionist diplomacy, Obama will not be able to achieve much in the short run. Neither the Afghan Government of Hamid Karzai nor its Pakistani counterpart under Asif Ali Zardari command sufficient popular support, military resources or loyalty to engage in anything more than cosmetic changes.

The same goes in varying degrees for three other al-Qaeda hot spots: Iraq, Somalia and Yemen. Although the level of violence has declined in Iraq over the past two years, its Government is far from having the capacity to maintain Iraq’s viability beyond the scheduled American troop withdrawal from mid-year.

The underlying ethnic and sectarian tensions between the Shiite majority and the Sunni and Kurdish minorities in Iraq remain a major threat to the country’s future, and have allowed al-Qaeda and its supporters to strengthen their presence – as evidenced by a sharp rise in massive bomb blasts that have shaken the country.

The Obama leadership will not be able to resolve this situation in a short time – and still maintain America’s vital interests in the oil-rich but politically volatile Middle East – unless the President opts for a longer-term military presence in Iraq and abandons his policy of early troop withdrawal.

That brings us to Somalia and Yemen. Somalia has no effective government and the Islamic movement of al-Shabab, which has links to al-Qaeda, seems to be gaining strength by the day.

The US intervened in Somalia in the early 1990s in the wake of the collapse of the pro-Soviet government of Said Barri, but withdrew humiliated a short time later. Somalia suffers from such a power vacuum that neither the US nor its NATO allies would want to send troops into the country again. The best they can do is to work through proxy counter-terrorism activities, which cannot be an effective method of transforming Somalia into a stable state.

Yemen shares the same factor of weak and corrupt governance with the other four states. In addition, it offers two advantages for the forces of radical political Islam: Osama bin Laden has ancestral ties there, and Yemen’s difficult terrain provides protective cover for al-Qaeda. To move Yemen in the direction of moderate Islam and good governance would be a mammoth task.

These countries confront the Obama Administration with serious dilemmas. It has basically two options: to engage in wider counter-terrorism activities, or to intervene directly in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen in a fashion similar to that in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The US military is overstretched and simply does not have the capacity for the second option. At the same time, it is unlikely to prove effective in achieving state transformation.

The dilemma is that the more Obama widens America’s anti-terrorism operations, along with its direct involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq, the more it is likely to cause outrage in the Muslim world and to advantage the very forces that it wants to defeat or marginalise. This was precisely what former president George W. Bush’s so-called ‘war on terror’ did.

Such a development would do nothing to help Obama’s policy of reaching out to the Muslim world – a process he started with two promising speeches in Cairo and Istanbul last year. And with the Iranian nuclear and Palestinian problems also unresolved, he could risk taking America’s standing back to where it was under Bush.

This article first appeared here in The Age.

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.

1. Muslim organisations and governance reform in Indonesia
2. Indonesia and Obama: thinking past the honeymoon period
3. Obama, Islam, and Indonesia

One of the byproducts of the rigged presidential election in Afghanistan is a looming confrontation in the north of the country. If not defused urgently, it could cause greater security problems for the US and its allies than they have experienced so far.

The confrontation is shaping up rapidly between the governor of the Balkh province, General Atta Mohammad Nur, and supporters of President Hamid Karzai. It essentially stems from Atta breaking ranks with Karzai to support his leading opponent in the election, Abdullah Abdullah, his long-standing rivalry with General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek leader and ally of Karzai, and the Karzai leadership’s resolve to rein in and subordinate Atta to its authority.

Atta boasts a reputation as one of the credible mujahideen commanders against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and was a close ally of the legendary anti-Soviet and anti-Taliban commander,Ahmed Shah Masood, who was assassinated by al-Qaida agents two days before the tragic events of 11 September 2001. Following the US-led intervention eight years ago, Atta and Dostum joined forces to drive the Taliban out of the north, but soon their relationship fell apart as they engaged in a power rivalry, with Karzai eventually appointing Atta as the governor of Balkh. However, Atta, like many other former mujahideen commanders, has grown disillusioned with the Karzai government and its recently renewed alliance with Dostum for the purpose of winning the votes of Afghanistan’s Uzbek minority, despite the unsavoury character of the Uzbek warlord. Atta threw his weight behind Abdullah, which immediately drew the wrath of Karzai, and more importantly his interior minister, Mohammed Hanif Atmar, a former pro-Soviet communist whom Atta had fought during the Soviet occupation.

Atta has now accused Karzai and Atmar of deploying forces against him in the north and airdropping troops by helicopters in night flights. Karzai has admitted that armed men have been ferried by ‘unidentified’ helicopters. He promised an investigation – something that Atta has rejected, holding Karzai and Atmar responsible for the development.

Whatever the case, Atta is reasonably armed, with a popular based of support. He has the capacity to disrupt the northern routes of supply to Nato forces, and to do whatever it takes to defend his territory against the Karzai government, which since the fraudulent election of 20 August has no constitutional status. In this, he will have the support of a majority of people in northern Afghanistan, who have strongly voted for Abdullah. If Karzai is declared the winner of the election, the current standoff could easily result in a major bloody confrontation, with a widespread destablisation effect on the north, which has until recently been fairly peaceful.

The Atta episode is a microcosm of larger difficulties in a country where the state is very weak and society very strong – a society that is made up of numerous micro-societies and local power-holders or ‘strong men’, capable of challenging that authority of any central government. This is especially so if that government is viewed as illegitimate and a foreign puppet by a majority of the population.

So far most of the energy of the US and its allies has been focused on containing the Taliban insurgency in the south and east along the border with Pakistan, even though unsuccessfully. If the north falls apart, it would enormously benefit the ethnic Pashtun Taliban by default, as the non-Pashtun people of the north have all along been very hostile to the Taliban, given the militia’s brutal treatment of them during its rule from 1996 to 2001.

Under such circumstances, the US and its allies will have the whole country in revolt, which it will not be able to quell without massive troop deployment. Since a troop surge on a large scale is not on the cards – given the growing opposition to it in the troop contributing countries, Afghanistan faces an incredibly bleak future. To avoid a bigger disaster than it has had so far, it is critical for the international community to make sure that the outcome of the presidential election is the creation of a legitimate government that can attract the support of a cross-section of Afghanistan’s mosaic society.

The way forward may be to work for a government of national unity to include the Karzai and Abdullah camps, based on a common set of principles. Although Abdullah has thus far remained opposed to such a government, in the final analysis he may find it to be in the best interest of Afghanistan. Otherwise, all alternatives could only widen the massive political and strategic vacuum that the Karzai’s corrupt and inept rule has created in the last years. The Taliban have been the biggest winner from this vacuum up to this point, but may prove to be even more triumphant if Afghanistan continues to lack a credible government.

This article first appeared here in the Guardian.

1. The Afghan presidential elections: some scenarios
2. Afghanistan: It is time for Karzai to step down
3. Afghanistan: Unready for US exit

It is time for President Hamid Karzai to bow out gracefully, even if he is declared as the winner of last month’s election. His regime is tainted by allegations of corruption, maladministration and electoral fraud to the extent that he is no longer capable of leading Afghanistan for another term with an acceptable degree of legitimacy.

Karzai assumed power nearly eight years ago, with more national and international support than any previous Afghan ruler had enjoyed. The Afghan people had suffered from 24 years of warfare, bloodshed and devastation: the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, followed by internecine conflict among various Afghan warring groups and the Pakistan-backed medievalist Islamic rule of the Taliban in the 1990s. A majority of them desperately yearned for a constructive and effective national leader. The US-led intervention in response to the 11 September 2001 al-Qaida attacks on the US, resulting in the toppling of the Taliban regime and the instalment of an internationally backed administration under Karzai, provided a unique opportunity. The US and its allies invested very heavily in the new Afghan leader with an expectation that he would prove instrumental in working with them to generate the necessary conditions for democracy, stability and security – enabling the Afghans to rebuild their lives and their country.

Karzai has confounded the expectations. He has failed to open a new chapter in Afghan history in order to put the country on a stable course of change and development. Instead of discarding old political norms and practices, which had traditionally marred Afghanistan’s political evolution, he has reinforced them as a basis for ensuring his position. He has presided over the politics of patronage, based on nepotism, corruption and political favouritism. He has behaved, more or less, like a traditional tribal head rather than a forward-looking national leader. In the process, he has not been able to maintain the support of either his own ethnic Pashtun cluster, which forms some 42 per cent of the Afghan population and to which the Taliban belong, or the non-Pashtun ethnic groups in the country. Meanwhile, he has increasingly been at odds with the very international forces, especially the US and the UK, which have so far safeguarded his limited rule over Kabul and a few other parts of the country.

He won the presidential election of 2004 – the first of its kind in Afghan history – with 55 per cent of the vote, based on a voter turnout of 70 per cent. He could have used this popular mandate to build a clean, credible and functional administration and promote the causes of institutionalisation of politics rather than personalisation of politics, which had traditionally marred Afghanistan. Merit has figured little in his filling of key governmental positions. Family, tribal, ethnic and factional connections have been the order of the day. He has made no noticeable effort to generate a constructive working relationship between the executive and the parliament, and has done whatever it takes to manipulate the legislature and judiciary in support of his dysfunctional leadership and administration.

To win the 2009 presidential election, he has shown no moral qualms about engaging in opportunistic actions and stitching up alliances with unsavoury figures. His signing, shortly before the election, of a bill to empower Shia’ite men to refuse their wives food if they failed to have sex with them four nights a week was purely for electoral purposes. It was designed to please a particular Shia leader, Sheikh Mohammad Asif Mohseni, and to entice his supporters, who constitute a proportion of Afghanistan’s 15 to 20 per cent Shia population, to vote for him. Similarly, his alliances with a number of notorious warlords, such as a former defence minister, Mohammad Fahim, an Uzbek leader, Rashid Dostum, and a Pashtun strongman, and now governor of the eastern province of Nangarhar, Gul Agha Shirzai, have all been made for a similar reason. These men, together with some members of Karzai’s family, have been high on the lists of the international community for alleged corrupt practices and human rights violations. Yet Karzai has been willing to incur widespread criticisms in order to have them on his side.

While there is no evidence that Karzai had a direct hand in rigging last month’s election, there is plenty of evidence that intimidation, multiple voting and ballot box stuffing on the part of Karzai’s supporters were widespread – something that has now been confirmed by many international observers. A premature claim of victory by Karzai’s campaign chief, barely before any votes had been counted, gave an early indication that Karzai was in deep trouble in winning the election in the first round. The claim was made to cover up as quickly as possible Karzai’s disadvantage arising from the very low voter turnout in general (less than 40 per cent), and substantially so in the southern provinces where Karzai had hoped to do well among the Pashtun voters but could not – largely due to the Taliban’s threats.

It is not surprising that the US special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, reportedly raised the election irregularities with Karzai shortly after the poll, but only to be rebuffed at the cost of a further downturn in Karzai’s relations with the Obama Administration.
The Karzai leadership has proved to be very ineffective for a majority of the Afghan people and the international community, especially the US. Karzai will carve a better place for himself in history if he now leaves the field on his own accord, and allows a new leader and administration to take over. The change will not solve Afghanistan’s daunting problems in the short run, but it may help the processes of the country’s stabilisation and reconstruction in the long run.

This article first appeared here in the Guardian.

1. Afghanistan: Unready for US exit
2. Afghanistan after US withdrawal: Could Karzai seek a third term in office?
3. Afghanistan: what way forward?

General Sir David Richards, the incoming head of the British Army and former commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, has predicted that the British involvement in Afghanistan’s state and security building could last for another four decades. His comment, which comes at a time when the number of British troops killed and wounded has dramatically escalated and the domestic support for the Afghan war has evaporated, is bound to invoke further among the Afghans the bitter historical memory of British interferences in their country. This can only assist the Taliban and their supporters to reinforce their claim that the British have come once again to subjugate Afghanistan.

Of course, it was a strategic mistake from the start to deploy British troops in the hotbed of the Taliban insurgency in Helmand Province along the border with Pakistan. The Taliban could not have wished for a better nationality to fight than the British. It has provided them with a very effective propaganda tool to galvanise public support and enlarge their circles of recruitment.

The Pashtuns, who form the largest single ethnic cluster in Afghanistan, with extensive cross-border ties with Pakistan, and to whom the Taliban as well as President Hamid Karzai and many of his key ministers and administrators belong, have displayed a special distaste for the British in history. They have taken great pride in the claim that their ancestors bravely and gallantly foiled the British efforts in subjugating Afghanistan during their colonial rule of the Indian Sub-Continent. As enforced by successive Afghan political leaders, the Afghan population in general, and its Pashtun component in particular, hold a strong view of the British as cheaters, vacillators and conspirators, prepared to engage in any intrigues in order to promote their interests. Pashtun literature and folklore are full of stories painting the British as untrustworthy and adversarial to Islam, but glorifying the Afghan (primarily Pashtun) defeat of the British in the three famous Anglo-Afghan Wars in 1842, 1880 and 1919.

Exploiting this, the Taliban have been quite successful in impressing upon many of their compatriots that their ancestors had driven out the British in humiliation several times and that they must not now betray them by allowing the British to seek to reoccupy their homeland. As such, it is their religious and moral duty to join the fight against the British. Reportedly, many young Pashtuns, who form the bulk of the new generation of the Taliban, have heeded the call in increasing numbers. This is an ominous development for not only the British and their allies in the south, but also for the Hamid Karzai government, which the Taliban have dismissed as a stooge of the US.

It is not surprising that despite its dependence on foreign forces for its survival, the Karzai government’s relations with London have increasingly been quite recriminatory. On several occasions President Karzai has lashed out at the British for playing double games by publicly supporting his government on the one hand, and seeking to make secrete deals with various opposition groups, including the Taliban, on the other. In late 2007, when the report of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) listed Helmand Province as the largest producer of opium, Karzai asked the Head of the UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa, why the very province which was under the control of the British also produced the largest amount of opium in the country. There is a strong view within the Karzai administration that the British have pursued an approach of their own in the south; they have acted in line with the Afghan proverb that ‘they bang on the nail and the horse shoe at the same time’.

There is no question that the future of not only the British controlled Helmand, but Afghanistan as a whole, hang in the balance. Neither Britain nor, for that matter, the US and its other allies has so far come up with a strategy to put Afghanistan on a solid path of viable transformation. The Afghans’ – or more specifically the Pashtuns’ – distrust of the British has enormously helped the Taliban to draw on historical parallels to gain wider popular support for their cause.

It would have been far more appropriate if the forces of NATO countries other than Britain were deployed in the heartland of the Taliban. This is something to which NATO strategists need to pay serious attention. Otherwise, the British deployment against the Taliban within a Pashtun zone may well seriously undermine President Obama’s revised strategy in Afghanistan, which is now adopted by NATO, and thwart its goal of reducing the Taliban insurgency to a manageable level in the foreseeable future.

This article originally appeared here in the South Asia Masala.

1. Afghanistan: what way forward?
2. Afghanistan: Unready for US exit
3. Afghanistan: It is time for Karzai to step down

In regaining control of Mingora city in the Swat valley, the Pakistani military has proved to be capable of taking on the Taliban and giving them a bloody nose. The military’s success could put the Pakistani Taliban on the defensive and help expand Pakistan’s jurisdiction over some of the unruly areas of the Ofree tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan, and thus also deprive the Afghan Taliban of some support from Pakistan. However, by the same token the process could lead to a new dangerous phase in Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s quest for stability and security, unless it is accompanied by urgent structural reform of Pakistani and Afghan politics and social-economic landscapes.

Pakistan’s latest military success against the Taliban is encouraging. It has the potential to generate a great deal of optimism in Pakistan as well as Kabul and NATO’s capitals, especially Washington, which have repeatedly urged the Pakistani Government to take a tougher stand against its religious extremists.

This has been for the purpose of ensuring not only a stable democratic transformation of Pakistan, but also a speedy stabilisation and reconstruction of Afghanistan. However, there are two dimensions to the current Pakistani military operations which may backfire if they are not handled tactfully and effectively.

One is the humanitarian dimension. The operations have already resulted in hundreds of civilian casualties and the dislocation of some 2.5million people, creating a massive refugee problem. The Mingora city and its surroundings are badly damaged.

Even if Pakistan succeeds in rapidly reconstructing the areas and in rehabilitating their population, there will still be many long-term human, social and economic grievances on which the extremists could draw to maintain and strengthen their resistance in different forms.

Another is the ethnic dimension. The Pakistan army is dominated by Punjabis, who form the largest of the four main national groups in Pakistan. The other three are the Sindhis, Baluchis and Pathans, with the last one sharing extensive cross-border ties (and the second one less so) with Afghanistan.

Both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban belong to ethnic Pashtuns (who are also the largest cluster though not the majority of the population in Afghanistan). The Pakistani Pashtuns, together with the Baluchis, have historically viewed themselves as being exploited largely by the Punjabis and partly by the Sindhis. Their discontentment has led them from time to time to mount serious nationalist challenges to Pakistan for either greater autonomy or independence.

In this, they have occasionally been supported by outside forces, most importantly Afghanistan, which has disputed the Afghan-Pakistan border, drawn unilaterally by the British in 1893. During the Cold War, this position of Afghanistan was backed by the Soviet Union as part of a policy of forging close ties with Afghanistan and rebuffing the Pakistan-United States alliance.

Pakistan’s support of various Afghan Pashtun-dominated Islamic resistance groups (the Mujahideen) during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s produced a double effect. On the one hand, it sharpened the division between the Pashtun and non-Pashtun population of Afghanistan, which has become a perennial problem for the country.

On the other hand, it helped the growth in Pakistan of extreme Islamic groups, in close affiliation with their Afghan counterparts. Pakistan’s subsequent orchestration of the Taliban to take over Afghanistan amounted to another shot in the arm of Pashtun extremists on both sides of the border.

Although at the time Pakistan’s strategy was to export many of Pakistan’s extremists to Afghanistan as a way of diverting their energy from Pakistan, its strategy came unstuck when al-Qaeda, while harboured by the Taliban, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.

Whereas now the Afghan Taliban are locked in a bloody fight with the Karzai Government and its international backers, most importantly the US and its NATO and non-NATO allies, the Pakistani Taliban are confronted by Pakistan’s Punjabi-dominated military and Sindhi-led government. This has introduced a dangerously polarising ethnic element in the struggle. It has the potential to heighten cross-border Pashtun solidarity and nationalism.

This could easily encourage a similar development among the Baluchis, who also have very deep grievances against Pakistan for exploiting their rich mineral resources and land, brutally suppressing their nationalist demands, and not doing enough to improve their standard of living.

It is now important that Pakistani and Afghan offensives against the Taliban are immediately accompanied by such political and reconstruction steps that could entice the Pashtun populations of both countries into viable processes of national reconciliation and political as well as social and economic integration.

This would require serious changes in the political structures and policy direction of the two states as well as in the strategy of their international backers. They would need to engage in the type of policy actions that could persuade their Pashtun populations to divest themselves of any attraction that the extremist elements in their midst may provide them.

If they fail in this respect, the present conflicts in both countries carry the risk of taking on an ethnic dimension that could prolong their instability and insecurity for decades to come.

It is to this imperative that the Obama Administration will need to direct much of its attention and resources.

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 originally appeared in the Canberra Times on June 3.

1. Afghanistan: what way forward?
2. The West must tackle Pakistan to fight Taliban
3. Afghanistan: a British nightmare?

The region from Pakistan to Palestine to Egypt now constitutes the most volatile zone in world politics. The issues involved include the growing instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan, the out-of-control insurgency in Afghanistan, the nuclear ambitions of Iran, the imminent withdrawal of American forces from Iraq, the political fragmentation in Lebanon and the explosive Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

US President Barack Obama has promised to tackle all these issues, with an emphasis on diplomacy, confidence-building measures and friendship, predicated on mutual respect and interests.

However, the region has historically confounded expectations. One of the underlying reasons is the state-society dichotomy that has come to dominate the Muslim, especially Arab, constituent states of the region. Unless Obama comes up with a strategy that could reconcile his policies with this dichotomy, the chances of him succeeding would be at serious risk.

The choice that he has to make is to work with authoritarian regimes that could reinforce their position or to engage in policy actions that could empower the peoples of the region to determine their destiny free of internal tyranny and external hegemony.

The historical gulf between the rulers and the ruled has never been wider in the Muslim states of the region, although in some cases various devices, such as elections and legislative processes, have been deployed to conceal it.

All the rulers have come to power without any public contest and freedom of choice, although the Afghan, Pakistani and Iraqi leaderships, as well as the Iranian regime to some extent, have been able to forge more electoral legitimacy than others. As a result, the rulers have taken one policy direction and their subjects another, with the distance between them widening.

No recent examples have reflected this state of affairs more than the reaction of many Arab countries to Israel’s 2006 and 2008 assaults on Lebanon and Gaza respectively. While the Arab streets widely supported the resistance mounted by the militant Lebanese Hezbollah and its Palestinian counterpart, Hamas, most Arab regimes were not in accord with the sentiments of their publics.

This state-society dichotomy entails a serious challenge to Obama to reach out to Arab and Muslim peoples, and open the clinched fist of not only those few regimes that have grown hostile to the US, but also the ones that have had close relations with the US. The dilemma confronting Obama would be two-fold. One is that for a resolution of the regional problems he would need to rely on the regimes for their co-operation and therefore confirm legitimacy upon them. This is something that they would seize upon to strengthen their grip on their societies. The other is that if he seeks to respond to the wishes of Arab and Muslim societies in pursuit of empowering the people to determine their destiny, he would seriously risk losing the co-operation of the regimes, jeopardising his chances of making meaningful progress in solving various regional conflicts. The question then is what is to be done?

It is imperative for Obama to have a two-pronged strategy. On the one hand, he should engage the regimes for short-term objectives to settle regional disputes and stabilise the region from Pakistan to Palestine. On the other hand, he will need to design his processes of engagements and conflict resolution in ways that could pave the way for some long-term objectives: to move the regimes towards loosening their authoritarian control in pursuit of building and expanding the necessary basis for the growth of civil society and liberty as foundations for democracy.

However, Obama must not aim at replicating George Bush’s agenda for exporting democratisation as a means to change the region in the image of the US. That policy has already cost thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, denied Hamas its right to exercise power as the democratic choice of the Palestinian people, and therefore led the US to have contradictory dispositions in the region. In inducing dictatorial regimes to unclench their fists, he should use whatever diplomatic and economic means at his disposal to engender liberal changes from within those societies to meet the expectations of the people on the basis of their own traditions and cultures.

Beyond these, Obama may find himself with no choice but to restrain Israel from pursuing a policy of confrontation with the Palestinians and regional states as the basis for ensuring the security of the Jewish state. This requires a restructuring of the US-Israeli strategic partnership, which has too often made the US pursue a double standard policy in the Middle East: one for Israel and another for Arabs.

If Obama succeeds in cutting across the state-society dichotomy in the region, together with constraining Israel, he stands a reasonable chance of succeeding in his goal of reaching out to the Muslim world. Otherwise, he is at serious risk of being caught in the same complexities that marred the policies of his predecessors, especially George Bush.

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 piece originally appeared in The Age, March 9th, 2009.

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The US and several of its main NATO allies have now called for the lowering of any expectation of victory against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Despite Washington’s public opposition to negotiation with the Taliban as a terrorist group, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada, which also have sizable troop deployments in Afghanistan, have openly supported a negotiated settlement with the militia and backed President Hamid Karzai’s efforts in this respect as the best way to end the Afghan conflict. The Taliban have so far rejected Karzai’s overtures and demanded the departure of foreign forces as a precondition for any peace talks. However, there can be no meaningful negotiation with the Taliban unless first the Karzai government and its international backers reduce their vulnerabilities to the militia, especially in three areas.

Urgent priority needs to be given to addressing the political sources of insecurity in Afghanistan. The Karzai government has grown to be corrupt and dysfunctional. Karzai has failed even to prevent some members of his family from engaging in extensive malpractices, let alone many of his senior ranking officials. A majority of the Afghan people have now turned against the Karzai government, subjecting it to mounting international criticism. This has generated a massive political and security vacuum for the Taliban and their supporters in Afghanistan and Pakistan to exploit. As such, irrespective of how much military and non-military assistance the international community pours into Afghanistan, a large part of it will simply disappear in a black hole. Afghanistan is desperately in need of structural political and administrative reforms, based on institutionalisation rather than personalisation of politics as the foundation for good (not necessarily democratic) governance in the country. This requires a new Loya Jirga (traditional Afghan assembly), constitutional changes and a strong parliamentary system of government, with stronger local and regional governments that would connect ordinary Afghans to the political system. Such a system stands a better chance of working in Afghanistan than the strong presidential system that Karzai and his backers have sought to put in place. This is particularly so given the country’s history of weak state structures in ever-changing relationships with fairly coherent tribal, ethnic and sectarian micro-societies.

Given its geopolitical complexities, Afghanistan’s status in world politics needs to be formally declared as a neutral state, with no strategic partnership with any foreign power. Its current alliance with the US and participation in the so-called war on terror strategy has not served Afghanistan well. They have brought outside actors into the country not on the basis of Afghan needs and capabilities but rather what is required to win the war on terror, which has become as elusive as its targets. A position of formal neutrality will give Afghanistan’s neighbours less reason to interfere in the country’s internal affairs. Pakistan and Iran and for that matter some of the Central Asian republics as well as Russia and India have remained very proactively watchful of the situation in Afghanistan partly because they are worried about how the Afghan conflict would affect the future of their conflicting regional interests. For example, Pakistan wants to be in a position not to allow India and for that matter Iran to gain a strategic foothold in Afghanistan; Iran is vehemently opposed to any Pakistani comeback in Afghanistan (as was the case under the rule of the Taliban 1996-200) and to any long-term US strategic presence in the country; and the Central Asian republics are deeply concerned about any danger that may arise for them from radical Islamism and Iranian-Pakistani rivalry as an outcome of the Afghan conflict. Concurrently, Moscow does not find any American entrenchment in Afghanistan conducive to its desire to be a major player in the region.

Beyond this, the non-ethnic Pashtun population of Afghanistan should be discouraged from going down the same lane of discontent as many of their Pashtun counterparts towards the Karzai government and its international backers. While the Pashtuns have historically formed the largest ethnic cluster in Afghanistan, the non-Pashtuns have constituted the majority of the population. The predominantly non-Pashtun areas in northern, central and western Afghanistan have been relatively peaceful, but many in these areas have not been rewarded for their cooperation and have become disillusioned with the government and the international forces. This must not be allowed to continue. More international reconstruction investment is needed in health, education, administration and infrastructural building to stem the tide of their disillusionment.

Without addressing these issues, the Karzai government and its outside backers will not be able to act from a position of strength to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table for a widely acceptable settlement. As the situation stands, the future of Afghanistan remains very bleak. The Afghan conflict has become increasingly vicious for the Afghans and unpopular for the US and its NATO and non-NATO allies. It has the potential to drag on for decades at growing costs for all sides.

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