America’s Afghan war

Vivek Katju

OCTOBER 7 marked the 15th anniversary of the US military intervention in Afghanistan in the wake of Al-Qaeda’s heinous terrorist acts on the US mainland on 9/11. It has passed almost unnoticed as the global attention on terrorism has shifted from Afghanistan to the ISIS. However, Afghanistan remains dangerously unsettled as the Taliban insurgency remains strong and the faction-ridden Afghan government continues to be weak and ineffectual in many areas. This has led to continued US military presence in Afghanistan, in what is America’s longest war, and by present indications, there is no end in sight.

The primary US objective of the Afghan war was to ensure that the Al-Qaeda was so decimated that it could never again be able to attack the US mainland. A recent report of the US Special Inspector-General for Afghanistan Reconstruction notes, “...in March 2009, President Obama reiterated that the core goal of the US was to ‘disrupt, dismantle and defeat’ Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan and to prevent their return to either country in the future.” That aim has been largely achieved. The Al-Qaeda is a pale shadow of the deadly organisation that it was. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was killed five years ago and it does not have the space now for major terrorist strikes against US interests. So why are the Americans continuing with their military presence in Afghanistan? 

Many reasons can be advanced, but they are all subsumed by this: the global war against terror has mutated but terrorism remains deadly with an expanding reach and an unsettled Afghanistan that is also the world’s largest producer of illicit opium. The US strategy to settle Afghanistan is to co-opt the Taliban within the country’s political system. Many sections of the Afghan people have misgivings about the Taliban but the Afghan authorities have gone along with the approach. At the October 5 Brussels conference on Afghanistan, the joint communiqué said inter alia, “International community welcomes the undeterred willingness of the Afghan government to engage with all armed groups without preconditions.” It went to underline though that such a process must lead to the renunciation of violence, the breaking of all ties to international terrorism and respect for the Afghan constitution. The difficulty is that the Taliban, encouraged and controlled in large measure by Pakistan, are simply unwilling to seriously negotiate peace with the Afghan authorities. As long as they succeed in ensuring that the terrorist insurgency can continue, and it is doing so with much violence, they have little incentive to negotiate. And in that respect the key is with Pakistan.

Soon after the Taliban were ousted from Kabul, the US realised that the Al-Qaeda leadership had retreated to Pakistan. It is then that the US made a strategic error that has cost it 2,300 US lives and $800 billion. It struck a Faustian bargain; it agreed that Pakistan could keep the Taliban going and also get rewarded with generous US assistance, provided it handed over Al-Qaeda operatives. Pakistan gave the Taliban sanctuaries and got the cash, but as the Osama bin Laden episode demonstrated it cheated on the Al-Qaeda front by rendering only low-level operatives. The US overlooked Pakistan’s cheating because of the mistaken view that its goodwill was essential to extricate itself from Afghanistan. This was an error because the US could have used its great leverage to demand Pakistan’s cooperation in Afghanistan by insisting that it takes deliberate and effective action against the Taliban. It chose not do so.

This decision was at least initially due to the carryover of the 1990s’ view that the Taliban was an authentic Afghan group that was a factor of stability in the war-ravaged country. That it was only its association with the Al-Qaeda that was the source of all the difficulty. Take away that connection and it would be a legitimate stakeholder in the Afghan political process. Its primitive and violent world view, completely at odds with the aspirations of the progressive sections of Afghan society, was ignored. It became a worthy, though secret, interlocutor of the US in 2008-2009. And Pakistan was courted to nudge it along.

Essentially it is this paradigm that is still being followed to end US involvement. It has become a stalemate and its military costs to the US, both in lives and money, is now low; hence, it does not grab headlines. The political costs have also been contained. No one questions President Obama on his failure to bring all US soldiers back home as he had pledged; nor does any American hold him to account to partially reversing his decision to give US troops in Afghanistan a greater combat role. Afghan narcotics too do not damage the US as they go mainly to Europe. That continent too is the destination of educated Afghan refugees who seem to have lost hope in their country. 

For the past year, the Obama administration has been conducting a holding operation in Afghanistan. It took the initiative though to kill Mullah Omar’s successor, Mullah Akthar Mansour, on Pakistan territory to signal a degree of impatience with Pakistan’s Afghan approaches. But the Pakistanis have taken Mansour’s killing in their stride without changing course. They have been unwavering in their aim to dominate Kabul’s India policy, despite the downturn in their relations with President Ashraf Ghani. Recently, some Pakistan senators have argued that peace in Kabul is dependent on a resolution of the Kashmir issue. This is an old refrain that seeks to create an India-Pak-Af theme to replace the Pak-Af linkage which Pakistan intensely dislikes. 

The Afghanistan issue will not be the main priority of Obama’s successor, which short of a major miracle for Donald Trump, will be Hillary Clinton. It is unlikely that she will pressure Pakistan to abandon the Taliban so that their terrorist insurgency can be contained and thereafter eliminated. She will pursue the same policy of seeking to bring them around into a negotiating process with the Afghan authorities. The question is if she will be willing to give Pakistan concessions to get the Taliban to the negotiating table?

The concessions will have to be at the cost of India. This will be in two ways. One, through advice to Ghani to go easy on ties with India. Two, by leaning on India to open a dialogue process with Pakistan, including on Kashmir, so that Pakistan’s attention is not diverted from the country’s western border to its eastern frontier. 

India will have to firmly reject these moves, if they come. The end of America’s Afghan war cannot be at India’s expense in the region.

The writer is a former Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs