July’s B-side
July’s B-side includes an article by David ‘Pakistan will fall in six months’ Kilcullen and focuses on his prescription for solving Afghanistan. Kilcullen’s article is contrasted by an article by Graham Fuller who was a former CIA Station Chief in Kabul who lays bare US folly in Afghanistan and Pakistan on President Obama’s watch. Both articles are sandwiched by the best article of all, a humourous article of horror on Lucifer’s litter namely the Taliban written by Fasi Zaka.
July’s B-side contents are:
- For Answers to the Afghan-Pakistan Conflict, Ask What Would Curzon Do? by DAVID KILCULLEN
- Taliban Teatime by FASI ZAKA
- Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan by GRAHAM E FULLER
For Answers to the Afghan-Pakistan Conflict, Ask What Would Curzon Do? By David Kilcullen
Britain’s eyes this week are on southern Afghanistan. US Marines have doubled Coalition troop numbers in Helmand and are moving to clear Taleban base areas as part of Operation Khanjar. A major British offensive is also underway: Operation Panchai Palang, an effort to extend Coalition control along the Helmand River valley, one month ahead of the Afghan presidential elections currently scheduled for 20 August.
Though the Taleban seem so far to be mostly melting away before the Marines, they are making a determined stand against the British. They are digging in among the tactically important canal and river crossings of the central valley, where UK troops are fighting hard to dislodge them from the Nad Ali district northwest of Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.
During their own Afghan war, the Soviets called this area the Green Belt. They suffered heavy casualties among its complex, densely vegetated mosaic of farms, fields, villages, orchards and irrigation channels — an extremely demanding environment akin, in some places, to the Normandy Bocage of 1944. For its part, Britain has now lost 184 soldiers in Afghanistan, higher than the 179 killed in Iraq, and a number that will unfortunately rise as operations continue. Taleban deaths are much higher.
For Nato, Afghanistan will remain the military main effort in South Asia. It is an important fight which, despite its grinding difficulty, may be slowly starting to improve due to the combination of American reinforcements and the energetic leadership of the new commander, General Stanley A. McChrystal, a Special Forces officer who genuinely ‘gets’ counter-insurgency. The shift to a strategy of protecting the population, reducing civilian casualties, increasing the size and capacity of Afghan police and military forces, and the planned ‘civilian surge’ of governance and development assistance are all positive, provided the effort can be resourced and sustained.
Indeed, some analysts are quietly starting to express a hope that the sharply negative trends of past years — increased violence, higher civilian casualties, a spreading and intensifying insurgency, an intractable narcotics problem and corrupt and ineffective local government — may begin to bottom out at some point in the next fighting season (conflict in Afghanistan, like its agriculture, having a very definite seasonal character). War is a complex human activity, insurgency is its most complex variant. So it is much too early to predict how the campaign will develop. But we can certainly expect continued major fighting over the summer and autumn and into the ninth winter of a very long war.
Meanwhile, across the frontier in Pakistan, another offensive is underway. And while Afghanistan is Nato’s main concern, what is happening in Pakistan is of even greater strategic importance.
Afghanistan has roughly 30 million inhabitants; Pakistan’s population and territory are more than five times larger. Two thirds of the Pashtun ethnic group, the world’s largest tribal society — one of the biggest nations without its own state and the main recruiting base for the Taleban — are in Pakistan not Afghanistan. The senior leadership of al-Qa’eda, the Afghan Taleban, and the other major insurgent factions are in safe havens in Pakistan.
The Pakistani version of the Taleban has defeated the army in every major campaign since 2001, resulting in a series of face-saving ‘peace’ deals that have ceded huge swaths of territory and population to extremist control. There have been dozens of terrorist attacks within Pakistan over the past several years, and there has been a Pakistani connection in many of the most serious international terrorist attacks over the same period. The Pakistani diaspora stretches worldwide, so that events in Pakistan affect substantial immigrant populations in many parts of the world. Militancy or insecurity in Pakistan can create insecurity elsewhere.
Pakistan has more than 100 nuclear weapons, an army larger than that of the United States, an economy that was nearing collapse before the IMF bailout of late 2008 and is still in bad shape, and a weak government whose civilian leaders have proven unable to control their own national security establishment.
Military institutions like the intelligence service, ISI, and some other security organisations, have complex and continuing ties to militant organisations, many of which they themselves created as proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war or as unconventional counterweights to Indian regional hegemony. Militant groups include the Afghan Taleban, religious extremist organisations, and groups like the Haqqani network centred on Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — a thorny hedge of mountain peaks and unsubdued tribes that has never been governed by outsiders, even since before British India extended its imperial grasp to what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 1840s.
One of Britain’s foremost colonial administrators, George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India 1899-1905, took office in the wake of the largest frontier tribal uprising in British Indian history. The Great Frontier War of 1897 pitted British and Indian troops against tribal lashkars and religious fanatics in exactly the same places — Bajaur, Malakand, Swat, Dir — where the Pakistani army is fighting the Taleban today.
Lord Curzon is well known for his observation that ‘No patchwork scheme and all our present and recent schemes: blockade, allowances, etc, are mere patchwork — will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.’
The question is whether Pakistan’s current operation (President Asif Zardari launched a new offensive against the Taleban in April) is the military steamroller finally going into action, or whether this is another patchwork scheme. Oddly, it may turn out to be both — a patchwork steamroller.
The latest operations began in April, perhaps not coincidentally, during a visit by Zardari to Washington, where US leaders had been heavily criticising Pakistan’s half-hearted performance. The Pakistani Taleban had been steadily expanding their control across Malakand Division (the northern third of North-West Frontier Province) and, after heavy-handed army operations in Swat, Bajaur and Mohmand in 2008, had gained control of Swat through the latest in a long line of peace deals.
Though the deal was initially popular in Pakistan, public opinion shifted when the Taleban committed some very public atrocities against the local population, and then moved into Buner, a settled district only 100 kilometres from Islamabad. From being a remote threat in an ethnically distinct backwater with a history of extremism (back in 1901, Curzon called the frontier tribes the last remaining ‘first-class fanatics’ in the world), the Taleban suddenly menaced mainstream Pakistan.
Since then, the Pakistani army has certainly shown that it can fight. Militants have been pushed out of Buner and Swat, the town of Mingaora has been recaptured (and extensively damaged), the Taleban have been driven back into Dir, and the army is preparing an offensive against militant strongholds in Waziristan. Pakistan has lost dozens of troops in the fighting, killed hundreds of Taleban, and reversed the tide of militant takeover — at least temporarily.
Yet this is not quite Curzon’s steamroller. The Pakistani army lacks a true counter-insurgency doctrine. It treats the conflict like a conventional offensive: applying heavy-handed tactics that have repeatedly backfired, turning local populations against the military. Pakistan has no equivalent of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the civil-military governance and development organisations that have proved so effective in Iraq and Afghanistan as a temporary bridge between military operations and the return of civil administration. While the army can temporarily clear areas, it cannot hold them: the police are intimidated, under-equipped, underpaid and often outgunned by the Taleban, and as troops move from Swat to Waziristan, Taleban re-infiltration into currently ‘cleared’ areas is highly likely. And the governance and administrative structures needed to build on security successes are entirely lacking.
Things are scarcely better in terms of humanitarian relief. Almost two million refugees were displaced by the Swat fighting, and though many moved to stay with relatives, large refugee camps developed across Malakand, adding to the half-million refugees displaced by previous fighting. In the camps, limited humanitarian assistance was provided by Pakistan’s small Emergency Response Unit, a military organisation created after the Muzaffarabad earthquake. International donors, including Britain and the United States, promised assistance but much international aid has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, extremists filled the gap. Groups like al-Khidmat, the charity arm of a political party aligned with the Taleban, and Jamaat ud-Dawa, the charity front for the terrorist organisation Lashkar e-Tayyiba, have been delivering humanitarian assistance to refugees but also radicalising some. Many are now returning to Swat, though there is little to return to.
Pressed in Swat, the Taleban have hit back outside the main area of military operations, with mass-casualty bombings, kidnappings and other terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets in Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi and elsewhere. In part, these are revenge attacks, but they also serve the strategic purpose of drawing off troops who, instead of participating in the main offensive, are now needed to guard and garrison vulnerable points. This saps military resources, which have never been adequately focused on the problem — until recently less than 20 per cent of the Pakistani army was engaged in the fight against internal extremists, while more than 80 per cent was deployed in the east against a possible conventional threat from India.
Taleban fighters are also beginning to flow into Afghanistan, moving across the frontier into eastern Afghanistan as the pressure increases, into areas where they will become an increasing problem for Nato. A friend, commanding a small Special Forces base right on the Afghan side of the frontier, told me recently that every night, when the sun goes down, the mountain passes fill with Taleban moving across into Afghanistan to continue the fight. And as Pakistani forces push into Waziristan and closer to the frontier, they will find the going increasingly difficult — this area and its people are some of the toughest in the world.
As in Afghanistan, it is far too early to discern the likely outcome of the current fighting in Pakistan. At least some members of Pakistan’s feudal elite appear to have grasped that the main threat to their society comes from internal extremism rather than from India. But without a genuine, full-spectrum counter-insurgency doctrine this realisation may be too little, too late.
For Britons and Americans watching the hard-fought progress of our Coalition troops in Helmand, the harsh reality is that Nato could do everything right in Afghanistan and still lose the broader regional campaign against terrorism if Pakistan fails to contain its internal militants. This makes the fight in Pakistan, and finding means to help Pakistanis help themselves, the most important battle in the world.
Published in The Spectator
WASIM VIEW- David Kilcullen is known to Pakistan and Pakistanis the world over as the fool who predicted that Pakistan could fall in six months. However readers are advised not to flog him for those views alone, no matter how abhorrent they find him and his opinions.
Kilcullen’s bio shows him to be an Australian national revered as a so-called counter-insurgency expert who advises luminaries no less than General David Petraeus, the current commander of US Central Command. Consequently Kilcullen’s views are not to be ignored as he has the ear of General Petraeus, a man who is responsible for the US military in our region.
Kilcullen’s article begins by painting ‘the big picture’ vis a vis NATO operations in the region yet true to form soon indulges in some Pakistan-bashing. Kilcullen rounds on the Pakistani army accusing it of defeat at the hands of the Pakistani Taliban – a blatant lie given the Pakistani army never really fought the Taliban except for crude shadow boxing except for the present successful Swat operation. Kilcullen is nevertheless right in bemoaning pathetic peace deals and the handover of territory to the Taliban for which blame squarely lies with the Pakistani army and our political leadership.
Kilcullen’s article goes from bad to worse when he lists the failings of the Pakistani state including its need for an IMF bailout. Kilcullen conveniently forgets that Pakistan is in need of such IMF ills precisely because of US actions propping up a proxy in Pakistan to fight their war of choice whilst Pakistan was paid a paltry $3bn in real terms as thanks yet suffered and still suffers a loss of a colossal $35bn to this day for that supreme folly.
The crux of the Kilcullen article is two-fold, one to prove that the Pakistani army does not have a counter-insurgency doctrine with Kilcullen bemoaning that Pakistan fights the Taliban menace conventionally. Secondly Kilcullen engages in some pleasant reminiscing of the good old times of the British Raj via his affection for Lord Curzon an old Britisher who Kilcullen suggests has the answer to the Taliban problem.
Kilcullen rushes to quote Curzon as an expert in the field when he was no more than an imperial ghost long forgotten. Curzon was of course right in saying no patchwork will work in Wazirstan and the surrounding areas yet his century old solution of a military steamroller to rule over the whole country has never seen the light of day.
Yet Kilcullen a century later acts as another imperial lord in effect in seeing a military steamroller across Pakistan as the answer to the Taliban problem. Kilcullen in effect supports the kill strategy whereby Pakistan becomes a Killistan with killing fields aplenty.
The harsh truth is that even at its zenith the British Empire never achieved control with her steamroller in the tribal areas surrounding Afghanistan and Pakistan and soon ran away. Decades later the Russians suffered the same fate and today NATO and the American empire are sure to suffer the same ignominy. Kilcullen and friends would do well to learn from such history and not repeat the mistakes of the past and this is good advice.
The second article is written by one of my favourite columnist Fasi Zaka and looks at the vile Taliban written in a form of humourous horror if such a thing exists!
Taliban Teatime by Fasi Zaka
Breath (bad) Nullah heads the Taliban in Waziristan. Fuzz Gandah Nallah is his compatriot in Swat.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Welcome my friend. Please have some sherbet.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Thanks, vintage Rooh Afzah I see with a dash of B+’ve sprinkled on it.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Sorry, my friend, O-’ve is in short supply.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: No problems, these are hard times.
Breath (bad) Nullah: For tonight’s entertainment I have arranged a moonlight barbeque, and some song.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Please! What is wrong with you, don’t you know going out in the moonlight is haram ever since the naapaak Americans put their foot on it without wuzoo?
Breath (bad) Nullah: Please forgive me, my noble friend. But the music I have arranged is absolutely halal, it is by the Village People (YMCA). There are no women in this group, nor do they have women in their music videos.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Good, good. Village People are my favourites. They are most important to our cause.
Breath (bad) Nullah: I have taken a new initiative. When animals and livestock are in heat, they shall be placed in separate quarters so they do not spread the disease of sex in the minds of innocent people.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Yes, the perverts. This is a longstanding problem in Pakistan that needed a solution.
Breath (bad) Nullah: All leaders and politicians are non-Muslims, who are in the hands of the CIA.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Yes. They only promote sex. Lots of sex.
Breath (bad) Nullah: They are destroying our nation by promoting sex. So immoral.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: That’s all they can think of, sex. We should ban sex.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Yes. And polio drops too.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: And women too. Because they spread sex.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Thank God we are not obsessed by sex.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Yes. We never think about sex. Only revolution!
Breath (bad) Nullah: But tell me, brother, how can we give a ghusl to the moon to make it paak again?
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Muslim Khan will do it. He says he can clean anything, and if not, then he will kill the moon. The moon is like a bad woman who seduced the Americans to come there.
Breath (bad) Nullah: We should also take action against Cartoon Network.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Yes, we should. Tom is always chasing Jerry. They are always naked.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Yes, it is an American conspiracy to spread sex.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: I think Indians are also involved.
Breath (bad) Nullah: We should also ban jokes.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: And everything modern. Except weapons.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Also, we should establish rule of law.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Yes. Only we should be able to authorise kidnappings and beheadings.
Breath (bad) Nullah: And in our caliphate people will not get sick.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: I will issue the fatwa against germs soon, banning them forever.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Good, then our ban on female doctors will work even better.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: The news has just come in! Our spokesperson Muslim Khan is injured, he may not be able to carry on the job!
Breath (bad) Nullah: It’s ok, Dr Shahid Masood is still there.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Yes, thank God the media is still on our side. We must tell our forces not to cut the throats of children.
Breath (bad) Nullah Absolutely, we are not barbarians. Only children who want to go to school will have their throats slit.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: I am sure all sane men will see our compassion in that. Breath (bad) Nullah: I am also working on destroying the great Satan, the Israeli- supported Internet.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: We will bamboozle the Google.
Breath (bad) Nullah: It will be our thrill kill.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: Our next target should be the bees.
Breath (bad) Nullah: Yes, I have heard they promote indiscriminate sex between flowers.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: By the way, who is your favourite singer in the Village People?
Breath (bad) Nullah: The one with the big moustache.
Fuzz Gandah Nallah: He is best in their song “Macho Man,” like we are.
Breath (bad) Nullah: You got that straight.
Published in The News
WASIM VIEW- Fasi Zaka’s article is just too good. It lays bare the so-called Islamic ideals of the Taliban who are butchers of a false god. The references made to the moonlight losing its appeal due to US presence, the fixation with sex of the human and bee variety, Tom and Jerry and polio drops are only a few of the topics that Zaka touches upon with incisive analysis masked in brilliant humour.
In doing so, Zaka’s article is a must read for all Pakistanis on what the curse of the Taliban represents in reality and lays bare how the Taliban have hijacked a great faith. Zaka’s article should be owned by the Pakistani government and printed and promoted across the country and be read as a national health warning over and above health warnings that affect the individual- the Taliban are injurious to Pakistan’s health as a nation should do it!
The final article is written by Graham Fuller, a man who knows what he is talking about vis a vis Afghanistan and Pakistan as he has served as the CIA chief in Kabul. Need I say more?
Obama’s Policies Making Situation Worse in Afghanistan & Pakistan by Graham E Fuller
For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.
Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.
The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban like them or not as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.
It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.
India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan in the intelligence, economic and political arenas that chills Islamabad.
Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.
Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.
The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.
The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?
The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.
Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.
Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.
But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.
The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that — something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule — not what Pakistan needs — will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad’s basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.
In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.
It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education — areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.
Al-Qaida’s threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.
What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.
If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.
Published in The Huffington Post
WASIM VIEW- Graham Fuller’s article could have been written by me for it is as close to my views as is practically possible. Thus my comments on the article wll be brief and will be the polar opposite of what I have moaned about at length in the earlier Kilcullen article.
The fact that Fuller was the CIA station chief in Kabul proves he is no armchair analyst, morever he is someone who must be heard in the corridors of power due to his personal experience in the region. Fuller is only too right when he charges that the Obama Administration’s policies are failing and worse following the failed Bush doctrine, change yes we can does not apply!
Moreover, Fuller does well too in stating the Pakistani position untold till now by a non-Pakistani be it our cultural and historic links with the Pashtun community in the region as well as the Pakistani interest regarding India and her influence in Afghanistan. To put it simple, Fuller’s article is a must read for all opinion and decision makers. Indeed should Fuller’s suggestions be acted on they could chart a peaceful way out for NATO and its allies from the graveyard of empires that is Afghanistan. are you listening Barack Obama?
