ZURICH: The United States is losing in Afghanistan because it lied to itself. Its war against the Taliban was never driven by a vision of fighting terrorism through nation-building, even though that was what policy debates implied. Rather, the conflict was a two-level engagement: an instinctive reprisal against Al Qaeda to exact vengeance for 9/11, and a protracted effort to stabilize Afghanistan so that it would not be an ungoverned space that could serve as a launch pad for future 9/11s. The first goal was attained but its accomplishment took almost a decade, with the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The second is looking to be a failure. Why? Because the U.S. has refused to take a longitudinal view of Afghanistan-Pakistan relations since 1947. Had it done so Washington would have recognised that the Taliban were and still are merely the latest symptom of Afghanistan’s misfortune. The cause lies in Islamabad’s repeated efforts to degrade Kabul’s functionality as a seat of government and fracture Afghanistan as a sovereign nation. In this way, a long-simmering bilateral dispute over the Durand Line can be buried. The U.S. has contributed to its own defeat and that of its Afghan partners by treating the Line for nearly 20 years as a de jure ‘border’. Washington calibrated its counterinsurgency efforts accordingly, extending military force up to the Line and replying on diplomacy beyond it.
Whereas Islamabad exploited the Line as a de facto ‘frontier’ that had no legal weight to block covert aggression. Pakistan projected both military and diplomatic power across the Line, the former covertly through the Taliban and Haqqani Network, the latter overtly through disingenuous vocabulary like ‘need for strategic depth’ and later, ‘need to contain Indian influence’.
The Soviets had made the same mistake as the Americans. During their decade-long occupation of Afghanistan, they and their local allies avoided crossing the Durand Line except on rare occasions. For a while, such restraint seemed to be reciprocated by Islamabad, which trained mujahideen fighters but desisted from cross-border employment of regular soldiers. However, once the Soviets opted for a phased withdrawal, direct Pakistani involvement increased commensurately. Islamabad dispatched special forces troops under false identities into Afghan territory. Known as ‘Black Storks’, they were used in assault roles as opposed to merely reconnaissance and advisory missions. Their targets were sometimes the Soviet occupiers but often Afghan government troops defending their country from a new type of foreign threat: Islamist marionettes controlled from Islamabad.
At the root of all this has been the tense history of Afghan-Pakistani relations. In 1947, Afghanistan was the only country to oppose Pakistani membership of the United Nations, on the grounds that the newly formed state included land seized from Afghanistan. Large tracts of today’s Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan would be marked as ‘disputed’ in any politically neutral map. Pending a negotiated settlement, they are eligible for inclusion in either historic Afghanistan or modern-day Pakistan, or independent statehood as ‘Pashtunistan’ if such were the demand of the local populace. Instead, what has happened is that Islamabad, while ostensibly enhancing its surveillance capacity along the ‘border’, has quietly fenced off the Durand Line in the face of Afghan diplomatic protests.
By supporting Afghan Islamists since 1973, Pakistan has generated the discursive equivalent of a dust cloud, masking the dubious legality of its north-western frontier. It has succeeded largely because of an American proclivity towards strategic narcissism. As far as Washington is concerned, there is a war in Afghanistan because terrorists attacked the United States on 9/11 and the Taliban shielded them. The fact that there have been three conflicts previously in the same geopolitical space, all similar to the present one (in that they superficially had the appearance of an insurgency or civil war while actually being a Pakistan-sponsored proxy war) is unimportant. But this fact is crucial to explaining U.S. failure today. During the three earlier conflicts—beginning with a low-level insurgency in the 1970s, escalating to a jihadist encroachment and then civil war in the next two decades—Islamabad initiated and reinforced efforts to weaken Afghan nationhood as a political idea.
An impoverished and divided Afghanistan could not assert irredentist claims across the Durand Line. It had less diplomatic capital with foreign governments, who were more familiar with Islamabad’s silence on the issue, a silence which implied there was never any real dispute and that the frontier was an official ‘border’. Into this multi-generational rivalry parachuted the Americans and their European allies in 2001. Their initial success in overthrowing the Taliban flowed not from brilliant strategy but from a sleight of hand: purchasing the cooperation of Afghan drug traffickers. The latter were at the time reeling from a ban on opium cultivation imposed by the Taliban. They happily assisted in the regime’s fall. Subsequently, they themselves were responsible for much of the American inability to create a functioning state apparatus. A strong and centralized Afghan government might deter foreign aggressors, but it would also cut into the traffickers’ freedom to move drugs across borders. Many international supply routes for these drugs, especially those which began from the south of Afghanistan where the Taliban insurgency was strongest, cut across Pakistani territory.
Pakistan’s dominance of the South Asian heroin economy is crucial to explaining the enduring nature of its covert influence in Afghanistan. During the Soviet-Afghan War, its frontier areas had been flush with heroin labs. Once the war ended, these moved a short distance into Afghan territory across the Durand Line so that they were nominally outside Pakistani jurisdiction. But their role was still to pump drugs south-east towards Karachi or south-west towards the Pakistan-Iran border, for onward shipment to Western markets. Using worthies such as Dawood Ibrahim and contemporary successors to the Quetta Alliance (a triumvirate of heroin traffickers who had bankrolled the initial Taliban conquests in 1994), Islamabad was able to rebuild its patron-client networks on Afghan territory.
Where the Americans went wrong after 2001 was in viewing the slow Taliban resurgence as a domestic Afghan phenomenon. Cross-border linkages with Pakistan were seen as important but not crucial. Meanwhile, Islamabad had no intention of respecting the notional sanctity of the Durand Line, only to have a reconstructed Afghan state arise Phoenix-like after three decades of bilateral hostilities. With a cohesive military once again at its disposal, Kabul could at any time reassert its claim to Pashtun lands east of the Line. Not even the Taliban while in power from 1996 to 2001 had recognized the colonial-era boundary as a formal border. Islamabad was not being especially clever when it began to destabilize Afghanistan again from 2004 onwards, using the Taliban as a proxy. It was being prudent, knowing that one day the Americans would leave and then the situation would resemble the 1970s, with Kabul having sovereignty over Afghan territory and being more wary about Pakistan than ever.
The Americans never quite grasped the essence of that bilateral suspicion and covert contestation. First, they were distracted for a good half-decade by Iraq (2003-2008). Then, the Obama presidency redirected policy focus back towards Afghanistan. But its priority was never about stabilising the country as much as bringing home a trophy, in the form of a spectacular win against Al Qaeda. After killing Osama bin Laden in 2011, the general mood in Washington was that the Afghan war was over. Then President Obama dropped unmistakable hints that he did not see Afghan lives as worth fighting for. This portended a reprise of Vietnam, where 40 years previously the U.S. policy establishment had made clear that it did not consider Asians to be worthy of American blood and treasure. A complete pull out from Afghanistan after 2014 was only symbolically delayed by the coincidental rise of ‘Islamic State’/Daesh in Iraq, which made it difficult for any U.S. administration to just cut and run from Kabul.
But the impulse to flee still remains. Washington is heading towards a repeat of the same blunder that cost it international credibility in the 1970s, by abandoning an allied government to a hostile power that covertly projects force across a de facto but not de jure international boundary. For the U.S., the Durand Line is the modern-day equivalent of the 17th Parallel that once separated North and South Vietnam. It is a convenient line for any side that is covertly on the offensive, because it offers a safe haven for planning and respite from hot pursuit. But it offers no protection for the defender. To counteract this disadvantage, American diplomacy ought to recognize that the Durand Line is only a working boundary, subject to negotiation and final settlement amid a larger Af-Pak peace deal. Washington will have to stop mollycoddling Islamabad. It will instead have to focus on building the capacity of the Afghan military to not just fight insurgents but also a conventional opponent. And if the last 73 years offer any indication, it should have no doubt about who that opponent is likely to be.
(The author is lead analyst for geoeconomics at the Indo-Swiss Future Leaders Forum. Views expressed in this article are personal.)
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