Moving towards Vietnam

It’s an assumption I know, but it is likely that Graham E. Fuller, former CIA station chief in Kabul and former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council, knows something about Afghanistan and terrorism in general. He’s worried that Obama is making things worse in the area. His knowledge of the area leads him to the following conclusions:

• Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the US military footprint.
• Most Pashtuns see the Taleban -- 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.
• It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
• India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state.
• 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 US is learning.
• The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the US war raging on the Afghan border.
• 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.
• 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. 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.

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 US 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 US recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.