Emergency exit
Deccan Chronicle
Shashi Tharoor / August 20, 2010

A year from now, the United States will have reached its self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan. The imminence of the moment has occasioned much anxiety around the world: Is the US, always notoriously prey to the isolationist impulses of its narcissistic domestic electorate, about to abandon Afghanistan? Kabul has been overlooked before. We all remember the days when the Bush administration began focusing on an impending invasion of Iraq.

The attitude to Afghanistan, in the hubristic arrogance of defence secretary Don Rumsfeld, was “been there, done that”. The Taliban-controlled “Emirate” had fallen; Hamid Karzai had been installed as President; the war, as far as Washington was concerned, was over. As the US focused on Iraq, nobody paid Afghanistan the slightest attention, and the result has been the revival of a war that Washington had thought it had won.

The irony was that almost everybody who had an opinion to express on Afghanistan, especially in the subcontinent, knew that the greatest danger from Islamic radicalism emanated from there and not from Saddam Hussein’s secular autocracy in Iraq. The tragedy of 9/11, orchestrated from Osama bin Laden’s command centre in the Taliban-ruled state, made it obvious that the most important strategic objective for the United States had to be to ensure that Afghanistan never again became the kind of state that could provide a base for a future Bin Laden. But the neo-conservatives around President Bush had long been obsessed with the “unfinished business” of Iraq, and many went around quite deliberately misleading the American public into thinking that Saddam was somehow behind 9/11 and in league with Al Qaeda.

Iraq’s attractive oil reserves, its educated middle class and the potential for the country to become, under American rule, an alternative pro-American “model” for the Arab world, all weighed heavily in Washington’s calculations. To the neo-cons, Afghanistan, a hardscrabble land of caves, deserts, poorly-developed infrastructure and warring tribals, looked like yesterday’s problem.

Well, yesterday’s problem has become tomorrow’s threat, and many of us feel that America has only itself to blame. Distracted by its misadventure in Iraq, the US neglected Afghanistan for too long, failing to convert its stunning military success in 2001 into a larger developmental and political triumph. Osama has still not been captured, though it has been a while since he released one of his mocking messages to the world to taunt his would-be captors and inspire his revived followers. Al Qaeda stays secure in its mountain redoubts, and the Taliban, which Washington thought had been scattered to the winds in 2001, is enjoying a resurgence, harassing the belatedly-augmented Nato forces and regularly killing Afghan civilians and government security personnel.

Some reports suggest the insurgents now dispose of some 2,000 local and foreign fighters, trained in the mountains and armed to the teeth. For a couple of years now, more Western soldiers are killed in Afghanistan each month than in Iraq.

Saying “Afghanistan” is, however, shorthand. Much of the menace in the region comes from the other side of the Afghan borderlands — the lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) inside Pakistan. When they were routed in Afghanistan and hounded relentlessly by American air power in 2001 and early 2002, many of the Taliban fighters sought refuge in Fata, particularly in South Waziristan, where the Pakistani government’s writ barely runs. At the same time, both the legitimate Afghan government of President Karzai and the US-led Nato forces were handicapped by not being able to pursue their tormentors across the border into Pakistan.

Islamabad is a key US ally, a fact that paradoxically appears to have hampered America’s ability to act decisively against threats emerging from Fata. Washington was, after all, obliged to be sensitive to Pakistani claims of sovereignty over the area (a sovereignty Islamabad is ill-equipped to exercise in practice). The Bush administration, all too prone to personalise its foreign policy preferences, was also anxious not to undermine its friend President Musharraf by leaning too heavily on him. President Obama seems, if anything, even more solicitous of General Kayani. An increasingly beleaguered Islamabad, in turn, is concerned at all costs to avoid any military action that might provoke a Pashtun tribal rebellion against its forces. Musharraf tried to buy himself more political space by cutting deals with the insurgent leaders in Fata, signing peace agreements with the very chiefs his Army should have been pursuing. The leaders gratefully used the ceasefires to shore up their defences, build up their weaponry and recruit more fighters. When the ceasefires inevitably collapsed, they were ready again. The Pakistanis say they have lost 4,000 soldiers to their counter-insurgency efforts, but they have done so while nurturing their own insurgents, from the Haqqani network, so useful to them in Afghanistan, to the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, whose preferred victims are Indians.

The result is that the threat from Afghanistan, made graphically apparent on 9/11, still persists, except that it has moved from the environs of Kandahar to the Pakistani Fata. Surely the US can’t be serious about withdrawal? No one really knows the answer, except that it will have a lot more to do with US domestic politics than with the geopolitics of the subcontinent. A decision will be driven more by the results of the November mid-term elections in America than by military actions in Afghanistan. Should the Obama administration conclude that the electorate wants it to abandon its international commitments to focus on domestic recovery, it will want to start showing that it has got the message well before the presidential elections of 2012. So if you are worried about Waziristan, look at the political news from Washington.

* Shashi Tharoor is a member of Parliament from Kerala’s Thiruvananthapuram constituency