To Save Pakistan, Author Says U.S. Needs Plan for Afghanistan
By Michael Coleman
Uploaded on April 30, 2012
News articles and media commentators frequently describe Pakistan as a
dangerous place — the world's most dangerous, according to many
observers — but few, if any, can match the vivid, sometimes frightening
reporting of celebrated journalist Ahmed Rashid.
Rashid, once called Pakistan's "best and bravest reporter" by the
late author Christopher Hitchens, exploded into the international
consciousness in 2001 with "Taliban," a New York Times number-one
bestseller that was translated into more than 20 languages. The book
helped readers better understand the brutal regime that hijacked
Afghanistan and incubated the terrorist group behind the 9/11 attacks.
He earned widespread acclaim for his 2008 follow-up, "Descent into
Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan,
Afghanistan, and Central Asia."
Photo: Ahmed Rashid
Now, Rashid, based in Lahore, is back with "Pakistan on the Brink:
The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan." The book examines
U.S. policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan and how the U.S. withdrawal
from Afghanistan will affect international terrorism and a region vital
to world security. While the subject matter is grim, Rashid offers
clear-eyed suggestions for a peaceful path forward, including the
provocative notion that the United States and Pakistan should negotiate a
political compromise with the Taliban.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Washington Diplomat, Rashid said
he wrote his book "with the very acute realization that Pakistan was
literally going down the tubes."
In fact, just days after the interview, Taliban fighters stormed a
prison in northwestern Pakistan, freeing nearly 400 inmates in what is
being called the biggest jailbreak in the country's history. At the same
time in Afghanistan, officials in that country were blaming the Haqqani
network of the Taliban, based in Pakistan, for a coordinated series of
attacks that paralyzed the capital of Kabul in mid-April.
As for U.S.-Pakistani relations, they seem to plunge to ever-lower
depths as each new crisis explodes. Bilateral ties — already strained in
the wake of the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden at a secret
compound about an hour north of Islamabad — ruptured following a NATO
air attack in November that mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. As a
result, the Pakistani Parliament underwent a complete review of its
relationship with the United States, demanding an immediate end to drone
strikes and an unconditional apology for the strike on Pakistani
soldiers.
There was speculation that with the review finished, Pakistan might
reopen a critical NATO supply route to Afghanistan. "We are a
responsible nation," Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told Parliament,
though he wouldn't confirm if the route would reopen. "We know our
obligations as well as the importance of the United States."
Yet Rashid argues that Pakistani leaders have long fostered a
narrative that blames everyone — and especially America — for the South
Asian nation's precarious state, when the overwhelming evidence is that
many of its troubles are homegrown. Rashid's newest book begins in 1989,
at the twilight of the Cold War.
"When the Cold War ended, Pakistan did not change at all," Rashid
said. "It remained heavily dependent on the United States, the elite
refused to pay taxes, and we pursued a foreign policy that was
expansionist and aggressive."
Rashid argues that while Pakistan made terrible domestic political
decisions, the United States enabled the country's government by pouring
aid into a Pakistani military that made no effort to account for its
spending. The situation dramatically worsened after al-Qaeda terrorists
attacked the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Rashid said. In the decade
since 9/11, the U.S. government has sent $20 billion to Pakistan and
has little to show for it.
"That's a hell of a lot of money," Rashid said. "Eighty percent of
that money has gone to the military, and there has been no accounting of
that money in the civil sector. How do they account for it?"
Rashid says the gravy train started with former President George W.
Bush and former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, who made backroom
deals that allowed CIA agents and U.S. Special Forces to infiltrate the
country in exchange for truckloads of American cash.
"People essentially said, 'Give us something that is visible and
tangible,'" Rashid charged. "They said, 'Don't give us this democracy
support bullshit.'"
However, rank-and-file Pakistanis, who are among the world's poorest
people, resented the aid, which went almost exclusively to the
all-powerful military.
"There was deep suspicion about America's intentions," Rashid said,
adding that the two countries should have been more transparent. "I
think if [Pakistan] had been more responsive earlier to this whole
notion of civilian aid and a strategic dialogue with the U.S., we could
have worked out something that would be more balanced."
Rashid says the Obama administration has largely continued these
secretive policies, as evidenced by the record number of surreptitious
drone strikes in the country.
"These secret deals deeply annoyed the people of Pakistan and that's
one of the reasons for this anti-Americanism," he said. "There is a
horrendous spate of anti-Americanism that's going on, which is extremely
dangerous because along with that comes anti-democracy, extremism and
outright religious conservatism."
Rashid also argues that the glut of American money has made the
deadly, decade-long U.S. exercise in Afghanistan — inextricably linked
to neighboring Pakistan — vastly more expensive and ineffective than it
needed to be. During the initial U.S. invasion in 2001, Rashid and other
experts in the region met with top officials at the White House and
suggested a modest plan to rebuild the country after the toppling of the
Taliban.
Over the past 11 years, the United States has sunk more than $500
billion into the war in Afghanistan. Rashid and the other experts argued
that stabilizing the country could have been done for a fraction of
that amount.
"We estimated if you gave the Afghan government $5 billion per year
just for development for 10 years, that was all the Afghans could
absorb," he said. "It would have sufficiently rebuilt the economy to
where it was in 1978 before the Soviets came in.
"I would claim right now that unfortunately the West has not even
been able to do that despite spending billions on so-called
development," Rashid continued. "Apart from some areas where there have
been huge contributions, particularly education and health care, as far
as developing an indigenous economy, agriculture, infrastructure, there
hasn't been much done at all. It's difficult to see how it has come up
to the level even of what it was in 1978."
Although President Obama pledged and delivered more resources toward
the fight in Afghanistan, he's largely pursued a military-centric
approach in both Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan, especially given
the successes of drone strikes and special ops raids that have
decapitated the bulk of al-Qaeda's leadership.
The hallmark achievement of this counterterrorism strategy was the
killing of Osama bin Laden a year ago during a covert U.S. raid in the
midsize town of Abbottabad, where the terrorist mastermind had
essentially been hiding in plain sight of Pakistani military forces.
While celebrated in the United States, bin Laden's death marked a
pivotal turning point in U.S.-Pakistani relations, especially after the
circumstances of the midnight raid came to light, Rashid told The
Diplomat.
"Initially, people welcomed his death," the author said. "But then
what happened is the Pakistani press lambasted the military and raised
two issues that remain unresolved.
"Were they hiding Osama? And if they weren't hiding him, they were
bloody incompetent," Rashid said. "That caused immense embarrassment and
questioning inside the military. Then the military came back and [said]
these are not the questions. They said the real question is, 'Is
America breaking our sovereignty by intruding into Pakistan, etc.' That
then became the new mantra."
Rashid explains in his book, and in his Diplomat interview, that he's not buying the military's attempt to change the subject.
"The military tried to change the narrative," he said. "We can get to
the sovereignty question later, but first they need to answer these
questions. Not only did nobody answer them, but there was no
accountability. Nobody was sacked or fired and nobody was held
responsible."
Why not?
"There was acute embarrassment, but also in the lower ranks of
officers there was acute anti-Americanism," he replied. "I think the
high command was faced with a barrage of criticism from the mid-level
officers who wanted the army to denounce the Americans."
So what can the United States do to try to lift the abysmal state of relations with a hostile, nuclear-armed, Muslim nation?
The most important thing it can do, according to Rashid, is to get out of Afghanistan.
"I do think a withdrawal will be hugely beneficial to Pakistan," he
argues. "We have our own Taliban now who are very dangerous. If there
could be a political settlement between [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai
and the Taliban and the Americans that allows the Americans to withdraw
in a peaceful situation, I think it would have a huge effect on
de-fanging and de-legitimizing the Taliban.
"One of their claims of a legitimate jihad is that they are fighting
with their Afghan brothers against the American occupation," he added.
"That is a legitimate jihad, but if that reason was to disappear
tomorrow, or in 2014 [the planned U.S. withdrawal date], so does one of
their main planks. That would have a huge impact."
Rashid contends that the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan will also
remove a convenient excuse for Pakistani leaders trying to explain the
sorry state of affairs in their country.
"We would no longer have this excuse that everything is going wrong
because of the Americans or the American presence in Afghanistan," he
said. "We would be forced to look at ourselves and sort out our own
problems, rather than blaming others for them.
"Pakistan would be forced into a kind of self-sufficiency."
But Rashid does not advocate a hasty withdrawal, especially in the
absence of a political agreement in Afghanistan, where he says the
Taliban must be dealt with somehow before U.S. troops head for the
exits.
"There has to be a negotiated political settlement with the Taliban,"
Rashid said. "The Americans cannot leave Afghanistan with that country
in a state of civil war as it is today. The Americans can only leave
that country with a relative reduction of violence.
"If you leave that country in a state of civil war, the Afghan army
isn't going to stand up to the pressure of the Taliban," he warned. "I
think in a year or two, the government would collapse and there would be
a multidimensional civil war. It would spread its tentacles into all
the neighboring states and even allow al-Qaeda to come back."
Rashid suggested a two-pronged approach. The first phase would be a
military ceasefire between the United States and the Taliban after
extended exercises in "confidence and trust building." The second part
would be a power-sharing agreement between the Afghan government and the
Taliban, with representation from all sectors of Afghan society —
including women.
"The Taliban has to meet with Afghan women and be exposed to Afghan
women who have in the last 10 years gotten educated, gotten jobs and are
working," he said. "This is a generation of women the Taliban have
never even met with. They can't even conceive of them."
He also suggested that the primitive religious group be given modern offices.
"If we can open an office for the Taliban [in Afghanistan] and have
negotiations, the more you can expose the Taliban to modern Afghan
society — urbanized Afghans — the more you'll be forcing the Taliban to
moderate their positions."
Of course, that's assuming the Taliban is even willing to enter into
peace talks, a concept that's been tentatively in the works for years,
only to be derailed by incidents such as the alleged massacre of 17
Afghan civilians at the hands of a U.S. soldier, as well as the Taliban
assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, a top Karzai emissary in the
proposed negotiations.
Despite the difficulties, Rashid says the alternative is worse. "The
grimmest outcome would result from a botched, overly hasty Western
withdrawal, the absence of a political settlement with the Taliban, a
continuing civil war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani leaders' continuing
resistance to internal reform, the army's refusal to seek a compromise
on Afghanistan with the United States and Afghans, and a consequent
meltdown of the Pakistani state," he warns in "Pakistan on the Brink."
To that end, if the region implodes, Rashid says there would be
plenty of blame to go around. "Obama and his senior officials share a
major part of the blame because their failure to act as a team has
resulted in contradictory policies, intense political infighting, and
uncertainty about U.S. aims and objectives in the region," he wrote.
At the same time, Rashid blasts the Pakistani military for its
obsession with Indian hegemony, the Kashmiri cause, protecting its
nuclear program, and ensuring a pro-Pakistani government in Kabul —
despite U.S. pressure and money.
"Its political and military leadership has shown neither the courage
nor the will nor the intelligence to carry out major reforms in the
country's foreign and economic policies," he charges. "The military has
allowed the Afghan Taliban factions and their leaders safe sanctuary and
support ever since 2001 — something the Americans knew well but failed
to raise effectively. Social services are near collapse, law enforcement
is abysmal, economic hardship is widespread, natural disasters occur
with little or no government assistance, and the majority of the
population has no security."
This kind of blunt talk is unquestionably dangerous in Pakistan,
where shadowy violence abounds — as does shadowy Machiavellian politics.
(Islamabad's former ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, became
ensnared in a bizarre controversy last year revolving a memo purportedly
orchestrated by the civilian government asking the U.S. for help
reining in the military.)
The Committee to Protect Journalists declared Pakistan the most
dangerous country in the world for reporters in 2011, with seven
journalists dying in the tumultuous nation that year. Rashid said he's
well aware of the perils of his work.
"I'm very outspoken, but one tends to play a cat-and-mouse game with
the extremists and the terrorist agencies," he said. "It's become very
hard to become a journalist in Pakistan. The threats and harassment
journalists face are very real. I feel them all the time.
"But this is very important and I don't think Pakistan can be ignored."
Rashid also encourages American policymakers to re-evaluate their
attitudes toward Pakistan, especially those who might want to dismiss
the nation as a lost cause.
"The tendency of some in Congress to say 'let them go hang' doesn't
make sense," he told us. "It's a geostrategic linchpin in South Asia and
West Asia, and its location on the Gulf makes it extremely important
for the U.S. oil supply and global stability.
"It also happens to house the full range of Islamic extremists — local, Arab, Central Asian, the Chechens."
So what to do about those terrorists, especially the radical Taliban?
Rashid proposes the radical notion of rehabilitating them, when
possible, rather than killing them.
"There has to be a change in foreign policy," he said. "We have to
wake up to the new reality that we have to de-fang these militants, not
through military action necessarily but through some kind of
reconciliation program."
He pointed to a program in Saudi Arabia in which young al-Qaeda
recruits were captured and initially imprisoned, then gradually
re-indoctrinated through the intervention of moderate mullahs.
"They didn't kill them, but put them into jails which became
residential accommodations and they kept them there for many years and
had them indoctrinated by mullahs, got them degrees and skills, got them
married, and gave them psychological treatment.
"It's been a very successful program and we could probably get
funding for something like that," he said. "We need to do that on a much
larger scale in Pakistan, and I think if we did that there would be a
lot of Western support.
"In the 21st century, we cannot maintain extremists on our soil as an
arm of foreign policy," he added. "That era has gone. It was possible
during the Cold War because the fundamentalists were anti-Soviet and the
Americans also funded extremists — Osama bin Laden and all kinds of
groups. After 9/11, that era has ended."
