M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — The 1989 defeat of the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan was a tactical victory, but a strategic defeat for
the Western alliance. The induced success of the jihadis gave them a boost of
vainglory, leading to the expansion of their jihad to the West.
Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and
their al-Qaida organization are the unintended consequences of the 1979-87
strategy by former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and
former director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency William Casey of
funding, training and equipping jihadists to fight a conventional force.
Those lessons are now coming in handy for
terrorists operating in the Afghan countryside, where NATO is floundering in a
manner similar to the 1983-84 travails of the Soviet battalions.
If it can be said that the economic and other
costs of the Afghan war helped push the Soviet Union to collapse, it can also
be argued by those determined to undermine the West that the immense financial
costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – along with the concomitant
speculative rise in commodity prices sparked by the conflicts – are responsible
for the apparent meltdown in Western economies witnessed in the latter half of
2008.
Iraq and Afghanistan are theaters separated
by conditions on the ground. In Iraq, the policy of occupation has led to an
essentially nationalist rebellion against the United States and the United
Kingdom – giving the religious Shiite parties an opportunity to secure the
political space left empty by the secular nationalists’ recourse to insurgency.
In Afghanistan the resistance has come from
the jihadists who since 1996 have been known as the Taliban. And, as in the
1980s and 1990s, the principal support base for this militia has been the
Pakistan army. Whether it is training given by soldiers "on leave" or
access to funds, safe houses and munitions, the Taliban could not have put up a
viable front against NATO for more than a few months without such support.
Astonishingly, as yet the CIA, the Defense
Intelligence Agency and numerous other U.S. intelligence agencies appear
clueless about the extent to which the Pakistani army is providing sustenance
to the Taliban. U.S. officials are still in denial and hoping for a miracle –
aware that numerous military, diplomatic and academic careers would go up in
smoke were they to accept that their policy of relying on Pakistan’s army to
fight their own auxiliary in battle is flawed.
By looking toward heaven rather than at
ground realities, NATO planners are preparing for a Soviet-style retreat from
Afghanistan. But this will give the jihadists the oxygen they lost after the
setbacks caused by the U.S. military and other actions since the terror attacks
of 9/11.
The head of the snake that is the Taliban
is the Pakistani army. This is where attention needs to be focused, now that
Pakistani General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has failed in his gambit of using the
Mumbai terror attacks to divert international attention away from his
reluctance to engage the Taliban in Waziristan and in Pakistan’s Federally
Administered Tribal Areas.
Because cash and other assistance is
funneled through religious "trusts" and other cutouts, and because of
an undeclared policy that all soldiers fraternizing with the Taliban be dressed
in the same garb as the militia, somnolent U.S. intelligence agencies have
failed to detect the multiple contacts between the Pakistani army and the
jihadists, including clearance from the higher brass to missions directed
against India and NATO.
Kayani's bluff must be called. This is what
Soviet leaders failed to do when General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, the former
president of Pakistan and founder of jihadism in a once-professional army, was
soaking up billions of U.S. dollars to send irregulars into Afghanistan.
The de facto president-cum-prime minister,
also known as army chief, of Pakistan needs to be given the message that unless
his forces take out the Taliban within Waziristan and FATA, NATO will provide
assistance in the form of air sorties, missile strikes and reconnoitering
troops on the ground. The elimination of the Taliban within their nests in
Pakistan has become a national security priority for the United States and the
European Union. It is intolerable that success is denied because the Pakistani
army is clearly unable or unwilling to accomplish the job.
As matters evolve, despite the infatuation
of the many U.S. and EU officials for Pakistan’s military, planners in Western
capitals may finally accept that the rapid metastasis of jihad from safe areas
in Pakistan is a hazard requiring immediate action, and that the present policy
of relying on Pakistan has not worked.
The 2009 general elections in India may
produce a government willing to commit at least two divisions of Indian troops
to Afghanistan to assist in the battle against a jihadist force that has
carried out six mass terror attacks in India in 2008 alone. While a fresh
terror attack on India may not lead to a military attack on Pakistan, it may
strengthen the argument that India needs to place military boots on the ground
to assist NATO in Afghanistan.
Unless the Pakistani army is liberated from
the jihadist influence steadily injected since the days of Zia, it will remain
an accessory to terror rather than a defender against it. General Kayani had
calculated that the Mumbai attacks would lead India to mobilize troops on its
western frontier, thereby giving him a reason to refuse NATO's request to go
after the Taliban. That has not happened. The Indians have not mobilized.
The situation does not need more of the
same failed medicine of depending on Kayani. It requires a clear ultimatum,
followed by NATO action to take out the Taliban nests.
The people of FATA, Waziristan and the
North West Frontier Province will themselves hand in the Taliban once they see
that having them in their areas does not bring goodies from the Pakistani army,
but death from NATO attacks.
The road to success in the war against
jihadis runs through Pakistan, and this route is too vital for the security of
the world to remain in the control of the current leadership of the Pakistani
army, unless that army can throw away the poisoned legacy of Brzezinski, Casey
and Zia.
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and
professor of geopolitics at Manipal University.He can be reached at
mdnalapat1@gmail.com. ©Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
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