M.D. Nalapat
Manipal, India — During the 1960s, the
United States had a president who did more for the underclass than most of his
predecessors put together. Lyndon Johnson introduced healthcare, civil rights
and other measures designed to provide a level playing field for people of
different classes and colors among the citizenry.
Instead of acclaim, what he got was
unpopularity, forcing him to surrender office after just one term. The reason
was an unpopular war, fought the wrong way – through the insertion of greater
and greater numbers of troops.
U.S. soldiers marauding through their land
converted several hundred thousand South Vietnamese into Viet Cong. As a recent
editorial on Afghanistan in the New York Times put it, Americans too would be
tempted to violence were a strange-looking bunch of aliens to invade and occupy
Oregon.
Those who seek conventional military
solutions to problems within other countries forget that the world is very
different from what it was during the peak years of European colonialism. Then,
mass killings were acceptable. But now, were NATO to repeat in Afghanistan the
tactics of European colonial powers in South America, Africa and Asia, their
own populations would halt such slaughter.
In the age of worldwide cable television,
significant "collateral damage" is unacceptable. This is not a
situation that would have endeared itself to Winston Churchill, the wartime
British prime minister who once favored the bombing of undefended villages in
the Middle East, and looked the other way when more than 6 million Indians died
in 1944 of starvation in the single British-ruled province of Bengal.
Given the absence of public support, unless
soldiers are given the freedom to impose their version of order on the populace
without regard to collateral damage, they will be unable to extinguish local
guerrillas, especially when anger at the presence of alien forces creates
significant accretions to the resistance.
Most internal conflicts need to be settled
by forces native to the particular country, and Afghanistan is no exception. As
in Iraq – where the victory over Saddam Hussein should have been followed by a
phased withdrawal of coalition troops to the borders within 18 months of the
2003 victory – in Afghanistan NATO forces should concentrate on training and
equipping local troops rather than participating in combat, except as backup to
local forces.
Should U.S. President Barack Obama view
more troops as the answer to military reverses in Afghanistan, exactly as
Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam four decades ago, he is likely to follow the same
political trajectory as the visionary Texan.
In Iraq, al-Qaida clones have been
desperately ramping up operations to ensure that NATO forces remain on the
frontlines, thus ensuring a plentiful supply of volunteers to the resistance.
Once NATO troops withdraw from active combat in Iraq, the motivation for such
enlistment will fall dramatically. One sect no longer dominates the rest, as
during the Saddam period, when Sunnis from Tikrit – and Sunnis generally –
enjoyed a privileged status.
Interestingly, Western media lays almost
all the blame for the present dismal conditions in Iraq at the door of the
hapless government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, rather than holding their
own governments accountable for the disaster zone that Iraq has become since
2003.
In Afghanistan, Western policymakers and
representatives of selected non-governmental organizations have agreed on
multiple objectives, few of which are feasible within the local context.
In 2005-06, NGOs retailed several, largely
accurate, stories of human rights violations and corruption within the
Afghan-Afghan government – as distinct from the NATO-Afghan government. As a
consequence, some of those who had fought the Taliban since 1996 were culled.
They were replaced by individuals suggested by agencies linked to the Pakistan
army – that steadfast ally of both NATO and the Taliban – or by people
acceptable to the NGOs but ineffective against the Taliban and its al-Qaida
core.
During World War II, Churchill embraced
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, even though he was hardly a friend of the
Bolshevik Party. The enemy was Hitler, and to fight him, the British leader was
willing to put old prejudices aside.
Sadly, there seem to be few Churchillians
in NATO. Policymakers there have separated the populace into a dizzying welter
of categories, with differential policies that often change at quick intervals.
What is needed is a simple divide between those who are part of or favorable to
the Taliban and al-Qaida, and the rest. The latter need to be co-opted as
allies.
Tajiks and Hazaras in Afghanistan are
generally outside the armed resistance to NATO, as are the overwhelming
majority of Uzbeks. However, instead of rewarding them for this, NATO has
discriminated against these ethnic groups in its eagerness to "win
over" the Pashtuns. Seeing that bad behavior is rewarded and good behavior
is ignored, few Pashtuns will be motivated to back NATO against the armed
resistance.
Similarly in Iraq, Shiites have been
neglected in a bid to win over the Sunnis, a policy that reached its peak when
Zalmay Khalilzad was the U.S. envoy in the country. Of course, there has been a
Western neglect of the human rights of Shiites throughout the Middle East, for
reasons that are not obvious.
Instead of inflaming local resentment by
saying, as a British general did recently, that NATO will remain in Afghanistan
for 40 years or more, what is needed is a phased transition to Afghan hands.
Barack Obama is right in saying that more troops are not the answer in Iraq.
Then why has he fallen into Lyndon Johnson's "Vietnam trap" in
Afghanistan?
-(Professor M.D. Nalapat is
vice-chair of the Manipal Advanced Research Group, UNESCO Peace Chair, and
professor of geopolitics at Manipal University. ©Copyright M.D. Nalapat.)
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