In lieu of a regular post, which will finally happen tomorrow, this is my latest submission for my parallel writing endeavour, which I finally finished last last evening.While the impending loss of the leased American air base in Kyrgyzstan is a substantial setback, it offers another opportunity to revisit the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. As American and NATO forces prepare to mirror the Iraq troop surge in the nation where the West's war against terrorism began, the current coalition logistical challenge may lead some to question whether the Afghan priority ought to be shifted elsewhere. Steadfast resolve in Afghanistan must remain a top global security priority, but the Kyrgyzstan conundrum brings another security dilemma, itself inexorably tied to Afghanistan, into stark clarity.
The situation in Manas comes at a precarious time, following recent Taliban attacks on major coalition supply routes through Pakistan and the 2005 closure of the Karshi-Khanabad (K2) Air Base in Uzbekistan. The loss of the Kyrgyz base would be another major blow to coalition logistical requirements in the region. The closure of the Manas Air Base would further bottleneck the already expensive process of supplying military forces in Afghanistan. This development comes as the United States prepares to mirror the successful Iraq surge on the South Asian front. In order to understand the current situation in Afghanistan, its complexity, and its context in the strategic security effort, one must review not only recent Afghan history, but the current situation with a number of prominent regional players: Pakistan, Iran, and Russia, just to name the big ones.
Since 2001, a number of pundits and historians have done a yeoman's job of painting the West, and particularly the United States, as the party responsible for turning Afghanistan into what it is today, and what it was during the horror years of the 1990's. The truth is that as recently as the 1970's, Afghanistan was a somewhat modern and moderate nation - imperfect, just as any other nation, but relatively stable. (An exceptional, if realistically fictional, account of Afghanistan during the 1970's can be read in Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel
The Kite Runner.) It was the Soviet Union that robbed Afghanistan of this prosperity. By introducing the radical Marxism that threw the country into civil war in the 1970's, invading and occupying the nation throughout the 1980's in an effort to sustain the communist government, and leaving a power vacuum in the nation they had destroyed by the time of their withdrawal in 1989, it was the Soviet Union that left Afghanistan a broken shell of its former self.
America can rightfully be accused of some degree of negligence following the Soviet withdrawal for not helping Afghanistan to fill this vacuum for itself, although popular hindsight accounts such as
Charlie Wilson's War appeal to a simplistically false notion that a few million dollars in infrastructure projects would have certainly prevented extremism from taking hold. A short memory of Soviet tyranny and a desire on the part of some to blame the United States for all of the world's ills have led some to deceive many into believing that the now-defunct Evil Empire deserves anything less than an overwhelming majority of the blame for what Afghanistan became during the 1990's. It was the vacuum that they created for themselves to fill in 1979, and that they subsequently vacated a decade later, that led to the Afghan Civil War of the 1990's and the ensuing rise of the Taliban. The degree to which America was negligent in Afghanistan after 1989 was comparatively negligible, particularly in light of the numerous additional military challenges preceding the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1991.
This concept of a power vacuum is an important one to understand, because the purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom is to prevent the same power vacuum from reappearing in Afghanistan, and thus allowing for the creation of a brand new humanitarian and security disaster. While there are numerous objectives tied to Operation Enduring Freedom, the two most prominent are the military and political destruction of the Taliban (at least, as it currently stands), and the provision of security in order to facilitate the reestablishment of the Afghan government and economy. Military leaders and most of the troops on the ground understand this, and are directing the war accordingly, but few members of the general public in the West truly understand the situation. While the controversial Iraq War remained the source of headline fodder over the last several years, few paid attention as the war in Afghanistan ebbed and flowed. With the overwhelming focus in South Asia placed on Afghanistan, many pundits ignored or paid only passing attention to the equally dangerous void that has existed for years within bordering Pakistan.
The Taliban's grip on Afghanistan grew out of this power vacuum. Despite having been ousted from power, al Qaeda and the Taliban were able to occupy an adjacent region with its own power vacuum: the unforgiving mountains and jungles of the Northwest Frontier Province, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and North and South Waziristan, all of them components of western Pakistan. This is one of the most difficult areas in the entire world to police, and Osama bin Laden was well aware of this fact when he relocated from Khartoum to Jalalabad in 1996. The border also arbitrarily divides ethnic Pashtun territory into components of two sovereign countries, a division that most Pashtuns ignore due in large part to the inability of either government to actually secure the border. Although al Qaeda operatives and leaders have been denied the freedom of movement that they enjoyed prior to 9/11, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri have remained at large for the greater part of a decade. While 2008 was a difficult year for al Qaeda and their Taliban allies, al Qaeda leaders remain at large while the Taliban has been largely successful at reconstituting itself. This reconstitution results not only from the power vacuum in northwest Pakistan, but also from two sources of support: Iran, and opium crops.
Numerous sources have tied the Taliban to Iranian benefactors. One of the first mentions of this relationship came in 2007 (
AP,
BBC,
Reuters), and was followed in 2008 by news reports indicating that the Taliban was acquiring specialized rifles and anti-vehicle mines of Iranian manufacture (
BBC). In a recent interview, Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morell indicated that the same
explosively formed penetrators that Iran appeared to be supplying to the Jaish al Mahdi militia in Iraq may be
turning up in Afghanistan. There have also been rumblings for a number of years, and from various sources, that Iran may maintain a relationship with al Qaeda, despite occasions during the last several years in which the two parties have found themselves in public relations slug fests with one another over one issue or another. Despite media pundits who claim that Shia Persians could never cooperate with Sunni Arabs, Iran has maintained support for Hamas for many years, and Sunni Arab Syria is Iran's closest ally - in short, an alliance with al Qaeda's Sunni leaders against a common enemy is well within the realm of possibility. The conflicted relationship between al Qaeda and Iran notwithstanding, even a rudimentary understanding of the Iranian state would seem to indicate that Iranian weapons finding their way into the hands of Taliban insurgents could only happen with at least the passive permission, and perhaps the active support, of the Iranian government. With even a moderate degree of Iranian support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, these groups have the potential to use such support from within their Pakistani sanctuary to continue their terrorist operations both within and beyond the borders of Afghanistan.
In the same way that many misunderstood and oversimplified the justification given for the invasion of Iraq (which had more to do with terrorism than with the specific accusations about illicit weapons programs), many fail to see operations in Afghanistan as anything more than a retaliatory strike, followed by a lengthy peacekeeping operation. Not surprisingly, the truth is more complex than this. Prior to the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom in late 2001, Afghanistan was one of the foremost terrorist sanctuaries in the world - a title which it essentially held openly and defiantly, as opposed to other terrorist sanctuaries and sponsors that deny their participation in and support for such activities. When Taliban governance of Afghanistan collapsed, so too did the sanctuary status and state terrorism sponsorship that Afghanistan had previously embodied. So severe was this blow to the Taliban that it was several years before the organization was once again able to pose a remotely credible threat to Afghanistan or the coalition.
The American government and a handful of allies seem at present to have the resolve necessary to complete the mission in Afghanistan, a task that could yet take years or even decades to fully complete. The purpose of this mission, as stated previously, is to support the Afghan government and develop the Afghan army and national police service until they can successfully and legitimately operate on their own, without foreign support. By assisting with rebuilding, helping the Afghans to rebuild for themselves, and providing the security necessary for these rebuilding and development efforts to succeed, the coalition is attempting to accomplish the strategic mission of preventing Afghanistan from being overrun and becoming a sanctuary for anti-Western terrorism once again.
Thus, the problem at hand is no longer only Afghanistan itself, but also these Pakistani safe havens from which the Taliban and al Qaeda are able to base their operations. Even if the mission to help the Afghan security forces secure the country is a complete and total success, and this security allows for Afghanistan to become respected as a regional power, a terrorist safe haven across the border in the ungovernable region of northwest Pakistan would not only threaten to destabilize Afghanistan itself, but its very existence would undermine the entire purpose of providing support to Afghanistan in the first place: to prevent its use as a terrorist safe haven. While a Pakistani sanctuary is not necessarily as useful for al Qaeda as Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was, there are advantages to operating from within an ungovernable area. The frequent Pakistani government protests at American drone air strikes in northwest Pakistan raise sovereignty issues that the American and NATO governments must deal with and consider before every mission; al Qaeda and the Taliban, on the other hand, make copious use of this advantage to both evade capture and stage attacks against Afghan government and civilian targets.
The Taliban and al Qaeda used this advantage, both in Afghanistan and within Pakistani borders; and if pressure from NATO or the Pakistani military tapered off, there would be nothing to stop them from attacking Afghanistan again, or simply using the Pakistani sanctuaries to stage attacks against the West. In recent weeks, their targets have included both Pakistani government forces, and coalition supply lines. With this disruption to the flow of supplies into Afghanistan, directly preceding a troop surge, the scramble to determine an alternative route to replace supplies that would have otherwise travelled through Kyrgyzstan becomes easier to understand. So, what of the situation with Kyrgyzstan?
There are indications that the idea to oust the American contingent from Manas came about not in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, but in Moscow. The day after Bishkek announced that it would evict American forces from Manas, the Russian government announced that a number of former Soviet states would be forming a
cooperative military bloc, and Kyrgyzstan was one of the nations listed as participating. The next day, the Guardian reported that Kyrgyzstan was
recovering from an apparent online attack against the Central Asian nation's technology infrastructure. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a tactic allegedly used by Russia, or with the passive support of the Russian government, during a political conflict with
Estonia in 2007, and against
Georgia during the 2008 South Ossetia War. For a quiet nation in Central Asia to fall victim to an attack similar to those allegedly used by its former imperial master,
and to evict a tenant from a military facility supporting a conflict that the same imperial power has looked on unfavorably in the past, all in the same week, seems a bit too coincidental.
For her part, Russia has pledged to allow the United States to transport non-lethal military and humanitarian cargo through Russian territory (
BBC,
CNN), leading one to question why the Russians would have wanted to pressure the Kyrgyz government into ousting the American garrison in the first place. Tajikistan, which actually borders Afghanistan (unlike Russia and Kyrgyzstan), has made a similar pledge to allow the US and NATO to
use Tajikistan as an overland route for construction supplies, medicine, fuel, and water. Even with the availability of these two options, the supply line disruption caused by the loss of the Manas facility
and the unreliability of the Pakistani overland routes is leading some pundits to suggest that the United States may be forced to reopen military ties with Uzbekistan, whose leader ordered the closure of the aforementioned K2 Air Base in 2005 after a dispute with the United States over human rights.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan proper, early 2009 is a mixed bag. The Taliban have made a long and profitable business out of forcing Afghan peasants to grow opium poppies for use in the illicit international drug trade, a strategy that has provided huge financial dividends to the insurgency in recent years. Last year saw many Afghan farmers, encouraged by the coalition, trading opium for more lucrative cash crops like wheat (
Guardian,
AP) and pomegranates (
Guardian,
AP). This trend appears to have
continued into the new year. In theory, this will pay two dividends: not only will it increase the economic prosperity of the Afghan people, but it will also stifle the economic viability of the Taliban. Both of these developments would further the goals of the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, but success in many other areas will be needed if the US, NATO, and the Afghan national security forces are to defeat the Taliban once and for all. And, as alluded to before, any solution will have to eliminate the viability of the Taliban in both Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
Unfortunately, every piece of good news from Afghanistan seems to be greeted with another piece of equally bad news. There are still reports that former Guantanamo inmates are
joining the Taliban; and with support for extremism collapsing in Iraq, many insurgents are
relocating to Afghanistan. Last year was the most violent year in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, and the Afghan people appear to be
losing confidence in the coalition's ability and resolve to support them against the Taliban.
With good leadership, sufficient resources, and steadfast resolve on the home front, coalition troops can and will win in Afghanistan, even if a victory requires leaders to make difficult decisions about how to shift supplies from a Kyrgyz hub to another strategic inlet. For the sake of the Afghans, the innocent among the Pakistanis, and the security of the West, this mission must be completed in its entirety - failure to do so would result not only in a security and humanitarian tragedy in South Asia, but in the undermining of more than eight years of critical efforts from the finest individuals and teams that America and her allies have to offer. To undermine their efforts and sacrifice would be a gross tragedy in and of itself.
