U.S. President Barack Obama is piling up foreign policy disasters. In at least three areas, crucial for world peace and American interests — Arab-Israel, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Yemen-Somalia — he is pursuing a course which can only be described as foolhardy. The anger and hate towards the United States which he is generating could take a generation to dispel.
His abject surrender to Israel on the Palestine question has shocked a large part of the world and gravely damaged America’s standing among Arabs and Muslims. To court the Jewish vote at next year’s presidential election, he has thrown into reverse the policy of outreach to the Muslim world which he expressed so eloquently in his 2009 Cairo speech. If he is now driven to use America’s veto at the Security Council to block the application of a Palestinian state for UN membership, he will have been defeated by the very forces of racism, Islamophobia, neocon belligerence and Greater Israel expansionism he once hoped to tame.
Obama’s policy in Afghanistan is equally perverse. On the one hand he seems to want to draw the Taliban into negotiations, but on the other some of his army chiefs and senior diplomats want to kill the Taliban first. This is hardly a policy likely to bring the insurgents to the table. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Ryan Crocker, America’s new ambassador to Kabul, actually said that the conflict should continue until more of the Taliban are killed. Who, one wonders, is in charge of U.S. policy?
In a message on the occasion of the Eid at the end of Ramadan, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leader of the Afghan Taliban, seemed to hint at his readiness for a comprehensive negotiation. “Every legitimate option can be considered,” he said, “in order to reach the goal of an independent Islamic regime in Afghanistan.” He urged foreign powers to withdraw their troops “immediately” in order to achieve a lasting solution to the problem. In a gesture to his local opponents, he stressed that the Taliban did not wish to monopolize power and that all ethnicities would participate in a “real Islamic regime acceptable to all the people of the country.”
Should not the United States and its allies respond positively to this message? A conference in Bonn next December is due to review NATO’s war in Afghanistan – a war which seems closer to being lost than won. 25,000 soldiers deserted the Afghan armed services in the first six months of this year because they had lost faith in the Karzai government’s ability to protect them and their families. Coalition troops are due to withdraw their troops by the end of 2014. Might there not be an argument for an immediate offer of negotiation together with a pledge of an earlier withdrawal? It is far from clear what strategic interests, if any, the West is defending in Afghanistan.
The subject is of considerable urgency since America’s counter-insurgency strategy is in real trouble. In July, Ahmad Wali Karzai, President Karzai’s powerful brother, was shot dead in Kandahar. In August, the Taliban attacked the British Council in Kabul. On September 10, a truck packed with explosives killed five people and wounded 77 US troops at a NATO military base south-west of Kabul — the highest injury toll of foreign forces in a single incident in the 10-year war. On 13 September, insurgents staged a 20 hour-long assault on the U.S. embassy and NATO headquarters in the heart of Kabul — supposedly the best protected perimeter in the whole country. And on 20 September, Burhanuddin Rabbani, head of the High Peace Council, was assassinated.
Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, was charged by Karzai with the task of seeking peace with the Taliban. He seems to have made little or no progress. He was a mujahidin leader in the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, then President of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996, before he was ousted by the Taliban. He then became a leading figure of the Northern Alliance of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras which fought the Islamists until the Taliban were driven from power by the U.S. invasion of 2001. No one has claimed responsibility for Rabbani’s murder but suspicion has fallen on the Pakistan-backed Haqqani network.
Pakistani has a vital strategic interest in Afghanistan. It wants to keep Indian influence out of a country, which it considers its strategic depth. It suspects Karzai of being in league with India. It would seem to prefer a Taliban-governed Afghanistan to Karzai’s American-backed regime. In any event, Rabbani’s death robs President Karzai of a key ally and strains his relations with Pakistan. It could be a step towards a civil war if no early attempt is made to engage the Taliban.
Now entering its eleventh year — at the colossal cost to the U.S. taxpayer of about $120bn a year — the Afghan war has drained U.S. resources, dangerously undermined the Pakistani state and threatened to destroy the U.S.-Pakistani alliance. Addressing the U.S. Senate in mid-September, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, accused Pakistan’s army and the ISI, the powerful military intelligence service, of being in league with the Haqqani network. By using “violent extremism as an instrument of policy,” Mullen said, Pakistan was undermining the American military effort and jeopardizing the U.S.-Pakistani strategic partnership.
Pakistan’s response was not long in coming. Speaking on the BBC programme The World Tonight on 22 September, General Asad Durani, a former head of the ISI, described U.S.-Pakistan relations as in a state of “low-intensity conflict.” Pakistan should back America’s opponents in Afghanistan, he said if the United States continued drone strikes against targets in Pakistan.
Meanwhile, in their hunt for the Taliban and their supporters, US special forces mount frequent night raids in Afghanistan, such as the one on 2 September which killed Sabar Lal, a wealthy Afghan in his home in Jalalabad. According to press reports, the Americans broke in, handcuffed and blindfolded him and his guests, then took him out on the veranda and killed him. He had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, spent five years in Guantánamo, then built a new life for himself and his family. Clearly this was not enough to allay American suspicions of his links with Islamic militants.
In Yemen and the Horn of Africa, America’s increasing resort to drones, with their inevitable toll of civilian deaths, has enraged the local populations and driven recruits into the arms of the militants. According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration has used CIA-operated drones to carry out lethal attacks against al-Qaida in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. The drone program has killed more than 2,000 militants and civilians since 2001.
Is it not time to enquire whether U.S. policy has not created more terrorists than the CIA has managed to kill? Would it not be better if the United States were simply to declare victory in Afghanistan — and indeed in all the other places where its Special Forces operate — bring its troops home as soon as possible and turn its attention to tending the wounds in its own broken society?
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
Copyright © 2011 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 27 September 2011
Word Count: 1,182
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