Pakistan: Now or Never?

And now, into the dead end in Afghanistan

When the history of the Afghan war is written, the protests over the burning of copies of the Koran will certainly be defined as a watershed. What remains to be seen is whether they become the moment the United States lost the war, or rather, when America lost patience.

The anger of Afghans is evident, whether it be over the sense of religious insult or the sheer frustration with a war that has gone on too long and yielded too  little.

Less evident, but perceptible and equally important, however, is the American response. “2014 cannot come fast enough,” was one comment on Twitter about the date when the United States and its allies are meant to hand over control of security to Afghan forces.

“It’s reasonable to wonder what we have gotten out of more than a decade of investment-including 1901 US and 2901 total NATO Coalition deaths-in an effort to forge, as President Obama put it in his speech at West Point, a “partnership with Afghanistan grounded in mutual respect – to isolate those who destroy; to strengthen those who build; to hasten the day when our troops will leave; and to forge a lasting friendship in which America is your partner, and never your patron,” wrote James Joyner at the Atlantic Council. “Aside from hastening the day when our troops leave, none of those goals seem any closer than they were in 2001.”

Contrast that with the reaction to last September’s assault on the U.S. embassy on Kabul, which was erroneously compared to the Tet offensive, when Vietnamese insurgents attacked the U.S. embassy in Saigon 1968 and convinced the American public that – although the attack was defeated - the war was lost.  Last year, the attack on the embassy in Kabul was blamed on Pakistan.  This year, while that accusation stands, the protests over the burning of the Koran are delivering the more authentic message of the Tet offensive – that wars are lost on the home front of public opinion more often than they are on the battlefield.

Andrew Exum from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) summed it up best in his complaint on Twitter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had appeared to take sides with the protesters against the Americans. “In a reversal, with each passing day, Karzai needs U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 more than the U.S. does. Does he realize that?” he wrote. “The U.S. has interests in Afghanistan, but surely Karzai sees how they have become less and less important for the U.S. government & public.”

Yet stop for a moment and consider how this jars with U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Along with its allies, the U.S. aim is to build up Afghan security forces to the point where they can hold their own against an insurgency after 2014, with or without a peace deal with the Taliban.  The sequencing in the rather confusing U.S. mantra of “fight, talk and build” requires an ability to project enough power - or at least pretend to do so - that the Taliban might find they have more to gain from negotiating a settlement while U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan than by fighting their way to Kabul in a civil war.

Culture wars: The burning of the Koran

U.S. President Barack Obama has apologised for the inadvertent burning of copies of the Koran at a military base in Afghanistan and the top general in the country has ordered all coalition troops to undergo training in the proper handling of religious materials by March 3.

Quite apart from the question of how can you “inadvertently” burn books, the bigger issue is can soldiers be so blindly ignorant of the consequences of their action ? Is it because these were soldiers in the rear, insulated  in a huge base that  sometimes feels like a little America with its gymns, snack joints and the easy conviviality between men and women, a setting far removed from the hard-scrabble country outside ?

On the other hand, troops who have to step out of the wire or those directly in harm’s way in  their combat outposts, say for instance in Kunar in the east, would know instinctively the anger such desecration of the holy book would provoke.

This is not to say that the men on the frontlines of Afghanistan’s longest military entanglement have consistently exhibited exemplary behaviour. Only last month the top generals were again rushing to contain the damage after a video surfaced in which U.S. Marines deployed in southern Helmand province appeared to be urinating on Taliban corpses.

Eleven years into the war in Afghanistan, interspersed by the invasion of Iraq, you would expect the world’s most advanced and, according to some, the most moral force, to have picked up the most basic of do’s and don’ts while operating in a Muslim country.”The desecration of the a Quran to many Afghans is even more emotive than civilian casualties or disrespect towards dead bodies and there is more social pressure to react,” wrote Martine van Bijlert on the Afghanistan Analysts Network website.

It’s staggering actually that at one end you have some of the brightest minds in the U.S. military, very perceptive, very polite and sensitive to the beliefs and customs of people around them.  I once had an American officer telling me at that same base in Bagram how he would wolf down his sandwich in a corner or slip to his tent because his Afghan colleagues were fasting during the month of Ramzan and he didn’t want to be seen as impolite.

Difa-e-Pakistan: What we know and do not want to hear

It is an adage that everything is already known; it just has to be rediscovered. But it applies particularly well to the rise of the Difa-e-Pakistan (Defence of Pakistan) Council (DPC). The new alliance of Islamist groups, campaigning for a break in ties with the United States  and an end to warming relations with India, is giving clear shape for the first time in many years to an underworld of hyper-nationalism, militancy, sectarianism and faith-based politics whose influence in Pakistan has until now operated largely beneath the surface.

And many Pakistanis are not liking what they are seeing.  Columnist Ejaz Haider described the very public rallies of the DPC - which includes the Jamaat-e-Islami political organisation, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (the humanitarian wing of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group),  the anti-Shi’ite Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, and former spy chief Hamid Gul among others – as “a Whisky Tango Foxtrot moment for the entire nation and, yes, the military and its various intelligence agencies”.

Yet what is interesting is what the DPC tells us about the trends already going on below the radar.  Given widespread suspicion that the alliance enjoys the tacit backing of the Pakistan Army – few believe it could operate so openly without the approval of the generals in Rawalpindi - it also provides an (albeit distorted) window into the thinking of the country’s powerful security establishment.

The alliance, which has held rallies in the cities of Lahore, Rawalpindi, Multan and Karachi since late last year, is unusual in bringing an intense dislike of India and anger at the United States onto the same platform. Pakistan’s relations with the two countries have always been linked – the military has traditionally sought American support to help it stand up to India. And its reluctance to cede to U.S. pressure to turn on its former militant proxies has in part been explained by its view that Pakistan needs them to counter the influence of its much bigger neighbour in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

But in recent years, Pakistan’s approaches to India and the United States have been viewed separately (in part due to a determined policy of “de-hyphenation” of India and Pakistan in Washington). The United States was the strategic partner with whom Pakistan threw in its lot after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks; India was the country with which it nearly went to war in 2001/2002. Much later, as relations with the Americans soured, they improved with India – so much so that a populist tendency to blame the United States for all of Pakistan’s problems almost completely ignores the traditional enemy India (except in the ranks of the India-focused military.)

The Difa-e-Pakistan criticises the United States and India equally. It is demanding that Pakistan refuse to reopen supply routes for NATO forces in Afghanistan, closed after last year’s NATO airstrike which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border; and that the government withdraw its decision to offer Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trading status to India.

What is important is the narrative which unites them both.

Afghanistan: Asia’s Congo

                                   By Dan Magnowski

For many in the West, Afghanistan and Iraq have much in common.  Both are Islamic countries whose nasty regimes were kicked out by the U.S. after September 11 2001; in both places, the Americans, British and others stayed and spent huge amounts of money on nobody’s quite sure what; and both were examples of ‘evil’, back when that was a cornerstone of foreign policy thinking.

But Afghanistan isn’t just another Iraq. In many respects, it’s much more like another country beloved of the international community: Democratic Republic of Congo.