Given the debate about whether the United States should refocus its strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan more narrowly on hunting down al Qaeda, it’s worth looking at what happened immediately after 9/11 when it did precisely that.

Reluctant to destabilise Pakistan, then under former president Pervez Musharraf, the United States turned a blind eye to the training camps and poured money into the country. In return, Pakistan hunted down al Qaeda leaders — among them alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2003. ”For the Bush administration, the priority was al Qaeda,” writes Bruguiere. ”The Pakistan Army and the ISI would focus on this - external - objective, which would not destabilise the fragile political balance in Pakistan.”

But for Bruguiere, one of the major lessons was that Islamist militants can’t be separated into “good guys and bad guys”, since they were all inter-linked. 

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures. ”After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way,” he said. “All the groups are scattered, very polymorphous and even mutant.”

Gone were the political objectives which drove terrorism before, he writes, to be replaced with a nihilistic aim of spreading chaos in order to create the conditions for an Islamic caliphate. For the hijackers on the Algiers-Paris flight, their demands seemed almost incidental. “We realised we faced the language of hatred and a total determination to see it through.”

Many have argued against this view of international terrorism as a new and nebulous Islamist network without obvious political objectives, which found its most powerful expression in al Qaeda. Just as Lashkar-e-Taiba grew out of rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the GIA sprang from anger about the annulment of elections in Algeria that an Islamist group was poised to win. Its attacks on Paris in the mid 1990s were seen as a reprisal for France’s role in supporting the government in its former colony. Many of those who support al Qaeda and other Islamist groups are driven by anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other perceived injustices across the Middle East. 

Yet if he is right that the United States and its allies are facing a loose international network of Islamists with no clear pyramid structure, then it would suggest that no amount of drone bombing of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership of the kind promoted by counter-terrorism supporters would work. Nor would it be enough, alone, to address political grievances at a national level without taking account of a network which operates globally and does not recognise the validity of the nation state. Rather, you would need a sophisticated and comprehensive strategy which went far beyond the kind of focused counter-terrorism first used by the Bush administration.

Browsing through the New Yorker profile on U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, I noticed the same argument was raised there:

“A pure counter-terror approach had, in fact, been the Bush Administration’s policy for years: kill or capture terrorist leaders, with minimal support for political institutions in Kabul and Islamabad,” it said. “It had created the mess that (President Barack) Obama inherited, with two countries under threat from insurgents and Al Qaeda’s strength increasing.

“‘Al Qaeda doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” it quoted former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who led Obama’s first review of strategy, as saying.  “They’re part of a syndicate of terrorist groups. Selective counterterrorism won’t get you anywhere, because the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes.”

(Photos: Jean-Louis Bruguiere; Pervez Musharraf, the Taj in Mumbai, the Marriot in Islamabad)

When France and Germany put years of enmity behind them after World War Two, they made a leap of faith in agreeing to entwine their economies so that war became impossible. With their economies now soldered by the euro, it can be easy to forget how deep their mutual distrust once ran - from the Napoleonic wars to the fall of Paris to Prussia in 1871, to the trenches of World War One and the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.

As India and Pakistan begin yet another attempt to make peace, they face a similar challenge. Can they put aside years of distrust to build on a tentative thaw in relations?

Many analysts argue that a sketchy roadmap to peace is already available, based on negotiations between advisers to former president Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in which Pakistani action against militants was matched by Indian moves towards a peace deal on Kashmir. But reviving that roadmap - or for that matter finding another way forward - would require both countries to put aside their past and accept that history is not the only guide to the future.

Indian newspaper, the Business Standard, summarised what many Indian commentators say about past attempts at peace-making - that Indian peace offers have never been matched by a sincere effort by Pakistan to curb Islamist militants. ”Pakistan has a history of trying first to get what it wants on the battlefield and, when that fails, to get it at the negotiating table,” it says in an editorial. “Indian leaders meanwhile fall into the traps of magnanimity (make a gesture to a smaller neighbour) or gullibility (concede this or that and it will deliver peace).”

Pakistan has its own version of history, seen from the perspective of a smaller country that believed it was cheated of Kashmir at partition in 1947, and then torn in two with Indian help when Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, won independence in the 1971 war.  Both sides accuse the other of breaching the Simla accord which followed that war - the last major peace treaty between the two - Pakistan by sponsoring militants to fight in Kashmir, and India by starting the Siachen conflict in the mountains beyond Kashmir in 1984.

Many other arguments about the past, too numerous to mention, come up every time anybody discusses India and Pakistan until the weight of history becomes an immoveable obstacle to peace.

So how did France and Germany put their history behind them? And are their parallels with India and Pakistan?

Their reconciliation was in part due to a real change in Germany after World War Two, when it renounced a tradition of militarism dating back to its roots in Prussia.  But New Delhi has yet to be convinced that Pakistan has really changed in its attitude to Islamist militants it once nurtured, fearing that while it attacks the Pakistani Taliban in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, it will leave alone other groups used against India like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in its Punjab province.

In a column in the Daily Times, Pakistani analyst Hasan-Askari Rizvi has an interesting take on this question, suggesting the next few months could be decisive.

“It seems that these (Punjab-based militant) groups are no longer favoured by Pakistan’s security and intelligence authorities. These have been put on hold because the army is busy in the tribal areas and does not want to open a new front in mainland Pakistan. Further, it does not want to seen as taking action against these groups under Indian pressure,” he writes. “The Punjab security and intelligence apparatus is now targeting activists of these organisations and monitoring the madrassas that have a reputation for militancy and maintain links with the Taliban. This effort is aimed at destroying their networks, isolating them and discouraging recruitment.

“The next two months will show if Pakistan’s civilian and military authorities will exert more pressure on Punjab-based militant groups and ensure that they do not force a foreign policy situation on Pakistan in its interaction with India. If the role of these groups is neutralised, it will be possible to argue that Pakistan’s counter-terrorism policy has made a historical shift.”

Franco-German reconciliation was also encouraged by the United States, which wanted both to work together against a common enemy in the Soviet Union. The United States, keen to see an improvement in relations between India and Pakistan to help stabilise the region as far as Afghanistan, is now quietly trying to persuade them that they both face a common enemy in terrorism.

As for the benefits of greater economic cooperation between India and Pakistan, these are rarely questioned by either country, from increased bilateral trade, to pipelines bringing oil and gas to India from Iran and Central Asia, and to the opening up of transit trade from India via Pakistan into Afghanistan.  So the parallels are there - in the possibility of real change (and the jury is still out on that one), in the backing of the United States, and in the potential economic gains.

Where the parallel falls down is perhaps in vision and leadership. While Franco-German reconciliation was inspired by men who had lived through the horrors of World War Two and saw European integration as the best way to stop history from repeating itself, there is no clear vision of where India and Pakistan might end up. And while France and Germany benefitted from leaders who were powerful enough to push change through, only in India does Prime Minister Singh enjoy a relatively strong position having just won a renewed mandate in a general election, while in Pakistan the civilian government shares power with the Pakistan Army on foreign and security policy.

A much-quoted aphorism is that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But only very rarely do two countries like France and Germany escape their history. Can India and Pakistan do the same?

(Photos: French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Verdun (1984), Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (undated); Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1983).)

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India is piling on the diplomatic pressure to convince the international community to lean on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants blamed by New Delhi for the Mumbai attacks.

According to the Times of India, “India has made it clear to the U.S. and Iran as well as Pakistan’s key allies, China and Saudi Arabia, that they need to do more to use their clout to pressure Pakistan into acting…” The Press Trust of India (PTI), quoted by The Hindu, said India had used a visit by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal to Delhi to drive home the same message.

As discussed previously on this blog, in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, India’s response was to look to the United States to put pressure on Pakistan. It also appears to have won some support from Russia, whose officials said publicly that the attacks were funded by Dawood Ibrahim, an underworld don who India says lives in Pakistan. China, Pakistan’s traditional ally, supported the United Nations Security Council in  blacklisting the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity accused of being a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba.  China’s Foreign Minister has also telephoned his counterparts in India and Pakistan urging dialogue, according to Xinhua. 

And to complete the tour of the permanent members of the Security Council, Britain blamed Pakistan-based militants for the Mumbai attacks, while France has also called on Pakistan to take action.

That’s a fairly broad consensus in favour of diplomatic pressure. There certainly seem to be more players more visibly involved than in 2001/2002 when India and Pakistan came to the brink of war over an attack on the Indian parliament that India blamed on Pakistan-based militants. You might therefore be tempted to argue that the diplomatic approach is working — and as long as this stands a chance, the prospects of military escalation are slim.

So what is going wrong? Despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, the military tensions are rising.  Pakistan has cancelled army leave and redeployed troops.  The Washington Post said thousands of troops were being redeployed from the Afghan border to the border with India.

Are the two countries’ armies simply making sure they are prepared, just in case the diplomatic efforts fail? Or is there more going on behind-the-scenes?

The rows of bombed-out and upturned Soviet era-planes that littered the ground at Kabul airport are gone. Gone also is the confusion that used to reign in the small immigration control office or over at the baggage belt in a dark corner of the damp building. You are quickly waved through, the bags have arrived and you are whisked off in Kabul’s crisp early morning air.

Returning to the Afghan capital after five years is both reassuring and a little bit disconcerting. Traffic clogs the dusty streets, people crane their necks out of cars hollering at each other to give way, smiling school girls in twos or threes wait by the roadside for a ride home in the crowded cabs. Mobile phone shops have sprung up everywhere, and everyone uses the phones. You even have shalwar-clad men standing at street corners selling Afghanis for dollars in one hand and pre-paid calling cards for your phone on the other.

Five years ago, it was a city that seemed to have just crept out of years of darkness. The signs of war were still there  - in the pock-marked government buildings and houses, and in the men and children you saw on almost every other street with an arm or a leg amputated because of a mine blast in the world’s most mined nation. You would also see a lot more former soldiers, members of one or other of the warlords, walking the streets still in military fatigues figuring out a future now that the war was over.

Most of that has gone. The grass has grown and there is a football game on in the stadium where the Taliban conducted public executions.

But then you look at Kabul’s high-walled compounds with their blast barriers, sandbags and concertina wire running all around to keep  suicide bombers as far away as possible, and you know that things can turn ugly very quickly. Five years on, the walls of the embassies and other foreign organisations have grown taller, there are more checkpoints and more roads that are either cordoned off completely  or regulated, and you begin to feel the insecurity that the city, especially the expatriate part of it, lives with constantly.

The assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai during a military parade in April, the Indian embassy bombing in July and last month’s Taliban ambush of French soldiers outside Kabul have added to a sense of siege that in some ways began with the storming of the luxurious Serena hotel earlier this year.

If large parts of the country have remained no-go areas, even the capital can feel menacing at times, especially for foreigners. Some people are starting to talk of the Taliban at the gates of Kabul, which along with Kandahar has traditionally held the key to dominanace over the fractious nation.

So what is the image to take away ? Of the laughter of children as they run home after school or that of a garrison city living in fear of the next attack? 

Last week the Canadians were soul-searching about their presence in Afghanistan after three female aid workers, two of them Canadian, were killed in an ambush. ”(The) Canadian deaths in Afghanistan underscore the most troubling aspect of the West’s strategy there,” said the Toronto Star. “Put simply, it isn’t working.”

Now it is the turn of the French to ask the same questions after the deaths of 10 French soldiers in a battle with Taliban fighters: What is happening in Afghanistan? Or, for some, what are we doing there?

French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France was “determined to continue the struggle against terrorism for democracy and freedom” after the biggest loss of French soldiers in combat since the Algerian war that ended in 1962.  But French Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande demanded answers to the many questions he said were raised by the deaths. “What are the aims of this war?” he asked. “How many soldiers are needed to achieve the objectives?

Comments on the website of French daily Le Monde were tempered by mourning for the dead. Some blamed the United States for “this crazy war which the Americans have dragged us into”; others anguished about whether they were fighting a “just” war in line with French beliefs in human rights.

“We are talking about the defence of the free world,” wrote one person, “and these soldiers died for democracy fighting the Taliban, who want to send us back to the Middle Ages. The soldiers’ bodies are not yet cold and already the Taliban collaborators are reacting…”

But that in case, asked another, “when are we going to decide to go and defend Georgia against Russian aggression?”

“The invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 2001 was supported by a very broad international consensus,” was the reply. “W. Bush leaves in a few months. So what do we do? Pack our bags and leave the Afghans to go back to civil war?”

It is clear that the war in Afghanistan has climbed back up to the top of the agenda in countries which sent troops to fight a war which, unlike Iraq, had been supported by domestic opinion after 9/11.  But now seven years on, will the voting public change its mind? Or are people simply waking up to the reality of the Afghan campaign, which by many accounts is getting uglier by the day?

Spare a thought for the people inside Afghanistan. “Taliban are really close to capital nowadays,” wrote the blogger Afghan Lord last week. “Horror is spreading fast among the people; the residents of Kabul are really worry what will happen in the next coming weeks.”
     

Peshawar is such an important city for Pakistan that it can be hard to write about it without sounding shrill.  It is significant strategically since it lies near the entrance to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.  But it is also important emotionally – not only is it a Moghul city and an ancient Silk Route trading hub, but it is also a Pashtun town on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line , the ill-demarcated border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by British colonial rulers that splits the Pashtun people of the region in two. For Pakistan, fighting for control of Peshawar is probably comparable to what France and Germany felt about Alsace Lorraine before World War Two.

So when the New York Times publishes an article about Peshawar being at risk of falling into Taliban hands  we must pay attention.  “In the last two months, Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on this city of three million people, one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms,” it says. “The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.”

The Daily Times says it more dramatically, with a Kiplingesque notion of what the fall of Peshawar to Taliban control would mean for Pakistan: “The Taliban are no longer at the gates of Peshawar, they’re inside, making their presence felt in the largest city in the NWFP (North West Frontier Province),” it says.

Pakistan has just launched an offensive against Taliban fighters near Peshawar  in an attempt to re-impose government control. As I said at the beginning, it’s hard not to sound shrill about a place that few outsiders understand. But history is in the making here, and the battle for Peshawar is one we all should watch.