An overused argument
From the Blog PkColumnist.com: An overused argument - THE strategic defeat of Al Qaeda "requires the sustained denial of the group's safe haven in the tribal areas of Western Pakistan" states the unclassified summary of the Obama administration's review of the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict. This lament, which pins the entire blame of failure in Afghanistan beyond the border, has been falling from the lips of nearly every foreign policy analyst in the wake of the review. Writing in the LA Times, Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations characterised the issue of Pakistan's 'safe havens' as one of the most difficult to address. The collective finger-pointing in Pakistan's direction echoes the view pushed by the Karzai administration since at least last August, when the Afghan president told Gen James Mattis of the US Central Command that "the war on terror was not in Afghanistan at all" but across the border in Pakistan. The 'safe havens' argument has, in the days following the release of the review, been elevated to a catch-all defensive shield that can obscure the intractability of the conflict in Afghanistan and place the weight of failure squarely on Pakistan's shoulders. While painting Pakistan as the singular nemesis afflicting the Af-Pak conflict is not in itself a novel development, its emergence as the central focus of strategic analysis is worrisome. Hit by more suicide bombings than any other country in the world, Pakistan can hardly deny the existence of militant groups on its soil. The presence of groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, Lashkar-i-Jhangvi, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan and an assortment of others is well known to anyone studying the region. The amoebic formations of a variety of terror groups morphing in and out of names and leaders have claimed thousands of Pakistani lives and eviscerated any semblance of safety and normalcy in large parts of the country. However, the existence of terror groups in Pakistan cannot in itself explain American failures in Afghanistan. First, it elides over the fact that the failure to eliminate the Taliban in Afghanistan rests most pointedly on the non-existence of a viable Afghan state to which control of the country can be ceded. This dismal reality has been whetted by the turn from nation-building to counter-insurgency that came along with the election of President Obama. The fact that no state actually exists in Afghanistan directly questions the importance of cross-border sanctuaries in Pakistan. As stated by Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace "our strategy is we increase the force, the Taliban gets weaker. And then we put more effort into building an Afghan army, and Karzai gets stronger. The actual reality on the ground is the reverse. For nine years now, the Taliban has gotten stronger, and Karzai's state, for good reasons, has gotten weaker". An open letter written by academics studying Afghanistan further reiterates the weakness or non-existence of the Afghan state. The letter, published earlier this month, states: "It is now very difficult to work outside the cities or even move around Afghanistan by road. The insurgents have built momentum, exploiting the shortcomings of the Afghan government and the mistakes of the coalition. The Taliban today are now a national movement with a serious presence in the north and the west of the country." With the Taliban having perfectly viable hiding places within Afghanistan itself, a place where US/Nato forces operate, one wonders at the utility or necessity of cross-border refuges whose elimination is considered so crucial by US officials. A second problem with the sanctuary argument is the ontological chicken and egg question that festers beneath it. If the frequency of asserting the presence of safe havens is considered an indication of the proliferation of such sanctuaries, it would seem that the number has multiplied rapidly within the last year. Another tactic whose use has also risen rapidly is the number of drone attacks in the tribal areas where these sanctuaries are said to exist. According to media sources, drone attacks have nearly doubled in the past year, going up to nearly 100 strikes in 2010. While these attacks are repeatedly touted as targeting just militants, the increasing number of casualties and the fact that no information is actually released by either US or Pakistani security forces throws doubt on these assertions. It is thus impossible to discern whether it is the targeting of local populations that fosters recruitment by militant groups or vice versa. The possibility that the tactics of war — drone attacks — may be perpetuating the existence of what the war is supposed to eliminate is an ignored proposition that will likely impose debilitating costs. The Obama administration's reliance on the 'safe havens' argument also reveals the persistence of a paradigm that has proven to be increasingly superfluous in conceptualising the war on terror. Ultimately looking at borders and sanctuaries suggests that there is a geographic core to the agendas of groups such as Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their various incarnations which can be eliminated if only the territory was controlled and refuges destroyed. This myth, erected on the inability to invest in promoting ideological responses to terror, pretends that other competing terrorist hideouts in places such as Yemen and Somalia can similarly be eliminated by a hodgepodge arsenal of drone attacks and covert assassinations. Enumerating the fallacies that allow for the proliferation of the sanctuary argument exposes the unfortunate clash between strategic objectives and tactical methods. With the countdown to July 2011, the date that withdrawal is scheduled to begin, looming ominously over the American political horizon, it is unlikely that the crutch the 'safe havens' argument provides will be readily abandoned. At the same time, the unquestioned reliance on it is unlikely to produce the much-needed rethinking the Afghanistan-Pakistan conflict requires to bring some semblance of stability to the beleaguered region. . Read Full Post
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