President Obama at the Organizing for America Health Insurance Reform-Forum-81: pic: Barack Obama ~ flickr pgs

After months of intense deliberation, the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize has announced the escalation of America’s military involvement in Afghanistan, ordering the deployment of three new brigades of 30,000 additional troops within six months in Afghanistan. The war announcement from West Point on the first day of December was sombre and subdued, free of flights of patriotic fancy, and included the promise to start the drawdown in troop level in July 2011.

A week later in Oslo, Obama gave a more spirited defence of America’s role in the world in his Nobel acceptance speech, to cheers from the American right. He asserted that America had never attacked a democratic government, but failed to remember that almost all world conflicts involving America were precipitated by American support of undemocratic regimes or counter regimes. The Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s politico-military complex that is now Taliban-infected came out of America’s Cold War policies. Military action alone is not enough to undo America’s past misdoings, more so in Afghanistan.

With this escalation, President Obama has assumed ownership of the Afghan war. It is no longer Bush, but Obama who is answerable for it – not so much to history but to the American electorate in 2012. The man who hitched his candidacy to opposing the Iraq war has now predicated his presidency on the first war that Bush started but gave up for Iraq. Obama really had no other alternative. Withdrawing suddenly or in stages would have been more than an admission of military failure – it would have weakened America’s diplomatic and political clout everywhere. So the least unwelcome option is to ‘surge’ now and pull out later in stages. What could be achieved by the proposed surge is still uncertain.

The NATO allies are coughing up close to 10,000 troops of their own – that would bring additional reinforcement to levels that the US commander in Afghanistan, General McChrystal, has estimated as needed for the surge and to reestablish control over the resurgent Taliban forces. For his part, Hamid Karzai, the beleaguered Afghan President, has stunned his benefactors, declaring that it would be 2024 before Afghanistan could create and pay for its own security. A 400,000 strong force of army and police of Afghans is what it will take for an Afghanistan government to do the job on its own, according to General McChrystal. At an annual cost of $10 billion for this build up, America may have to bankroll most or all of $150 billions over 15 years till 2024. That would be eight more years after Obama’s second term. The Congress is jittery and the Americans are not happy. Opinion polls indicate a small majority of Americans supporting Obama’s escalation gamble. For now.

The pundits are divided in speculating the outcome of Obama’s decision, the momentousness of which is not wholly apparent given the economic doldrums that America is in. The comparison to Johnson and Vietnam is the obvious one, but the one to Brezhnev and the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan is the one that is worrying the American liberals who thought that in Obama they had found a new man to turn a new page in American foreign policy. The Soviet comparison might be farfetched because the external circumstances are far different and more helpful now than they were when the Soviets took their kick at the Afghan can.

India is totally behind continuing US involvement in Afghanistan. In altogether different circumstances, India was supportive of the Soviet involvement earlier. There are no non-Islamic sources of support in the world for the Taliban, unlike when they were fighting the Soviets. There will be no arm supplies from China, because there are no American dollars to pay for them – as was the case earlier when America indirectly paid for Chinese weapons to arm the Taliban against the Soviets. It is the internal situation in Afghanistan and the interconnections to Pakistan that pose the biggest hurdles to not only sustainable military advances but also viable diplomatic and political breakthroughs in the region.

Afghan-Pakistan Nexus

Pakistan’s involvement in Soviet-Afghanistan began in the context of Cold War realpolitik. What has become inextricable since is the sociopolitical nexus between Pakistan and Taliban-Afghanistan provided by the Pashtun people. Numbering over forty million, the Pashtuns are reputedly the world’s largest patriarchal (segmentary lineage) ethnic group comprising 60 tribes and 400 sub-clans. Thirty million of them are equally divided between southeastern Afghanistan and bordering Pakistan and the remainder are in Iran and also India. Eighty five percent of the millions of Afghan refugees who fled to Pakistan during the Soviet invasion were Pashtuns. The Pashtuns are the social base of the Taliban, a potent fusion of primordial solidarity, bitter war experiences, and transnational Islamic fundamentalism, now seamlessly straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The government of Hamid Karzai, himself a Pashtun, is barely holding together a patchwork country of disparate groups scattered over a rugged terrain. The Pashtuns account for over half the population of 28 million people and dominate southeastern Afghanistan. Karzai’s formula for power is his questionable trade offs with the northern groups of Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and other smaller groups who make up the so called Northern Alliance. In return for their electoral support and power sharing arrangements, Karzai has given the leaders of the northern groups the monopoly over corruption and license for lucrative businesses involving not only opium but also kidnapping. Karzai’s failure despite American-led international support has given the Taliban the opportunity for a second coming against corruption and for power in Afghanistan. Fighting corruption was also the reason for their first uprising in Soviet-Afghanistan.

While Pahstuns form the core base of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Talibanization of Pakistan has gone beyond Pakistani Pashtuns and has in its web the country’s core centres of power. The opportunism and ideology of influential sections of Pakistan’s military-industrial complex, its political class and the media has brought them into alignment with the Taliban agenda. America’s wrongheaded Cold War policies created and sustained Pakistan’s military regime for decades. After the Cold War the remnants and successors of the old military-industrial complex have found in Talibanization a new mode of survival.

President Zia-ul-Haq cultivated the Taliban with American support ostensibly against communism. When terrorism became America’s new bogey following the 9/11 Al-Qaeda attacks, Pervez Musharraf played both sides receiving American money to fight the Taliban while letting his army keep its Taliban connections active. Musharraf and the Pakistani establishment undermined the Karzai government in Kabul and kept alive Pakistan’s own cold war against India. When Musharraf got too clever by half and riled up internal opposition, Washington sent Benazir Bhutto to engineer an orderly succession and bring Pakistan into firmer alignment with America’s war against the Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Washington could not protect Bhutto from her assassins, but her widower and fortuitous successor Asif Zardari appears to have set himself against Pakistan’s traditional military-industrial power elites and against their shared agendas with Islamic fundamentalism and the Taliban.

The traditional power brokers are deeply alarmed. They were supposedly behind the Mumbai attacks to derail a new Indo-Pakistani peace initiative for Kashmir. Friendship with India would eliminate the main reason for their being and the huge defence investments using mostly American money. More worrisome to them is the new Kerry-Lugger (Senators John Kerry and Richard Lugar) legislation on Pakistan that commits to providing economic aid of $7.5 billions over five years passed with the unprecedented requirement that the responsibility for using the funds lies with the country’s civilian and not the military authorities. This has shocked the military establishment and pro-military sections of the media who blame President Zardari and Pakistan’s Ambassador in Washington, Hussain Haqqani, for the turn of events and they are whipping up a patriotic furor against both men.

Informed observers and even statements in the US Congress have warned of the possibility of a new form of coup against Zardari – regime change brought about by systematically discrediting him before the public rather than rolling out the tanks on the streets as was done in the past. It is not difficult to discredit Zardari in public or in private. There is now a banned industry of Zardari jokes in Pakistan, the old corruption charges against are being recycled in the pro-military media, and the fact that Zardari is not a Punjabi elite but a Sindhi upstart is also a powerful ammunition against him.

The Supreme Court’s ruling last week revoking the law giving amnesty to politicians against corruption charges has led to calls for Zardari’s resignation. The law was the creation of President Musharraf to enable Benazir Bhutto to return to Pakistan and share power with the then President. The deal was made in Bush’s Washington and Zardari became its beneficiary after Bhutto’s assassination. The Obama Administration is now faced with the dilemma of propping up the unpopular Zardari in return for his support of their surge strategy in Afghanistan, or risking a short term setback and letting the wheels of Pakistani politics make their next turn.