The Myth of ‘Solving’ Pakistan, And How Afghanistan Suffers

The more I read Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, the more pissed off I get at the CIA. As early as 1989, diplomats at the State Department were warning of the dangers of unconditional aid to the Islamists in Peshawar, of the hundreds of millions of dollars funneled to the ISI, and the danger of walking away from Afghanistan. As early as 1989, the CIA was actively freezing out those diplomats, saying that supporting militiamen like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in their effort to oust the communist Mohammed Najibullah from Kabul was more important than the threat of radical Islam. The CIA believed that Pakistan had a virtual right to rule Afghanistan, and they could never stop the ISI even if they wanted to. The unfortunate, inevitable result was a Pakistani puppet government—the Taliban—and their allies, men like Osama bin Laden.

When the Americans invaded in 2001, Hekmatyar claimed the U.S. would face the same fate as the Soviets, and he now brags of having helped Osama bin Laden and his entourage escape the fighting in Tora Bora, just north of the so-called “Parrot’s Beak,” where Pakistan juts into Afghanistan. The nearest town, of course, is Peshawar, which is well-known as a stronghold of radical Islamism. So, what can the U.S. do about it?

Well, the U.S. certainly can’t do anything Haddick suggests (which amount to: invade, bomb, raid, reverse-jihad, reverse-ISI, coerce, and nothing). He’s right that invasion, air strikes, and limited raids would be counterproductive. He is similarly right that Afghan proxies lack “the motivation” for invading Pakistan, because they never were an offensive force, and because you’ll never get the militia in Nangarhar or Paktia to cross the border (or get the locals to allow a Tajik or Uzbek militia to use the border provinces as operating bases). Similarly, “convincing” Musharraf to crack down is a non-starter, as he is completely unwilling to do so, just as doing nothing would be unacceptable to the electorate (and is partially what allowed al-Qaeda to form in the first place).

The idea of “dividing and conquering,” as Haddick puts it, raises the best hope of perhaps stemming the al-Qaeda factions in Pakistan, but Haddick doesn’t seem to know much about Pakistan. For one, there are “anti-al-Qaeda” groups in the country, it’s just they’re not particularly good choices for American support. Benazir Bhutto’s PPP is the most obvious example (and exactly what we don’t want to promote), but there are other, more moderate groups within Pakistan who do not want their country turned into a woman-hating theocracy.

In other words, Pakistan is a much more complex place than a military dictatorship’s rogue intelligence service funding al-Qaeda. As has been rather pointedly said to me in this space, and what is backed up by the last two decades, is that Western ignorance and laziness about the region will not just lead to bad policy, but to rather significant blowback. For example, if all Musharraf had to do was to “crackdown” on the militants, why are they bombing their own support base? It’s just not simple enough to declare one side evil and other good—in reality, Musharraf is a weak dictator, unable to exercise control over large swaths of his territory.

What’s more, as of September 10, 2001, Musharraf was the Taliban’s best friend. Now they’re enemies because, as Pervez claims in this video, Richard Armitage told him if he didn’t help the U.S., his country would be bombed “back to the stone age” (also called, as Craig Kilborn said when he hosted the Daily Show, “last week”). So Musharraf is stuck in a basically unwinnable situation: he cannot openly support the militias he once did and they hate him for it, and he cannot openly defy the U.S. and they don’t trust him for it.

Musharraf’s unwillingness to bear the cost of actually choosing a side has had grave consequences for Afghanistan. Though firmly opposed to the practice during the Soviet War (going so far as to refuse to bomb the Salang tunnel because it was too dangerous), the militants now brag about employing the technique, having claimed their first casualties in Lashkar Gah.

The point is, Pakistan is why Afghanistan remains as unstable as it is. And Pakistan cannot be changed through simplistic policies or a lackadaisical understanding of all of the issues engulfing South Asia. Which is why it won’t be solved any time soon—I have yet to see any evidence that stabilizing the region that brought us 9/11 is a priority in any Western government.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust