The Afghan Foreign Ministry is shocked—shocked!—that Pakistani militant leaders are vowing jihad in their country.
The Afghan Foreign Ministry Thursday summoned the charge-de-affairs of the Pakistani Embassy to Afghanistan and lodged a protest over the remarks of Pakistani militants’ leaders, a statement of the ministry said.
“The foreign ministry described the remarks of Pakistani militants’ leaders Mullah Nazir and Mullah Hafiz Gul Bahadir as intervention to the internal affairs of Afghanistan and called on the Pakistani government to check such irresponsible remarks,” the statement said.
According to the statement, the above Pakistani militants’ leaders had vowed to continue Jihad or holy war in Afghanistan.
Nazir, if you recall, is the recipient of a generous arms and funding subsidy from the U.S. because of his hatred Baitullah Mehsud. That he and Mehsud share goals and merely hate hate one another was, apparently irrelevant… as is the very salient fact that he’s never made it a secret that he intends to attack targets inside Afghanistan.
This is the true danger of exporting Anbar to Waziristan: we have no idea who we are funding… kind of like the 1980s. Blindly funding whomever happens to hate one of our short-term enemies is exactly the strategy that got us stuck with Jalaludin Haqanni and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to say nothing of Osama bin Laden, in the first place.
But really, ignore all that because we’re winning! That’s right, no matter that attacks are up 40% this year, or that western casualties have actually outstripped Iraq, Jeremy Shapiro wants us to know that we’re secretly winning:
SPIEGEL ONLINE: But isn’t it understandable that security is paramount to people in Afghanistan?
Shapiro: Of course, but we can’t solve that problem simply by increasing forces. Achieving overall security in Afghanistan will be a slow process and unfortunately we will have to tolerate violence in the country for a long time. The insurgents are not winning in Afghanistan — they have no capacity to stand toe-to-toe with Western forces or the Afghan National Army. Their ideology is bankrupt and they are unpopular in the country.
Hrm. That’s not quite right. You can’t improve security by increasing forces? Tell that to Kip. I am generally sympathetic toward taking a long-term view of the situation, but the idea that simply because the insurgents in Afghanistan cannot withstand open battle against the West says nothing about whether or not they’re winning. They don’t have to defeat us, they just have to frustrate us enough for domestic pressure to force a withdrawal. That is already slowly building in European NATO partners, and even in Canada. The Taliban groups and militias only need to act as spoilers—taking over a police station here, occupying a village there—to demonstrate how fundamentally incapable we are of providing even basic security.
Regardless, the security issue is one that must be addressed. And when the primary problem is insufficient forces to hold cleared territory, wouldn’t it make sense to add forces to the mix? This is a strategy being pushed by Barrack Obama, Admiral Mike Mullen, and many other scholars besides. Aside from talking in generalities, Shapiro really doesn’t overcome this basic problem. Then again, what do I know? Shapiro is an expert in “civil-military relations, Europe, France, military operations and National Security,” and besides once working for RAND he went to a few bases in Afghanistan.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 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
For information on reproducing this article, see our Terms of Use
