Independence Day and Occupation

By Steve Hynd

Happy Fourth of July to our American Readers. As I've said before, as a lifelong voter for Scottish independence I'm jealous as hell.

But on your Independence Day it might be worth giving a few minutes thought to those your nation and mine occupy in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've been reduced to the role of "collateral damage", told they should be greatful for being bombed into submission to our edicts, denied basic rights such as habeas corpus in our foreign prisons, tortured and abused, exposed to our dumb belief in The White Man's Burden. Iraqis have finally managed to gain enough independence to tell us to butt out of their internal struggles, as we always should have.

Days earlier, Iraqis had celebrated the withdrawal of American forces from their cities as a "day of national sovereignty." And while Biden's visit was welcomed as evidence that the U.S. doesn't plan to completely disengage from Iraq, al-Maliki made it clear that he does not want U.S. officials to involve themselves as closely in Iraqi politics as they did in the past.

Al-Maliki told Biden that "the reconciliation issue is a purely Iraqi issue and any non-Iraqi involvement might have a negative effect," al-Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said. "We don't want the Americans to come and get involved."

But Afghans, citizens of a state which has no power to constrain our colonialism, don't have that luxury. This Independence Day I recommend reading  an op-ed by Rory Stewart, an ex-soldier and diplomat who is Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard. From 2000 to 2002 he walked solo across Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal, a journey of 6000 miles, staying in villagers houses, and he has been the UK's Coalition Deputy Governor for two Iraqi provinces.

Rory Stewart's op-ed, The Irresistable Illusion, is available at the London Review of Books website (h/t Newshoggers' regular Geoff). Read it all, but here's a lengthy snippet.

Every Afghan ruler in the 20th century was assassinated, lynched or deposed. The Communist government tried to tear down the old structures of mullah and khan; the anti-Soviet jihad set up new ones, bolstered with US and Saudi cash and weapons supplied from Pakistan. There is almost no economic activity in the country, aside from international aid and the production of illegal narcotics. The Afghan army cannot, like Pakistan’s, reject America’s attempt to define national security priorities; Afghan diplomats cannot mock our pronouncements. Karzai is widely criticised, but more than seven years after the invasion there is still no plausible alternative candidate; there aren’t even recognisable political parties.

Obama’s new policy has a very narrow focus – counter-terrorism – and a very broad definition of how to achieve it: no less than the fixing of the Afghan state. He presents this in a formal syllogism. The final goal in the region is

to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future.

A necessary condition of the defeat of al-Qaida is the defeat of the Taliban because

if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban . . . that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

Such efforts are hampered by the nature of the Afghan economy and government. We must implement a counter-insurgency strategy, which includes

the deployment of 17,000 troops [to] take the fight to the Taliban in the south and the east

but also adopt a more ‘comprehensive approach’, aiming to

promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government . . . advance security, opportunity and justice . . . develop an economy that isn’t dominated by illicit drugs.

Finally, Afghanistan cannot be addressed without addressing Pakistan:

To defeat an enemy that heeds no borders or laws of war, we must recognise the fundamental connection between the future of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Or, in the pithier statement made by Obama last October:

In order to catch Osama bin Laden we have to win in Afghanistan and stabilise Pakistan.

Obama, then, combines a negative account of Afghanistan’s past and present – he describes the border region as ‘the most dangerous place in the world’ – with an optimism that it can be transformed. He assumes that we have a moral justification and obligation to intervene, that the US and its allies have the capacity to address the threat and that our global humanitarian and security objectives are consistent and mutually reinforcing.

...It is impossible for Britain and its allies to build an Afghan state. They have no clear picture of this promised ‘state’, and such a thing could come only from an Afghan national movement, not as a gift from foreigners. Is a centralised state, in any case, an appropriate model for a mountainous country, with strong traditions of local self-government and autonomy, significant ethnic differences, but strong shared moral values? And even were stronger central institutions to emerge, would they assist Western national security objectives? Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan. But Osama bin Laden is still in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. He chooses to be there precisely because Pakistan can be more assertive in its state sovereignty than Afghanistan and restricts US operations. From a narrow (and harsh) US national security perspective, a poor failed state could be easier to handle than a more developed one: Yemen is less threatening than Iran, Somalia than Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan than Pakistan.

Yet the current state-building project, at the heart of our policy, is justified in the most instrumental terms – not as an end in itself but as a means towards counter-terrorism. Obama is clear about this:

I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That’s the goal that must be achieved.

In pursuit of this objective, Obama has so far committed to building ‘an Afghan army of 134,000 and a police force of 82,000’, and adds that ‘increases in Afghan forces may very well be needed.’ US generals have spoken openly about wanting a combined Afghan army-police-security apparatus of 450,000 soldiers (in a country with a population half the size of Britain’s). Such a force would cost $2 or $3 billion a year to maintain; the annual revenue of the Afghan government is just $600 million. We criticise developing countries for spending 30 per cent of their budget on defence; we are encouraging Afghanistan to spend 500 per cent of its budget.

Some policymakers have been quick to point out that this cost is unsustainable and will leave Afghanistan dependent for ever on the largesse of the international community. Some have even raised the spectre (suggested by the example of Pakistan) that this will lead to a military coup. But the more basic question is about our political principles. We should not encourage the creation of an authoritarian military state. The security that resulted might suit our short-term security interests, but it will not serve the longer interests of Afghans. What kind of anti-terrorist tactics would we expect from the Afghan military? What kind of surveillance, interference and control from the police? We should not assume that the only way to achieve security in a developing country is through the restriction of civil liberties, or that authoritarianism is a necessary phase in state-formation, or a precondition for rapid economic development, or a lesser evil in the fight against modern terrorism.

After seven years of refinement, the policy seems so buoyed by illusions, caulked in ambiguous language and encrusted with moral claims, analogies and political theories that it can seem futile to present an alternative. It is particularly difficult to argue not for a total withdrawal but for a more cautious approach. The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.

A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

Read the whole article. Seriously.

Comments

[Batocchio]

Remember Culloden!