Now for an extrication strategy
Comment
H D S Greenway
IF geography is destiny, then both Iraq and Afghanistan are fated to be plagued with difficulties in their respective neighbourhoods. The borders of both were drawn by British colonial cartographers, lumping together different ethnicities and tribes with strong links to neighboring countries. That alone accounts for many of the difficulties the United States has had since deciding to invade them and reorder their politics during the ?last decade.
Iraq was a cobbling together of three Ottoman provinces following the First World War, with Shia and Sunni Arabs in the south and Kurds in the north. After first thinking that Mesopotamia, as Iraq was then called, might be an ideal, oil-rich addition to empire, constant troubles and revolts made war-impoverished Britain think otherwise.
“Our policy in Mesopotamia is to reduce our commitments and to extricate ourselves from our burdens while at the same time honorably discharging our obligations and building up a strong and effective Arab government which will always be a friend to Britain,” said Winston Churchill in 1921, sounding very much like what the Obama administration would like to achieve today. Powerful neighbours, however, especially Iran and Turkey, have their own legitimate interests in what happens in the land between the Tigris and Euphrates and will have their say. Afghanistan is also a conglomeration of differing tribal and ethnic groups with close ties to powerful neighbors.
Never wanted as a colony, Afghanistan within its present borders was created in the 19th century as a buffer state a protectorate of sorts between British India and the ever encroaching Russian empire. Its eastward-reaching tail, the Wakhan Corridor linking Afghanistan to China, was put there for no other reason than to prevent Russia and British India from rubbing up against each other. Afghanistan has even more interested parties to contend with than Iraq; it borders on six countries, including Iran, with India a major player too.
With that in mind, Britain’s foreign secretary, David Miliband, gave a speech recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology about how to end the Afghan war. After tracing Britain’s and Russia’s armed efforts in the last two centuries, Miliband said that the only way to “stabilize Afghanistan in the long term is to empower the Afghans themselves to secure and govern their own villages and valleys.” To realise this, he said, “the Afghans need full political and military support, and generous subsidy from outside.” He said that “every other regime in modern Afghan history” had depended on external subsidies, including the regime the Soviets left behind. That lasted for three years after the last Russian left, collapsing only after the demise of the Soviet Union ended subsidies.
Miliband said that after three wars between 1840 and 1920, after the lessons of military disasters had been learned, “imperial strategists sought and secured a saner and more sustainable objective: a self-governing, self-policing, but heavily subsidised Afghanistan where the tribes balanced each other and the Afghan state posed no threat to the safety of British India.” Unlike Iraq, which has the potential of vast oil reserves, Miliband’s vision for Afghanistan sounds a lot like the re-establishment of an ever-dependent protectorate, this time an international one, taking into account all the legitimate strategic interests of its neighbours, especially Pakistan.
Like America’s special representative, Richard Holbrooke, speaking a few days before at Harvard, Miliband stressed the importance of neighboring countries, and suggested that the heavily centralised Afghan state that had been conceived of after the Taleban had first been defeated, has been a mistake. The way forward was to work more with the tribes in a more decentralised Afghanistan.
After proving to the Taleban and its Pashtun base that it can not win militarily, the emerging allied strategy is to win over as many disaffected insurgents as possible. It is a coherent strategy, but despite protestations to the contrary, there is a whiff of a desire to “extricate ourselves from our burdens,” as Churchill put it almost 90 years ago. America’s friends and adversaries in the region, including the Taleban, sense this and will make their own plans accordingly. Afghanistan and Iraq have a way of disappointing their conquerors’ hopes and expectations.—Khaleej Times
