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AfPak on ForeignPolicy.com
How Realistic is Walt’s Realism?
By Peter Bergen
Stephen M. Walt, fellow Foreign Policy blogger and professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and the co-author of the influential 2007 book The Israel Lobby has turned his sights on the Obama administration's strategic justification for the ramped-up American efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In a recent
post for Foreign Policy Walt
takes to task President Obama's assertion at an appearance before the Veterans
of Foreign Wars on Monday that, "If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will
mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more
Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the
defense of our people."
As Walt points out, "This is a significant statement. In effect, the president
was acknowledging that the only strategic rationale for an increased
commitment in Afghanistan is
the fear that if the Taliban isn't defeated in Afghanistan,
they will eventually allow al Qaeda to re-establish itself there, which
would then enable it to mount increasingly threatening attacks on the United States."
Professor Walt has six objections to Obama's strategic rationale for the Afghan
war effort that you
can read in more detail, which I will summarize.
First, we should not lump all jihadists in South Asia together; only some want to attack American targets.
Second, that if, in the unlikely event, the Taliban came back to power in Afghanistan it's not clear that they would continue to give al Qaeda a safe haven there.
Third, anyway Afghanistan is hardly an ideal place from which to launch attacks against the United States.
Fourth, that if the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan the U.S. would still be able to take out any jihadist training camps based there.
Fifth, an expanding American presence in Afghanistan will only feed recruitment to groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Finally, Walt suggests that "one might also take comfort from the Soviet experience. When the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujahidin didn't "follow them home." Were the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan and the Taliban to regain power (or end up sharing power, which is more likely), going after the United States won't even be on their ‘to do' list."
All of these objections to Obama's "Af-Pak" strategy are seriously flawed.
First, while it's true that there are many jihadist groups in South Asia with differing goals; increasingly these groups have defined themselves by their anti-Western agendas. The Taliban were a quite provincial group before 9/11 but since then they have adopted al Qaeda's world view and tactics and see themselves as part of a supposedly global jihadist movement. The late and unlamented leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, for instance, dispatched suicide bombers to Barcelona in January 2008, according to Spanish prosecutors.
And nearly a year later the Kashmiri militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba launched attacks in Mumbai, specifically targeting Westerners and a Jewish-American religious center there. Taliban suicide bombers have repeatedly targeted U.S. soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and American diplomats and commercial interests in Pakistan.
Second, if the Taliban did come back to power in Afghanistan, of course they would give safe haven to al Qaeda. Despite all the pressures military and otherwise exerted on them over the past decade, giving safe haven to al Qaeda has been at the heart of the Taliban project; first in the five years before 9/11 when they ran Afghanistan, and since then in the areas of Pakistan's tribal regions that they now control.
Taliban leader Mullah Omar was prepared to lose everything on the point of principle that he would not give up Osama bin Laden after the 9/11 attacks. And he did lose everything: after 9/11, the Taliban were swiftly removed from power by U.S. forces. This does not suggest a Kissingerian talent for realpolitik. Professor Walt may be a foreign policy realist, but that doesn't make Mullah Omar one also.
Third, the idea that Afghanistan is not an ideal place from which to launch anti-American attacks is simply absurd. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the first attack by Islamist terrorists against the United States, was led by Ramzi Yousef who trained in the Sadda training camp on the Afghan-Pakistan border. The bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 that killed more than 200 were coordinated and carried out by men who had trained in Afghanistan, as was the attack on the USS Cole two years later.
And while, as Walt points out, elements of the 9/11 plot were coordinated in Hamburg -- where three of the pilots had lived in the run-up to the attacks -- the idea of attacking iconic targets in Washington and New York was first hatched in Afghanistan in 1996; the coordination of the attacks took place in Afghanistan over the next several years; the pilots were given their specific orders about target selection and their duties by the leaders of al Qaeda when they travelled to Afghanistan in 1999, and all 15 of the ‘muscle' hijackers passed through al Qaeda's Afghan training camps.
And after the fall of the Taliban when al Qaeda was forced out of Afghanistan into the neighboring tribal regions of Pakistan -- where they were then given shelter by the Pakistani Taliban -- al Qaeda coordinated from there the largest terrorist attack in British history -- the four suicide bombings on London's transportation system on July 7, 2005 that killed 52 commuters.
Fourth: yes, if the Taliban did take over Afghanistan the United States would still be able to attack jihadist training camps there, but is Professor Walt suggesting that somehow a Taliban takeover really helps American interests simply because the U.S. could then rely on drone attacks and other measures to take out jihadist training camps there?
Fifth, Walt invokes a version of the hoary ‘antibody' argument that the more American troops there are in Afghanistan the more they will be treated like a foreign bacillus and so help the Taliban to recruit and the like. Since 2005 BBC/ABC News have conducted yearly polls around the country that test this proposition and have found it wanting.
Four years after the fall of the Taliban, eight out of ten Afghans expressed in the BBC/ABC poll a favorable opinion of the United States, and the same number supported foreign soldiers in their country. Today 63 % of Afghans continue to approve of the international forces in their country. And around half have a favorable view the U.S.; in the Muslim world only the Lebanese have a more rosy view of America.
Walt saves one of his flimsiest arguments for last arguing that because the mujahideen did not attack Russia after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 that once the Taliban are in power that attacking America won't be on their "to do list." But as we have seen, when the Taliban were in control of Afghanistan their al Qaeda allies launched a multitude of attacks on American targets.
And, similarly, after 9/11 when the Taliban was hosting al Qaeda in Pakistan's tribal areas the group planned the 2006 ‘planes' operation; a scheme to bring down seven American and Canadian airliners with liquid explosives after they had departed from Heathrow. Luckily the plot was discovered but if it had gone through the attacks would have killed as many as 1,500 civilians.
The implication of Walt's objection to the ramped-up Obama strategy in Afghanistan is that the U.S. should either do less in Afghanistan, or even just get out altogether. But America has already gone down this road. Twice. In 1989 the U.S. closed its embassy in Kabul and then effectively zeroed out aid to one of the poorest countries in the world; meanwhile Afghanistan was racked by a civil war, which spawned the Taliban who then gave safe haven to al Qaeda.
Then in the winter of 2001 the Bush administration overthrew the Taliban, and because of its aversion to nation-building rebuilt the country on the cheap and quickly got distracted by the war in Iraq. Into the resulting vacuum stepped a resurgent Taliban. This time the movement of religious warriors was much more closely aligned with al Qaeda.
So the U.S. has already tried the Do Nothing approach and the Do It Light approach in Afghanistan, the results of which are well known. The Obama administration is now attempting a Do It Seriously approach, which has a real chance of success.
For an expanded version of some of these arguments here is a piece I did for the Washington Monthly last month.
Peter Bergen is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of The Osama bin Laden I Know.
STR/AFP/Getty Images
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Contributors
on the other hand, al qaeda might be nothing much more than...
...a myth manufactured to give us an excuse for doing what we've been wanting to do, as the peak in global oil production becomes too obvious to deny...
...remembering, of course, that PNAC said they needed a new pearl harbor just before they got into positions from which they could make their new pearl harbor happen.
and bibi thought 9/11 was a pretty good deal, too... why is that?
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anyhow, here's a little map of operation enduring turmoil
reality squirms a little bit, doesnt it...?
...especially when you're serving people who think they can create their own reality.
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so i guess it pretty much depends on whose version of reality you want to believe, doesnt it?
do you spose that you're gonna be able to keep on churning out this bogus reality forever?
It's largely about money
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, did great damage there, and fled in 1989, leaving behind a ravaged and starving nation. The US had equipped and trained Osama bin Laden and many Afghans to fight the Soviets, spending an estimated (and secret) &4 billion to do so. Into the destitute post-Soviet Afghanistan, it poured virtually no civilian aid, at all. The earlier supplies of military hardware had brought considerable profit to the manufacturers of that hardware, at US taxpayer cost.
20 years later, we have a debate being conducted in ignorance of the obvious fact that the current war has become something of a sideshow. Most of the current civil unrest -- which is what the Taliban and friends participate in -- is an expression of detestation for the foreign invasion of their nation. And in the view of Petraeus and McChrystal, they're succeeding and the invaders are losing.
Behind this, there's the fact that one day, the US and partners are going to come home from there. Whether its next month or mid-century, the value of the whole exercise will show in what happens to the civilian population after this departure.
Will starvation continue or resume widespread? Will the main industry be the international drug trade? Will the poverty-ruled country be open once more to any foreigners with money who arrive just as tal-Qaeda notoriously did before? And will the next arrivel, if there is one, be as bad as al-Qaeda, or worse? Civilian foreign aid, its extent and its commonsense, will provide the answers. Military hostilities can't.
Let's not forget the current war in Afghanistan is really aimed against, not the Taliban, not against the ASfghan people. It's against memories of al-Qaeda -- who left there in 2001. Shooting up Afghanistan seems an irrelevance.
Neglected Moral Obligation
Peter Bergen as do so many other commentators reveal Mr. Walt's poor analysis and complete failure to comprehend a region of the world he devotes no small amount of his time to. And while it's entirely reasonable to have an opinion about a war your country is fighting, Mr. Walt's opinion despite his academic credentials in reality displays no more substance than a mediocre high school student who has googled a few pages.
I suppose in the 'Realist' world there is little or no place for morality only legitimate pursuit of national objectives.
However I would point out that there is a moral obligation that the US owes Afghanistan that seems to be completely overlooked by all commentators no matter what side of the argument they advocate.
It was the US that systematically destabilised Afghanistan. It was the US that invited Saudia Arabia into the region for co-operation to challenge then Soviet hegemony over central Asia by deliberately introducing the most radical elements of Wahabi/Salafist Islam to challenge the Soviets.
It was the deliberate policy of the Carter administration to introduce and recruit Radical Islamic forces to destabilise Afghanistan drawing the Soviet Union into a quagmire. It was the Brzezinski policy adopted by Carter to further export fundamentalist (Salafist/Wahabi) Islam to Central Asia to further destabilise the Soviet Union. More than a Million Afghanis have died as a direct result of the war the US initiated.
Zbigniew Brzezinski was the architect of that policy which saw the world through strictly 2 dimensional cold war tunnel vision. Here was his answer in 1998 admitting to the deliberate destabilisation.
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998 Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?
Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?
Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998 Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.
Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries. (Remember this is 1998 and not all has unfolded)
Full interview http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
It was this same tunnel vision whereby the Carter presidency deliberately decided not to support the Shah and accept a revival of the old Islamic Republic because they would be anti communist, believing that is all that mattered.
Fast forward, the US is now deeply mired in 2 wars both of which can be directly traced back to policies of Carter and Brzezinski.
If the US had not pulled the rug on the Shah there would have been no Iran/Iraq war, No Gulf War 1 or 2, No Iranian support for Syria or Hizbollah, No Iranian support for the most extreme irredentist elements in the Arab world, such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, interesting side bar you remember them, they got chased out of Egypt settling into Afghanistan renamed themselves Al Quaeda. And interestingly enough New York where they first started trying to blow up the World Trade Towers in 1993.
Further no 1982 attack on US forces in Lebanon. No sleazy US military assistance to Iraq and most importantly there would have been a strong US ally in Central Asia unlike the candidate Brzezinski chose to go with Pakistan. If the US had not destabilised Afghanistan it would not have become a Taliban state hosting foreign extremists that developed into Al Quaeda.
Brzezinski and President Carter enlisted Saudi Arabia to build a string of Jihadi Madrasas in Pakistan catering to students from Central Asia to destabilise the Soviet influence. Neither Brzezinski or President Carter seem to reflect for a moment that Saudi Arabia is a much worst police state than the former Soviet empire with far greater contempt for liberal western values.
The list is longer but I think the uninformed can start to grasp the enormity of these failed short term policies.
Although Islamic extremism was already a well developed ideology and a growing threat, and we can't know how we would be dealing with that threat today, it is most certain the US would not be in Iraq now or 1991 or NATO bogged down in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future.
Again, more than a Million Afghanis have died as a direct result of the war the US initiated in Afghanistan. Surely the US owes something to the Afghan people and how that debt could be settled might be a better starting point in the debate.
No Reagan Admin in this tale?
A little balance, please. The Carter admin was only in for one term. It was bracketed by 20 years of Republican administrations.
The Shah's Savak was brutally in charge of Iran's internal security, not the Carter WH.
Plus Two
To Peter Bergen's comments I would add two observations.
First, that the American withdrawal administration critics like Dr. Walt appear to be proposing would very likely be seen by many Afghans as another abandonment of their country. To expect adequate levels of assistance from them as the United States attempts to deter or suppress al Qaeda activity from afar seems optimistic.
The second observation is that the pre-2001 Taliban regime had a friendly relationship with the Pakistani military and intelligence services, a relationship now compromised by the fact that the most militant Taliban factions cannot be kept safely isolated in Afghanistan. Is it prudent to ignore the incentive Pakistan will have to attempt to export its current Islamist problem if the Americans leave Afghanistan? A restored Taliban ruling most of Afghanistan would be of little concern to us even if it hosted al Qaeda, as long as neither they or their "guests" ever left. The history of Pakistani sponsorship of Islamist extremism suggests that we should not simply assume, as Walt appears to, that nothing that has happened before can happen again.
those who ignore history are condenmed to repeat it.
Zathras wrote "...assume, as Walt appears to, that nothing that has happened before can happen again."
I believe the phrase is those who ignore history are condenmed to repeat it. This phrase constantly echoes in my mind when I read Mr. Walt.
Foreign Occupation
I found Mr. Bergen's counter-arguments persuasive except for the fifth point:
"Fifth, Walt invokes a version of the hoary ‘antibody' argument that the more American troops there are in Afghanistan the more they will be treated like a foreign bacillus and so help the Taliban to recruit and the like. Since 2005 BBC/ABC News have conducted yearly polls around the country that test this proposition and have found it wanting.
Four years after the fall of the Taliban, eight out of ten Afghans expressed in the BBC/ABC poll a favorable opinion of the United States, and the same number supported foreign soldiers in their country. Today 63 % of Afghans continue to approve of the international forces in their country. And around half have a favorable view the U.S.; in the Muslim world only the Lebanese have a more rosy view of America."
Nothing about this poll sufficiently undercuts Walt's argument that US military occupation plays a significant role in the Taliban's ability to garner new recruits.
First, the polling indicates that over a third of Afghans disapprove approve of international forces in their country. The Taliban do not need 100% of Afghans to be motivated by a hatred for infidel invaders to gain a steady stream of recruits, money, and indirect support for their insurgency. Alienating a third of the country is plenty to attract necessary numbers of willing fighters.
Second, international troops occupying Afghanistan helps to unify different factions of the insurgency. With the foreign invaders gone, it would be a lot harder for the disparate insurgent groups to remain as cohesive and potent, leading to much more in-fighting.
Third, an eight-year foreign occupation (and several more years minimum) of ANY Muslim country only substantiates the perception of those in the Muslim World who subscribe to the notion that the US is in fact leading a war against Islam itself. Consequently, the US cannot afford to assess the views of Afghans alone, as the Muslims around the world are watching.
Fourth, the US is not sending enough troops to Afghanistan to really establish sustainable security. According to COIN doctrine, even when all of the troops the Obama administration has sent to Afghanistan arrive, there will be far too small of a force to protect the population. Some argue we don't need troops in all of Afghanistan, which is true, but despite this observation the troop levels are not sufficient (precisely why Gen McChrystal is contemplating asking for more). Therefore, if the US does not have the political will to go in with full force, we shouldn't go in half-ass either -- doing so is counter-productive (see points one through three).
That being said, the Obama administration cannot just up and leave Afghanistan either. Additional troops should focus on training a competent, dependable, and professional security Afghan apparatus so that Afghans can take over as quickly and responsibly as possible. Furthermore, withdrawing militarily is not the same as abandoning Afghanistan (as we did post-1989) if we continue to help the Afghans develop their country from behind-the-scenes. The point is not to fuel further perceptions of a large and threatening American footprint in the region, not to forget that Afghanistan exists.
the logic is real simple...
if PNAC wanted a new pearl harbor, and PNAC creates its own reality, then PNAC probably created its own new pearl harbor.
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dont we have evidence of PNAC creating another new reality? ...that reality being an iraq in possession of wmds?
and now PNAC is trying to fabricate yet another new reality: an iran that's building nuke weapons.
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exactly how stupid do you think we are?
"and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do..."
okay
and what are the real realities...
...the realities that PNAC, for all its reality-making prowess, is unable to change?
what are the realities that caused PNAC to fabricate their own reality ---by staging their new pearl harbor, by inventing pretexts to stage their invasion of afghanistan, by fabricating evidence that justified their invasion of iraq, and by fabricating evidence against iran?
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short term reality
long term reality
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overview of planned neocon reality, a work in "progress"
what does history have in store for the neocon project?
history is a story that makes the most sense to the people who write it, assuming for the sake of argument that the historian is honest.
...and the farther along in time a historian gets, the more he can get a sense of what the well-informed shakers-and-movers knew before they shook and moved ---because the stuff the shakers-and-movers expected to happen has happened by the time the historian rewrites history.
and so, if peak oil and global warming turn out to be the real thing, the current official history of 9/11 is likely to be trashed.
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in the meantime, i'm sure you all will be proud to have your names associated with this heroic neocon effort.
Bergen's Afghanistan Fantasies
Bergen and Walt seem to be engaged in a debate on a number of tangential points that have little to do with the provision of sensible security measures against terrorism. And nothing Bergen says in response to Walt convinces me there is a significant causal connection between terrorist attacks and the existence of large “safe havens”, whether in Afghanistan or elsewhere. Nor does he give any reason for thinking that, on the hypothesis that safe havens do play a role in enabling terrorism, the United States has it within its capacity to prevent the establishment of such minimal safe havens as are needed. Certainly a military occupation and counterinsurgency appear to be blunt and inept tools for this kind of effort. Carrying out a massive and expensive counterinsurgency in Afghanistan in order to prevent Islamist terrorism against US and Western interests seems comparable to invading Sicily in order to prevent mafia narcotics and firearms racketeering in Queens.
It is depressing to realize that eight years after the 9/11 attacks, people who ought to know better are still thinking about anti-terrorism operation in terms of large-scale military solutions and the conquest of territory.
Bergen’s citing of the connection of Ramzi Yousef to Afghanistan is almost frivolous. Consider the 9/11 attacks: The 9/11 hijackers learned how to fly in the United States. Their operation was planned and coordinated in multiple locations, including some in Europe and the United States. Had some locations that were actually used been closed to the terrorists, they would have found others. There is no way to conquer the world in such an extensive and all-embracing way that young militant Muslim men cannot find a place to gather and plan a terrorist strike if they are so inclined. We could spend an imperial fortune and waste thousands of lives attempting to cleanse Afghanistan of jihadist terrorists, and the terrorists would just do their thing somewhere else, even on the extremely fanciful supposition that we could succeed in carrying out the cleansing of Afghanistan.
Exactly how much of a “safe haven” do terrorists need? A safe haven could be an apartment building in New Jersey, a social club in London, a home in North Africa or a dorm room in Spain. What resources are required? Some cell phones? An internet connection? Access to some bank accounts?
What we are talking about are criminal conspiracies. Stopping them requires the kinds of intelligence, investigation and interdiction that the professionals who deal with such criminal enterprises already know how to handle. Yes, the interdiction phase may sometimes require military or paramilitary means, in Afghanistan or elsewhere, given the details of the particular operation involved. And if the regime in the country of interest is friendly, and its intelligence and law enforcement services are cooperative, that makes the whole job easier. But the job can be done either way, especially if we redirect the resources we are wasting on fantastic Pentagon schemes for the conquest of Muslim territory into the right channels. The marginal payoff for the massive investment that will be required to secure permanent regime friendliness and regime control throughout all of Afghanistan is way out of proportion to the cost of that investment. And those who support these mad schemes for Afghanistan should really think just for a moment about what would actually be required in order to turn the government of Afghanistan into the kind of operation that would be capable of eliminating jihadists safe havens throughout their vast and rugged territory. The whole notion is laughable.
The very idea of a terrorist attack being “launched” from Afghanistan seems concocted out of very misleading imagery. Terrorist operations are not like the invasion of Normandy, which requires a large, safe base of operations in which to store and protect the massive amount of material resources that will be needed for the attack, and to train and organize the armies that will be used in the attacks. Terrorist attacks require minimal resources, small numbers of personnel, and one-room planning and training. And they can be “launched” from anywhere. The launching requires a call from one cell phone to another, with the speaking of the word “go”.
Extremely poor attempt at a take-down
First, this seems simple enough to understand, but South Asia, Pakistani Taliban and Kashmir are not Afghanistan. You: "Taliban suicide bombers have repeatedly targeted U.S. soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and American diplomats and commercial interests in Pakistan." How does that disprove Walt's claim that the Taliban "aren't dedicated jihadis seeking to overthrow Arab monarchies, establish a Muslim caliphate, or mount attacks on U.S. soil."?
Second, of course Mullah Omar is a crazy zealot who can't learn a thing (sarcasm). You don't need to be a realist to decide to save your skin. Try to kill me once, shame on you, I let you try to kill me a second time, shame on me. Are you saying Omar is incapable of thinking this?
Third, you and Walt are both throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks, but you have to answer Walt's question: "does that unlikely danger justify an open-ended commitment that is going to cost us more than $60 billion next year?" I think his other points better show that danger to be unlikely.
Fourth, easy, the answer is no. As a realist, he knows that a Taliban takeover has a very small effect on American interests, either for good or bad.
Fifth, general population polls don't address his assertion, which is about "extremist organizations like the Taliban and Al Qaeda."
Sixth, Walt is talking about the Taliban, you are talking about al Qaeda.
Are you saying our embassy and aid could have prevented a civil war?
Finally, I await your arguments that the benefits of success from the Do It Seriously approach outweigh the costs.
Inside Info
How come Peter Bergen has such inside knowledge on Al-Qaeda operations? He seems to know who visited Afghanistan when, and what instructions they got. These are at best tenuous conjectures, guessed at by the same people who "saw" yellowcake in Iraq, and "knew" Saddam could hit with WMDs within forty-five minutes.
Bergen takes those conjectures seriously, as facts.
Another neo-conman, trying to con us into more rash acts?
Fighting Pakistani jihad in Afghanistan
The Pashtun Taliban began organizing in Peshawar and other refugee centers, with help from the IRP gov't. Omar continued to get ISI-IRP help when he established a post-soviet base in Kandahar, and was armed by Pakistan in the final stages of the civil war, when the Taliban faction took Kabul.
Both Omar and bin Laden fled BACK into Pakistan in 2001, and most seem to guess they enjoy 'safe' haven there still. In Pakistan.
The Islamic Republic of Pakistan arguably fields the most anti-western military in the Islamic world, known for a near-jihad standard of Deobandi fanaticism against Hindu India, and committed to support itself financially and strategically thru nuclear proliferation sales to lethally nasty countries like Sudan and Myanmar.
So when discussing future safe havens in Afghanistan for this or that islamic jihad organization, do keep throwing in the "now centered in Pakistan's Pashtun provinces" reminder of where the strategic center of this 25 year war of jihad remains.