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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