More on what if we fail in Afghanistan?
By Steve Coll
Wednesday, November 18, 2009 - 1:21 PM
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By Steve Coll
I have a new post up on my New Yorker blog.
In the comments on Thomas Ricks’s blog at Foreign Policy, I came across a well-informed dissent to my straw-man forecast about what failure in Afghanistan would bring. Here is the writer’s alternative take on my failure scenarios one and two:
On a 90s-style Afghan Civil War:
There already IS a civil war. It’s just that we’re fighting it on
behalf of the Northern Alliance at the moment. We’d have to turn it
over to them to fight. Also, one key difference between the 90s War and
the new one would be that we would be backing one of the sides with
arms, money and diplomatic cover. As would the rest of the world. So
all the nasty things that our Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara brethren would
be doing to the Pashtuns would be looked over by virtually every major
player on the International scene.
On momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan:
I usually agree with Steve Coll about AfPak but the logic behind
this scenario is murky, at best. The ISI, as a rule, still backs the
‘Afghan Taliban.’ The loose coalition of militants that exists in FATA
and NWFP that are known as the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ have distinct
ambitions from the ‘Afghan Taliban.’ They attack ISI and Pak military
targets, and the leaders have supposedly said they would target NATO
convoys once they’re ‘finished’ with the Pak Army. No one yet knows
what the future of the two Talibans is going to be. Steve’s assumption
seems to be the ‘worst case scenario.’ And even then it doesn’t address
the fact that the ‘Afghan Taliban,’ in helping the ‘Pakistani Taliban,’
would be biting the hand that helped create them (ISI), sustain them,
protect them, and brought them back to power again….
Just a couple of thoughts. I take the point that the international
community already engaged in an Afghan civil war; that’s well said. But
it is for the moment clearly a war that is not yet producing the kinds
of ethnic schisms and civilian deaths familiar from the recent past.
Note the Oxfam poll of Afghan civilians,
for example, as evidence about skeptical Afghan attitudes toward the
Taliban, despite the stresses and failures of the Karzai government.
Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker.
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