Localization | 2009.12.08
Obama has charted an Afghan course. Britain must lead the way on Pakistan | Timothy Garton Ash
European states should not simply make foreign policy in reaction to Washington, but look to our own vital interests
Obama has spoken , but we must think for ourselves. What are our vital interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan? It is our vital interest to prevent another terrorist attack coming from, or closely connected with, violent extremist Islamist groups located in Afghanistan or – now more likely – Pakistan. This is true for all European countries, but especially for Britain, with its large minority of Pakistani origin. It is our vital interest to ensure that Pakistan does not become a failed state with, in the worst case, its nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists. It is, too, our vital interest to ensure the United States does not feel abandoned by its European allies, but also that it does not make the kind of disastrous blunders it made in the Islamic world during the Bush years.
We are where we are in Afghanistan today – that is, teetering on the edge of failure – because of those blunders. Unlike the Iraq war, the original military action in Afghanistan was entirely justified as a response to the 9/11 attacks. In Tuesday night\'s speech at West Point, Obama reminded us of the domestic and international legitimacy that action initially enjoyed, including solidarity – "all for one, and one for all" – from America\'s European and Canadian Nato allies, and endorsement from the UN security council. The proclaimed objectives were limited: hammer al-Qaida, get Osama bin Laden, destroy the military capability of the Taliban.
If you had to point to the moment it began to go wrong, it might be on or around 16 December 2001 when, according to a recent report prepared for the Democratic majority on the Senate foreign relations committee, Bin Laden and his bodyguards "walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan\'s unregulated tribal area" – even though there was a large American military presence around the Tora Bora caves. The precise details are still disputed, but there is no doubt that Bin Laden got away to Pakistan. If he had been caught, the whole story could have been different.
The more fundamental blunder came a few months later, as the Bush administration stormed on to Iraq, which had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, leaving the job in Afghanistan unfinished. "Everyone\'s going to forget us now," president Hamid Karzai told the war reporter Christina Lamb .
And so they did. Western troop levels crept down; the Taliban came slinking back; the Karzai regime sank into a pit of corruption.
What Obama now proposes is a mongrel policy: more than the limited counter-terrorism strategy advocated by some; less than what would be needed for a fullblown comprehensive counter-insurgency campaign to have a serious chance of success. Large though the hike of 30,000 soldiers and $30bn is, it does not bring the total numbers – military, civilian and financial – close to what a comprehensive counter-insurgency strategy would require.
Above all, it is strictly limited in time, with a drawdown due to start in 2011, ready for the 2012 US presidential election. Afghans will therefore make their personal calculations on the assumption that western troops will withdraw – albeit leaving a residual security presence – over the next three to five years. Five years in Afghan history is a very short time. The empires come and go, the clans remain.
There is a seemingly unavoidable political hyperbole that requires Obama to talk in his speech of bringing this war "to a successful conclusion", and will doubtless have him declaring his policy a "success" in the mid-term Congressional elections and again in the 2012 presidential election campaign – just as, in that same speech, he talks of "successfully leaving Iraq to its people". We should not be fooled, any more than I suspect he himself is.
The word "success" here translates as the avoidance of failure. Beyond that, if all goes well, it means achieving those limited counter-terrorist and counter-proliferation objectives that are in our British and European vital interest as much as they are in America\'s. The rest is humbug.
Only those who know Afghanistan and Pakistan well, and travel there regularly, can give us an informed guess about the prospects of "success", thus modestly defined; and even they will only really know after the event.
Yet every citizen of a country that has troops in Afghanistan must make his or her own political judgment on this basic question: do you think it is worth our sons and daughters continuing to risk their lives for these objectives, pursued in this way? Can such a strategy justify the agony of those grieving widows, husbands, parents and children whose photos we see on our front pages, the tears of little Victoria Chant, the funeral marches through Wootton Bassett?
This is a question that many countries face: Canada, Germany, France and Poland as well as Britain. To some extent we do need to give a common answer, because this is also about the solidarity of allies. Once upon a time it used to be Germany that was most directly threatened; the US and Britain stood by it. Now it is the US and Britain that are more directly threatened; Germany should stand by them. But the moral and political demands of alliance solidarity should not prevent us from thinking for ourselves, assessing our own national interests, and working out what we think the policy should be – rather than simply reacting to whatever the American president of the day asks us to do.
So far as Britain is concerned, my answer is this. No one would wish to start from where we are; nor should we have needed to. However, having already expended so much blood, sweat and tears over a period of eight years, and being part of an alliance of democracies, the continued deployment of some of our troops for only a few more years is just about justified – but only on two conditions. The first is that Obama\'s military and civilian surge really is a case of "advancing the better to retreat". Let us harbour no illusions that we shall turn Afghanistan into a fundamentally different kind of place. If for the next decade, with a residual security presence, we can stop it again becoming a safe haven and breeding ground for terrorists, that will be the avoidance of complete failure (in politician-speak: success).
The second condition is even more important. It is that we in Britain develop a comprehensive, long-term, non-military policy for helping Pakistan to save itself from a descent into chaos, violence and the triumph of extremism. (In his blog on the Foreign Office website, David Miliband writes approvingly about the idea of a Marshall Plan for Pakistan.) In doing this, British citizens of Pakistani origin, many of whom have intense connections to their other motherland, should be regarded not just as a security threat (which a very small radicalised minority clearly are) but as a source of understanding and a huge potential asset. Having drafted this policy, we should work with our European partners and American allies to refine and implement it, as Washington asks us to implement its chosen strategy in Afghanistan. For Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is the bigger danger today. No one is better placed than Britain to craft a policy to help it.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ma-aghanistan-pakistan-britain
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