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In search of the Afghan Maliki - -

By Amir Taheri

In Search of the Afghan Maliki
The U.S. should focus on its own interests

AMIR TAHERI

Early in 2007, as the American presidential campaign started to gather momentum, critics of Pres. George W. Bush’s War on Terror invented a scheme that allowed them to oppose the administration’s strategy while dodging charges of appeasement. Under that scheme, Iraq was presented as “the bad war” or, according to Sen. Barack Obama, “the wrong war, at the wrong time, and in the wrong place.” In contrast, Afghanistan was presented as “the good war,” the “just war,” or even “the necessary war.”

The argument was that the war in Iraq was wrong because it had not been explicitly approved by the United Nations, while the invasion of Afghanistan had been. That argument ignored the fact that the U.N. Security Council had passed 14 resolutions about Iraq, all of them implicitly allowing the use of force against the Baathist regime. The fact that of all the wars in the world since 1945 the U.N. had ordered only three explicitly did not prevent critics from singling out the liberation of Iraq as a violation of international law. Those critics also ignored the fact that the U.S. Congress had overwhelmingly approved the use of force against Saddam Hussein, thus providing the legal basis that they claimed was lacking.

Opponents of the liberation of Iraq also claimed that the invasion had been wrong because it had not enjoyed the support of U.S. allies. However, among the key U.S. allies, only France and Germany had not backed the war. The “coalition of the willing” that joined the U.S. in liberating Iraq initially included 49 countries (35 had rallied to the cause in Afghanistan).

Critics of the war in Iraq also used a third argument: Taking action against Afghanistan was legitimate because it had harbored al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization whose operatives attacked the U.S. on 9/11. (The critics ignored the fact that al-Qaeda had been established in Afghanistan years before the Taliban appeared on the scene.) They saw the American intervention in Afghanistan as a case of self-defense, while Iraq represented an example of the type of preemptive war that they regarded as the Bush administration’s most dangerous invention.

Over the two years that followed, this argument was transformed into a pillar of Candidate Obama’s platform, with the promise that, once he had won the election, it would be a key element of his foreign policy. As president, Obama would withdraw from Iraq but increase American military presence in Afghanistan — from which he would also invade Pakistan, if necessary.

This analysis was motivated by clever electoral calculations — and it might not reflect the real interests of the United States in the “Arc of Crisis” spanning from Central Asia to North Africa, passing through the Persian Gulf and the Levant.

WHY AFGHANISTAN?

In intervening in Afghanistan in 2001, the U.S. had three key interests. The first was to show friend and foe alike that it could not be attacked with impunity. Prior to 9/11, the U.S. had suffered a series of terrorist attacks, from the seizure of its diplomats as hostages in Tehran to the mass murder of 241 U.S. service personnel in Beirut to the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, but had not hit back in a way that dissuaded future aggressors. By declaring war on Afghanistan, the U.S. was making up for that mistake, reassuring its friends and warning its enemies. The U.S.’s second interest was in finding and destroying the bases from which terror had been exported to America and, where possible, capturing or killing the masterminds. Its third interest was to help Afghans replace the Taliban with a government of their own choice in the hope that it would prevent the re-emergence of terrorist bases.

By 2005, all three objectives had been achieved. The world had absorbed the message that, if attacked, the U.S. would fight back. U.S. and allied forces had destroyed every single terrorist base used by dozens of groups, many with no links to al-Qaeda, throughout Afghanistan. They had also killed or captured most of the terrorists present in Afghanistan at the time. By 2007, in fact, of the 25 senior leaders of al-Qaeda, only three were still alive and free, presumably hiding in Pakistan. Many in the region were even convinced that Osama bin Laden, the self-styled “supreme guide” of al-Qaeda, had died as early as December 2001 — this despite audio and video messages broadcast in his name on a few occasions since 2004. The U.S. had also supervised a process of consultations and referenda that led to the writing of a new democratic constitution and the election of a new parliament and president in Afghanistan.

By the end of 2005, therefore, the U.S. could have declared victory in Afghanistan and started to reduce its military footprint in preparation for full disengagement. However, the Bush administration could not contemplate such a course — for two reasons: First, Afghanistan was perceived as “the good war” and thus could not be abandoned while “the bad war” continued in Iraq. And second, the Afghan enterprise had developed a momentum of its own and brought up a set of new objectives that had little relation to U.S. national interests.

Rebuilding Afghanistan’s economy by reviving its agriculture, destroying the opium trade, improving the status of women, increasing the number of children in school, and creating a Western-style judiciary were all laudable objectives; but they didn’t have much to do with U.S. national interests. More important, perhaps, these were objectives that no outside power could hope to achieve without the full participation of the native population, let alone against its will.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE TALIBAN

It is also important to emphasize a fact often ignored in the debate on Afghanistan: The Taliban had never been an explicitly anti-American outfit. In fact, the Taliban were created by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, all allies of the U.S., in or around 1993 with the goal of preventing pro-Iran elements from controlling Afghanistan after the fall of the Communist regime. Nursed on the Salafist ideology, the Taliban saw itself at war primarily against Shiites and other non-Salafist Muslims rather than against the U.S. or any other “infidel” power. The mass of Taliban literature, including addresses by Mullah Muhammad Omar, their emir al-momineen (“commander of the faithful”), contained no specifically anti-American themes. A year before 9/11, the Taliban had opened talks with the Clinton administration to establish diplomatic ties with the U.S. Clinton had dispatched a number of high-profile emissaries, including the then-envoy to the U.N., Bill Richardson, to Kabul for talks with Taliban leaders.

For their part, the Taliban used Zalmay Khalilzad, who was to become a key diplomat in the Bush administration, as its chief lobbyist in Washington. In August 2001, just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, Taliban foreign minister Mullah Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil told me that his regime would soon open its embassy in Washington. Hamid Karzai, the future president of Afghanistan, was to be the Taliban ambassador. Soon afterward, I heard the same message from Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim, in Doha. A few days later, Gareth Evans, a former Australian foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group, confirmed Mutawakil’s hopes. In an interview in Brussels he told me that an international consensus was emerging in support of “recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan.”

While everyone acknowledged that the presence of Osama bin Laden and his group on Afg


    
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