Malala been shoot for Education by doubtful Taliban.. enough that report to make the world humanity awake from Her and so many prizes for her. What a Humanity of us for a innocent girl. Ahaa our tears made this universe teary and her blood made all specially the setting sun bloodier. Some said it’s not a sun the blood of Malala..
Now this Question again to these Hypocrite Humanist whom shouted that time, where your voice now for the innocent children’s of Palestine??? You are going to gift a Nobel prize to her for been shoot than how many words you threw for the babies of Palestine for peace??
How Zionist Empire Rebuild Countries After Invasion
Why has the US spent so much money and time “so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad”?
Some images remain like scars on my memory. One of the last things I saw in Iraq, where I spent a year with the Department of State helping squander some of the $44bn American taxpayers put up to “reconstruct” that country, were horses living semi-wild among the muck and garbage of Baghdad.
Those horses had once raced for Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein and seven years after their “liberation” by the American invasion of 2003, they were still wandering that unraveling, unreconstructed urban landscape looking, like many other Iraqis, for food.
I flew home that same day, a too-rapid change of worlds, to a country in which the schools of my hometown in Ohio could not afford to pay teachers a decent wage. Once great cities were rotting away as certainly as if they were in Iraq, where those horses were scrabbling to get by.
To this day, I’m left pondering these questions: Why has the United States spent so much money and time so disastrously trying to rebuild occupied nations abroad, while allowing its own infrastructure to crumble untended? Why do we even think of that as “policy”?
The good war(s)
With the success of the post-World War IIMarshall Plan in Europe and the economic miracle in Japan, rebuilding other countries gained a certain imperial patina. Both took relatively little money and time. The reconstruction of Germany and Japan cost only $32bn and $17bn, respectively (in 2010 dollars), in large part because both had been highly educated, industrialised powerhouses before their wartime destruction.
In 2003, still tumescent with post-9/11 rage and dreams of global glory, anything seemed possible to the men and women of the Bush administration, who would cite the German and Japanese examples of just what the US could do as they entered Iraq. Following what seemed like a swift military defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the plan had gotten big and gone long. It was nothing less than this: remake the entire Middle East in the American image.
The country’s mighty military was to sweep through Iraq, then Syria – Marines I knew told me personally that they were issued maps of Syria in March 2003 – then Iran, quickly set up military bases and garrisons (“enduring camps“), create Washington-friendly governments, pour in American technology and culture, bring in the crony corporations under the rubric of “reconstruction”, privatise everything, stand up new proxy militaries under the rubric of regime change and forever transform the region.
Once upon a time, the defeated Japanese and Germans had become allies and, better yet, consumers. Now, almost six decades later, no one in the Bush administration had a doubt the same would happen in Iraq – and the Middle East would follow suit at minimal cost, creating the greatest leap forward for a Pax Americana since the Spanish-American War. Added bonus: a “sea of oil“.
A sort-of elected government was more or less in place, and in the press interviews I did in response to my book I was regularly required to defend its thesis that reconstruction in Iraq had failed almost totally, and that the same process was going down in Afghanistan as well. It was sometimes a tough sell. After all, how could we truly fail, being plucky Americans, historically equipped like no one else with plenty of bootstraps and know-how and gumption.
Failure every which way
Now, it’s definitive. Reconstruction in Iraq has failed. Dismally. The US couldn’t even restore the country’s electric system or give a majority of its people potable water. The accounts of that failure still pour out.
Choose your favourites; here are just two recent ones of mine: a report that a $200m year-long State Department police training programme had shown no results (none, nada), in part because the Iraqis had been completely uninterested in it; and a long official list of major reconstruction projects uncompleted, with billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, all carefully catalogued by the now-defunct Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction.
Failure, in fact, was the name of the game when it came to the American mission. Just tote up the score: the Iraqi government is moving ever closer to Iran; the US occupation, which built 505 bases in the country with the thought that US troops might remain garrisoned there for generations, ended without a single base in US hands (none, nada); no gushers of cheap oil leapt USA-wards nor did profits from the above leap into the coffers of American oil companies; and there was a net loss of US prestige and influence across the region. And that would just be the beginning of the list from hell.
Even former National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, George W Bush’s accomplice in the invasion of Iraq and the woman after whom Chevron Oil once named a double-hulled oil tanker, now admits that “we didn’t understand how broken Iraq was as a society and we tried to rebuild Iraq from Baghdad out. And we really should have rebuilt Iraq outside Baghdad in. We should have worked with the tribes. We should have worked with the provinces. We should have had smaller projects than the large ones that we had”.
Strange that when I do media interviews now, only two years later, nobody even thinks to ask “Did we succeed in Iraq?” or “Will reconstruction pay off?” The question du jour has finally shifted to: “Why did we fail?”
Corruption and vanity projects
Why exactly did we fail to reconstruct Iraq, and why are we failing in Afghanistan? (Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book, Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, is the Afghan version of We Meant Well in detailing the catastrophic outcomes of reconstruction in that never-ending war.)
No doubt more books, and not a few theses, will be written, noting the massive corruption, the overkill of pouring billions of dollars into poor, occupied countries, the disorganisation behind the effort, the pointlessly self-serving vanity projects – internet classes in towns without electricity – and the abysmal quality of the greedy contractors, on-the-make corporations and lame bureaucrats sent in to do the job.
Serious lessons will be extracted, inevitable comparisons will be made to post-World War II Germany and Japan and think tanks will sprout like mushrooms on rotted wood to try to map out how to do it better next time.
For the near term a reluctant acknowledgment of our failing economy may keep the US out of major reconstruction efforts abroad. Robert Gates, who succeeded Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon, told a group of West Point cadets that “any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined‘, as General MacArthur so delicately put it”.
Still, the desire to remake other countries – could Syria be next? – hovers in the background of American foreign policy, just waiting for the chance to rise again.
The standard theme of counter-insurgency theory (COIN in the trade) is “terrorists take advantage of hunger and poverty”. Foreigners building stuff is, of course, the answer, if only we could get it right. Such is part of the justification for the onrushing militarisation of Africa, which carries with it a reconstruction component (even if on a desperately reduced scale, thanks to the tightening finances of the moment).
There are few historical examples of COIN ever really working and many in which failed, but the idea is too attractive and its support industry too well established for it to simply go away.
Why reconstruction at all?
Then there’s that other why question: Why, in our zeal to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, we never considered spending a fraction as much to rebuild Detroit, New Orleans, or Cleveland (projects that, unlike Afghanistan and Iraq in their heyday, have never enjoyed widespread support)?
I use the term “reconstruction” for convenience, but it is important to understand what the US means by it. Once corruption and pure greed are strained out (most projects in Iraq and Afghanistan were simply vehicles for contractors tosuck money out of the government) and the vanity projects crossed off (building things and naming them after the sitting ambassador was a popular suck-up technique), what’s left is our desire for them to be like us.
While, dollar-for-dollar, corruption and contractor greed account for almost all the money wasted, the idea that, deep down, we want the people we conquer to become mini-versions of us accounts for the rest of the drive and motivation. We want them to consume things as a lifestyle, shit in nice sewer systems and send everyone to schools where, thanks to the new textbooks we’ve sponsored, they’ll learn more about… us.
This explains why we funded pastry-making classes to try to turn Iraqi women into small business owners, why an obsession with holding mediagenic elections in Iraq smothered nascent grassroots democracy (remember all those images of purple fingers?), why displacing family farms by introducing large-scale agribusiness seemed so important, and so forth.
By becoming versions of us, the people we conquer would, in our eyes, redeem themselves from being our enemies. Like a perverse view of rape, reconstruction, if it ever worked, would almost make it appear that they wanted to be violated by the American military so as to benefit from being rebuilt in the American fashion.
From Washington’s point of view, there’s really no question here, no why at all. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to be us? And that, in turn, justifies everything. Think of it as an up-to-date take on that classic line from Vietnam, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it”.
Americans have always worn their imperialism uncomfortably, even when pursuing it robustly. The British were happy to carve out little green enclaves of home, and to tame – brutally, if necessary – the people they conquered. The United States is different, maybe because of the lip service politicians need to pay to our founding ideals of democracy and free choice.
Failed reconstruction
We’re not content merely to tame people; we want to change them, too, and make them want it as well. Fundamentalist Muslims will send their girls to school, a society dominated by religion will embrace consumerism, and age-old tribal leaders will give way to (US-friendly, media-savvy) politicians, even while we grow our archipelago of military bases and our corporations make out like bandits. It’s our way of reconciling Freedom and Empire, the American Way. Only problem: it doesn’t work. Not for a second. Not at all. Nothing. Nada.
From this point of view, of course, not spending “reconstruction” money at home makes perfect sense. Detroit, et al., already areus. Free choice is in play, as citizens of those cities “choose” not to get an education and choose to allow their infrastructure to fade. From an imperial point of view it makes perfectly good sense.
“Failed reconstruction elsewhere turns out to be more important to us than successful reconstruction here at home.”
Erecting a coed school house in Kandahar or a new sewer system in Fallujah offers so many more possibilities to enhance empire. The home front is old news, with growth limited only to reviving a status quo at huge cost.
Once it becomes clear that reconstruction is for us, not them, its purpose to enrich our contractors, fuel our bureaucrats’ vanity, and most importantly, justify our imperial actions, why it fails becomes a no-brainer. It has to fail (not that we really care). They don’t want to be us. They have been them for hundreds, maybe thousands of years. They may welcome medicines that will save their children’s lives, but hate the culture that the US slipstreams in like an inoculation with them.
Failure in the strict sense of the word is not necessarily a problem for Washington. Our purpose is served by the appearance of reconstructing. We need to tell ourselves we tried, and those (dark, dirty, uneducated, Muslim, terrorist, heathen) people we just ran over with a tank actually screwed this up. And OK, sure, if a few well-connected contractors profit along the way, more power to them.
Here’s the bottom line: a nation spends its resources on what’s important to it. Failed reconstruction elsewhere turns out to be more important to us than successful reconstruction here at home. Such is the American way of empire.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year veteran Foreign Service Officer at the State Department, spent a year in Iraq leading two Provincial Reconstruction Teams. Now in Washington and a TomDispatch regular, he writes about Iraq, the Middle East and US diplomacy at his blog, We Meant Well.
Following the publication of his book We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (The American Empire Project, Metropolitan Books) in 2011, the Department of State began termination proceedings, reassigning him to a make-work position and stripping him of his security clearance and diplomatic credentials.
Through the efforts of the Government Accountability Project and the ACLU, Van Buren will instead retire from the State Department with his full benefits of service in September. We Meant Well is just now being published in paperback. Van Buren is currently working on a second book about the decline of the blue-collar middle class in the US.
I As I was reading newspaper and it caught my interest as Isaac Kafr writes the ex cheif of ISI said American people are innocent and I thought it would be nice to share all this pre-engineered wars. Pakistan has many internal weaknesses undermining its ability to operate as a normal state. The global jihadi network seems to operate from the Pakistani city of Quetta, and increasing portions of Pakistani territory are coming under the control of militants, both Islamist and tribal in nature. As a result, Pakistan has been experiencing a wave of terrorist attacks in its urban center, unparalleled in Pakistani history. This has had direct bearing on the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which, like previous administrations, recognizes Pakistan’s importance for maintaining international peace and security.
Since 2009, a litany of reports and studies have called for greater focus to be placed on Pakistan, seeing it as more important than Afghanistan and arguing that only by solving the problem in Pakistan could stability develop in Afghanistan, since Pakistan has served as a safe-haven to Afghan militants and al-Qa’ida activists. There has thus been a greater international commitment to the area with more troops sent to Afghanistan and improved cross-border cooperation, as seen with Operation Panchai Palang (Panther’s Claw) in Helmand Province. The operation saw U.S., British, and Afghan forces taking action against the Taliban while the Pakistani military sought to prevent insurgents from escaping across the border.
The focus of this article is the political challenge faced by the United States in respect to Pakistan. The author argues that the American approach to Pakistan is fundamentally erroneous, as lack of political stability in Pakistan severely undermines the effectiveness of the military campaign against the Islamists and jihadists that operate within Pakistan and along the Afghan-Pakistan border. Pakistani terror groups may differ in their interests, base of operations, and so on, but they are united in their hatred of the United States and the Pakistani government, which they view as an “American puppet.”
A key challenge for American decisionmakers concerning Pakistan is the topsy-turvy nature of Pakistani politics, where the police and the courts operate as tools of politicians’ ambitions while the state system remains praetorian in nature, leading to chronic instability. Thus, although the “kill-ratio” (the number of insurgents killed on a daily and weekly basis) is rising, as drone attacks become more effective, what the international community fails to understand is that the more money it invests in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the more unstable these countries become. There is evidence that foreign aid ends up being used for unnecessary projects and programs, with the money rarely reaching the people and areas that need it the most. British journalist Jason Burke recounts that in the late 1990s, one could travel in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the Khyber Agency, something that is no longer possible without an armed escort. Apparent to Burke as he travelled throughout the area, were the dire conditions of the inhabitants, treated by Islamabad as second-class citizens in Burke’s eyes.
Thus, in many ways a key challenge in removing the Pakistani Taliban threat from FATA and other areas along the Pakistan-Afghan border is to make the indigenous community feel that it is part of Pakistan; yet considering that the local population tends to identify with its ethnic, Pashtun background, this is not an easy task. Second, experience has shown that at times of political upheaval and instability, the Pakistani army tends to step in and impose order, which raises the specter of a fourth military intervention (the three previous military rulers were: Ayub Khan, Zia-ul-Haq, and Pervez Musharraf). Another military takeover would deal a deadly blow to any democratic hopes that Pakistan might have, not to mention furnish Islamists with more ammunition in pointing to Western hypocrisy, as seen with Pervez Musharraf. The Taliban knows that the international community would not stay in the region indefinitely–made clear by President Obama in his West Point speech on December 1, 2009. The Afghan Taliban can therefore afford to wait. Thus, sending more troops and money to South Asia without dealing with the political situation in Pakistan means wasting valuable resources at a time when the United States and the international community can ill-afford such profligacy.
The praetorian nature of Afghanistan and Pakistan:
During the 1960s, the prominent Harvard political scientist Professor Samuel P. Huntington argued that newly formed states are more likely to develop a praetorian style of governance than established democracies. Amos Perlmutter’s study, which built on Huntington’s earlier work, identified the social and political conditions that lead to the emergences of a praetorian state. Perlmutter argued that praetorianism requires low social cohesion within the state in question. This condition stems from a situation whereby personal desires and group aims differ when it comes to management of the society and development. What exacerbates the situation is lack of state institutions or weaknesses within the state institutions that are supposed to promote cohesion.
Second, the state in question must have fratricidal classes, which refers to the gap between the classes. This is normally an upper and lower class, which adds to the fragmentation that exists in the society, as the upper class is composed of traditionalist and modernists, while the lower class focuses on survival.
The third social condition refers to lack of a middle class. This does not mean that there is no middle class, but what there is of the middle class is either too small to effect change or too weak. As Perlmutter states, “The middle classes in most praetorian states are small, weak, ineffective, divided, and politically impotent.”
The final social condition identified by Perlmutter as being important to the development of praetorianism refers to recruitment and the mobilization of resources: a government in a praetorian state lacks widespread support and is reliant on a few small groups for support. This is why a praetorian state needs to attract people to its cause, and it does so by allowing them to use certain resources or to exploit positions in society. Thus, for example, a praetorian state allows individuals to control valuable resources. The state also follows the common pattern of higher modernization at the center with much less on the periphery, leading to tensions between these two zones.
Perlmutter identifies a number of political conditions that assist in the development of a praetorian state. These include lack of institutionalism–which ensures that the state has weak and ineffective political parties–and continuous tensions between the periphery and the center. During the Partition of India, the Hindu-led Congress Party had more experience in politics, while the All-India Muslim League was organized very much around a strong, quasi-authoritarian system led by Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Thus, with Jinnah’s death, the league had no one of his caliber to lead it, causing fragmentation, wrangling, and divisions. This was because during the pre-independence period, the league had no real base. Mainly, this was because it was very much a product of the United Provinces, which meant that in 1947, it was a party without a base, as the United Provinces remained in India. Finally, India unlike Pakistan had benefited from the state mechanism that the British had created. It was in India that most of the infrastructure was located, whether it was in terms of political machinery or economic conditions. In 1947, Pakistan had to start with very little: no real infrastructure, no wealth, and not much experience in the realm of public administration. These conditions have allowed the military to assume greater control, because it is generally the only Pakistani institution that is reasonably united–not beset by petty factionalism–and able to operate in difficult situations.
It is clear that Pakistan is deeply imbued with praetorian characteristics, whether on the social or political level. In Pakistan, the army wields tremendous power and influence and has direct say in government policies and the management of society, as seen with the way Zia-ul-Haq allowed groups such as Jama’at-e-Islami (JI) to penetrate every facet of Pakistani society, especially the military and later on the Afghan refugee camps. Pakistan lacks social cohesion in that there are tensions between the different provinces and ethnic groups that inhabit the country. All of these factors, coupled with ethnic and social tensions precipitate the development of a quasi-praetorian state system, which fundamentally aims to prevent the growth of a democratic system.
The AFPAK Strategy:
The Obama administration’s approach to the troubles in Pakistan centers on its “AfPak” Strategy, which recognizes that in order to resolve the problem in one country (Afghanistan or Pakistan), one needs to address what is occurring in the other. Thus, when President Obama announced the adoption of the new policy–AfPak–on March 27, 2009, it subscribed to the view that one could not solve the problems of Afghanistan without addressing what was occurring across the Durand Line. President-elect Obama declared in December 2008:
“…we need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region–Pakistan and India and the Afghan government–to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community. And, as I’ve said before, we can’t continue to look at Afghanistan in isolation.”
AfPak emphasizes a substantive change in U.S.-Pakistani relations and is indicative of U.S. impatience with Pakistan’s failure to deal with extremism and terrorism. President Obama has officially moved away from former President George W. Bush’s position of refusing to rebuke Pakistan publically for failing to deal with Islamist militancy in all of its guises. The change of policy arises from a perception among members of the Obama administration that rather than deal with extremism, Pakistan has allowed it to grow. The Obama administration has paid special attention to the Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI), as Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared in March 2009, “They [ISI] have been very attached to many of these extremist organizations, and it’s my [Mullen’s] belief that in the long run, they have got to completely cut ties with those in order to really move in the right direction.”
AfPak’s roots lie in the rising violence in southern Afghanistan, which is Taliban-based. Since 2007, Taliban forces have sought to recover ground lost following the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In the south of the country, mainly the Helmand and Kandahar regions, Taliban fighters crossed into to Pakistan, where International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) or American forces could not pursue them. The city of Quetta, which arguably is the home of many leading Afghan Taliban members, is not very far from the Afghan-Pakistan border. Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute writes, “The Taliban apparatus in Pakistan’s madrassas was not dismantled, and many Taliban officials continued to operate in Pakistani cities, particularly Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan. By 2004 Taliban officials were openly fund-raising again in Quetta.” Moreover, Mullah Omar comes from the Ghilzai tribe, which located between Kabul and Kandahar.
At the heart of AfPak is the acknowledgment that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has become dangerous, for America and for the rest of the world, and that there is a need to take action. The United States is thus determined to remain engaged in the area, by adopting an activist campaign designed to prevent the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, as the Taliban allows such groups as al-Qa’ida to operate without impunity. AfPak therefore fits in well Head of ISAF operations in Afghanistan General Stanley McChrystal’s assessment of the situation in Afghanistan (which came after AfPak was announced), whereby the former commander of Special Operations in Iraq adopts a kinetic-oriented, information operation vis-à-vis Afghanistan. In other words, McChrystal accepts the principle of AfPak and has a plan to improve the situation in Afghanistan.
Second, AfPak identifies the actors involved in the conflict: the United States, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the international community. The enemies are al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, and other radical organizations. The main goal of the strategy is not the long-term occupation of Afghanistan or direct control of the region, but the build-up of Afghanistan to the point where the government can maintain stability. This is for the sake of the Afghan and Pakistani people as well as for the security of the international community. In the words of President Obama:
For the American people, this border region [Afghan-Pakistan] has become the most dangerous place in the world…. For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people–especially women and girls. The return in force of al Qaeda terrorists who would accompany the core Taliban leadership would cast Afghanistan under the shadow of perpetual violence.
The terrorists within Pakistan’s borders are not simply enemies of America or Afghanistan–they are a grave and urgent danger to the people of Pakistan. Al Qaeda and other violent extremists have killed several thousand Pakistanis since 9/11. They have killed many Pakistani soldiers and police. They assassinated Benazir Bhutto. They have blown up buildings, derailed foreign investment, and threatened the stability of the state. Make no mistake: al Qaeda and its extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within.
In his statement announcing AfPak and again in his West Point speech (December 1, 2009), Barack Obama argued that greater political action was needed regarding Pakistan’s terrorism problem. The Obama administration’s position is that by improving the political situation–a codeword for democracy promotion–Pakistan could successfully deal with its internal and external terrorist problem (insurgents, Islamists, and the al-Qa’ida network). For Obama, the removal of Pervez Musharraf from the presidency has not meant an end to Pakistan’s political problems, in that it allowed for the restoration of democracy, because the system still fails to address the country’s needs and people’s demands to a minimal level.
The final element appearing in AfPak is the role of the international community, which President Obama argues cannot abandon Afghanistan and the region, especially at time of such deep economic crisis. The rationale behind the position is that first, President Obama is determined to end America’s image as a unilateralist state. The notion is that by cooperating with other countries to improve the situation in Afghanistan, the United States has abandoned the Bush-Rumsfeld methodology. Second, there is also the issue of cost sharing, in that the United States can no longer afford another costly war as in Iraq, which might be what Afghanistan becomes if the United States has to provide security while paying for reconstruction and development.
More specifically, AfPak focuses on improving intelligence sharing, enhancing military cooperation along the Afghan-Pakistan border, as well as addressing such issues as trade, energy, and economic development. In addition to committing greater military resources, Washington has also expanded its non-military assistance, as seen with the large injection of development aid to Pakistan and specifically to the FATA. This began with the reentry of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) into Pakistan in 2002.
The military side of AfPak is different for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the case of Afghanistan, the focus is on strengthening the American and NATO presence, as well as engaging the Taliban on a multilateral level–NATO and the Afghan army support. For this reason, General McChrystal, the head of ISAF has adopted an active policy of seeking to control territory in order to provide peace and security for the indigenous population so that they are able to develop sustainable communities, making them less likely to join or support the Taliban. Thus, the military’s goal is to drive out the Taliban and its interference with the reconstruction process. The United States has adapted to the new situation in southern Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s tribal belt by placing greater emphasis on special operations, whether through U.S. Special Forces or drone attacks. U.S. Special Operations Command ensures that U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan are deployed on a 12-month rotation–six months in the war zone and six months at home. The units are expected to monitor what takes place in their area of operations, and when they redeploy they are sent back to their area, allowing them to develop personal relations with the local community. Tied to this campaign is greater cooperation from the Pakistanis, with ISAF taking the position that without pressure from the other side of the border, the situation in Afghanistan will continue along the same lines.
On the non-military side of the “strategy,” there is a strong commitment to reconstruction and development. As James Dao recounts, in the Baraki Barak District, American soldiers are based “…living alongside its police officers and public officials, trying to win friends as it struggles to root out enemies.” During the day, the troops not only patrol the city but also engage with the community, whether it is in dialogue, by purchasing local products, or employing the locals in reconstruction projects. This means that on the Afghan side, the international forces not only seek to establish and ensure security but also undertake confidence-building measures, work on reconstruction, as well as develop and improve ties with the community. Thus, AfPak involves such policies as law and order (increasing the size of the Afghan police as well as training the Pakistani police in law and order procedures), trade development, education, and so on. This is closely linked with the bipartisan Kerry-Lugar Act, which saw the adoption of a policy of increasing American non-military contribution to Pakistan (there is less focus on Afghanistan because the country is already a large recipient of non-military aid as part of the Bonn Agreement, in which the United States is also a key player).
The Kerry Lugar act 2009:
In May 2009, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Dick Lugar (R-IN) introduced their Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act. The legislation, which began when Joe Biden was chairman of the Senate of Foreign Relations (then known as the Lugar-Bidden Act), emphasized the deteriorating situation in Pakistan and the deep commitment of the United States to the country. The legislation provides Pakistan with large sums of non-military financial aid to assist it in combating the rising tide of terrorism within its borders and outside of them.
The legislation recognizes and declares that the current state of affairs in Pakistan–the lack of security, democracy, and stability–allows militant organizations to use Pakistan as a launching pad for attacks against targets in Pakistan and across the globe. The act, which Congress passed on October 7, 2009, provides financial assistance (around $1.5 billion per annum until 2013) to Pakistan. The goals of the act are also for Pakistan to support and consolidate democracy and the rule of law in the country. Second, the act pledges to help Pakistan establish the conditions conducive for stability, with references made to economic security. Third, the legislation seeks to provide Pakistan with the means to prevent and combat the usage of its territory for terrorist camps. This includes helping the Pakistanis develop the tools for improving coordination and cooperation among the military, paramilitary, and police action against terrorists. That is, the act recognizes that each branch operates against terrorists in Pakistan, but far too often, there is a failure to communicate between the branches, which undermine the counterterrorism efforts. Finally, the Kerry-Lugar Act hopes to improve relations between Pakistan and the United States, especially as Kerry and Lugar noted that the United States is not widely esteemed in Pakistan. The act has received support from President Asif Ali Zardari, who called upon Congress to support the bill, because “President Obama understands that for Pakistan to defeat the extremists, it must be stable. For democracy to succeed, Pakistan must be economically viable. Assistance to Pakistan is not charity; rather, the creation of a politically stable and economically viable Pakistan is in the long-term, [a] strategic interest of the United States.”
Yet there are numerous problems with the Kerry-Lugar Act, the key being Pakistani opposition. Pakistanis see elements of the act as unacceptable U.S. interference in domestic Pakistani issues. Further, the legislation is not groundbreaking; everything it seeks to do has already been tried in respect to Pakistan. In addition, although it allocates funds for anti-corruption purposes, it fails to recognize that this money often ends up in the hands of those engaged in the abuses, as the system does not take into consideration the nature of the Pakistani state, which is tribal and kinship-based. The concept of biraderi (extended family) means that one must contend with the idea of the extended family and the obligation that one has for one’s extended family. Thus, what in the West is understood as corruption or nepotism is in Pakistan, simply part of family life and obligations. In practical terms, biraderi means that if one is in a good position, this power must be used to assist family members and help them find employment.
Foreign military financial assistance:
Foreign military financing (FMF) has become an important tool for U.S. policymakers. FMFs are congressionally appropriated grants in which the recipient country is provided with funds to purchase American-made weapons, services, and training. In respect to Pakistan, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gillani has noted the significance of FMF, as the Frontier Corps (FC) has had to face “terrorists” using old, unsophisticated guns. The FC, a large paramilitary force of around 80,000 men entrusted with border security in the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan, has received U.S. assistance including financial support and training. Overall, since 2001, Pakistan has benefited from an increased commitment by Washington in terms of military equipment that it claims it needs to combat Islamist terrorism. Between 2001 and 2008, the United States has provided Pakistan with $1.6 billion through the FMF program. Islamabad has used these funds to purchase American military equipment such as 5,600 military radio sets, six C-130E transport aircraft, 20 AH-1F Cobra attack helicopters, 26 Bell 412 transport helicopters, night-vision equipment, and protective vests. In their review of U.S. aid to Pakistan, Cohen and Chollet were critical of FMF, arguing that FMF “…is often justified to Congress as playing a critical role in the war on terrorism, in reality the weapons systems are often prestige items to help Pakistan in the event of war with India.”They add:
Looking at the total approved U.S. weapons sales, including weapons purchased without the benefit of direct U.S. assistance, Pakistan has spent $8.4 billion between 2002 and 2006. Most of this has been spent on weapons such as F-16s and other aircraft, anti-ship Harpoon Block II missiles, and antimissile defense systems. Few of these weapons are likely to provide much help in rooting out al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Pakistan is continuously demanding sophisticated weapons from the United States, especially since the military’s operation in the Swat Valley when the Pakistani Air Force executed more than 300 combat missions using F-16s. The air force has argued that it needs more advanced F-16s to counter the Taliban, as the newer plans carry better imagery facilities. Air Chief Marshall even admitted that the air force used Google Earth in order to learn the area. However, what the country’s military forces require are counter-insurgency equipment and more importantly a change in outlook. That is, much of the Pakistani military outlook has remained directed at India and external threats instead of dealing with Pakistan’s internal threats that stem from the presence of terrorist groups. Professor Bruce Hoffman recounts a discussion in Islamabad in August 2008, when a diplomat told him that the Pakistani military had no knowledge of a counter-terrorism operation. Professor C. Christine Fair of Georgetown writing in the Wall Street Journal in June 2009 noted:
…the army has resisted developing a counter-insurgency doctrine. It prefers to plan and train for conventional battles and views its struggle against insurgents as a “low-intensity” conventional conflict. Washington has been slow to understand that this is not a quibble over semantics but a serious difference in how the army intends to contend with the threat. The Pakistani army believes India is its principal nemesis, not the insurgents who have occupied the Swat valley and destabilized Pakistan and the region.
CONCLUSION
History has shown that in regards to South Asia and the Afghan-Pakistan tribal belt in particular, outsiders cannot impose solutions. The inhabitants of the region proudly recall that the only foreigners that have come close to defeating them were Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan. Thus, it is highly unlikely that the United States and the international community can solve the problems of Pakistan and Afghanistan. In an interview, a tribal elder in Kunduz, Northern Afghanistan noted, “For 30 years we lived under the rule of war. Only in the last six years have we had some peace. The solution is not to send foreigners–the more foreign troops there are, the more resistance they create. The Afghan army and police should secure the villages.”The locals join the Afghan or the Pakistani Taliban either because they are drawn to the ideology of the Taliban, due to tribal or filial ties, or they are coerced. Increasing corruption and criminality has led to growing support for the Taliban, as local Afghans view their own government and security services with nothing but contempt. A classic example was seen in the Wardak Province of Afghanistan, when Taliban forces captured a group who had kidnapped the son of a wealthy merchant. The kidnappers’ bodies were found hanging in Maiden Shah, the province’s capital with a note: “The same fate awaits others who choose to kidnap for a living.” The merchant allegedly provided them with a gift of $200,000 for freeing his son. In the words of Karimullah, a local shop owner, this kind of policing role explains why Afghans help the Taliban:
It proves the Taliban have no problem with ordinary Afghans. They have a problem with those Afghans who work in high government positions who run crime in this city…. Of course I help them. They never pressure us to support them. They come around once a month and ask for help. We give them charity. People here prefer the Taliban to the government and the kidnappers. They are the ones who will bring security.
While AfPak has attempted to present “new thinking” regarding the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it has not brought any substantive change in strategy, which remains: an increased presence of foreign troops to ensure the security of the Afghan people until the Afghan National Army (ANA) is ready to assume the responsibility. The only revision has been to upgrade the projected size of the Afghan army from a 100,000 to approximately 300,000. The problem with this is that the ANA is far from a well-functioning military force, as its members are part of different ethnic and religious groups that often resent one another. Moreover, it takes more than a few weeks or months to train a soldier. The costs to train and equip foreign troops are also extremely high. In comparison, Afghan soldiers are rushed through the training process. This is the fourth attempt in Afghanistan’s history to establish a national Afghan army. The issue though is that recruitment is low, due in part to threats from the Taliban and other insurgents, ethnic differences (trained Tajiks outnumber Pashtuns 41 to 30 percent), and low wages ($180 a month paid to an Afghan soldier versus $250 to $300 month insurgents reportedly receive from the Taliban.
Second, developing ties with the local Afghan community helps make clear that the United States wants promote development and reconstruction. To further familiarity with the local population, the U.S. military returns troops to the areas that they operated in previously when they are rotated back into action. The rebuilding of Afghanistan is a huge undertaking, which requires a long-term commitment of years if not decades. For this reason, there has been apprehension over President Obama’s West Point speech. Moreover, although U.S. forces generally behave well, there is a culture of abuse and impunity in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, where men of rank abuse their positions. Thus while Afghans and Pakistanis hear about the American commitment to their respective countries, they rarely enjoy the benefits, which ironically makes them more hostile towards the United States, because they maintain that the United States is in fact fuelling the corruption and lawlessness by handing money to those in power. The Petraeus-McChrystal strategy of providing security to the local population, though laudable is therefore superfluous, because the Taliban will have strong popular support. Simply put, the failure is not lack of security, but because the Taliban is favored as a military, anti-corruption, religious, and congenial force.
Third, the framework and the Kerry-Lugar Act fail to realize that the Afghan jihad has substantially undermined the traditional nature of Pashtun (along the Afghan and Pakistan border) society. It has led to the emergence of three types of maliks (heads of villages or village sections): the traditional “white beard” malik as well as two new types: The “self-made malik,” is a man who returned from working in Iran or the Gulf states where he gained additional sophistication and often uses corruption to get his way. The third type is the youngmujahidin (fighter) who has gained enhanced status by participating in the fight against foreigners. Moreover, the Afghan jihad along with the Islamic reforms of Zia-ul-Haq, the use of the Kashmir by the ISI, and rising anti-American sentiments in Pakistan have ensured a solid base of support for anti-American activity in Afghanistan.
As President Obama declared in his West Point speech:
…I am convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is from here that new attacks are being plotted as I speak. This is no idle danger; no hypothetical threat. In the last few months alone, we have apprehended extremists within our borders who were sent here from the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan to commit new acts of terror. And this danger will only grow if the region slides backwards, and al Qaeda can operate with impunity. We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region.
The problem is that once again, the United States, despite its good intentions and regardless of all the options offered by the Obama administration or congress, has failed to appreciate that foreigners cannot solve South Asia’s problems. None of the options offered by the Obama administration or Congress can help improve the situation.
The situation within Afghanistan and Pakistan is very serious due to a combination of factors, including a decrepit political system; a social system that exacerbates local, regional, and state tensions; and leaders who define their own interests in ways that make progress impossible and stability unlikely. The agenda of leaders and groups is self-preservation rather than cooperation. This became blatantly obvious in the days leading up to the 2008 Afghan national elections, when incumbent President, Hamid Karzai invited the former mujahidin commander Abdul Rashid Dostum to join his administration. Similarly, in Pakistan, President Zardari has made extensive compromises to ensure his survival, especially in light of growing scrutiny over his wealth. Thus, until U.S. policymakers accept the precept that South Asian leaders are first and foremost political survivors, and national politicians second, the United States and its allies will continue to risk the lives of brave women and men as well as pour money into the bottomless pit that is South Asia.
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