Peace Or Victory In Afghanistan? You Can't Have Both
Peace and a multilateral trade regime are more important than victory, says Harvard lecturer Zeenia Satti. Her argument is that the United States and NATO face much weaker opponents. Gen. Petraeus squanders a historic chance for Afghan peace.
ZEENIA SATTI | Thursday | 12 May 2011 | Columnists
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Strangely, instead of negotiating a settlement in Afghanistan and helping to initiate a multilateral trade regime to the benefit of all concerned, the Obama administration, during its end of 2010 Afghan strategy review, has prioritized a 'military victory.'
What is taking place in Afghanistan is not a war, it is a massacre. Nato's Afghan battle death tolls on both sides – when available – endorses the conclusion. (Routinely, scores are killed on one side, barely one or none on the other). A military that does not halt its massacre of substantially weaker opponents and refuses to look at other options on the table is on a genocidal path. The generals of such combat forces have eternal notoriety, not glory, as their lasting abode in the annals of history. General Petraeus should remember this as he squanders America's historic opportunity of negotiating a settlement in Afghanistan. A peace deal followed by troop withdrawal while simultaneously facilitating a trade zone between regional states would benefit the region as well as big corporations.
It is obvious that a trade corridor through Afghanistan is America's paramount concern. Instead of benefiting the Afghan population, why does the US want to establish such a corridor on the graves of Afghans?
Military victory in Afghanistan, given the vast disparity in power systems, would bring no glory to the US. On the other hand, a peace deal, massive troop reduction with a timetable for exit (soon) and the establishment of a multilateral trade regime, in that order, is a long term solution to America's alleged security concern in Afghanistan; i.e. end to the culture that hosts terrorism. The landlocked states of Central Asia need to form a common trading route as sovereign members, free of the imperial influence of any country that can dictate terms to its exclusive benefit. Pakistan forms the lynchpin of such a regime. Civilizations flowered in antiquity owing to their location on trade routes. Afghanistan and FATA would follow suit should such a regime be established.
A Wasted Decade
Ten years of combat has nothing to show by way of cultural development in Afghanistan. Talibanism would have died at the hands of Taliban's children if they were given schools, computers and Internet during the last ten years of post Taliban Afghanistan. Instead what they got is a brutal occupation that is radicalizing, militarizing and maiming the population at a breakneck speed. It is destroying what infrastructure was built post Soviet scorched-earth policy, turning the area into a skull desert.
While Pentagon has prevented the leak to the international media of graphic evidence of the carnage in Afghanistan, some American soldiers-turned-conscientious objectors have revealed the brutality and injustice of the war at all levels in their congressional testimonies. Even Hamid Karzai has begun to feel the pain in the cushy throne the US has placed him on. His call for a negotiated settlement with the Pashtuns, growing louder by the day, is drowning in the louder thud of Pentagon's military jackboots rampaging all over Afghanistan.
James Loewen, a revisionist American historian, writes in his book 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' that:
"It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit. Modifying one's opinions to bring them into line with one's actions or planned actions is the most common outcome of the process known as cognitive dissonance. No one likes to think of himself or herself as bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider reasonable human beings creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier."
Nowhere in modern times is the example of cognitive dissonance more apparent than in the transformation of the Afghan freedom fighters from the Mujahideen of the Soviet era to the savage, woman-beating 'Taliban' of today. The truth that Afghan villagers are fighting to expel foreigners from their homeland, and their kith and kin across the border in Pakistan sympathize with them, is constantly given a media spin. Bereft of this spin, the battle news from Afghanistan would read like this; 'Hundreds of (number?) Afghans died when the US bombed the Afghan village of (name?). Instead of 'Afghans' we read 'Taliban' – Instead of 'village' we read 'hideouts.' Instead of 'supporters of Afghan independence', we read 'extremists' or 'militants' in FATA.
While the opening of beauty parlors in Kabul has been heralded in the west as a feminine triumph in Afghanistan, the western forces have created so many widows all over the country without instituting a program of widow/child rehabilitation that the question of gender based cruelty remains paramount in Afghanistan even under Western occupation.
Three out of five children in Afghanistan are orphans. The phenomenon has produced endless recruits for an insurgency which harvests the orphaned, uncared-for-children as suicide bombers. The war destroys the infrastructure of an area completely. Prolonged combat and deteriorating law and order prevents NGOs from entering to provide relief to the needy. As misery compounds the region's security situation worsens.
Historically, the Pashtun area has produced two predominant professions; tradesmen and hard working laborers. The correct approach from the US perspective would have been to de radicalize Afghanistan and through it, the borderlands of Pakistan, by instituting an economic regime which would give the indigenous people a vested interest in its continuance as their lives improve by supplying labor to local and international businesses.
The reverse has been undertaken by US forces and Pakistan has been dragged deeper and deeper into the reversal. Business is kept at bay as the security situation worsens. The region is fast turning into a graveyard. US death toll is mounting. Against this background, the Obama administration wants to continue with the war in Afghanistan AND Pakistan.
When pressured into assisting the US to victory in its ill conceived war, Pakistan's generals must ponder the following question: Do they have the global clout to prevent being turned into this century's Milosevic, facing war crimes tribunals to shield Pentagon's crimes? More succinctly, does Pakistan have the political clout, equivalent to the US, to survive a moral defeat in FATA-Afghanistan?
This op-ed is simultaneously posted at PakNationalists.com and ProjectPakistan21.org Zeenia Satti, based in Islamabad, has studied and taught International Relations at the Fletcher School, MIT and Harvard respectively and is currently writing a book on American footprint in the South-Central Asian region. Reach her at zeenia.satti@post.harvard.edu
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