- Joined
- Feb 23, 2009
- Messages
- 5,419
- Likes
- 1,001
<In continuum>
11. Another much-talked-about component of contemporary COIN strategy is the ‘hearts-and-minds’ component, the effort to win over local populations through developmental works. In the first instance, it is highly improbable that any such initiative can be successful as long as Predator and missile strikes continue to inflict disproportionate ‘collateral damage’ – though President Obama has committed particularly "to make every effort to avoid civilian casualties"36. Crucially, the USD 65 billion allocation for Afghanistan includes a developmental component that "doubles the size of the pot of money used by American commanders in Afghanistan to win over the population"37, though the US proposes to ‘limit its efforts to areas of expertise’, as far as developmental initiatives in Afghanistan are concerned, while greater emphasis would be placed on coordinating the efforts of other countries. Unfortunately, the record of developmental investment in Afghanistan has been disastrous – what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has described as "heartbreaking":
For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work… There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability.38
12. To reiterate, then, the surge is not a solution; only a sufficiency of forces and resources, deployed within a coherent strategic framework, can constitute a solution. President Obama’s AfPak strategy contains none of these elements. It brings, in effect, far too little and much too late to the Afghan theatre. It does so, moreover, at the expense of Iraq, where levels of stabilization remain, at best, tentative and fragile, and consequently risks escalation in that theatre as well.
3. Pakistan: The Seat of Political Desolation
1. It is in Pakistan that the Obama administration faces its greatest challenge, and where its policy fails most comprehensively to break new ground. Crucially, Obama’s perspectives remain firmly fixed on near-term challenges and the objective of securing a tenable ‘exit policy’ for US forces in Afghanistan, with drastically diminished goals within the region – specifically, denying the al Qaeda safe haven and an operational base in Pakistan’s border areas. The strategy to secure these limited objectives appears to be a virtual blank cheque to the Pakistan Army and Government, notwithstanding some tough rhetoric about ‘conditionalities’ and the diluted terms imposed by the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act, 2009, which gives approveal to a tripling of non-military aid to Pakistan, even as it deleted the reference to "cross border attacks into India" – replacing this with the expression "neighbouring countries". While this may appear to be no more than a quibble, the reality is that Pakistan reads this as near-immunity for acts of terrorism on Indian soil. In any event, US conditionalities are of no real relevance. The US has no punitive capacities against Pakistan in view of its continued dependence on the latter to secure any kind of action against the Taliban – al Qaeda combine on Pakistani soil. Indeed, if the US had the capacities to impose effective penalites on Pakistan, it would not have ignored the Pakistani role in the hundreds of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, including many in which American lives were lost; or ignored the repeated and well documented warnings of an expanding Pakistani nuclear arsenal at a time when the security, from extremist forces, of the country’s existing arsenal is suspect. The truth is, the same old ‘strategic’ calculations and the logic of Pakistan’s ‘indispensibility’ to the ‘war against terrorism’ or "COIN (counter-insurgency) campaign"– or whatever politically correct euphemism the Obama Administration may now choose – will inevitably prevail the next time US or ISAF lives are lost in Afghanistan, or Indians are targeted in Afghanistan or in India, in an ISI-backed terrorist attack.
2. Curiously, augmenting US aid to Pakistan comes at a time when President Obama explicitly recognizes that the "civilian government there is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services."43 Worse, despite the apparent magnitude of aid flowing in to Pakistan, these are paltry amounts in terms of the sheer demographic explosion and developmental deficits in the country. Far from addressing the country’s poverty and backwardness, infusions of foreign aid have historically acted as no more than bribes to the national elites – military and political – to secure minimal compliance with reduced US and Western policy objectives. There is no reason to believe that President Obama’s policy brings anything new to the table.
3. Worse, as Pakistan’s implosion gathers pace, neither the US nor the wider international community appears to be exploring the imperatives of responding to what is obviously a rapidly failing nuclear-armed state. Ignoring the entirety of the destructive dynamic that has been unleashed by enduring pathologies within the Pakistani state and society, the US leadership continues to clutch at the straws of ‘negotiated settlements’ with the ‘good Taliban’, of concessions on ‘outstanding disputes’, including Kashmir, and of developmental aid that is expected to choke off the "assembly lines of jihad" and the progressive formal and informal (non-state) militarization of Pakistan. But billions of dollars of aid to Pakistan in the post-9/11 era and a succession of failed experiments with the ‘moderate Taliban’ on both sides of the AfPak border have done nothing to stabilize this catastrophic country, and have only seen a continuous increase in the spaces for radicalization and religious extremism on its soil. Pakistan has, today, established itself as the very heart of global terrorism and the necessity of re-examining past policies with regard to this failing state is now inescapable.
4. The difficulty is that the world’s imagination has been conquered by a skilfully constructed nightmare fantasy, and this has long paralysed responses to a Pakistan that is now approaching the threshold of state failure.44 Islamist extremism and terrorism have remained integral to the ruling establishment’s approach to domestic political management and regional strategic projection, as well as of international resource mobilisation. In the latter context, Pakistan presents itself as part of the solution to the problems it creates, combining manipulation, intimidation, and blackmail – including nuclear blackmail – and is then handsomely rewarded for its ‘cooperation’. Against this backdrop,
This threat has yielded enormous rewards in foreign assistance as well as great latitude in conduct that would otherwise be construed as unquestionably criminal and as appropriate grounds for international sanctions. It is under a benign international dispensation – rooted in fears of possible state collapse – that Pakistan has consistently remained a ‘minimal satisfier’, doing as little as is possible to secure itself against punitive action, but preserving its instrumentalities and networks of terrorism, sustaining its campaigns of terrorism at currently available levels of deniability and the international ‘tolerance of terrorism’.
5. The instrumentalisation of Islam and jihad remain an integral element of the political and strategic ambitions and outlook of the military-feudal-fundamentalist bloc that has ruled Pakistan since its creation. Despite the colossal ‘blowback’ of the jihadi-terrorist enterprise that the country is now experiencing, it remains the case that a powerful constituency in the political-military establishment remains sympathetic to and complicit with the Islamist extremist and terrorist formations that continue to operate with varying degrees of freedom across Pakistan. Ahmed Rashid thus notes,
A nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive double-dealing policies after 9/11, even under the watchful eye of the CIA.46
6. Pakistan’s accelerating hurtle into the abyss now appears irresistible. Unfortunately, US policy continues to fail to deal with the realities of Pakistan and its enduring pathologies, and with what one commentator has described as "the slow transformation of the Pakistani state itself into an instrument of the jihadist agenda."47 The sheer urgency of the crisis has largely been neglected by America’s status quo policies, which ignore the fact that, as Ahmed Rashid notes, "the situation in Pakistan deteriorates at a pace faster than policymakers can grasp."48
7. It is critical to recognize the augmenting danger, in this context, of WMD terrorism. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert, observes,
8. Despite a growing realization among wide segments of its national elite that terrorism is doing irreparable damage to Pakistan, and despite the best-intentioned abundance of aid and advice from other countries, Pakistan’s paper-thin institutions and deeply compromised leaderships simply lack the capacities, the vision and the will to check the augmenting momentum. Traditional ‘solutions’ – democratisation, development, negotiated settlements and peace processes – have little scope for success in this context. The Army is the only significant and relatively stable power in the country, and it has historically held the nation together principally through the application of brute force and the instrumentalisation of radical Islamism – devices that are now producing diminishing returns. Crucially, this Army remains deeply ambivalent about the ongoing jihadi terrorism, treating it still as a principal instrumentality of regional power projection and domestic political management, even as it is locked in uncertain war with its own creations, stretched to the limits of its diminishing capacities across multiple theatres of internal conflict. This is an Army, moreover, that has long been mobilised on precisely the same ideology and principles of an aggressive, conquering Islamism that motivate the Taliban, al Qaeda and the numberless lashkars that project carnage across South Asia and into the wider world through their ‘global jihad’. It is an Army that cannot commit itself unambiguously to the objectives of counter-terrorism – even if the tasks of counter-terrorism could still be assessed to be within its capacities.
9. The strategic and foreign policy challenges for the US and the global community, within the emerging scenario, principally involve the neutralisation of Pakistan’s nuclear assets and the containment of the fallout of the country’s collapse into anarchy or takeover by a Talibanised terrorist order. Evidently, these are colossal challenges, and the temptation to lapse into the make-believe of aid-driven development, democratization, ‘peace processes’, ‘negotiated settlements’, and deals with the ‘good Taliban’ will be great. But these are precisely the contours of past failure. Unless the hard core of Pakistan’s ‘enduring pathologies’, its risk of state failure, and the cumulative consequences of these, are directly addressed, policy initiatives, including Obama’s AfPak, will secure nothing of enduring value.
4. From Wishful to Strategic Thinking
1. Regrettably, there is little in the US policy shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, or the related AfPak strategy, that gives grounds for any hope of a ‘new era of peace’ or any significant ‘opportunities for advancement’ in the South Asian region.
2. President Obama’s AfPak strategy overwhelmingly concentrates on unrealistic short-term targets and goals, based on irrational settlements with the most dangerous elements in the region – the Pakistan Army, the ‘moderate Taliban’, and a powerless and unreliable political leadership in Pakistan. At the same time, the setting of hard deadlines for US withdrawal, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, encourage an extremist calculus within a protracted war framework that simply seeks to exhaust the political will of the Western leadership to remain engaged in the war. It is only when the US and the West accept and operate within the protracted war paradigm that a rational policy framework can emerge.
3. For the moment, as President Obama has rightly noted, "there wil be more violence". Regrettably, this violence50, with its overwhelming dependence on both sides of the AfPak border, on long range weapons and aerial targeting, and the inevitable and disproportionate ‘collateral damage’ – the killing of numberless civilians – cannot lead to stabilization of either theatre. It has already provoked a massive displacement of populations, and this will also further feed radicalization, even as the Pakistan establishment’s duality on Islamist terrorism persists. Crucially, with urban centres and parts of Punjab increasingly affected, the very core of the surviving institutional base has come under threat. Within this centrifugal dyanmic, there is little within Pakistan’s existing institutional configuration or the foreign policy tools currently available to outside powers that can help stem the country’s ‘descent into chaos’.
4. President Obama’s ‘AfPak’ strategy rightly recognizes the irreducible connectivity of the many crises of the region, but fails to recognize that this ‘connectivity’ is itself part of the problem. Pakistan has successfully established an Afghan dependency through its strategy of disruptive dominance, and current US perceptions and strategy are perpetuating and institutionalizing this dependency. If Afghanistan is to escape the destructive dynamic imposed on it by Pakistan, it must be helped to escape this dependency, and not be forced into closer and closer "intertwining" of interests through initiatives such as the Reconstruction Opporutunity Zones (ROZs), joint security arrangements, etc. – structures and inititiatives that will always be held in jeopardy by a wilful, disruptive and extremist Pakistani state.51
5. It is necessary to recognize that Pakistan continues to dictate the agenda for the region through its violence and extremist perversity, and also that Afghanistan is now secure from all directions except Pakistan. None of its neighbours have demonstrated any evidence of hostile intent, and most (excepting, for extraneous reasons bound to the relationship with the US, Iran) are now cooperating, in various measure, with the US-led coalition. These are the ties that need to be enormously strengthened, both on tactical and strategic grounds.
6. Within the framework of strategic initiatives in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is crucial to understand that areas of conflict cannot be developed inless they are first recovered. The ‘clear and hold’ imperatives of COIN must – but rarely do – precede efforts of development.
7. While emphasis shifts increasingly to the AfPak complex, it is imperative that the ‘fragile and reversible’ gains in Iraq are not lost. There is significant risk that Iraq may be destabilized again.
8. While the AfPak strategy offers very little that is new in this region, it is also the case that there is no evidence of any alternative strategy within the US perspective. There is, in other words, no ‘Plan B’ that could engage with and contain the consequences of the high probabilities of structural failure in the region. Crucially, existing US perspectives seem to be focused on devices that are merely incremental and entirely inadequate. As one commentator notes, "No one in Washington is, as yet, responsible for winning the war."52
For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work… There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability.38
A very large proportion of the aid, moreover, simply flows out of the country, funding profiteering western implementing agencies. Noting that "Foreign aid accounts for 90 per cent of public expenditure in Afghanistan"39, the aid agency OXFAM had earlier charged that much of the U.S. aid in Afghanistan is wasted on consulting costs, subcontractor fees and duplication40. Another commentator observes,
It is estimated that less than half of development-assistance money budgeted for roads, schools, hospitals, electricity and other structural needs actually reaches the projects it was ear-marked for and only a quarter of those funds actually get to end users in the rural areas where most Afghans live.41
At bottom, it is necessary to contend with the reality of the collapse of governance in Afghanistan, and the principal that you cannot develop42 what you do not control. Development can only follow once the disruptive dominance of the Taliban over an overwhelming proportion of the country is effectively neutralized. The truth is, "NATO forces may be able to defeat the Taliban in individual battles, but they are not able to hold territory, much less clear, build and develop." There is little possibility that NATO or the Afghan Government will be able to meet this necessary objective of counter-insurgency – to clear, build and develop – under the present policy framework and disposition of forces and resources.
It is estimated that less than half of development-assistance money budgeted for roads, schools, hospitals, electricity and other structural needs actually reaches the projects it was ear-marked for and only a quarter of those funds actually get to end users in the rural areas where most Afghans live.41
At bottom, it is necessary to contend with the reality of the collapse of governance in Afghanistan, and the principal that you cannot develop42 what you do not control. Development can only follow once the disruptive dominance of the Taliban over an overwhelming proportion of the country is effectively neutralized. The truth is, "NATO forces may be able to defeat the Taliban in individual battles, but they are not able to hold territory, much less clear, build and develop." There is little possibility that NATO or the Afghan Government will be able to meet this necessary objective of counter-insurgency – to clear, build and develop – under the present policy framework and disposition of forces and resources.
12. To reiterate, then, the surge is not a solution; only a sufficiency of forces and resources, deployed within a coherent strategic framework, can constitute a solution. President Obama’s AfPak strategy contains none of these elements. It brings, in effect, far too little and much too late to the Afghan theatre. It does so, moreover, at the expense of Iraq, where levels of stabilization remain, at best, tentative and fragile, and consequently risks escalation in that theatre as well.
3. Pakistan: The Seat of Political Desolation
1. It is in Pakistan that the Obama administration faces its greatest challenge, and where its policy fails most comprehensively to break new ground. Crucially, Obama’s perspectives remain firmly fixed on near-term challenges and the objective of securing a tenable ‘exit policy’ for US forces in Afghanistan, with drastically diminished goals within the region – specifically, denying the al Qaeda safe haven and an operational base in Pakistan’s border areas. The strategy to secure these limited objectives appears to be a virtual blank cheque to the Pakistan Army and Government, notwithstanding some tough rhetoric about ‘conditionalities’ and the diluted terms imposed by the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement (PEACE) Act, 2009, which gives approveal to a tripling of non-military aid to Pakistan, even as it deleted the reference to "cross border attacks into India" – replacing this with the expression "neighbouring countries". While this may appear to be no more than a quibble, the reality is that Pakistan reads this as near-immunity for acts of terrorism on Indian soil. In any event, US conditionalities are of no real relevance. The US has no punitive capacities against Pakistan in view of its continued dependence on the latter to secure any kind of action against the Taliban – al Qaeda combine on Pakistani soil. Indeed, if the US had the capacities to impose effective penalites on Pakistan, it would not have ignored the Pakistani role in the hundreds of terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, including many in which American lives were lost; or ignored the repeated and well documented warnings of an expanding Pakistani nuclear arsenal at a time when the security, from extremist forces, of the country’s existing arsenal is suspect. The truth is, the same old ‘strategic’ calculations and the logic of Pakistan’s ‘indispensibility’ to the ‘war against terrorism’ or "COIN (counter-insurgency) campaign"– or whatever politically correct euphemism the Obama Administration may now choose – will inevitably prevail the next time US or ISAF lives are lost in Afghanistan, or Indians are targeted in Afghanistan or in India, in an ISI-backed terrorist attack.
2. Curiously, augmenting US aid to Pakistan comes at a time when President Obama explicitly recognizes that the "civilian government there is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services."43 Worse, despite the apparent magnitude of aid flowing in to Pakistan, these are paltry amounts in terms of the sheer demographic explosion and developmental deficits in the country. Far from addressing the country’s poverty and backwardness, infusions of foreign aid have historically acted as no more than bribes to the national elites – military and political – to secure minimal compliance with reduced US and Western policy objectives. There is no reason to believe that President Obama’s policy brings anything new to the table.
3. Worse, as Pakistan’s implosion gathers pace, neither the US nor the wider international community appears to be exploring the imperatives of responding to what is obviously a rapidly failing nuclear-armed state. Ignoring the entirety of the destructive dynamic that has been unleashed by enduring pathologies within the Pakistani state and society, the US leadership continues to clutch at the straws of ‘negotiated settlements’ with the ‘good Taliban’, of concessions on ‘outstanding disputes’, including Kashmir, and of developmental aid that is expected to choke off the "assembly lines of jihad" and the progressive formal and informal (non-state) militarization of Pakistan. But billions of dollars of aid to Pakistan in the post-9/11 era and a succession of failed experiments with the ‘moderate Taliban’ on both sides of the AfPak border have done nothing to stabilize this catastrophic country, and have only seen a continuous increase in the spaces for radicalization and religious extremism on its soil. Pakistan has, today, established itself as the very heart of global terrorism and the necessity of re-examining past policies with regard to this failing state is now inescapable.
4. The difficulty is that the world’s imagination has been conquered by a skilfully constructed nightmare fantasy, and this has long paralysed responses to a Pakistan that is now approaching the threshold of state failure.44 Islamist extremism and terrorism have remained integral to the ruling establishment’s approach to domestic political management and regional strategic projection, as well as of international resource mobilisation. In the latter context, Pakistan presents itself as part of the solution to the problems it creates, combining manipulation, intimidation, and blackmail – including nuclear blackmail – and is then handsomely rewarded for its ‘cooperation’. Against this backdrop,
…it is useful to conceive of Pakistan as a state acting as a suicide bomber, arguing that, if it does not receive the extraordinary dispensations and indulgences that it seeks, it will, in effect ‘implode’, and in the process do extraordinary harm to others. Part of the threat of this ‘implosion’ is also the spectre of the transfer of its nuclear arsenal and capabilities to more intransigent and irrational elements of the Islamist far right in Pakistan, who would not be amenable to the logic that its present rulers – whose interests in terrorism are strategic, and consequently, subject to considerations of strategic advantage – are willing to heed.45
This threat has yielded enormous rewards in foreign assistance as well as great latitude in conduct that would otherwise be construed as unquestionably criminal and as appropriate grounds for international sanctions. It is under a benign international dispensation – rooted in fears of possible state collapse – that Pakistan has consistently remained a ‘minimal satisfier’, doing as little as is possible to secure itself against punitive action, but preserving its instrumentalities and networks of terrorism, sustaining its campaigns of terrorism at currently available levels of deniability and the international ‘tolerance of terrorism’.
5. The instrumentalisation of Islam and jihad remain an integral element of the political and strategic ambitions and outlook of the military-feudal-fundamentalist bloc that has ruled Pakistan since its creation. Despite the colossal ‘blowback’ of the jihadi-terrorist enterprise that the country is now experiencing, it remains the case that a powerful constituency in the political-military establishment remains sympathetic to and complicit with the Islamist extremist and terrorist formations that continue to operate with varying degrees of freedom across Pakistan. Ahmed Rashid thus notes,
A nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive double-dealing policies after 9/11, even under the watchful eye of the CIA.46
6. Pakistan’s accelerating hurtle into the abyss now appears irresistible. Unfortunately, US policy continues to fail to deal with the realities of Pakistan and its enduring pathologies, and with what one commentator has described as "the slow transformation of the Pakistani state itself into an instrument of the jihadist agenda."47 The sheer urgency of the crisis has largely been neglected by America’s status quo policies, which ignore the fact that, as Ahmed Rashid notes, "the situation in Pakistan deteriorates at a pace faster than policymakers can grasp."48
7. It is critical to recognize the augmenting danger, in this context, of WMD terrorism. Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and a leading nuclear expert, observes,
When you map W.M.D. and terrorism, all roads intersect in Pakistan… The nuclear security of the arsenal is now a lot better than it was. But the unknown variable here is the future of Pakistan itself, because it’s not hard to envision a situation in which the state’s authority falls apart and you’re not sure who’s in control of the weapons, the nuclear labs, the materials.49
8. Despite a growing realization among wide segments of its national elite that terrorism is doing irreparable damage to Pakistan, and despite the best-intentioned abundance of aid and advice from other countries, Pakistan’s paper-thin institutions and deeply compromised leaderships simply lack the capacities, the vision and the will to check the augmenting momentum. Traditional ‘solutions’ – democratisation, development, negotiated settlements and peace processes – have little scope for success in this context. The Army is the only significant and relatively stable power in the country, and it has historically held the nation together principally through the application of brute force and the instrumentalisation of radical Islamism – devices that are now producing diminishing returns. Crucially, this Army remains deeply ambivalent about the ongoing jihadi terrorism, treating it still as a principal instrumentality of regional power projection and domestic political management, even as it is locked in uncertain war with its own creations, stretched to the limits of its diminishing capacities across multiple theatres of internal conflict. This is an Army, moreover, that has long been mobilised on precisely the same ideology and principles of an aggressive, conquering Islamism that motivate the Taliban, al Qaeda and the numberless lashkars that project carnage across South Asia and into the wider world through their ‘global jihad’. It is an Army that cannot commit itself unambiguously to the objectives of counter-terrorism – even if the tasks of counter-terrorism could still be assessed to be within its capacities.
9. The strategic and foreign policy challenges for the US and the global community, within the emerging scenario, principally involve the neutralisation of Pakistan’s nuclear assets and the containment of the fallout of the country’s collapse into anarchy or takeover by a Talibanised terrorist order. Evidently, these are colossal challenges, and the temptation to lapse into the make-believe of aid-driven development, democratization, ‘peace processes’, ‘negotiated settlements’, and deals with the ‘good Taliban’ will be great. But these are precisely the contours of past failure. Unless the hard core of Pakistan’s ‘enduring pathologies’, its risk of state failure, and the cumulative consequences of these, are directly addressed, policy initiatives, including Obama’s AfPak, will secure nothing of enduring value.
4. From Wishful to Strategic Thinking
1. Regrettably, there is little in the US policy shift from Iraq to Afghanistan, or the related AfPak strategy, that gives grounds for any hope of a ‘new era of peace’ or any significant ‘opportunities for advancement’ in the South Asian region.
2. President Obama’s AfPak strategy overwhelmingly concentrates on unrealistic short-term targets and goals, based on irrational settlements with the most dangerous elements in the region – the Pakistan Army, the ‘moderate Taliban’, and a powerless and unreliable political leadership in Pakistan. At the same time, the setting of hard deadlines for US withdrawal, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, encourage an extremist calculus within a protracted war framework that simply seeks to exhaust the political will of the Western leadership to remain engaged in the war. It is only when the US and the West accept and operate within the protracted war paradigm that a rational policy framework can emerge.
3. For the moment, as President Obama has rightly noted, "there wil be more violence". Regrettably, this violence50, with its overwhelming dependence on both sides of the AfPak border, on long range weapons and aerial targeting, and the inevitable and disproportionate ‘collateral damage’ – the killing of numberless civilians – cannot lead to stabilization of either theatre. It has already provoked a massive displacement of populations, and this will also further feed radicalization, even as the Pakistan establishment’s duality on Islamist terrorism persists. Crucially, with urban centres and parts of Punjab increasingly affected, the very core of the surviving institutional base has come under threat. Within this centrifugal dyanmic, there is little within Pakistan’s existing institutional configuration or the foreign policy tools currently available to outside powers that can help stem the country’s ‘descent into chaos’.
4. President Obama’s ‘AfPak’ strategy rightly recognizes the irreducible connectivity of the many crises of the region, but fails to recognize that this ‘connectivity’ is itself part of the problem. Pakistan has successfully established an Afghan dependency through its strategy of disruptive dominance, and current US perceptions and strategy are perpetuating and institutionalizing this dependency. If Afghanistan is to escape the destructive dynamic imposed on it by Pakistan, it must be helped to escape this dependency, and not be forced into closer and closer "intertwining" of interests through initiatives such as the Reconstruction Opporutunity Zones (ROZs), joint security arrangements, etc. – structures and inititiatives that will always be held in jeopardy by a wilful, disruptive and extremist Pakistani state.51
5. It is necessary to recognize that Pakistan continues to dictate the agenda for the region through its violence and extremist perversity, and also that Afghanistan is now secure from all directions except Pakistan. None of its neighbours have demonstrated any evidence of hostile intent, and most (excepting, for extraneous reasons bound to the relationship with the US, Iran) are now cooperating, in various measure, with the US-led coalition. These are the ties that need to be enormously strengthened, both on tactical and strategic grounds.
6. Within the framework of strategic initiatives in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is crucial to understand that areas of conflict cannot be developed inless they are first recovered. The ‘clear and hold’ imperatives of COIN must – but rarely do – precede efforts of development.
7. While emphasis shifts increasingly to the AfPak complex, it is imperative that the ‘fragile and reversible’ gains in Iraq are not lost. There is significant risk that Iraq may be destabilized again.
8. While the AfPak strategy offers very little that is new in this region, it is also the case that there is no evidence of any alternative strategy within the US perspective. There is, in other words, no ‘Plan B’ that could engage with and contain the consequences of the high probabilities of structural failure in the region. Crucially, existing US perspectives seem to be focused on devices that are merely incremental and entirely inadequate. As one commentator notes, "No one in Washington is, as yet, responsible for winning the war."52
From: The South Asia Terrorism Portal
Last edited: