Posted: May 2nd, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Foreign Policy, Politics, South Asia | Tags: Afghanistan, Counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, development, Pakistan, Taliban Afghanistan, Taliban Pakistan, War on Terror | 1 Comment »
As the war in Pakistan rages, there have been many pundits offering ways forward. Each of them gets us halfway to a solution, but in the end, none of them has an adequate plan. In this rather long post (advance apologies), I’ll try to cobble together the best of each school.
To begin with, let me summarize the situation. In Afghanistan, groups with Iranian/Persian roots make up almost 80% of the population, with the others each having 2% or 5% shares. The ethnic power balance is clear. It’s governed, ineptly, by an unpopular U.S. puppet and being challenged/revolted against by a more popular insurgency of tribal leaders, i.e. the erstwhile Taliban government. Over the years, many of those leaders have moved over the border into western Pakistan. In Pakistan, the ethnic situation is more complex, with all the major provinces corresponding, roughly, to a different ethnic group and language. In the area bordering Afghanistan, the majority of the population belongs to the same ethnic group–the Pashtuns–who dominate Afghanistan. Indeed, many in the 1940s thought that region should have been part of Afghanistan anyway. Instead, Pakistan negotiated for the territory but agreed to give the Pashtuns there some semi-autonomy, continuing the borders laid out by the Brits in the 1890s. So over the years, as the Taliban and other Pashtun refugees have come over the border, they have some semi-autonomy when it came to organizing and recruiting: the result is a copycat movement, the Pakistan-Taliban, affiliated but not officially tied to the guys we are fighting in Kabul.
For many years, Pakistan hands and Pakistani political elites assumed that the unofficial alliance meant that any radicals trained in this lawless border region had their eye on Kabul anyway. So long as their enemies were Russians or Americans in Afghanistan, Islamabad did not care. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s military/intelligence units were quite happy to have these radicals training in their backyard in the hope of turning some of them east to fight India. It never occurred to authorities, or they chose to block out the possibility, that the Pakistan-Taliban was also a class movement of the disenfranchised and downtrodden who would turn on social elites in Islamabad directly. Instead, they insisted that if the US had not bungled the first and second Afghan wars (which we did), there would be no Pakistan-Taliban, and that if the US withdrew, the Pakistan-Taliban would just go back to being harmless country bumpkins that Islamabad could ignore. What Pakistani elites have learned, the hard way, these last few years is that the Pakistan-Taliban have it out for them too, that this is not just America’s war but Pakistan’s war too. So long as vast class inequities and social injustices exist, not only in the tribal regions but across the country, the Pakistan-Taliban will be able to expand eastwards. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: April 27th, 2009 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Politics | Tags: CIA, Eric Holder, Leon Panetta, Obama, torture, transparency, War on Terror | No Comments »
I’ve waited on the sidelines a few days, but I now feel it’s time to dive into the torture memos debate. Here’s what stands out to me: as Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff reports, there was a divide within Obama-land about how much info to release and what to do with it. Ultimately, as Eric Holder explained to the President, there was no choice, since the ACLU Freedom of Info Act suit forced the release, but in the lead-up, CIA director Leon Panetta was arguing the other side, asking the President not to expose the agency to public censure and if he did, to promise not to investigate those who “followed” orders.
Why would Panetta be so worried about this? Because, as Isikoff argued on MSNBC’s Hardball, he is a newbie to the agency who does not have credibility with the career employees who were involved in, but not politically committed to, the Bush agenda. In other words, someone from WITHIN the CIA might have been more able to lead the agency through public scrutiny with grace, counterintuitive as that sounds. This is precisely the kind of problem I had in mind when I critiqued his appointment to the post.
President Obama listened to the law, but I have some qualms with his decision to “look forward,” not backward when it comes to investigating those involved in the torturous practices. Not only because I agree with Keith Olbermann that un-investigated practices could remain as precedent, but also because I don’t completely buy into the assumptions that drive Obama’s decision. Basically, the Obama administration reflects a rising tide in 21st century liberal thought that idealizes the power of transparency. So long as the government comes clean, this argument runs, these practices can’t ever happen again, because the public won’t let them. Implicit in this argument is the notion that somehow the public did not know, and therefore could not protest, what was happening before.
That’s naïve: we didn’t have confirmation before, but you’d have to have been living under a rock not to have seen or heard discussion of these practices over the last 7 years. Moreover, full awareness of government misconduct never worked as a powerful enough check before. The law (an institution) exists to achieve the kind of justice that public opinion, even at its moral best, cannot enforce. Once again, the faith in public opinion (the morality of individuals) is just insufficient.
Posted: July 24th, 2008 | Author: Maha Rafi Atal | Filed under: Economics, Foreign Policy, South Asia | Tags: counterterrorism, Pakistan, Taliban Afghanistan, Taliban Pakistan, War on Terror | No Comments »
Tom Friedman has a line about US energy policy—“dumb as we wanna be.†I’d like to apply the same to our policies in Pakistan. Right now, we’re pummeling billions into the Pakistani military to help us fight insurgent Taliban sympathizers on the Pak-Afghan border. This is a good cause, but giving a blank check and big arms shipments to the army, then waiting for them to do the right thing is a bad methodology.
First of all, as the NY Times reports, there’s no guarantee that the funds go towards counterterrorism. Secondly, by helping to expand the power of the military at the expense of civilian leadership, we undermine the progress of the rule of law. That’s been the case throughout the Musharraf years, but it’s even more so now when there’s a new democratic government who campaigned as an alternative to Mush. Thirdly, by encouraging the country to focus so myopically on its military, we feed the fire of a ballooning deficit and stalled economic development.
In the end, this “counter-terror†policy of ours promotes dictators over democratic leaders, martial law over constitutionalism and wasteful government spending over economic growth. But it’s when young people have no economic opportunities and no voice in government or in the law to appeal for change that they turn to radical alternatives like terror in the first place.
As Dumb As We Wanna Be.