Author: Lawrence F. Kaplan
Publication: The New Republic -
Issue date 11.26.01
Date: November 15, 2001
URL: http://www.tnr.com/112601/kaplan112601.html
A wonderful thing happened this
week in Afghanistan. So why does everyone in the Bush administration--everyone,
that is, except officials at the Pentagon--sound so glum? Because with
the fall of Kabul, the United States achieved an impressive military victory
and suffered an impressive diplomatic defeat. Having urged soldiers of
the Northern Alliance to fight the ground war it would not, the United
States then stipulated that they not enter the capital. Unsurprisingly,
they did.
Foggy Bottom's special coordinator
for Afghanistan, Richard Haass, privately warned Northern Alliance representatives
two weeks ago to halt short of the city. Last Sunday, Colin Powell repeated
the admonition in public, saying, "it would be better if they were to `invest'
the city." And, at Powell's urging, President Bush announced that the Northern
Alliance should advance "but not into the city of Kabul itself." It was
left to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to remind the public why the
United States supports the Northern Alliance in the first place. "[T]he
goal is, as soon as humanly possible in the right way, to get the Al Qaeda
and the Taliban the dickens out of Kabul," Rumsfeld insisted on CBS, even
as Powell was urging restraint on NBC. "[The Alliance is] going to attack
and take Kabul when they feel like it ... and when they think that they're
capable of defeating the Taliban and getting them out of there." Which
is exactly what they did.
The contradictory messages were
but the latest example of an exceedingly strange feature of the war in
Afghanistan: Publicly at least, the United States treats its proxy scarcely
better than its foe. So low was the State Department's opinion of the Northern
Alliance that last month it didn't want the bombing to begin at all, arguing
that the United States should instead wait for the contours of a future
Afghan government to emerge. Then Foggy Bottom insisted that the U.S. air
campaign exempt Taliban forces arrayed against the Northern Alliance, so
the rebels couldn't advance on Kabul. Finally, the Pentagon took over the
war--with swift and astonishing results. But as the anti-Taliban offensive
draws to a close, and war management slowly reverts to the diplomats, the
pressure for calibration and political refinements has returned. As has
America's shabby treatment of the soldiers who have been fighting and dying
to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban.
Prior to the seizure of Kabul, Pentagon
and Northern Alliance officials claim the Defense Department conveyed to
the anti-Taliban rebels, both in Washington and on the ground in northern
Afghanistan, precisely the message Rumsfeld repeated in public: Fight.
Indeed, U.S. Special Forces even accompanied the Northern Alliance into
the city. The episode illustrates an important truth about this war: Relations
between the United States and its proxy have thus far been conducted nearly
exclusively by the Pentagon. The State Department, by contrast, has had
barely any contact with the Northern Alliance--a fact that accounts in
large part for the muddled message Alliance officials claim to have received
from the United States. And, with the fall of the capital, the message
became even more confused than before. As the locus of the war moved south
this week, administration officials debated two options: Either they could
rely on local Pashtun uprisings against the Taliban, or they could encourage
the overwhelmingly non-Pashtun Northern Alliance to continue its march.
Fortunately, the anti-Taliban Pashtun seem to have taken Washington's cue.
But, in the event they did not, Pentagon officials said they would have
had no qualms about relying on the Northern Alliance instead. The State
Department, however, had plenty.
"What you're seeing now is the same
[State Department] hand-wringing that held up the bombing [of northern
Taliban positions]," complained one senior administration official on the
day Kabul fell. "The arguments never change." What were those arguments?
First, State Department officials argue that the last time the Northern
Alliance had a say in governing the country--prior to the Taliban's seizure
of the capital in 1996--it made a hash of things, most notably Kabul, which
it all but leveled. The second argument holds that were the minority-dominated
Northern Alliance to march south of Kabul, the Pashtuns would recoil into
the arms of the Taliban. And the third and final argument is that if Afghanistan
falls into the hands of the Alliance, it could destabilize Pakistan.
None of these arguments entirely
holds up--perhaps because all three originate from Pakistan, which loathes
the Northern Alliance. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf's insistence
that "[i]f the Northern Alliance enters Kabul, we'll see the same kind
of atrocities against the people there"--a claim U.S. officials have been
regurgitating daily--is largely contrived. To begin with, the destruction
of Kabul in the mid-1990s was to a great extent the work of Pakistan's
own client, the Pashtun leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who killed thousands
of residents and shelled the city into dust after breaking with the Northern
Alliance's Ahmed Shah Massoud. And since the capture of Kabul this week,
we have seen little evidence of the widespread atrocities predicted by
Pakistan. To be sure, there have been isolated cases of the Alliance meting
out rough and violent justice to Arab and Pakistani cadres. But, for the
moment at least, Kabul is a city celebrating its liberation with music,
kite-flying, and discarded burqas.
The corollary to this argument--that
rapid Northern Alliance gains would prompt wide-scale ethnic conflict--boasts
a curious history as well. For years Pakistani leaders have promoted real
and imagined Pashtun grievances, seeking to wield Pashtun nationalism as
a club against the Northern Alliance while at the same time deflecting
it away from their own territory. But Powell's concern that the Northern
Alliance not advance too far because Afghanistan's factions "are of different
tribal loyalties"--echoing as it does his contention that the war in Bosnia
had "deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years"--is
misplaced. Afghanistan's divisions largely derive from political differences
and, to a lesser extent, religious ones. As Afghanistan expert Barnett
Rubin has observed, inter-Afghan conflict "is almost entirely about power
and security. While the groups are ethnically distinct, none of them has
an ethnic ideology, and inter-ethnic hostility remains quite low in Afghanistan."
Indeed, the ethnic structure of Afghanistan's 20-year-long war has shifted
as routinely as its battle lines. And, as the rejoicing in the streets
of largely Pashtun Kabul suggests, it's already shifting once more.
The most serious argument for restraining
the Northern Alliance has always been that a Northern Alliancedominated
government could destabilize Pakistan. For years the State Department has
deferred to Pakistan's wishes concerning Afghanistan--including its early
sponsorship of the Taliban. True to form, Foggy Bottom officials argued
that, were Kabul or Kandahar to fall to the Northern Alliance, enraged
Islamist extremists in the Pakistani officer corps might try to overthrow
President Musharraf. But other administration officials find the argument
unpersuasive. "[Musharraf] has that country wired," says one. "If he feels
so threatened, what's he doing in New York?" According to officials managing
the U.S.-Pakistani relationship, Musharraf wields an iron grip on the army
and shows no sign of being besieged by his country's comparatively weak
religious parties. "[Musharraf] is worried about India, not about himself,
and certainly not about our interests," says a senior Bush adviser. Indeed,
the argument about Pakistani stability, like the others the State Department
has been peddling (including the desirability of "moderate Taliban" representatives
in any new government), originates with the Pakistanis themselves.
If the State Department exaggerated
the danger of working closely with the Northern Alliance, it minimized
the danger of doing the reverse. Foggy Bottom's arguments against the Alliance
always presupposed the existence of an alternative force that could govern
Afghanistan. But so far there isn't one. Despite having had two months
to do so, the State Department has failed to assemble an Afghan governing
coalition or to persuade UN Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to organize a peacekeeping
force. (In a sign of the administration's impatience, earlier this month
much of Haass's Afghanistan portfolio was handed to a new envoy, diplomatic
troubleshooter James Dobbins.) Nor have the CIA's efforts, which culminated
in the disastrous capture and execution of opposition leader Abdul Haq,
proved any more impressive in this regard. Hence, the Northern Alliance
claim that its forces are policing Kabul in the absence of any alternative
has an indisputable basis in fact--a fact, moreover, for which the United
States bears no small measure of culpability.
But even more important than the
absence of a viable governing alternative to the Northern Alliance has
been the absence of a viable fighting alternative. Indeed, to have restrained
the Northern Alliance at the gates of Kabul would have served no purpose
other than to embolden the Taliban south of the city. Fortunately, the
Pentagon continued to prod the Alliance forward. The State Department may
not be working closely with Alliance forces, but the U.S. military's coordination
with them improves daily. And, explicitly recalling Powell's disastrous
Gulf war advice that a sizable chunk of Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard
be allowed to retreat from Kuwait unscathed, Pentagon officials claim that
had Pashtuns not acted in the South, they would have backed a Northern
Alliance advance there as well. Far from being preoccupied with the tumult
that such a move may have provoked, Defense Department officials argued
that the more chaos in southern Afghanistan the better, as pressure from
the Northern Alliance would have flushed Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives
out into the open. As it happens, anti-Taliban Pashtuns may already be
doing that themselves.
So the ground campaign continues
as it began. From the first days of this war, Foggy Bottom has denigrated
the Northern Alliance in its pursuit of a secondary political aim--the
stability of postwar Afghanistan--at the expense of the war's essential
aim, the destruction of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But whoever could best
achieve the latter aim always deserved our support. After all, who's doing
whom the bigger favor here? The Northern Alliance has bled for us and toppled
the Taliban. In return, President Bush says that the Northern Alliance
will receive no preferential treatment from the United States, and a State
Department official claims it will be entitled only to a "very subordinate
role" in a postwar government. The administration would do well to remember
that it's only because of the Northern Alliance's "very subordinate role"
in the war that Afghanistan has a postwar government at all.
(Lawrence F. Kaplan) is a senior
editor at TNR.
