- (september 2009)
Obama's War.
The world's public opinion seems to be willing to forgive Obama for facts
that would cause mass outrage if done under Bush's watch. Afghanistan's
elections now rank as the most visibly rigged of the decade, with
Hamid Karzai winning amid grotesque reports of irregularities.
Afghanistan is now producing 93% of the world's heroin, so much so that even
Russia has complained
(see this New York Times article).
That drug money fuels corruption at all levels of the government. Drug-lords
exert an influence that is unmatched in history in any country of the world
since the heydays of Colombia's drug-lords.
Pakistan is responsible for much of the Taliban's success
(see Pakistan, not Afghanistan)
and now Obama is resorting more than ever to Bush's illegal and more or less
clandestine strategy of bombing targets inside Pakistan (a clear violation
of international law).
If Obama recognizes Karzai as the legitimate president of Afghanistan,
the USA will be back to the old days of embarrassing friendships with
dictators widely despised by their own people, a recipe for future trouble.
Few in the world seem to stand up for the opposition the way they stood
up for even the worst of oppositions (for example, Saddam Hussein) when
the president was Bush.
Few in the world seem to stand up for the opposition the way they stood
up for Iran's opposition: why should Iran have fair elections if the West
approves Afghanistan's rigged elections?
Abdullah Abdullah is credited with 28.3% of the votes by the official
(Karzai-controlled) commission, which probably means he won much more.
It is a bit surprising that nobody in the world seems to take his side.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (april 2009)
The Second Taliban war.
The first war against the Taliban (the invasion of 2001) was largely successful:
the Taliban were removed from power and virtually expelled from the country.
In 2009 a new president finds himself having to fight another war against the
Taliban, who have regrouped, rearmed and brought their war deep into Afghanistan.
The USA will not win the second war unless it realizes why the Taliban have been
so successful in regrouping, rearming and pushing their war deep into Afghanistan.
There are at least three factors at play.
First of all, there is Pakistan
(See Pakistan, not Afghanistan) that
does not protect its borders. There are 900 kms of border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan. The Taliban fighters who were expelled by the USA in 2001 crossed
the border and settled into Pakistan. They were surrounded by countries that
hated them (such as Iran, a Shiite country that hated their Sunni ideology,
and the former Soviet republics, who are wary of Islamic insurgencies on their
own territories). Pakistan allowed them to stay both because it was the path
of least attrition and because Pakistan insists in keeping most of its forces
along the border with India. Pakistan is obsessed with the threat coming from
India. There is no indication that India ever dreamed of invading Pakistan but
there are reasonable arguments that India might be tempted to cross into
Pakistan to pursue terrorists: that would be enough to inflame public opinion
and cause the fall of the Pakistani government. Thus each Pakistani government,
first and foremost, has had to protect itself from the specter of a humiliating
attack by India. Pakistan's army is mostly deployed along the border with India,
and the Taliban simply took advantage of the unguarded border with Afghanistan,
that causes less of an embarrassment to the Pakistani government (at least until
recently).
Secondly, there are thousands of USA citizens who fund the Taliban. Opium
now constitutes 60% of Afghanistan's GDP. Opium is mostly used to produce
heroin, and the USA is the largest customer of Afghan heroin.
The Taliban get a cut of that huge trade of opium from the farmers that they
protect against the Afghani government and against the USA troops They make
about $300 million a year. That's how they rearmed themselves. They simply used
Western money to buy weapons to fight the Western armies deployed on Afghan
territory. They have no other major donor. The traditional sources of money
(the rich Arab sheiks) ended after 2001, when Saudi Arabia switched sides and
dumped the Taliban. That new source of funding will stop only when the West will
stop buying opium. The USA is planning to invest $250 million in helping
Afghanistan eradicate the opium plantations and replace them with wheat fields,
but that's wishful thinking: which party animals in the West will start buying
Afghan wheat instead of heroin? Afghan farmers are desperate. The opium that
Westerners consume in abundance is the only way they can make ends meet.
Just like in Colombia and Peru, opium is just too lucrative for such a poor
country. The war on drugs has been lost repeatedly by the USA because the
enemy is inside the USA, not outside: all the people who do drugs.
Thirdly, there are the mountain civilian casualties of USA strikes.
Hardly a week goes by without news of an "accident" in which civilians
have been killed (sometimes by the dozens) by USA air strikes. The relatives
of those dead civilians are easily recruited by the Taliban to help push the
fight inside Afghanistan.
That's how the Taliban regrouped, rearmed and expanded: a simple but effective
strategy of exploiting its enemy's weakest points (its drug users, its fearful
allies, its excessive violence).
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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- (january 2009)
Obama's forthcoming war on Pakistan.
It all started in Afghanistan. USA president decided that the country to be
attacked in retaliation for the 2001 terrorist attacks was Afghanistan.
It made a lot of sense. The Taliban had created the most extremist Islamic
republic. They had sheltered Al Qaeda. The Taliban and Al Qaeda were, respectively, a national and an international terrorist group acting in the name of the Quran, bent on attacking non-Muslim institutions and individuals. The Taliban did
it domestically when they blew up the giant Buddha statues of Bamiya. Al Qaeda did it internationally when they blew up two skyscrapers in New York.
USA president George W Bush retaliated by removing the Taliban from power and
chasing Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan.
That USA president viewed Pakistan the way USA presidents had viewed Pakistan
since India began to gravitate into the Soviet Union's orbit: a trusted ally.
At the time nobody saw Pakistan for what it was: the mastermind of the Taliban
revolution; the organizer of Al Qaeda's supply lines. Even now that obviously
(obviously) both the Taliban and Al Qaeda are using Pakistani territory as
a launching base for a reconquest of USA-occupied Afghanistan, the USA refuses
to openly single out Pakistan as the enemy.
Barack Obama is a different kind of president, the first one brought up
(politically speaking) after the Cold War. It is likely that the USA will soon
realize that Pakistan is more of a burden than an ally. The USA needed Pakistan
to fight the Soviet Union and counter the power of India in that region. Now
that the Soviet Union is gone and India has become a USA ally, Pakistan is
simply a state like any other. Any other state that harbored and protected
USA enemies would have already paid a dear price. Pakistan has been exempted
for punishment for as long as the old Cold War mindset ruled. Obama signals the
end of that mindset.
Obama has repeatedly stated that he wants to finish the job in Afghanistan.
It won't take long before he realizes that the job in Afghanistan is not
finished simply because of Pakistan. The war is not inside Afghanistan. The war
is at the border with Pakistan. As long as that war rages on, it will be
impossible for the USA to solve the two big domestic problems of Afghanistan:
the narcotics trade and political corruption. That war forces the USA to accept
a widly imperfect Afghan state.
Political analysts sometimes see it the other way around: the USA intervention
in Afghanistan has destabilized Pakistan (by pushing the Taliban across the
border). That is the old logic: Pakistan at centerstage.
But this interpretation of the facts is obviously false: it is Pakistan that
destabilized and is still destabilizing Afghanistan (by protecting the Taliban
as they attack Afghanistan). The Taliban were born in Pakistan and then invaded
Afghanistan from Pakistan. At the time the USA loved the idea. Nonetheless,
that's what happened: there is a clear aggressor and a clear victim.
It is likely that Obama, free from past debts of gratitude, will see it
more clearly than Bush.
Afghanistan is a mess. The central government controls only the capital Kabul.
Provincial governors are corrupt tyrants who control the economy of their
regions. The "illegal" narcotics trade is by far the most vibrant sector of
the economy and accounts for most of the exports. The infrastructure is still
medieval. Education is so poor that Afghanistan, a country with chronically
high unemployment, still has to import workers (let alone engineers) from
abroad. None of these problems can be tackled for as long as Afghanistan and
its Western allies are distracted by the war with Pakistan.
Make peace with Pakistan and all the problems will become tractable. Obama
wants to send thousands of troops to Afghanistan: they will fight ghosts,
because the enemy is not in Afghanistan.
TM, ®, Copyright © 2007 Piero Scaruffi All rights reserved.
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Articles on Afghanistan before 2009
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