10 May 2011
Leaving Afghanistan
By Gwynne Dyer
”With a single bound, our hero was free”, as writers of pulp fiction used to say when they saved their hero from some implausible but inescapable peril. Barack Obama could now free himself from Afghanistan with a single bound, if he had the nerve.
The death of Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, matters little in practical terms, but Obama could use it as a means of deflating the grossly exaggerated “terrorist threat” that legitimises the bloated American security establishment. He could also use it to escape from the war in Afghanistan.
If he acted in the next few months, while his success in killing the terrorist-in-chief still makes him politically unassailable on military matters, he could start moving U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, and even begin to cut the Homeland Security Department down to size. His political enemies would accuse him of being “soft on defence”, but right now the accusation would not stick.
The HSD’s reason for being is the “terrorist threat”. Drive home the point that bin Laden is dead, and that there has been no terrorist attack in the West at even 1/50 the scale of the 9/11 attacks for the past five years, and its budget becomes very vulnerable.
Obama promised in 2009 that the first of the 30,000 extra U.S. troops he sent to Afghanistan in that year will be withdrawn this July. It would be harder to get the remaining 70,000 American troops and the 50,000 other foreign troops out—but it is now within his reach.
Since it is politically impossible for a U.S. president to acknowledge military defeat, for half a century the default method for extracting American troops from lost wars has been to “declare a victory and leave”. It was pioneered by Henry Kissinger in the Vietnam era, it worked for the junior Bush in Iraq, and Obama could use it to get out of Afghanistan.
It just has to look like a victory of sorts until one or two years after all the American troops are gone, so that when the roof falls in, it no longer looks like the Americans’ fault. Kissinger talked about the need for a “decent interval” between the departure of U.S. troops and whatever disasters might ensue in Vietnam, and the concept applies equally to Obama and Afghanistan.
The case for getting Western troops out of Afghanistan now rests on three arguments. Firstly, that the Taliban, the Islamist radicals who governed the country until 2001 and are now fighting Western troops there, were never America’s enemies. Al-Qaeda (which was almost entirely Arab in those days) abused their hospitality by planning its attacks in Afghanistan, but no Afghan has ever been involved in a terrorist attack against the West.
Secondly, the Taliban never controlled the minority areas of the country even during their five years in power, so why assume that they will conquer the whole country if Western troops leave? President Hamid Karzai’s deeply corrupt and widely hated government would certainly fall, but Afghanistan’s future would probably be decided, as usual, by a combination of fighting and bargaining between the major ethnic groups.
And thirdly, Western troops will obviously leave eventually. Whether they leave sooner or later, roughly the same events will happen after they go. Those events are unlikely to pose a threat to the security of any Western country—so why not leave now, and spare some tens of thousands of lives?
This last argument is of course disputed by the U.S. military, who insist (as soldiers usually do) that victory is attainable if they are only given enough resources and time. But Karzai’s government is beyond salvage, and this month’s strikingly successful Taliban attacks in Kandahar city discredit the claim that pro-government forces are “making progress” in “restoring security”.
Western armies have fought dozens of wars in the Third World since the European empires began to collapse 60 years ago, and they lost almost every one. The local nationalists (who sometimes calling themselves Marxists or Islamists) cannot beat the foreign armies in open battle, but they can go on fighting longer and take far higher casualties.
Afghanistan fits the model. When a delegation from Central Asia visited a U.S. base in Afghanistan, one of the delegates was a former Soviet general who had fought in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. He listened patiently as eager young American officers explained how new technology and a new emphasis on “winning hearts and minds” would defeat the insurgency.
Finally his patience snapped. “We tried all that when we were here and it didn’t work then, so why should it work now?” he asked. Answer: it won’t.
Osama bin Laden’s death has given Obama a chance to leave Afghanistan without humiliation. Just wait a couple of months to guard against the improbable contingency of a big terrorist revenge attack, and then start bringing the troops home. Once the Taliban are convinced that he is really leaving, they would probably even give him a “decent interval”.
Will this actually happen? Probably not, for in terms of domestic U.S. politics it would be a gamble, and Barack Obama is not a gambler.
————
2 May 2011
After Bin Laden
By Gwynne Dyer
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Osama bin Laden, the author of the 9/11 atrocity in the United States and various lesser terrorist outrages elsewhere, has been killed by American troops in his hide-out in northern Pakistan. At last, the world can breathe more easily. But not many people were holding their breaths anyway.
President Barack Obama issued the usual warning when he announced that bin Laden had been killed by American troops in a compound in the city of Abbottabad: “The death of Bin Laden marks the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al-Qaeda. Yet his death does not mark the end of our effort. There’s no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us.” But that wasn’t quite right either.
No doubt attacks will continue to be made in the Arab world in the name of al-Qaeda, but the original organisation created by bin Laden has been moribund for years. Outside the Arab world, there have been no major terrorist assaults for about five years now, and bin Laden’s death is unlikely to change that. The whole enterprise was never what it seemed.
Bin Laden was a revolutionary before he was a terrorist. His goal was to overthrow existing Arab governments and replace them with regimes that imposed an extreme form of the Salafist (Islamist) doctrine on the people instead.
Once all the Muslims had accepted that doctrine, bin Laden believed, they would benefit from God’s active support and triumph over the outside forces that held them back. Poverty would be vanquished, the humiliations would end, and the infidels (“the Zionist-Crusader alliance”) would be defeated. It was essentially a form of magical thinking, but his strategic thinking was severely rational.
Successful revolutions bringing Salafist regimes to power were the key to success, but for the revolutions to succeed they must win mass support among Arab and other Muslim populations. Unfortunately, only a very small proportion of Muslims accepted Salafist ideas, so some way must be found to win them over. That’s where the terrorism came in.
Terrorism is a classic technique for revolutionaries trying to build popular support. The objective is to trick the enemy government, local or foreign, into behaving so badly that it alienates the population and drives people into the arms of the revolutionaries. Then, with mass popular support, the revolutionaries overthrow the government and take power.
This kind of terrorism has been used so often, and the strategy behind it is so transparently obvious, that no 21st-century government should ever fall for it. But if the terrorist attacks kill enough people, it is very hard for the government being attacked not to over-react, even if that plays into the terrorists’ hands. The pressure at home for the government to “do something” is almost irresistible.
The Bush administration duly over-reacted to 9/11 and invaded two Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, on a futile quest to “stamp out terrorism” – which was, of course, exactly what bin Laden and his colleagues wanted the United States to do.
However, almost ten years after 9/11, it is clear that bin Laden’s strategy has failed even though the United States fell into the trap he had set for it. Muslims everywhere were appalled by the suffering inflicted on Afghans and Iraqis, and many condemned the United States for its actions, but they didn’t turn to the Salafists instead.
When popular revolutions finally did begin to happen in the Arab world five months ago, they were non-violent affairs seeking the same democracy that secular countries in the West and elsewhere already enjoy. The Salafists have become virtually irrelevant.
Which is not to say that there will never be another terrorist attack on the United States. Bin Laden had not been in operational control of al-Qaeda for many years, because regular communication with the outside world would have allowed US forces to track him down long ago: the compound in Abbottabad had neither telephone nor internet connections. The real planners and actors are still out there somewhere.
The question is: what can the Salafists possibly do now that would put their project back on track? And the answer – the only answer – is to goad the United States into further violence against Muslims, in retaliation for some new terrorist atrocity against Americans.
There have been no major attempts by al-Qaeda to attack the United States in the past ten years because it was already doing what the terrorists wanted. Why risk discrediting President George W. Bush by carrying out another successful terrorist attack, even if they had the resources to do so?
But the probability of a serious Salafist attempt to hit the US again has been rising ever since American troops began to pull out of Iraq, and President Obama’s obvious desire to get out of Afghanistan raises it even further. Bin Laden’s strategy has not delivered the goods for the Salafists, but they have no alternative strategy.
Bin Laden’s death would provide a useful justification for another attempt to hit the US, but it wouldn’t really be the reason for it – and it probably wouldn’t succeed, either. Bin Laden’s hopes died long before he did.
_______________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8 and 12. (“This kind…irresistible”; and “Which…somewhere”)
Gwynne Dyer’s latest book, “Climate Wars”, is distributed in most of the world by Oneworld.
16 December 2010
Afghanistan: Wheels Within Wheels?
By Gwynne Dyer
President Barack Obama seems to be working under a serious misapprehension. Releasing the White House’s annual strategic review to the public on 16 December, he declared that US policy in Afghanistan was “on track” to defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Who told him that the United States is fighting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan?
“It was Afghanistan where al-Qaeda plotted the 9/11 attacks that murdered 3,000 innocent people,” he said, which is an accurate historical statement.
“It is the tribal regions along the Afghan-Pakistan border from which terrorists have launched more attacks against our homeland and our allies,”Obama continued. Note the leap of logic: suddenly, he’s no longer talking about Afghanistan, but about the “Afghan-Pakistan border.” In fact, he’s really only talking about the Pakistani side of that frontier, which American forces could not control even if they killed every insurgent in Afghanistan.
“And if an even wider insurgency were to engulf Afghanistan, that would give al-Qaeda even more space to plan these attacks,” Obama concluded. Maybe, but why would al-Qaeda want more space to plan its attacks?
If it actually wants more space, al-Qaeda could easily increase its presence in Somalia, for example, but western Pakistan is quite big enough to hide in. Pakistan also has big, busy airports where al-Qaeda recruits can slip into and out of the country, and it’s far too big for the United States to invade.
So what would be the point of winning a war against the Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, even if Obama’s apparent belief that they are just the Afghan branch of al-Qaeda were correct?
So long as the United States does not control every square metre (foot) of Pakistan – and it never will – the only way to prevent al-Qaeda attacks will remain good intelligence gathering, not heavily armed US troops clattering around in foreign countries. Indeed, good intelligence work is ALWAYS the best way to stop terrorist attacks.
But what if the Taliban sweep to power in Afghanistan once the Western forces leave? That’s not all that likely to happen, because the Taliban are almost exclusively drawn from one ethnic group, the Pashtuns. They account for 40 percent of the population, but they never managed to gained conquer the heartlands of the other ethnic groups even when they ruled the country in 1996-2001. Why would they succeed now?
The United States and its allies are unwittingly trapped in an Afghan civil war between the Pashtuns and everybody else. That’s why 98 percent of NATO casualties happen in Pashtun-majority areas. It’s also why the Afghan army that Washington is trying to build up (so that it can leave) is overwhelmingly made up of Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks – anybody but Pashtuns. They don’t even speak the same language as the insurgents.
But what if the Taliban do gain control of at least part of Afghanistan after Western troops leave? It wouldn’t matter all that much, because having “even more space to plan these attacks” wouldn’t make al-Qaeda any more dangerous. “Bases” are a conventional military concept that is virtually irrelevant in terrorist strategies.
In any case, it’s unlikely that a victorious Taliban insurgency would really invite al-Qaeda to set up in Afghanistan again. They share many of al-Qaeda’s ideas, but their actual situation would be very different – just as it was before 2001.
Al-Qaeda’s members were (and still are) revolutionaries trying to win power, mainly in Arab countries. Back then, they were getting nowhere because they lacked popular support. The 9/11 attacks were intended to sucker the United States into invading a Muslim country, in order to inflame Muslim opinion against Washington and the governments it backs in the Arab world. Then, perhaps, some of al-Qaeda’s stalled revolutions might actually happen,
No surprise there. That’s a standard terrorist strategy, though few people in Washington seem to realise it. But the Taliban were already in power; they didn’t need a revolution. Why would they back an al-Qaeda operation that would trigger a US invasion and get them driven from power? It’s very unlikely that they even knew about it in advance.
But if the Taliban were not involved in al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks on the United States even back then, it’s hardly credible that they would support such attacks now. Does President Obama understand that? It doesn’t sound like it – but then, Obama could never offer this analysis even if he shared it.
The simplistic mythology about al-Qaeda’s motives that was disseminated by the Bush administration – “they are Islamic crazies who attack us because they hate our values” – has taken such deep root in the American population that Obama cannot argue with it in public.
He cannot say that what happens in Afghanistan after the Americans leave hardly matters to the United States. But he may understand it in private.
Consider the comment in the strategy review that the US has made enough progress in Afghanistan to start a “responsible reduction” of forces in July 2011. That is nonsense: there has been no serious progress, and the Taliban will know it.
But it may be a coded signal to the Taliban that Obama wants to get out, but cannot do so if the Taliban are looking too successful.So stay low for a while, please, and we’ll soon be out of your hair.You know, like the deal that Henry Kissinger made with North Vietnam in 1972.
__________________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 8 and 9. (“But what…insurgents”)
There was not room to expand on Kissinger’s exit strategy from Vietnam. If the comment seems too obscure for your readership, just omit the last sentence.
26 October 2010
The Importance of the Middle East
By Gwynne Dyer
The media in the Middle East carry a lot of Middle Eastern stories, of course, but why do most of the other media in the world do the same? Asian media strike a better balance, but Western media, and any other media that basically follow the American news agenda, focus obsessively on the region. Between a third and a half of all foreign news stories in the Western print and broadcast media are usually about the Middle East.
Like fish that never notice the medium they swim in, people tend not to remark upon this familiar aspect of their media environment. I didn’t really become aware of it myself until I flew into Canada a few years ago, got a copy of the Globe and Mail, “Canada’s National Newspaper,” and found that every single story on the two pages of foreign news it offers was about the Middle East.
Eight or nine stories, about Iran and Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, oil and refugees and Iraq. Canada has troops in Afghanistan, so maybe that one is understandable, but there was no big war on, no vast crisis, just business as usual. Yet all the stories that might have been there about Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia had been crowded out by Middle Eastern stories. I doubt that anybody at the paper even noticed how weird that was.
This is a phenomenon that cries out for an explanation, and it’s not easy to find a credible one. It’s certainly not oil, which is the lazy explanation. Oil is quite important in the global economy, and the Middle East has a large share of the market and an even bigger share of the reserves. But it’s been 37 years since the oil-rich Arab states once refused to sell their oil, and they couldn’t do that again.
Not WOULDN’T; it’s not a question of trust. COULDN’T, because it would cause far too much disruption in their own economies. The 1973 oil embargo took place at a time when most of the major Arab oil-exporting countries had populations two or three times smaller than they are now, and when their people did not live in full-fledged consumer societies.
It’s different now. The cash flow from oil exports pays not just for imported cars and plasma-screen TVs, but for the very food that the local people eat: most Arab oil-exporting states import half or more of the food they consume. They also have huge investments in the Western economies that an oil embargo would hurt. Another oil embargo isn’t going to happen, and stories about oil belong on the business pages.
Well, then, how about the fact that the United States has invaded two Middle Eastern countries in the past ten years, and still has troops in both of them? Does that explain the obsessive focus on the Middle East?
No, because the obsession was there before the invasions. In fact, the causation is probably the other way round: the exaggerated importance with which Americans already viewed the Middle East was almost certainly a contributory factor in the Bush administration’s decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
The main factor in the Afghan decision, of course, was the foolish belief that invading Afghanistan would somehow help to suppress anti-American terrorism rather than stimulate more of it. Almost nobody in Washington seemed aware that they were falling into a trap laid for them by Osama bin Laden. The invasion of Iraq had more complex and even less rational motives, but was equally driven by the mistaken belief that this was a very important place.
The greater Middle East contains about ten percent of the world’s population. The Arab world at its heart is only five percent. The whole region accounts for only three percent of the global economy, and produces almost nothing of interest to the rest of the world except oil. So why does it dominate the international news agenda?
The Europeans play a role in this, because the media in the former imperial powers take a greater interest in their former colonies than in other countries of equal importance. But the American media really set the agenda, and their fascination with the Middle East requires a different explanation.
A large part of it is driven by the deep emotional investment in Israel that many Americans have. Israel is not viewed as just another foreign country, to be weighed by its strategic and economic importance. It is seen as a special place, almost an American protectorate, and its foreign policy agenda (which is all about the Middle East) largely sets the US media agenda.
The other big factor is the lasting American obsession with Iran, which is as great as the obsession with Cuba. Both countries have successfully defied the United States, and that has been neither forgiven nor forgotten.
Combine the love for Israel and the hatred of Iran, and you have an explanation for the American media’s obsession with the entire Middle Eastern region. Most media elsewhere, especially in the West, just follow suit. It’s a huge distortion that leads to the neglect of much important news about the rest of the world, but at least the Middle East gives good value for money. The news it generates is unfailingly interesting.
________________________________________
To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 2 and 3. (Like…was”)