Quick Study: Peter Tomsen on war in Afghanistan
How to hop out of a cauldron
Jun 1st 2012, 10:18 by A.B.
Peter Tomsen was George H.W. Bush’s special envoy to the Afghan resistance, with the rank of ambassador from 1989 to 1992. As such, he met many Afghan tribal leaders, commanders and ulema who remain active today. Tomsen entered America’s foreign service in 1967 and was posted to Vietnam’s Mekong delta as a civilian military advisor in 1969. He has served in India, China, Moscow and (as ambassador) Armenia. He is the author of “The Wars of Afghanistan” (2011).
What is the West going to do about Afghanistan?
There are two main challenges in the way ahead. They can be met if we understand how we got to this position in the Afghan war. The first is Pakistan’s double game. The second is to pass responsibility to the Afghans as quickly as possible and draw down our forces. In this structure the Afghans would become the supported side and the coalition would become the supporting side. It’s pretty much the framework we had in the anti-Soviet war. We provided the wherewithal for the mujahideen to defeat the Soviet army and they did the fighting. Afghans need to have custody over their own country, a point that President Obama underscored during his May 1st visit to Afghanistan. We should not attempt to displace them as we have done over the past nine years and make it into a coalition war against the Taliban. We’re on the right track—since 2009 the coalition has shifted to a training and mentoring role, equipping the Afghans to take on the insurgents. We should have done this at the beginning in 2002 as recommended by the Pentagon.
Why didn’t we?
The Bush administration decided the Afghan war had been won when it had not been won. The Taliban simply returned to the old sanctuaries in Pakistan, regrouped and were sent back into Afghanistan in 2005 in their thousands. There wasn’t any military force to resist them because the Bush administration had made the strategic decision to shift our military resources to fight in Iraq. When the Taliban made their comeback there was no Afghan army to resist them, only warlords paid by the CIA. So the Taliban had an easy time and we responded by sending more and more Western troops to Afghanistan because there was no Afghan army to resist this new invasion from the Pakistani sanctuaries. The officials involved in Afghanistan don’t seem to understand the cultural and societal context of the country.
Why not? Why don’t they read up?
It’s such a complex environment. You have the mosaic of hundreds of tribes and six major ethnic groups. Then, across the border in Pakistan, you have Pushtun tribes connected to the Afghan Pushtun and you have a history of inter-tribal and inter-ethnic rivalry that goes back hundreds of years. When the British invaded Afghanistan in the 19th century they didn’t face a conventional army and couldn’t attack the nerve centre of the enemy. They faced thousands of these little tribal communities that would rise up in ambush in their local area. Eventually, and this is what happened in the Soviet war as well, you had about 130,000 insurgents fighting in different parts of the country and chipping away at the Soviet army in small-unit engagements.
So what do we do?
We are going in the right direction now, arming, training and mentoring the Afghan security forces and passing more responsibility to civilian officials, but the war will not end as long as sanctuaries in Pakistan continue to churn out extremist jihadists. Pakistan is sponsoring a terrorist infrastructure that inflicts terror on the region, but also globally. Our policy has been contradictory and duplicitous—on the one hand accepting Pakistan’s claims that it is an ally, and on the other hand indulging and tolerating Pakistan’s continuing fostering of terrorism.
So the West has to get tough on Pakistan?
If these sanctuaries are not closed down this is going to get worse in the future. We need to worry about the Arab Spring. There are radical jihadist groups embedded in the groups emerging to replace the long-time military dictators in the region. They are connected to extremists on the Pakistani frontier and, indirectly, to Pakistani military intelligence. The army has fostered these networks and uses them as proxies in Pakistani foreign policy. We need a policy shift that will have a strategic effect on the Afghan war and addresses the global terrorism emanating from Pakistan.
The November 2nd, 2011 Istanbul international conference and its concluding statement called for all outside powers to exercise mutual restraint in Afghanistan. No outside power would attempt to gain a strategic foothold to use against other outside powers. This is the structure of agreement that the British colonial empire and the Russian empire worked out in the 1890s. The Afghan buffer between rival great powers kept the peace for almost a century, up to the Afghan Communist coup and the 1979 Soviet invasion. In June 2012 there will be another conference at which Afghanistan’s neighbours must agree to honour Afghanistan’s sovereignty and integrity, but this means convincing Pakistan that its extremist networks are more a liability than an asset.
Are you optimistic?
I’m optimistic in the long run. Pakistan must change its jihadist approach if this long-term policy is to be successful and peace is going to return to Afghanistan.
Another important prong of the coalition’s policy is to encourage reconciliation among the warring powers in Afghanistan, the government, the Taliban and others. We have to be careful that we don’t end up like the Soviets and the 19th century British in the Afghan political cauldron, attempting to arrange inter-Afghan negotiations. Outsiders, including Pakistan and Afghanistan’s other neighbors, should stand back and let the Afghans work out their own way ahead.
