The Hinge of Fate
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville , CA
An American general who has just earned his fourth star has taken charge in Kabul . His predecessor got the brusquest dismissal of a commanding general since MacArthur was relieved of command.
General Stanley McChrystal, schooled in the Special Operations Forces, brings with him a new war-fighting culture. On taking command, he laid out his mission statement: “The Afghan people are in the center of our mission. In reality, they are the mission. We must protect them from violence whatever its nature.”
McChrystal will lead a coalition force of 90,000 NATO soldiers in a year that will be very critical in the fight against the Taliban. He has promised that his forces will operate with care but not with timidity.
We may well witness a complete reversal of battlefield tactics, with fewer aerial attacks and more ground attacks. We will probably also see NATO soldiers seeking to bond with natives and winning them over with charm and tact by sharing the occasional cup of tea.
On the Pakistani side, the army is pursuing the Taliban in force in Swat and now venturing into Waziristan. Thus far, no senior Taliban commander has been netted in. The guerillas seem to have melted into the population.
However, more than two million civilians have been displaced and a monumental humanitarian crisis has ensued. This is a big change in tactics for the army which was unwilling to engage the Taliban just a few months ago.
So, will this change in strategy and tactics make any difference to the outcome of the war? One is reminded of Winston Churchill’s classic work, The Hinge of Fate, which chronicles in exacting detail the campaigns of the Second World War during 1943, when the Allies went from uninterrupted defeat to almost unbroken success.
Feldmarschall Erwin Rommel, the legendary desert fox, was gradually thrown back in North Africa. And slowly but steadily, the tide began to turn against the Japanese in the Pacific.
But it was much easier to define success in an “industrial” war that featured combat between large-scale armored and infantry formations, aided by air power and sea power. Once the armies capitulated, the war ended.
In the current war, it is much harder to define success. In Afghanistan, the Taliban were routed in just two months. But the war did not end. It just entered a new phase.
Hamid Karzai has been in power in Kabul for several years but does he really govern Afghanistan? Without the Taliban’s success in Afghanistan, their franchise would not have crossed over the Durand Line into Pakistan.
The new American narrative is focused on using NATO forces to protect the population from being held hostage by the Taliban, of giving the Afghans a gentler, kinder and more prosperous alternative than the harsh backward-centric future of the Taliban. Success will occur if McChrystal is able to reposition NATO as a friend of the Afghan people, not their enemy.
Of course, success in Afghanistan will not be realized without success in Pakistan. And that will not occur unless the Pakistani security establishment reverses its long-held weltanschauung so that the Taliban and other religious militias are no longer seen as the heroes but the villains in an epic struggle for survival.
Pervez Musharraf, the uber-general who still talks as if he is in uniform, offered the US “unstinted cooperation” as it attacked the Taliban in 2001. But he and many serving senior officers in the security establishment still regard India as Enemy Number 1, even holding it responsible for the actions of the religious militias.
They continue to espouse their myths, the latest of which is that the attacks in Mumbai and Lahore were the work of foreign agents. They have assiduously cultivated a popular perception in Pakistan that the RAW, the Moussad and the CIA are the primary cause of the ills that plague the nation.
In this narrative, non-Muslim foreign agents are behind the violent attacks that have been killing scores of mosque-goers. They contend that Muslims would never kill non-Muslims.
This very conveniently glides over the fact that not just in Pakistan but throughout the Muslim world Muslims in the thousands are serving time in jail for carrying out heinous crimes against fellow Muslims. Apparently, the force of religion was not strong enough to prevent them from robbing, raping and killing fellow Muslims for personal gain.
In the political sphere, the force of religion has been multiplied ten-fold by the hypnotic rhetoric of the terror-mongering mullahs who have convinced their followers that it is not only permissible but a virtuous act to kill other Muslims who have different beliefs. Indeed, those who carry out suicide bomb attacks have been guaranteed a one-way ticket to Paradise.
Despite all this evidence, the Pakistani security establishment sees an Indian hand in every terrorist attack that takes place and argues that India is out to destabilize Pakistan by pursuing a “death by a thousand cuts” strategy.
In a recent conversation with the German magazine Spiegel, General Musharraf cited the plethora of articles being written about the collapse or balkanization of Pakistan as evidence of a conspiracy. He refused to say who was behind it, stating that he would then be asked for evidence. But just a few minutes later, he opined that there was “an Indian element in the whole game. We have the Kashmir struggle, without which extremist elements like Lashkar-e-Taiba would not exist.”
Musharraf added that India was interfering in Pakistan by supporting “brutal insurgents” in Balochistan. He contended that Nawab Akbar Bugti’s grandson was “sitting in Kabul, protected by the Afghan government and provided with weapons and money by the Indian intelligence agency RAW. He has his own training camps and sends his fighters to Balochistan where they terrorize people and damage the civil infrastructure. RAW is also interfering in the Swat Valley.”
In this theory, which is also being expounded by many others in the Pakistani security establishment, the Taliban fighters in Swat are getting their arms and money from the many Indian consulates in Afghanistan which apparently exist only to serve as a thorn in the side of Pakistan.
This theory puts once again the onus for Pakistan’s failures on India. Do those who proffer it really believe in it? If so, fate is not on their side. They are, to borrow a line from Ayesha Jalal, on the wrong side of history.
Faruqui@Pacbell.net.
