Afghanistan: A Graveyard of Commitments
By Dr Mohammad Taqi
Florida
The US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Marc Grossman, has resigned his current position effective next week. While the Pakistani diplomats are singing his paeans as the great ‘friend of Pakistan’, the top US diplomat for the region really had a lackluster and underwhelming stint.
Of course, history would be the ultimate judge of the overall performance by Marc Grossman, his predecessors and those who inherit his position, and how it influenced a region in turmoil. But it might be safe to say that if George W Bush and his administration botched up the war in Afghanistan, the Barack Obama administration bungled diplomacy in Afghanistan. But if Grossman has little to show as his legacy, he might not be too worried as he is in great company with his predecessor, the much-revered late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.
Marc Grossman had big shoes to fill when Richard Holbrooke’s untimely death on December 10 two years ago left a sudden vacuum in the US diplomatic effort in the Pak-Afghan theatre. But in all fairness, instead of the larger-than-life ‘Bulldozer’ diplomat he was touted to be, Holbrooke was a shadow of himself when he came to the job. Some would argue that Holbrooke was a beleaguered man with many in the Obama team, with the notable exception of Hillary Clinton, hostile to him and no love lost between him, the CIA and the Pentagon. The fact, however, remains that despite his reputation for hardnosed diplomacy that resulted in the 1994 Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia, Holbrooke was far from putting anything of the sort together. Marc Grossman, as such, did not have much of a legacy to inherit. A policy of pursuing an elusive peace and rebuilding effort while fighting the war — later codified as the catchphrase ‘fight, talk, build’ by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — had left all three elements at various stages of incompletion at the time of Holbrooke’s death. And it remains so at the time of Grossman’s departure from office, despite the fact that he did not inherit the baggage of Holbrooke’s vendettas.
Holbrooke had personified the State Department’s obsession with peace and an exit strategy in his approach to diplomacy in the region. While the US military planners were trying ‘Vietnamizing’ the war in Afghanistan, i.e. enable the Afghan National Army to shoulder more responsibility and ultimately to stand on their own two feet, Holbrooke and then his successor Grossman let another kind of Vietnamisation happen. In the quest for peace, Pakistan — the principal backer of the Afghan insurgents — was receiving kid-glove treatment from the top US diplomats. As the recent interviews given by the outgoing US ambassador to Pakistan Cameron Munter suggest, the State Department peaceniks kept getting weak kneed each time a terrorist safe haven was taken out in North Waziristan by US drones. The Pakistani security establishment, which never did sever its ties with the Afghan Taliban and the India-oriented Punjab-based jihadists, mobilized crowds through the political patrons/wings of these outfits, creating the impression of mass-anti-US hysteria. Terrified by the well-orchestrated anger on the Pakistani street, an exit seemed to be the only strategy on the US diplomats’ minds.
Richard Holbrooke’s approach to the US’s Pakistan problem was more reflective of his early experiences in Vietnam than the Balkans. While he supported arming the Bosnians and bombarding the aggressor Serbs, he originally was an opponent of use of hard power against North Vietnam. Despite knowing well that the oxygen to the Taliban fire in Afghanistan came directly from Pakistan, Holbrooke apparently had opted to follow his Vietnam instinct. And that perhaps was the legacy bequeathed to Marc Grossman, which the latter appears set to pass on to whoever will be his permanent replacement. Michael Hirsh had noted in the National Journal, May 2012: “Washington and other capitals continue to watch, helplessly, as a middle-sized developing country defies a superpower and the NATO alliance with virtual impunity.” The US diplomatic pussyfooting is perhaps the main reason that has enabled, and in some ways encouraged, such defiance.
The military option to confront Pakistan was deemed to be a cure worse than the cancer itself. Tactical options like the drones, though effective in a circumscribed zone, were certainly not a strategy to cope where the entire country all the way from Khyber to Karachi was serving virtually as a bridgehead for al Qaeda and the Taliban cadres and sanctuary for the who’s who of transnational terrorism. The Haqqani terrorist network’s head honchos in Peshawar and the outskirts of Islamabad, the Taliban leadership in Quetta and Karachi, and of course, Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad say it all. Yet it was the Pakistanis who were ‘outraged’ and the US diplomats who were falling over each other to apologize! How hard was it to accurately analyze the situation and how long did one need to do so? We have heard a lot about Colin Powell’s famous phone call to General Musharraf and Richard Armitage giving a piece of his mind to General Mahmud Ahmed. It is pertinent to ask how hard the US diplomats tried to challenge Pakistan subsequently, if at all.
When the US had enough boots on the ground in Afghanistan and the war momentum going favorably, the diplomatic approach should have been how to engage the international community to honor the pledges made to the Afghans on the eve of November 2001. But equally important was to cobble together a broad-based diplomatic front to question even if not to confront Pakistan over its continued interference in Afghanistan. Why the US diplomatic corps, including Holbrooke, Gross and Munter, failed to do so when their colleagues like the former US ambassador to Kabul, Ryan Crocker, kept warning about the Pakistani interference, is intriguing. Incompetence, a Stockholm syndrome of sorts and, of course, the bickering within and between the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon could be blamed. But it is ultimately political expediency that forces many otherwise well-meaning people to buy into clichés, myths and stereotypes. From Alexander the Great to Genghis Khan to Great Britain to the Soviets, no one has been able to conquer Afghanistan. The fact however is that shallow understanding of the region, compromises made every step of the way and a lack of will to stay on, perpetuate the self-serving myth that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. To a common Afghan it is only a graveyard of international commitments.
(The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets @mazdaki)
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