February 23, 2018
Directorate S and Afghanistan
“Directorate S” is a new book on the history of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US relationship since 9/11. The author, Steve Coll, is a Pulitzer Prize winner, he is very well-sourced in the region, and his earlier book, “Ghost Wars” about the region in the years before 9/11 is a very impressive piece of reporting. He has already come under fire from Pakistanis for “demonizing” Pakistan and the ISI.
Directorate S is the branch of the ISI responsible for covert operations, similar to the National Clandestine Service in the CIA, and took the lead in both launching the Taliban in the 1990’s and reviving them around 2005.
In reality, Steve Coll does not “demonize" the ISI nor does he say that it is carrying out its own policy in contradiction to what the Pakistani government actually wants. It is true though that civilian politicians have little say over policy areas such as Afghanistan where the military sees national security as their concern.
The main point he makes about the ISI is that it first built up the Taliban in the 90's, and then rebuilt them around 2005 when Pakistan decided that having a way to influence the ultimate outcome in Afghanistan was extremely important. At that time, it seemed the US was totally occupied with Iraq, and the US had just granted India a major nuclear cooperation agreement, one that it refused to give to Pakistan. As of now, the Taliban military force consists of about 25-30,000 fighters that move freely back and forth between Afghanistan and their bases and families in Pakistan. Whether this support of the Afghan Taliban really serves Pakistan's long-term interests is debatable, and I would say it does not, but that is not the view of the army, and hence the ISI. Coll's book is actually quite critical of the US as his interviews make clear.
The bedrock idea on which the Pakistani military bases its Afghan policy is that eventually the US is going to leave. When that happens, it is imperative that India not have influence over the Afghan government, and that the Afghan government does not return to its policies of the 1960’s, when they wanted to somehow erase the Durand Line that defines the Pakistani border and incorporate KPK province into Afghanistan. This however is a huge miscalculation of American intentions. As the US no longer take casualties, and the deployment is of only 10,000 soldiers with the cost less than 10 billion per year for support of Afghanistan, the answer is that the US can stay as long as it needs. There is no political pressure in the US to withdraw, while allowing the Taliban and Al-Qaeda to retake Afghanistan would be a completely unacceptable outcome to the American public and no President will therefore simply abandon Afghanistan. It is not Vietnam with 500,000 draftees deployed and taking hundreds of casualties a month.
The US, in a practical sense, has won in Afghanistan. It has stood up a government that is functional, much more so than anything Afghanistan has experienced in the last 50 years, and the country is mostly at peace. The Taliban are reduced to terrorist attacks on soft targets, but they cannot mass any real force on the ground as they would be destroyed easily by air strikes. They cannot take and hold any city, they lack heavy weapons, armor, mobility, medical support, and anti-aircraft capacity. They may stay in the field for decades, like the FARC in Colombia, but they can never really threaten to take over Afghanistan.
The US has two aims in the region, according to Coll’s reporting of debates in both the Bush and Obama White House. Ensuring a stable Pakistan is one, and ensuring that Afghanistan never again becomes the base of operations of al-Qaeda is the other. The idea that the US will one day get tired and just leave is a Pakistani pipe-dream. After the example of what happened in Iraq after a complete US pullout (the Sunni areas were taken over by the Islamist terror groups ISIS), the US is not going to replay that mistake.
So how much support do the Taliban have inside Afghanistan, and how successful have they been at seizing and holding territory? The Asia Foundation does extensive research in Afghanistan including a massive public opinion survey every two years. The last one in 2017 involved over 10,000 people around the country. What they found was that there is basically no support in Afghanistan for the Taliban who are seen as Pakistan's proxies and who are only interested in power.
The weakness of the Taliban can also be seen in how little of the country they actually control. Many reports on this in the press are deceptive, in that they lump together regions that are actually controlled by the Taliban with those in which the Taliban have some military activity (known as contested regions). The actual "control" fraction is in fact very tiny. More importantly, as much of Afghanistan is sparsely inhabited, the Taliban actually control less than 5% of Afghanistan's population. The BBC just did its own analysis and found the Taliban control a trivial 4% of the country although they are active in a wide area (up to 70% of the country). This makes them a widespread terror group, but in a military sense they are extremely ineffective. They never try to attack the main American base in Afghanistan, nor do they seek combat with large Afghan army units, and limit themselves to car bombs, suicide bombings, roadside IED’s, and other weapons of the weak.
Steve Coll does say that if the US public got tired of Afghanistan the US would leave. But the US has had forces in Korea for 70 years, also in Germany and Japan even longer, and has not gotten "tired". It only gets tired when the military is in active war, and the war is imposing large burdens on the society (see Vietnam or Iraq in the previous decade). The Afghan commitment is no longer visible to the American public. They don't care and they don't know about it, because it is trivial, and therefore the political pressure to withdraw is non-existent. It was never even discussed during the 2016 Presidential election, and is not on the political radar this year at all.
There is a huge difference between the current scenario and what happened with the Soviet invasion in the 1980’s. The Mujahideen in the 80’s were receiving a billion dollars a year in military aid, most critically Stinger missiles that totally neutralized the Soviets most important advantage, the use of attack helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. They also had anti-tank weaponry that could knock out Soviet tanks. In addition, the US is much more capable in 2017 than the British in 1870 or the Russians in 1980. The Taliban have no advanced weapons of any sort. The Taliban are so militarily inept that they only go after soft targets using terrorism, unlike the Mujahideen who engaged the Soviet forces routinely. The Soviets invaded the Panjshir Valley five times during the 1980's and Ahmed Shah Masoud beat them every time.
The Taliban, unlike the Mujahideen, do not even pretend to cultivate the support of the Afghan people, which is why they think driving an ambulance car bomb into Kabul and killing a hundred innocent civilians is a way to win hearts and minds.
So what is the future of Afghanistan? In the next several years the Taliban will not make any real gains. They will be a terrorist group confined to rural and mountainous areas, they will have no capacity to seize cities, the US presence will be maintained and there will be no political pressure in the US for withdrawal. They will have no support from the majority of Afghans who are not Pashtuns, and even among the Pashtuns, they will not get support from educated urban Pashtuns. This could go on for decades. The Pakistani strategy of supporting the Taliban is doomed to failure (of course there are many Pakistanis that insist that Pakistan has nothing to do with the Taliban, and though this is clearly false, it only begs the obvious question, why would Pakistan then care whether the Taliban win or lose?). The future of Afghanistan looks a lot like Colombia in the last 50 years where their government has battled a rural insurgency that could never be extinguished (the FARC). In the end, the FARC simply gave up in exchange for amnesty which is what happened in 2017. Something like that may one day happen in Afghanistan, but who knows how long that will take.
It is absolutely true that all countries pursue their national interests, and no one is "demonizing" Pakistan for doing so. The problem is that Pakistanis are trying to have it both ways, which doesn’t work. Pakistan at the same time it is supporting the Taliban, is claiming that it is an ally of the US against the Taliban. This is the double-game that Pakistan has played for a decade. On the one hand it arms the Taliban, on the other it collects a big check from the US for allowing American supplies to move through Pakistan. It wants the US to provide the backbone of Pakistan's Air Force, and it wants to sell goods to the US and EU markets. It can't have both forever. It has to choose which is more important, just like every other country has to look at the consequences of their policy choices.
The even more important question is who decides what Pakistan's national interest is and how it should be pursued. Shouldn't it be done through an open democratic process with real public debate? Shouldn't the National Assembly and Prime Minister make these choices? In reality, the civilians are shut out and the military decides for the nation. Why should a nation of 200 million people, with plenty of educated and informed citizens, grant this power to a small group of generals?
For Pakistan to pursue its national interest is only natural, and no different from what any other country does. But what is the real national interest and what is the best way of achieving that? By supporting the Taliban and giving them bases in Pakistan, Pakistan created the platform for the rise of the TTP (Pakistani Taliban, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Pakistanis) and all the mayhem they inflicted.
The policy of running an insurgency in Afghanistan has yielded nothing of value for Pakistan, and instead has pushed Afghans into the arms of India.
Because of geography and the shared Pashtun ethnic group, Pakistan could have pursued a different strategy. It should have emphasized soft power, tight transport and trade links with Afghanistan after 9/11, and aggressively promoted Pakistani exports and the expansion of Pakistani businesses into Afghanistan. Pakistan should have smothered Afghanistan, not turned to the Taliban as their instrument of foreign policy.
