All the indications from Washington suggest that President Barack Obama's long-awaited strategy for Afghanistan will be a compromise between the views of his principal advisers. But, as compromises please no one and are rarely effective, more trouble can confidently be expected. Vice-President Joe Biden advocates a counter-terrorist strategy aimed at capturing or killing Osama Bin Laden and his small band of Al-Qaeda followers, ideally by means of targeted air strikes against their alleged sanctuaries in the tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border. In contrast, the US commander on the spot, General Stanley McChrystal, has argued in favor of a wider counter-insurgency strategy, for which he has requested 40,000 more troops. Its main goals would be to protect the population in a dozen Afghan cities from Taleban attacks, prevent Al-Qaeda from penetrating these urban areas, while building up the Afghan army, police, provincial administration and central government to the point that they can keep the Taleban at bay without external help. It is by no means clear, however, that either of these strategies – or a compromise between them – will stave off defeat for the US and its NATO allies. This year has been the worst for the Coalition since the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001. Western military casualties are creeping up towards the 500 mark. Cities and military installations in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have suffered ferocious Taleban attacks, often carried out by suicide bombers, such as the recent slaughter of over 100 people in a market in Peshawar or the attack on a UN guest house in Kabul. Overshadowing the debate in Washington is the extraordinary advocacy of Matthew Hoh, a US Foreign Service officer and former Marine, who resigned from government service last September and has since become a leading critic of the Afghan war. In his resignation letter, Hoh wrote: “I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan...I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties and expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.” Hoh depicted the “civil war” as being violently and savagely waged between the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. But the latter, he suggested, were clearly the overwhelming majority. Most of the Pashtun people, he wrote, perceived the Western military presence as “a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion...” They therefore supported the insurgency. At the same time, Hoh described President Hamid Karzai's Afghan government as comprising “drug lords and war crimes villains,” guilty of “glaring corruption” and blatant electoral fraud. “Why and to what end?” he asked is the US pursuing this war. In several TV appearances, Hoh has disputed the view – argued by both President Obama and Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown – that the war in Afghanistan is being waged to protect the West against Al-Qaeda attacks. Al-Qaeda has evolved, Hoh says, into an “ideological cloud” on the internet. The 9/11 attacks on New York, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were planned and organized in Western Europe, not in the tribal areas of Afghanistan. Hoh's views are now being widely debated, since they undermine the very rationale for the war. The fact that they are uttered by a brave Marine officer, who served his country overseas for 10 years, makes them difficult to rebut. Adding to Obama's woes is the rampant anti-Americanism of Pakistan, as Secretary of State Hilary Clinton discovered during her three day visit at the end of October. The New York Times reported that her audiences heckled her and groaned audibly when she defended American policies. Opposition in Pakistan has been aroused by the campaign which the Pakistan army has waged in the Swat Valley and is now waging in South Waziristan – with US military aid and under intense US political pressure. The campaign has caused misery to hundreds of thousands of displaced people, who fled their homes to avoid the fighting. “We are waging a war which was imposed on us,” a female Pakistani journalist told Clinton in a televised debate. “It is not our war! You had your 11 September 2001. We have daily 9/11s in Pakistan.” The US has promised Pakistan $7.5 billion in aid over the next five years to allow it to continue the battle against the insurgents in the tribal areas. In addition, it has been rushing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to the Pakistani forces, including 10 Mi-17 troops transport helicopters. Many conspiracy-minded Pakistanis see America's aid package as a plot to bring Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal – the pride of the nationalists – under American control. More particularly, missile attacks by US pilotless drones in the tribal areas have aroused ferocious hostility, as many Pakistanis see them as an infringement of their country's sovereignty. A member of the audience at one of Clinton's appearances asked her whether such bombings by remote-controlled aircraft amounted to terrorism! Clinton hit back at such criticisms by accusing Pakistan of being soft on Al-Qaeda. “I find it difficult to believe,” she said on one occasion, “that no one in your government knows where they (Al-Qaeda) are and couldn't get to them if they really wanted to... Someone, somewhere in Pakistan, must know where these people are.” Her remarks were seen as directed against Pakistan's powerful Military Intelligence Service, the ISI, which has often been suspected of collusion with some jihadi groups, in particular those that could be used to curtail Indian influence in Afghanistan or pin down the Indian army in Kashmir. A Pakistani official called Mrs Clinton's remarks “very ill-advised.” There is little relief in prospect for Obama from his Afpak nightmare. Hamid Karzai is back in power for another presidential term but it seems highly unrealistic to expect him to root out the nepotism and corruption which have kept him in power. As Hoh argues convincingly, “the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taleban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.” At the end of the day, only the Afghans themselves can defeat the Taleban. It is surely time for the United States and its NATO allies to get out.
