My latest column is on Afghanistan
Whenever western leaders ask themselves the question, why are we in Afghanistan, they come up with essentially the same reply – “To prevent Afghanistan becoming a failed state and a haven for terrorists.” Until Afghanistan is stable, so the argument goes, we cannot risk withdrawal.
By Daniel Dombey, US Diplomatic Correspondent
Fly into Islamabad. Offer military aid. Deny conspiracy theories. Suggest that it wouldn’t be too bad an idea for Pakistan to go after Islamist extremists more vigorously.
That, in a nutshell, has been Robert Gates’ job over the last day – and it’s a difficult task to carry out.
Mr Gates’ 24 years of travelling to Pakistan have made him all too aware that US-Pakistani cooperation – which Washington sees as central to its own national security – is afflicted by what officials call “a trust deficit”.
Opinion polls make clear the US’s spectacular unpopularity among the public at large; Pakistani leaders well remember Washington’s decision to walk away from the region after the Soviets’ pullout from Afghanistan in 1989.
So it’s not surprising that in a television interview broadcast from the US’s fortress embassy in Islamabad, Mr Gates sought to shoot down conspiracy theories rife in Pakistan – denying, for example, that the US wants to take over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or its territory.
It is a little more alarming, however, that Mr Gates also felt the need to make such points in meetings with Pakistan’s leadership during the day. If the country’s top civilians or generals are tempted by such theories the US still has a long way to win Islamabad over.
He also went the extra mile to set out his “admiration” for the Pakistani’s army’s efforts to take on Islamist militants in the Swat and South Waziristan regions over the past year.
The US would clearly like Islamabad to do more, particularly in North Waziristan, which Washington says has hosted one of Nato’s main foes in Afghanistan. But Mr Gates tactfully acknowledged that “the Pakistani army, the Pakistani government, being sovereign, will make their own decisions about the pacing and the timing of what they do,” adding: “In that context we are prepared to help them with whatever help they want that will make them more effective.” (For those who aren’t clear about what that last comment meant, it’s probably a reference to weapons.)
The US already provides Pakistan with $3bn in military aid a year. But it knows it doesn’t have as many friends as it would like in the country’s military – not least because Washington cut off military ties in the 1990s in light of its worries about Pakistan’s nuclear programme. General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, who trained at Fort Leavenworth, may be one of the last Pakistani army chiefs for a while who was educated in the US.
So if it’s to overcome the trust deficit, Washington – and Mr Gates – hardly has very much time. Expect a good few more flying visits to Pakistan.
By Daniel Dombey, US Diplomatic Correspondent
The man responsible for America’s military has come to the country at the heart of the US fight against militant Islamists – and yet he can’t talk about a key part of that struggle.
Robert Gates, US defence secretary, has followed up on his trip to India by flying to Pakistan – his first visit to the country for almost three years. The last time he came calling, in February 2007, was only a couple of months after he had been installed as Secretary of Defence by George W Bush.
The Obama administration has been more forthright than Bush’s team was about how Pakistan – a nuclear armed state of some 166m – is more important for US national security than is Afghanistan, the country in which the US will soon have 100,000 troops.
But what is lost in the talk of grand strategy is the fact that the US’s experience in the Af-Pak region consists of two wars. One, in Afghanistan, revolves around improvised explosive devices, the crude bombs that account for most of the Nato casualties at the hands of insurgents. The other, in Pakistan, is largely about the drone strikes that are the US’s weapon of choice against al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders.
How long those two conflicts will last may depend on large part on how long the US is willing to accept significant numbers of IED casualties, and how long Pakistan will tolerate the drone strikes on its terrain.
The problem is that as a CIA operation, using bases on Pakistani territory, with the reluctant and off-the-record approval of Pakistani authorities, the drone strikes are not anything that US officials like Gates can talk about in public.
That’s all the more important, since the drone strikes are deeply unpopular in Pakistan, and are blamed for many civilan casualties (the US often disputes just how many). The issue has grown in intensity after a Jordanian double agent recently killed seven CIA operatives in Afghanistan, since when the tempo of the drone strikes has been upped still further.
So when asked about the drone strikes on the flight over Gates declined to talk about such operations. Instead he highlighted the US desire to avoid civilian casualties and Washington’s readiness to provide Pakistan with surveillance vehicles, adding a bland and not hugely meaningful: “We are very mindful of Pakistan’s sovereignty.”
It’s far from clear how effective such bromides will be in diluting opposition to the strikes. After all, all such attacks depend on a green light from Islamabad. Almost any country would be wary of allowing another power to carry out systematic, repeated attacks on its own territory – and that’s even more the case in Pakistan, where anti-American sentiment runs strong and the government is weak.
One gets the sense that the status quo can’t last for all that long.
But if you are looking for a public defence of Washington’s most controversial actions in its war against al-Qaeda – its most direct strikes against Islamist groups – sorry, the US can’t help.
By Daniel Dombey, US Diplomatic Correspondent
A large part of covering modern ministerial visits consists of spending long hours in confined spaces in the middle of very big countries. This blog has been written in the darkened interior of the last car in Defence Secretary Robert Gates’ convoy, parked in the midst of Sir Edwin Lutyens spectacular government complex in Delhi. Monkeys clamber on the rooftops of the buildings here and pigeons fly through the corridors. It is a very grand place – and it is unlike almost anywhere else the US has to deal with.
That’s partly the lesson of this trip – the US is keen for its ties with India to develop further and faster than Delhi is comfortable with. Though the relationship has come on in leaps and bounds, India has yet to sign three technological agreements that have been on the table since as far back as at least 2002. The deals would enable more cooperation between the two countries’ militaries and – hardly the least important detail – would also make US military hardware more attractive to Delhi by bundling it with fancier software. That way, aircraft sold by the US to India could include state of the art navigation and targeting systems.
But India, which is well aware of its status as a rising great power, is reluctant to do anything that would group it together with mere US allies
The oddest thing about 2009 was how normal it was. At the beginning of the year, the global economic crisis was still causing panic in prime ministers’ offices and presidential palaces across the world. Many politicians were looking anxiously back to the 1930s.
Those fears of a return to a world of soup kitchens and fascist marches turned out to be overdone. The German economy contracted by more than 5 per cent in the year to September. But in that month, the Germans still re-elected Angela Merkel – the very epitome of stolid, centrist good sense. The Japanese elections, a month earlier, were more dramatic – marking the end of the Liberal Democratic party’s almost uninterrupted hegemony over postwar politics. But it is still too early to tell whether Japan has really changed as a country.
For that reason, neither the Japanese nor the German elections make my annual list of the five most important events of the year. Instead, my top five for 2009 are as follows.
The remainder of this article can be read here. Please post comments below.
By James Blitz, defence and diplomatic editor, in Kabul
President Hamid Karzai’s inauguration speech has long been seen as a critical moment for him to spell out his determination to improve Afghan governance in his second term of office and begin the fight against corruption.
But the part of the speech that will make the headlines tonight in the US and Europe is his commitment to get the Afghan National Army and police into a position where they can manage the nation’s security alone by the middle of the next decade.
I know I’m meant to be working relentlessly on my book. But I just wanted to break off briefly, to draw people’s attention to this very fine piece on Afghanistan by Christina Lamb. It’s very well written and moving in parts. But I also found its analysis compelling – not least, because Lamb has been visiting Afghanistan on-and-off for many years, and was, until recently, a strong supporter of expanding the war.
By James Blitz, the FT’s defence and diplomatic editor
The collapse of the second round of the Afghan election will be viewed by some western governments as a fiasco, one that raises questions about how legitimate Hamid Karzai really is as the country’s leader and partner to the US. But many in Nato will also be relieved today that the long Afghan election saga has finally come to an end. Clearly, there are huge questions about Mr Karzai’s standing after the election debacle, the allegations of voter fraud and the evident US frustration with his leadership. But the second round of the election, was always going to be a severe test for Afghanistan – with fears about yet more violence and fraud, and the spectre of a low turnout. Many will breathe a sigh of relief that another chapter in this electoral nightmare has been avoided.
Back when the Obama administration took power, we were told that they had made a great intellectual breakthrough. They had realised that the problems of Afghanistan and Pakistan had to be treated as single issue – hence the ugly acronym, AfPak. And, of course, this is right. The Americans and their allies are not going to win the war in Afghanistan, while the Taliban enjoy safe havens in Pakistan. And it may not be worth “winning” in Afghanistan, if in the process you gravely destabilise Pakistan – a much bigger and more important country.
So much for the theory. But, in practice, we seem to have gone back to thinking about Afghanistan and Pakistan as two separate issues. So, on the one hand, there are the constant reports of the White House’s agonising over whether to send more troops to Afghanistan. And on the other, news of an upsurge in terrorism and fighting in Pakistan. But nobody seems to be connecting the dots.
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