In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan Read Online Free Page B

successful insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’s recent history. Mohammad Yousaf, the head of ISI’s Afghan Bureau during much of the Soviet war, noted that “a safe haven—a secret base area to which the guerrilla could withdraw to refit and rest without fear of attack” was necessary for winning the insurgency in Afghanistan, and “Pakistan provided the Mujahideen with such a sanctuary.” 11 Afghanistan, by reason of its poverty and geography, has always been a weak state at the mercy of its more powerful neighbors, including Pakistan. Unlike during previous periods, however, Pakistan has suffered considerable blowback from its support of proxy organizations like the Taliban after the 2001 U.S. invasion, as the country became infected by an insurgency that spread into its border regions and urban areas. By spring 2009, Deobandi militants successfully pushed into the Swat District of Pakistan, forcing the Pakistan government to negotiate.
    Stabilizing Pakistan requires tackling the structural gap that exists in the country’s border regions, including the Federally AdministeredTribal Areas. Government institutions in the tribal areas are weak, and social and economic conditions are among the bleakest in the world. Security options will be limited unless the Pakistan government provides tangible benefits to disaffected local communities. Political steps may also be important, including rethinking the Political Parties Act, which regulates the activities of Pakistan’s political parties and their members. Under its strictures, the major parties are not authorized to campaign or hold rallies or meetings in the tribal areas. Religious parties thus are at a distinct advantage, since they don’t need to conduct “party” gatherings—they have ready access to religious institutions from which they can run their political campaigns and associated political outreach. Though it would require an enormous lobbying effort, it may also be worth integrating the Federally Administered Tribal Areas—which are only nominally controlled by Islamabad—more fully into Pakistan.
    While confronting these social, political, and economic challenges is important, any impact will be limited unless there is a focus on Pakistan’s strategic interests, which support the use of proxy organizations to help execute its foreign policy in neighboring countries. Pakistan and India follow the political truism outlined by George Kennan, the father of America’s containment strategy against the Soviet Union, and academics such as Hans Morgenthau of the University of Chicago. In simple terms, states balance against more powerful ones. As the German-born Morgenthau wrote, the balance of power is a “natural and inevitable outgrowth of the struggle for power” that is “as old as political history itself.” 12 Security competition between India and Pakistan, which has triggered several wars and countless skirmishes, creates the impetus for each to check the power of the other. And Afghanistan has served as a key battleground state, much as Poland did for European powers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries—a country that historian Norman Davies referred to as “God’s playground.” 13
    After September 11, 2001, senior U.S. policymakers—such as Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin—presented then-President Pervez Musharraf with a stark choice: Support the United States or militant groups. There was no middle ground. This choice put Musharraf in a difficult position, since it meant overthrowing the very Taliban government that Pakistan had painstakingly supported for nearly a decade. But the combination of blunt threats and promises of economic assistance altered Musharraf’s cost-benefit calculation. By 2002, however, the United States quickly lost interest in the Taliban, who fled to Pakistan, deferring to Islamabad.