Uzbekistanism

Dov Zakeim, writing in the former Nixon Center's National Interest, warns that if the U.S. leaves Afghanistan too hastily a dangerous civil war might commence between India's and Pakistan's proxies. He writes:

It was precisely such an alignment of forces that led to the Taliban’s triumph in the late 1990s, followed by its sponsorship of al-Qaeda and the trauma of 9/11.

Indeed, [Afghan] President Karzai’s seemingly erratic relations with the United States can best be understood in terms of his concern about the future cohesion of his country once American forces depart. Should anything remotely like this civil-war scenario manifest itself again, America’s decade-long war will have been for naught.

The difference between then and now is that any president would make clear through words and action that the hint of renewed Taliban-al-Qaeda collaboration, or any threat to the homeland emanating from Afghanistan, would be intolerable. As for the regional interests Zakheim mentions, especially the possibility that Pakistan itself, a nuclear power, could fracture, they're obviously important. But before Sept. 11, none would've justified U.S. and NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

To some extent the U.S. deserves to be held accountable for whatever it's done to alter the regional landscape, including by raising hopes in some circles that, having stayed ten years, we might stay 20. But the Obama administration's critics should remember that there was no mystery about the limited and highly focused motive for our intervention. The American people supported the war because the Afghan government was a Sept. 11 conspirator, not because we were concerned about Pakistan, Uzbekistan, or Tajikistan. The president will always be responsible for making sure it doesn't happen again. Polls and common sense make clear he or she will have to do so without having troops on the ground.

Come Home, America

As the AP's Anne Gearan reports, President Obama said yesterday that public support for the Afghanistan war is waning "because we've been there ten years, and people get weary." She continues:

Just as he patterned his troop "surge" in Afghanistan on a successful military strategy in Iraq, now Obama is patterning his withdrawal from Afghanistan on the Iraq template as well.

The flaw in the pattern is that while George W. Bush's Iraq surge is viewed as a success, the increased U.S. commitment that Obama announced in late 2009 isn't. Gearan:

By the time the U.S. forces switched to the advisory role in Iraq, the back of the Sunni insurgency had been broken. The same cannot be said for the Taliban-led insurgency in Afghanistan, which causes most of the U.S. casualties and functions as the main enemy even if Obama's preferred opponent is the al-Qaida terror network the Taliban once harbored.

As a candidate, Obama didn't see the vital U.S. interest in Iraq, and he naturally opposed the Bush surge. In Afghanistan, he did see one, so he surged. A for effort? Only if you agree, as I didn't, that the best solution was more troops for stabilization and nation-building instead of using intelligence, special forces, and other covert means to keep Afghanistan from becoming a laboratory for terrorism again. If we had known Sept. 11 was in the offing, the U.S. almost certainly could have neutralized the Taliban and al-Qaeda just based on what we saw from afar. We'll now be a hundred times more vigilant, and especially so Obama, since he knows that any attack emanating from Afghanistan would be blamed on his decision to withdraw.

Friends also tell me that a continued U.S. presence contributes to Pakistan's stability and security. And yet according to the Institute for the Study of War, our policy has been undermined by national security-conscious Pakistani officials who support our enemy the Taliban because they also happen to be Pakistan's anti-India proxies. Who need to be caught in the middle of that chess game?

Gen. Zia's Legacy Of Intolerance

Pakistanis take to the streets to defend the legal right to persecute Christians.

Pakistan's Persecution Of Christians

The Rev. Jane Shaw, Pakistan's first and only female Anglican priest, tells the Anglican Communion News Service that the country's religious persecution is keeping Christian pastors away:

She said that while there have been incidents of Christians being attacked and killed, the majority of persecution was more insidious. "It’s largely low-level harassment," she said, "not being short-listed for jobs because you’re a Christian, or, if you do get the job, your colleagues making you so miserable that you have to leave. Also, in some cases Christian businessmen have been told that they’ll only get the most lucrative contracts if they convert to Islam."

Other harassment includes Christian children being teased or bullied at school, Christian workers being assigned excessive work­loads, Christians being evicted from accommodation without notice, and influential community members occupying Christians' land with impunity.

Another Shariah Snuff Film

From the "Clash of Civilizations? What Civilization?" desk, another report from the frontiers of primitive savagery:

Al Aan, a Dubai-based pan-Arab television channel that focuses on women's issues, said it had obtained cellphone footage that it says shows a woman being executed because she was seen out with a man. The killing reportedly took place two months ago and was smuggled out by a Taliban member who attended the stoning...

"Who attended the stoning"? Sounds like he bought a ticket. Maybe he did. I'd have called him "a Taliban member who was an accessory to first-degree murder."

While the video was reportedly shot in Pakistan, ABC's Brian Ross said these murders of women also occur in Iran, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, with two of which we hare cordial diplomatic relations. If they were murdering not women but...Oh, never mind.

Watch where you click. While ABC only shows a brief excerpt, it's gruesome enough.

Sunday's Sermon: "All About Us"

"All About Us," my sermon for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost at St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church. Seeing the hopeful eyes of children in Pakistan who've fled to a tent in a graveyard to escape flootwaters makes us wonder how we'd feel if they were our children. And ours they are, according to the radical empathy commanded by scripture. The wonder is that practicing empathy can deepen the joy in our own lives.

Shelter With The Saints

Pakistani flood survivors look out from their make-shift tent after fleeing their village in Sajawal near Hyderabad, Pakistan on Friday. Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis were fleeing floodwaters after the surging River Indus smashed through levees in two places, but many refused to leave the danger zone while others took shelter in an ancient graveyard for Muslim saints. (Caption and photo by AP/Shakil Adil)

To help through Episcopal Relief and Development, go here.

30,000 More Troops To Afghanistan

Writing at the "Daily Beast," veteran foreign affairs watcher Leslie Gelb says he has the inside track on the Afghanistan moves President Obama will announce on Tuesday. Gen. Stanley McCrystal will get at least 30,000 more U.S. troops with an option for 10,000 more in a year if Obama is satisfied with our progress. Our goal will shift from destroying to "dismantling and degrading" al-Qaeda, with a diplomatic component of working more closely with all the nations in the region so that terrorists will have nowhere to hide and rebuild.

Gelb likes what he hears, though he has one big concern:

It’s unclear at the moment just how tough Obama will be with Pakistan. In effect, Islamabad has provided a safe haven for Afghan Taliban for more than a decade as a hedge against Indian encroachments into Afghanistan. As a result, Pakistan urges the United States to stay and fight in Afghanistan to keep the Indians out, but provides succor to the Taliban to hedge against an American withdrawal. So, the Pakistanis want us to stay in Afghanistan and help the Taliban to kill our troops. It’s hard to see how Obama’s new strategy can work unless Pakistan’s leaders are brought to see for themselves the terrible consequences (the strengthening of the Pakistani Taliban extremists) of pursuing this duplicitous course.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 53

Waiting for Obama: According to the New York Times, while the Secretary of Defense is prevailing over the VP when it comes to the advisability of sending more troops to Afghanistan, the President is holding out for assurances that the Pakistani and Afghan governments will do more.

Her Finest Hour

A female Secretary of State speaks truth to power in Pakistan.

Our Obligation To Afghanistan

A thoughtful word from a knowledgeable friend. I wrote:

I'm having difficulty discovering my sense of our moral obligation to the Afghan people above and beyond the obligation all wealthy, powerful peoples have toward those who aren't. We're at war because Afghanistan's Taliban government nurtured and empowered a terrorist movement that mounted a devastating attack against the United States. President Bush's 2001 intervention was for our sake, not Afghanistan's. If we had focused more single-mindedly on the Taliban rather than going to war in Iraq as well, the situation might be better today, or perhaps not. Afghans are famously resistant to foreign influence and manipulation.

He replied:

Don't you think we have an additional obligation to countries we used as proxies in our (successful) global conflict against Soviet communism? Particularly when we conducted said proxy war so poorly (allowing Pakistan to dictate the distribution of arms and aid to fundamentalist forces, in order to keep any subsequent Afghan government weak, while the more pro-U.S. forces, which I have reason to believe RN favored, where left in the cold). Particularly when, having won a Soviet defeat that was a major contribution to the collapse of the USSR, we walked away from devastated Afghanistan, where, in the wake of our dishonorable disengagement, the Taliban rose (again, through Pakistan's nefarious influence).

By the way, those two Pakistan references should highlight the canard in that line about "Afghans are famously resistant to foreign influence and manipulation." Except when they aren't, which is, historically, when Afghanistan is weak, which occurs when it is divided, as it is now, awaiting yet another American absquatulation and the inevitable interference of neighbors, which will likely not be in America's interests. Please abandon that tired line about Afghan resistance, which belongs in the rhetorical junkpile of conservative doozies such as "they've been fighting for thousands of years," invariably intoned whenever a foreign conflict gets complicated and the isolationist delusion rises.

"Come Home, America" Watch, Day 23

Obama administration officials say al-Qaeda, the greatest direct threat to U.S. interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is going broke.

The Perils Of The Middle Way

It's a classic dynamic: Rivals inch toward understanding, if not yet friendship. Bitter anger gives way first, perhaps, to exhaustion and then the glimmer of a possibility of the hope of peace. Always good news -- except for extremists who for whatever reason find the idea of accommodation or compromise intolerable.

In March, teenage seminarians in Jerusalem were the victims of an attack that seemed calculated to destroy any progress being made by Israelis and the Palestinian Authority.

Similarly, the week's attacks in Mumbai (in which innocent Jews also died) seemed calculated to drive a new wedge between India and Pakistan, who had come to the brink of nuclear war after terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament in December 2001. India had blamed elements of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence. Both sides finally backed down. Now prodded by the U.S., which wants him to worry about al-Qaeda instead of India, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has been making determined overtures, mindful of his country's desperate economic straits as well. Reports the New York Times:

A businessman at heart, Mr. Zardari understands the benefit of strong trade between India and Pakistan. Now on life support from the International Monetary Fund, Pakistan would profit immensely from the normalization of relations.

But some people don't want normalization. They want their enemies humiliated and killed and their every ambition for revenge and power realized. When India quickly implicated Pakistan in the Mumbai attacks, the cycle seemed bound to recommence.

The on-line Times (its site is mucked up, so I can't link) now reports that Pakistan's ISS chief is heading to India to assist in the investigation, an extraordinary, encouraging move. Sometimes extremists make the middle way impossible. But sometimes they fail, and the world gets a little better.