"The War in Pashtunistan"

[amborin]

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.....If Al Qaeda is the threat, and Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, why send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan?

....the additional soldiers and marines were being sent to another land altogether: Pashtunistan.

That land is not on any map, but it’s where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban both hide. It straddles 1,000 miles of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistani border. It is inhabited by the ethnic Pashtuns, a fiercely independent people that number 12 million on the Afghan side and 27 million on the Pakistani side. They have a language (Pashto), an elaborate traditional code of legal and moral conduct (Pashtunwali), a habit of crossing the largely unmarked border at will, and a centuries-long history of foreign interventions that ended badly for the foreigners.

Whether Mr. Obama will have better luck there than President George W. Bush, the Soviet Politburo and British prime ministers back to the early 19th century remains to be seen. But it is there that the war will be fought....

Today, the enemies of the United States are nearly all in Pashtunistan....From bases in the Pakistani part of it....It is also from the Pakistani side of Pashtunistan that Qaeda militants have plotted terrorism against the West.

And the essential strategic problem for the Americans has been this: their enemy, so far, has been able to draw advantage from the border between the two nation-states by ignoring it, and the Americans have so far been hindered because they must respect it.

That is because Pakistan and Afghanistan care deeply about their sovereign rights on either side of the line, but the Pashtuns themselves have never paid the boundary much regard since it was drawn by a British diplomat, Mortimer Durand, in 1893. “They don’t recognize the border,” said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council, a Washington policy group. “They never have. They never will.”

....The Taliban can plan an attack from Pakistan and execute it in Afghanistan. Their fighters — or Al Qaeda’s leaders — can slip across the border to flee, or to rejoin the battle. At the same time, the Americans can fight openly only in Afghanistan, not in Pakistan, and the Taliban know it.

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it is about to change......The dispatch of 30,000 additional Americans to the Afghan side of the border will occur simultaneously with more intensive missile strikes from drone aircraft and Pakistani army offensives on the other side.

Ever since Osama bin Laden escaped American forces in December 2001, crossing the mountains of Tora Bora from Afghanistan into Pakistan, American strategists have spoken of a “hammer and anvil” strategy to crush the militants......

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Now, Mr. Obama’s added troops are likely to be concentrated in the Taliban stronghold in Helmand and Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, and near Khost in the east. At the same time, the president has approved a major intensification of drone strikes in Pakistan....

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“We finally have an opportunity to do a real hammer-and-anvil strategy on the border,”

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....For years, in fact, Pakistani intelligence has played a double game with Islamist extremists, nurturing them as a force to use against Pakistan’s archrival India in the disputed territory of Kashmir and helping create the Taliban as a buffer against Indian influence in Afghanistan.

But as the mujahedeen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s later turned on their American benefactors, so some militants in Pakistan have begun attacking the state that once encouraged them. Many in the Pakistani elite were stunned by the emergence in 2007 of the Pakistani Taliban and by the subsequent campaign of terrorist attacks against Pakistan’s power structure....

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Most significantly, Pakistan has yet to agree to go after the leaders of the Afghan Taliban, or to permit American drones to hunt them in the province of Baluchistan, across the border from their former Afghani base in Kandahar.....

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And history offers unnerving precedent for the Americans. In Waziristan, the patch of Pakistan where the Central Intelligence Agency now kills militants with missiles fired from drones, the British conducted what may have been history’s first counterinsurgency air campaign, bombing from biplanes between 1919 and 1925.

Mr. Nawaz, of the Atlantic Council, whose grandfather fought with the British in Waziristan in 1901, said he saw in the shifting American policies an echo of the British experience; the British found themselves caught for decades in a cycle of rebellion, brutal suppression, payoffs for tribal leaders, and then a period of peace followed by a new rebellion.

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/weekinreview/06shane.html?_r=1&sq=pashtunistan&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=all>

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All of which leaves the question of Pakistan’s complicity, or at least the connivance
of elements in its military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. What is beyond question is that the ISI has elaborate links to Afghan extremists going back to
the mujahedeen struggle to drive Soviet troops from Afghanistan in the 1980s,
when the ISI acted as the conduit for much of the $10 billion in American, Saudi
and British weapons and finance that went to the resistance groups.

Those links persisted into the 1990s, and then into this decade, encouraged by
Pakistan civilian and military governments that have always seen a crucial
strategic interest in maintaining influence in Afghanistan, partly for
“strategic depth” in Pakistan’s confrontation with India, partly to
guard against Pashtun nationalists on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border reviving the historic goal of a “Pashtunistan” nation that would
involve the dismemberment of Pakistan.

If anybody outside the ranks of the Qaeda and Taliban leadership knows
where bin Laden is, it is as likely as not to be an agent of the ISI.....

<http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/ask-john-burns-global-impact-of-afghan-plan/?scp=3&sq=pashtunistan&st=cse>

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“Along its border,” of course, means across the border — a k a Pakistan.
Obama never satisfactorily argued why more troops in Afghanistan, where
his own administration puts the number of Qaeda operatives at roughly 100,
will help vanquish the far more substantial terrorist strongholds in
Pakistan. But even if he had made that case and made it strongly, a
larger issue remains: If the enemy in Afghanistan, whether Taliban or
Qaeda, poses the same existential threat to America today that it did
on 9/11, why is the president settling for half-measures?

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If the enemy in Afghanistan today threatens the American homeland
as the Viet Cong never did, we should be all in, according to
Obama’s logic. So why aren’t we? The answer is not merely that
Afghans don’t want us as occupiers. It’s that such a mission
would require a commensurate national sacrifice. One big
difference between the war in Vietnam and the war in Afghanistan
that the president conspicuously left unmentioned on Tuesday
is the draft. Given that conscription is not about to be revived,
we’d have to spend money, lots more money, to recruit the troops
needed for the full effort Obama’s own argument calls for.

....As L.B.J. learned the hard way, we can’t have both guns and
the butter of big domestic projects, from health care to desperately
needed jobs programs. We have to make choices. Obama paid lip service
to that point, but the only sacrifice he cited in the entire speech was
addressed to his audience at West Point, not the general public — the
burden borne by the military and military families....

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Finally, the notion that we are still fighting in Afghanistan because the
9/11 attacks originated there is based on the fallacy that our terrorist
enemies are so stupid
they have remained frozen in place since 2001. Most Americans
know that they are no more static than we are. Obama acknowledged
as much in citing such other Qaeda havens as Somalia (the site
of a devastating insurgent suicide bombing on Thursday) and Yemen.

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....As long as our wars remain sacrifice-free, safely buried in the
back pages behind Tiger Woods and reality television stunts, he’ll
be able to pursue it....

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06rich.html?scp=1&sq=frank%20rich%20afghanistan&st=cse>

[FarCenter]

1. Neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan are actual nations

Both are combinations of multiple ethnic regions.

Afghanistan is comprised of Pashtun, Tadjik, Uzbek, and Hazara areas. Pashtuns dominate.

Pakistan is comprised of Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi and Pashtun areas. Punjabis dominate.

To complicate matters, the other half of the Punjabis are in India or Indian controlled Kashmir.

[elfin]

2. I thought this was a good article, which reminded

us that this remains an essentially tribal, familial region which tenaciously persists a strong semblance of autonomy despite colonialism and countless wars.

They have never ceded their identity and most likely never will. The most we can hope is that our bedevilment of their strongholds will convince them to give over Osama and a few important henchmen in exchange for our "benign neglect" so they can resume their centuries old Old Testament lifestyle.