Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 1, February–March 2009, pp. 83–96
End the War on Terror
Barnett R. Rubin
What Future for Afghanistan?
Amin Saikal
Plan B for Afghanistan?
Julian Lindley-French
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The situation in Afghanistan has turned so far against the United States, NATO, the international community, and those Afghans who originally hoped that the post-11 September 2001 intervention would finally bring them a chance for normal lives, that it will be very difficult to salvage. Al-Qaeda has established a new safe haven in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, from which it supports insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan and continues its global planning against the United States and its allies. Its press releases are so frequent that they are hardly newsworthy unless they feature video of Osama bin Laden himself. Negative trends in Afghanistan include the deterioration of security, Afghan governance and regional stability. The stability of Pakistan, a nuclear-weapons state that has been the main source of proliferation over the past two decades, is now at serious risk. Rising India–Pakistan tensions further exacerbate the regional risk, as do tensions over Iran’s nuclear programme and its relations with Hizbullah and Hamas.
The task in Afghanistan would have been difficult under any circumstances. The Bush administration’s unique record of incompetence, fecklessness and criminality has assured that the Obama administration inherits its responsibilities under the worst possible circumstances, not only in the region, but globally as well. Still, as President Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said of the economic situation, ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste’.
This serious crisis may finally force equally serious thinking about the goals of the international intervention in Afghanistan and the means required to have any serious hope of attaining or approaching them. Rather than proclaim objectives limited only by the audacity of our imaginations (an Islamic democratic, stable, gender-sensitive and prosperous Afghanistan) and the paucity of our means (fewer resources per capita than any other such operation), we need to align objectives with reality, and means with objectives.
The most important change in the definition of US objectives is to explicitly renounce the ‘war on terror’. Instead the United States is engaged in a war against al-Qaeda, which attacked America and its allies. Al-Qaeda, a non-territorial transnational network, can obtain a safe haven only through alliance with groups such as the Taliban, which have a national or ethnic base connected to a territory and population. Such alliances are inherently unstable, however, in so far as any territorialised political movement has objectives related to the territory and population where it is based, objectives which are necessarily different from al-Qaeda’s global goals of re-establishing the Islamic caliphate throughout Muslim territory.
The ‘war on terror’, which amalgamated all Islamist groups that used violence into a common threat, strengthened its primary target, al-Qaeda, by creating incentives for local groups treated as ‘terrorists’ to ally themselves with al-Qaeda. All handbooks of war, dating back at least to Sun Tzu, have recommended dividing the enemy. The ‘war on terror’ did the opposite.
While counter-terrorism requires military and intelligence tools, only a drastic strategic reorientation can provide those with their required political complement. In the...
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Barnett R. Rubin is Director of Studies and a Senior Fellow at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and the author of The Fragmentation of Afghanistan (2nd ed., 2002). He served as an adviser to the Special Representative of the Secretary-General at the UN Talks on Afghanistan in Bonn in 2001.
Amin Saikal is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (the Middle East and Central Asia) at the Australian National University, and author of Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (2006) and The Rise and Fall of the Shah: Iran from Autocracy to Religious Rule (2009).
Julian Lindley-French is Professor of Military Operational Science at the Netherlands Defence Academy and Senior Associate Fellow at the United Kingdom Defence Academy. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of any institution.
Related Articles
Doctrine and Reality in Afghanistan by Adam Roberts (February–March 2009)
What is Happening in Pakistan? by Hilary Synnott (February–March 2009)
Afghan Diary by Rodric Braithwaite (February–March 2009)
Averting Failure in Afghanistan by Seth G. Jones (Spring 2006)
Securing Afghanistan’s Border by Amin Saikal (Spring 2006)
Walking Softly in Afghanistan: The Future of UN State-Building by Simon Chesterman (Autumn 2002)
Afghanistan after the Loya Jirga by Amin Saikal (Autumn 2002)
The Taliban Papers by Tim Judah (Spring 2002)
