The Taliban is not the enemy

Tom Maertens
Mankato Free Press
July 30, 2010

CIA Director Leon Panetta told Congress recently that there may be fewer than 50 to 100 al-Qaida members in Afghanistan.

We are nonetheless fighting a major war there that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 NATO troops and 517 American troops being wounded during June. In 2010 alone the war will cost close to $100 billion … $1 billion to $2 billion for each al-Qaida member in Afghanistan.

It is important to note that the Taliban is not the same as al-Qaida. The Taliban supporters are Afghans, principally the dominant Pashtuns, who are attacking Americans only because we are in their country. The Taliban is not a threat to the U.S. homeland.

Yet the president lists among our goals in Afghanistan “breaking the Taliban’s momentum” and strengthening the Afghan government. Is it worth $100 billion dollars per year for us to keep Hamid Karzai in power and the Taliban out?

The enemy is al-Qaida. Our goal is to prevent them from establishing safe havens to use to attack us. Terrorists don’t need Afghanistan to plan their operations; they could do it from Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen or elsewhere. Our reaction to al-Qaida sanctuaries anywhere has been a rain of cruise missiles or Predator attacks.

In the name of fighting 100 al-Qaida members, however, we are being dragged into Afghanistan’s tribal and ideological warfare.

Karzai recently told an international conference that he expected Afghanistan to take over security for his country in 2014, but General George Casey, the chief of staff of the Army, said on CBS News July 10 that the United States could face another “decade or so” of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. This sounds like a trillion dollars to keep Karzai in power and the Taliban out.

Our real interest in the area is the stability of Pakistan, which has nuclear weapons. Michael Leiter, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, recently estimated the number of al-Qaida in Pakistan at perhaps 300 or more. We have given Pakistan over $11 billion since 9/11 to strengthen their hand against extremists. We also conduct Predator attacks on Pakistani territory, but they are a double-edged sword; they kill extremists but also civilians, which has enraged many Pakistanis and created more violent extremists.

The Pakistanis, unfortunately, are a shaky ally, and are playing a double game, as recent revelations from Wikileaks and the New York Times confirm. Civilian authorities provide some cooperation but are too weak to prevent duplicity by fundamentalist elements of the military and the intelligence service, the ISI, which actively support the extremists.

This is not new. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia funneled assistance to the Afghan Mujahedeen via the ISI, which siphoned off some of the money and used the rest to support fundamentalist groups sympathetic to Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

That long-standing connection led Washington officials to believe that the reason bin Laden narrowly escaped a cruise missile attack on his camp in 1998 is because the U.S. had to request clearance in advance for those missiles to overfly Pakistani territory, allowing the ISI to tip him off.

But whatever the concerns about Pakistan, they do not justify a war against the Taliban on behalf of the Karzai regime. Taking sides in what is essentially a civil war is a repeat of the “tar baby” conundrum that ensnared us in Vietnam.

The analogy is apt. After nine years of war, the Afghan government, like the Saigon government before it, has been unable to provide security and eliminate widespread corruption. The Taliban, like the Viet Cong, are strongly entrenched among the Afghan people. In most of the Pashtun areas outside Kabul, they control the night, whatever U.S. and Afghan forces do during the day.

The Taliban are an indigenous force and, whether we like it or not, will play a role in governing Afghanistan; we should not make them our problem. We need to manage the Afghanistan problem politically instead of attempting to solve it militarily. A RAND Corporation study of 648 insurgent groups found that by far the most common way for them to disappear was to be absorbed by the political process, or secondly, to be defeated by police work. In only seven percent of cases did military force destroy the “terrorist group.”

We must encourage Karzai to seek a settlement with less radical elements of the Taliban to bring them into the political process.

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