By Clive BanerjeeIDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis
NEW DELHI (IDN) - In the event of the 28 NATO member nations disengaging from Afghanistan, it would be prudent to firewall the Afghanistan-Pakistan (AfPak) region from all sides with only a minimal foreign military presence inside Afghanistan, states a new study by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), which has hardly been taken note of but has landmark character.
"Such an approach would not only free the United States from aimlessly paying for Pakistan's follies and haemorrhaging its own economy and military, but also drive its rival China to act more responsibly in the global fight against terrorism," says the study of the New Delhi based IDSA, a think tank in the sphere of defence and security studies.
"India has been fairly successful in firewalling the radical blowback emanating from Pakistan in the past and need not be overly worried about the impending U.S. withdrawal," say authors of the study, Sushant Sareen and Col. Harinder Singh.
As things stand, Indians would ideally like to see the West succeed in its mission of cleansing Afghanistan of the influence of Islamist terror groups like the Taliban and al Qaeda, they add. "But if the West fails to achieve this objective, as is becoming increasingly apparent, then it is unlikely that India will step in to replace them in Afghanistan."
While India could provide some military assistance in the form of advisors and trainers to anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, the chances of India putting military boots on the ground are simply remote, the authors explain. Instead, India would most likely prefer to beef up its security along the border areas in order to insulate itself from the adverse impact of Taliban ascendancy in Afghanistan.
According to the paper, given the turn of events in the AfPak region, New Delhi in all likelihood will try to insulate itself from a spill over of Islamist terrorists into India. "After all, the source of India's insecurity is not Afghanistan; it is Pakistan. And Pakistan will continue to be a problem regardless of whether or not Americans stay in Afghanistan. The much tainted Taliban becomes a menace for India only if they are deliberately directed or pushed into India by their Pakistani patrons or if they take over the Pakistani state."
The authors of the IDSA study go on to say: "While the former is something that India has been contending with for over two decades, the latter possibility will become a problem not just for India but also for the rest of the civilized world. Short of direct intervention in Pakistan to rescue and reform the Pakistani state, the only way to restrict the fallout of a Talibanised Afghanistan and the inevitability of this development resulting in a Talibanised Pakistan is for the West to take a cue from India and follow a strategy of firewalling the AfPak region."
The paper argues that there is little doubt that the strategic vacuum that will be created by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan will be filled by the Taliban and other assorted terror groups who comprise the 'jihad international'. This, it says, will certainly have local, regional and global repercussions. At the local level, Afghanistan will either descend into chaos and civil war or else revert to the graveyard peace that the Taliban imposed between 1996 and 2001.
"With the Taliban in control, Islamic radicalism will of course get a fillip. But more serious is the imminent prospect of Afghanistan becoming a sanctuary and launching pad for all varieties of Islamic terror groups from around the world," the authors warn.
While the immediate impact of such a development will be felt by countries in the region -- the Central Asian states, Iran, and China -- the global ramifications of a Taliban regime in Afghanistan in terms of the spread of Islamic terrorism cannot be understated, the authors say.
But the country likely to be worst affected is Pakistan. Rather than providing Pakistan 'strategic depth', a Taliban victory in Afghanistan will transform the country into a 'strategic black hole' for Pakistan. "In its obsession with sponsoring, supporting and providing sanctuary to the entire Taliban leadership and directing its war effort against the U.S. troops in an elaborate double-game, Pakistan does not seem to have thought things through."
STRATEGIC PIPEDREAMS
The IDSA study says Pakistanis are expecting that the gradual withdrawal of Western forces will be a best case scenario for them for several good reasons:
-- First, Afghanistan becomes a client state of Pakistan, which will then be in a position to dictate terms to the Taliban leaders who will be beholden to Pakistan for supporting them against the Americans.
-- Second, the Taliban either agree to share power with other players like the Northern Alliance and Hazaras or occupy the entire Afghanistan.
-- Third, the Taliban will forsake militancy and al Qaeda and, in return, a grateful West will continue to ply both Afghanistan and Pakistan with billions of dollars in aid.
-- Fourth, the Taliban will not give refuge to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other Islamic terror groups operating in Pakistan and will help Pakistan to either tame or eliminate these groups.
-- Fifth, as a result of these measures, the wave of terrorism inside Pakistan will end and the TTP and others will give up arms and become part of the mainstream.
-- Sixth, there will be no reaction in the frontier provinces to the disproportionate use of force by the Pakistan army against the Islamic insurgent groups, and the people of the area will simply forget the collateral damage caused by the army’s operations.
-- And finally, there will be no export of jihad from Afghanistan to any other part of the world except to India.
The authors of the paper say that this scenario is based on some extremely 'heroic' assumptions. It asks: Given that the TTP and Punjabi Taliban groups like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammad and others are part and parcel of the larger Islamist movement, what are the chances of the Taliban being able to keep them on a tight leash, much less handing them over to the Pakistani authorities?
Will the Islamists lay down their arms simply because the Americans have left the region or will they get emboldened by their success in defeating the sole superpower and try to impose a `talibanesque` regime in Pakistan?
Will groups like the Haqqani network end their relationship with the al Qaeda only because Mullah Omar, who is living under Pakistani protection, asks them to do so or will the radicals repudiate even the Emir-ul-Momineen as a Pakistani agent?
If the Taliban regime refuses to tow the Pakistani line on the TTP, what will be Pakistan's options? Invade Afghanistan? Or enter into a Sudan-like deal with the Islamists and enforce the Taliban version of Islam in Pakistan?
FIREWALL VERSUS PARTITION
The bottom line, says the paper, is that the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is not working and is unlikely to work in the foreseeable future. It adds: By pursuing the current strategy, the United States is essentially reinforcing failure and that too at a huge cost in men and money. What the U.S. needs is an alternate strategy that will address its strategic security concerns at a fraction of the cost being incurred at present. One such strategy is the 'partition' plan that former U.S. ambassador to India, Robert Blackwill, has put forward.
While Blackwill’s plan is much better than the other alternatives that he has discussed (and debunked) in his article, 'A de facto partition for Afghanistan', there are serious problems with this plan as well.
These are:
-- First, it is unlikely that the partition plan will find favour with any of the Afghans. Whatever their differences with each other, there is hardly an Afghan, whether Pashtun or non-Pashtun, Shia or Sunni, pro- or anti-Taliban, who supports the partitioning of Afghanistan. Despite ethnic animosities, Afghan nationalism remains strong as ever. A partition plan, imposed by an imperial power, could therefore backfire by affecting a tenuous unity among all Afghans against foreign forces.
-- Second, the Blackwill plan advocates partitioning Afghanistan along ethnic lines and calls upon the US to defend the predominantly non-Pashtun west and north and leave the Pashtun-dominated south and east to the depredations of the Taliban. The mistake Blackwill makes is that he implicitly assumes that the Pashtun areas end at the Durand line. Whereas the fact is that the geographical space that the Pashtuns occupy extends well beyond the Durand line in the east and should ideally end at the Indus river.
In other words, a Taliban dominated Pashtun entity in Afghanistan will invariably extend into the Pashtun areas under Pakistani control which constitute a natural hinterland for the Afghan Pashtuns. The creation of a de facto Pashtun state in Afghanistan will result in an explosive cocktail in which radical Islam and Pashtun nationalism will combine and spill over into Pakistan, which will find it impossible to combat this new force. Effectively, Blackwill's plan will not just partition Afghanistan but could end up splitting Pakistan along the Indus, with a Taliban dominated Pashtun state (de facto if not de jure) in the north west and perhaps an independent Baloch entity coming into existence in the south west of Pakistan.
-- Third, a partition plan in which the U.S. and other foreign forces maintain their presence in Afghanistan, albeit in the north and west, will continue to give the Islamists from around the world a legitimate cause to continue with their war. The al Qaeda will get a further lease of life as it will support the Taliban cause of unifying the country and expelling foreign forces.
-- Fourth, a war in Afghanistan between the Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns will almost certainly destabilise Pakistan, the impact of which on regional and global security has not been factored into the partition plan. Given the unrelenting and unchanging Islamist trajectory of the Pakistani state controlled by a military with a jihadi mindset, it is unlikely that US dollars will help to ‘persuade’ Pakistan to re-evaluate its strategic orientation and ‘concentrate on defeating the Pakistani Taliban and containing the Afghan Taliban’.
-- Fifth, a partition of Afghanistan will raise serious issues about how the U.S. will work its logistics lines for its 40,000 to 50,000 troops. While the cost of logistics for such a large force running through the northern route will be less than the estimated $120 billion per annum being incurred presently, it will still be huge – around $40 to 50 billion.
All that the partition plan hopes to achieve can be better obtained through the firewall strategy and at a fraction of the cost. Under the firewall strategy, all foreign forces will pull out of the AfPak region, i.e. no boots on the ground except for a handful of military units, advisors and intelligence operatives. The fallout of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and eventually Pakistan, will be contained by building a massive firewall around this region so that the Islamists and their Pakistani patrons stew in their own juice. In large measure, parts of the firewall around AfPak are already in place; all that remains to be done is to further beef up these firewalls.
