‘It did not have to end like this,” wrote columnist Con Coughlin in The Daily Telegraph recently. “Our valiant mission to defeat the Taliban and stabilise Afghanistan has been reduced to an undignified scramble for the exit by Nato leaders desperate to see who can be the first to bring their troops home.” But is it the end?
For the last three decades at least, peace and Afghanistan are two words that haven’t sat well together in the same sentence. The invasion by the Soviets in 1979 precipitated a decade-long civil war, interjected by Taliban rule which was itself interrupted by US carpet bombing before a full invasion by land forces in the guise of Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). That was 10 years ago this year.
According to a Pakistani intelligence official, the crisis in Afghanistan is far from over. And the consensus of opinion among Pakistani analysts indicates there won’t be peace in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. The next decade will be unsettled, and at best the status quo will prevail.
All the while, the US and its allies still have their eyes set on carving a territory from central Asia to the Arabian Sea. At stake are billions of barrels of oil and gas from central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Control of Afghanistan is pivotal to this supply route.
The world was ill at ease with the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas in Bamiyan. But no one batted an eyelid when the warlords were killing each other’s tribesmen. Then came 9/11, and suddenly ‘Taliban’ became synonymous with ‘savages’. But even that did not happen until the former US allies refused American demands to give up their whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and other members of al-Qaeda suspected of hiding out in Afghanistan at the time.
History is full of ironies. It was US taxpayers’ money that bankrolled the war against the Soviets in the 1980s, creating the Mujahedeen and their offspring, the Taliban.
In 2001 once again the US taxpayer funded the destruction of the same people who were the west’s heroes against Communism a decade before. The very same people who were welcomed to the White House by Ronald Reagan suddenly became a thorn in the side of the civilised world.
As Anna Mulrine wrote in the Christian Science Monitor (2 March 2012), the “cold-blooded killing of two US military advisers… by an Afghan soldier upset over the US military’s burning of Qur’ans” has raised “increasingly urgent questions among troops about whether the mission in Afghanistan is worth it” – both in the cost of nearly 2,000 American lives, and the billions of dollars that the cash-strapped US has poured into the country.
What’s the most likely scenario? I see a redeployment of US troops, not a withdrawal as in Iraq. This will probably require a deal with Taliban for the safe passage of troops, most likely without a UN umbrella. In return, the Taliban will be returned their comrades incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay; after so many years, they are of no use to the US intelligence agencies – assuming they had any credible intel in the first place. The US now wants a quiet disposal of these detainees (such a deal would also expedite the closure of Gitmo, which will surely come up again in President Obama’s re-election campaign).
The ultimate result of this is that US forces will remain in Afghanistan, with no end in sight. For many in Washington, among US voters and especially the families of troops, the question looms large: is it worth it? For the US establishment, the answer, unfortunately, is yes.
Rashid Butt is an entrepreneur, human rights campaigner and chairman of the Westmeath Immigrants Network (Win). In 2009 he became the first ever peace commissioner from the new communities in Ireland.
