Nato Is Deeper in its Afghan Mire than Russia Ever Was

Nato Is Deeper in its Afghan Mire than Russia Ever Was

 

     Two decades after the Soviet withdrawal, ever more

     resources are being poured into a war with scant

     chance of success

 

Jonathan Steele

The Guardian,

Saturday 14 February 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/14/nato-afghanistan

 

Twenty years ago tomorrow the last Soviet units left

Afghanistan after a nine-year intervention that took

15,000 soldiers' lives. As they crossed the river Oxus

I was in the air above them, the only foreign

journalist to fly to Kabul that day.

 

Russian friends in Moscow, where I was this newspaper's

correspondent, doubted my sanity, convinced a bloodbath

was bound to follow the Soviet exodus. I disagreed. The

secular regime under Mohammed Najibullah that the

Kremlin left behind had a firmer base than many

outsiders realised, thanks in part to support from

Kabulis who feared chaos and blood-letting if the

mujahideen won the civil war.

 

Two decades later the ironies of America's war in

Afghanistan are telling. When Richard Holbrooke, the

new US envoy to the region, visited the country this

week he may not have been aware of the Soviet

anniversary. But the US-led intervention is already

almost as long. At this stage of their war the Russians

were preparing to leave. Now the US and Nato want to

get further in, and if Barack Obama's plans for 30,000

extra US troops are met, along with efforts to get more

from Nato, coalition forces will almost equal the

115,000 troops the Russians had at their peak.

 

Western casualties are considerably less, but Nato has

been more successful. Like the Russians, the western

alliance mainly occupies Kabul and provincial capitals.

The countryside is vulnerable to attack or in the hands

of the resistance - a mixture of Islamic

fundamentalists, Pashtun nationalists, local tribal

chiefs and mullahs, and Arab jihadis - just like the

mujahideen who confronted the Russians. The difference

is that the west and Pakistan supported and armed them

in the 1980s. Now, using the profits of heroin-running,

they are self-sustaining and harder to control.

 

Nato faces tougher challenges than the Russians. Twenty

years ago the Taliban did not exist, suicide bombing

was not in vogue, and the Afghan army and police were

more effective. Kabul under Soviet rule was an oasis of

calm, where girls went to school and unveiled young

women attended university. The mujahideen fired

occasional rockets into the city but caused too little

damage to upset normal life. Note the contrast with

today's siren-screaming armoured convoys and western

offices hidden behind high walls and sandbags, and

still the Taliban were able to attack three government

buildings a few days ago.

 

The Soviet invasion violated international law and was

condemned by the UN. But its goals were more modest

than the US's in 2001. Moscow was not seeking regime

change. It was trying to prop up a regime under threat

from a mounting civil war. Although western hawks

claimed the Kremlin planned to advance through

Afghanistan to seize warm water ports in the Gulf, the

true aim was limited. Moscow wanted to defend an allied

government, contain the mujahideen (who were getting

CIA support before Soviet troops invaded), and prevent

Afghanistan becoming a pro-western bastion. This was

shortly after the US was expelled from Iran and the

Kremlin feared Washington wanted Afghanistan as its replacement.

 

Getting out was easier for Moscow than it will be for

the US. International negotiations in Geneva gave the

Kremlin the face-saver of "parallelism". The peace

terms were that the Russians would leave when aid to

the mujahideen ceased and an intra-Afghan dialogue was

launched. This disguised any appearance of defeat. It

even provided a good chance for the Afghan government

to continue after Soviet troops withdrew. In fact, it

lasted three more years.

 

The causes and consequences of the Soviet withdrawal

and Najibullah's eventual fall have led to some of the

phoniest myths of the cold war. Claims that US-provided

Stinger missiles forced the Russians to give up and

that this humiliation provoked the Soviet Union's

collapse are nonsense. Moscow's ally Najibullah fell

four months after the USSR died, when the Kremlin's new

ruler, Boris Yeltsin, cut fuel supplies to the Afghan

army and Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leading Uzbek

commander, defected to the mujahideen. Until that

moment, they had not captured and held a single city.

 

Another myth is that the west "walked away" after the

Russians left. If only it had. Instead Washington and

Pakistan broke the Geneva agreement by maintaining arms

supplies to the mujahideen. They encouraged them to

reject Najibullah's repeated efforts at national

reconciliation. The mujahideen wanted all-out victory,

which they eventually got, only to squander it in an

orgy of artillery shelling that left Kabul in ruins and

produced the anger that paved the way for the Taliban.

If western governments are now paying a high price in

Afghanistan, they have brought the disaster on themselves.

 

The Taliban will not drive Nato out militarily. The

notion that Afghans always defeat foreigners is wrong.

The real lesson of the Soviet war is that in

Afghanistan political and cultural disunity can slide

into massive and prolonged violence. Foreigners

intervene at their peril.

 

Nato is in a cleft stick and the idea that, unlike

Iraq, Afghanistan is the "right war" is a self-deluding

trap. A military "surge", the favoured Obama policy,

may produce short-term local advances but no

sustainable improvement, and as yesterday's Guardian

reported, it will cost the US and Britain enormous

sums. Pouring in aid will take too long to win hearts

and minds, and if normal practice is followed, the

money will mainly go to foreign consultants and corrupt

officials. Talking to the Taliban makes sense under

Najibullah-style national reconciliation. But the

Taliban themselves are disunited, with a host of local

leaders and generational divisions between "new" and

"old" Taliban. Worse still, since the war spilt into

Pakistan's frontier regions, there are now Pakistani Taliban.

 

What of the better option, a phased Nato withdrawal? It

will not produce benefits as clear or immediate as the

US pull-out from Iraq. Most Iraqis never wanted the US

in the first place. They know the destruction the

invasion brought, have stepped back from sectarian war,

and now have a government which has pressed Washington

to set a timetable to leave. In Afghanistan the risks

of a collapse of central rule and a long civil war are far greater.

 

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