A wise man once said peace is the period after a war to prepare for the next war. U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad signed last week a peace deal with Taliban representative Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. The historic peace deal comes amid much fanfare and jubilation on the streets of Afghanistan.
Everybody is hailing it as an end to America’s longest war, which indeed it is. Somehow, we all miss the simple fact that it is also the end of the Taliban’s longest war. Rather, the end of Afghanistan’s longest war. And importantly; it is the end of the longest war for American and NATO soldiers, not the civilians in the U.S. and NATO countries.
In Afghanistan, every civilian has lived through this war. It is not like Americans cannot go to their local Walmart fearing a drone strike. Pakistan is midwifing the peace agreement, which had been Pakistan’s position since the days leading up to the Oct. 7, 2001, invasion of Afghanistan. Pakistan, at the time, tried to convince the Americans that war was not the solution to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.
Gen. Mahmud Ahmad, then director-general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), met Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin, Defence Intelligence Agency representative Dave Smith and a visiting Pentagon team at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. They all gathered in the conference room in the chancery basement, which had shelves filled with books about Pakistan.
Gen. Mahmud tried to calm down the Americans who were seething with anger and were hell-bent on revenge. He reminded them of Sun Tzu’s aphorism that the supreme art of war involved winning without firing a single shot. “You need the help of the Afghan people while the U.S. forces are assembling. I beg you ... I implore you not to fire a shot in anger. It will set us all back many years. Don’t let the blood rush to your head,” the general said.
The Americans in the room listened while the general made the case for achieving the end without going to war. But he also added that “whatever decision you take, Pakistan will stand by you.” That elicited a response from Chamberlin who finally said, “the most important sentence you spoke was the last one. The time for negotiating is over.”
The starting day
While Afghanistan has been home to proxy wars, Qatar could rightly be called the home to proxy peace, even though they are also home to the largest U.S. drone base at al-Udeid. But this equation between the Afghans and Arabs is not so simple and not so new. It is much more subtle than we can possibly fathom and that is the real story behind all the noise. We would have to go far back into history.
Tariq Ali, a leading Pakistani-British scholar, rightly said the roots of today’s regional terrorism didn’t start in 1979 but rather in 1917. That is the year when the Russian Revolution happened. A year before that was the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which drew lines all across what is now the Middle East, creating nation-states keeping the British and French oil interests at the heart of it.
The Russian Revolution resulted in the rise of the Bolsheviks. The spread of communism was seen by the western capitalist society with alarm. The U.S. basically wanted to go into countries around the world and exploit their resources for private corporate power. Communism was favoring state control of those very resources. The conflict between that ideology and the greed of corporate powers spread around the world. That conflict in part created extremism. The U.S. supported the extremists to act as a counter-power to communism.
The extremists in various countries were basically the shock troops sent to destabilize their domestic communist governments. It just reminds me of a talk given by former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden in Houston, Texas. He said that during the Cold War, the U.S. was supporting the local extremist groups to weaken the governments but now support is given to strengthening governments to fight against extremist groups.
The conflict of capitalism and communism came to the battlefield in Vietnam and then to Afghanistan where the communists and the extremists came into direct battlefield contact. The CIA supported the "Mujahideen" insurgency against the Soviet forces. While the local Afghan fighters were fighting a war for the liberation of their land, the Takfiri Arabs who were flown in by the loads by the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistan alliance, were there to fight for Islam and martyrdom. They did not go to Afghanistan to end the occupation primarily but rather for the glory of Islam.
While the Afghan fighters believed in living another day to help fight the war, their Arab Takfiri co-fighters were there to die. The Soviets lost the war and retreated into whatever was left of their balkanized country. The Arabs left Afghanistan and looked elsewhere to achieve martyrdom such as Chechnya and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The paths of the Arabs and Afghans would cross again soon. The Mujahideen morphed into warlords and infighting erupted, paving the way for the formation of the Taliban, who rose to power in 1996.
Osama bin Laden's war
Around the same time, Osama bin Laden declared a "holy war" against the U.S. The Taliban gave bin Laden shelter because that is what the Pashtunwali code dictates – guests are never declined shelter, even if that guest is a sworn enemy. Then came 9/11. The Taliban refused to hand over bin Laden to the Americans because of the absence of proof of his role in the terrorist attacks that hit America.
President George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan following Taliban recalcitrance and literally within days, their government was dismantled. But then America looked toward the Middle East. The Taliban would have been history today had Bush not shifted his attention away from Afghanistan and toward Iraq.
In retrospect, the Taliban has Bush and Saddam to thank for their resurrection. While the U.S. invasion of Iraq gave the Taliban some breathing room and the opportunity to resurface, soon the Taliban are going to face a severe problem because of that very opportunity.
The invasion of Iraq, among other bad things, also created Daesh. One of the larger goals of the Daesh terrorist group includes the dismantling of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Their Daesh-K branch in Afghanistan is there to work toward achieving exactly that. It sure sounds like a long shot but their presence in Afghanistan is a cause for concern for the Taliban. The presence of Arabs or their ideology on Afghan soil can once again change the destiny of the Taliban and Afghanistan. Because of the “reduction in violence,” the Taliban spokesperson Suhail Shaheen said, “That was for making the environment conducive to sign the deal, but right now (there is) no such understanding of a cease-fire or reduction in violence.”
Furthermore, the obstacles remain for the smooth transition of this peace process including the prisoner swap, power-sharing, and so forth. The most interesting words came from Khalilzad when he said, “Our shared purpose is to reach a peace agreement (not a withdrawal agreement) that is worthy of the sacrifices made over decades of war."
Yes, it is not a withdrawal agreement. It is an agreement to create an illusion of peace so that the withdrawal can happen smoothly and Trump can win his re-election. It is that peace that was wisely described as the period between the two wars. Because what is ahead in Afghanistan is more war and bloodshed.
The main quid pro quo the Americans demand in the peace deal is that the Taliban do not allow any foreign terror group to operate on Afghan soil. But Shaheen said, “We will not allow our land to be used against any country including the U.S., but I am talking about the area where we have control.”
This either means that the Taliban have only guaranteed limited refusal of their land to foreign terror groups or it could mean that the Taliban are seeking more political power in a future Afghanistan so that all of the lands of Afghanistan are under their control. And who knows, it could slowly morph into something like covert support provided to the Taliban by the CIA to keep the rise of Daesh-K in check.
The Mujahideen were a creation of the U.S. The Taliban were a direct result of that creation. Daesh is a direct result of the aggression in Iraq. War is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The next phase of conflict would be with a different Frankenstein using the help of another Frankenstein. Only one thing would remain unchanged: war.
*U.S. based political analyst
