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Ahmed Rashid's War
By Tariq Ali
After
breakfast, I read Gideon Rachman’s often revealing blog on the
Financial Times website. Today there was some very good news.
Ahmed Rashid, a leading adviser to the US hawks on Afghanistan,
is depressed. Deconstructing Rachman on this occasion might be
useful for Counter Punch readers:
“…Jon Snow of Channel 4
News, allowed me to gatecrash a breakfast he was having with
Ahmed Rashid. In theory, Ahmed is just a journalist like us.
But his views on Afghanistan and Pakistan are now so widely
sought that he has really become a player. He seems to be
consulted by everybody - and I mean, everybody.”
This last is a slight
exaggeration. The main people who consult Rashid, apart from
Robert Silvers at the New York Review of Books, are US
policy-makers in favor of a continuous occupation of
Afghanistan. Rashid provides them with many a spurious argument
to send more troops and wipe out the Pashtoons opposing the
occupation. Within Afghanistan, Rashid’s principal backer and
friend is Hamid Karzai who has now managed to antagonize even
the tamest US liberals such as Peter Galbraith, recently sacked
as a UN honcho in Kabul because he suggested that Karzai had
rigged the elections. Rashid the journalist has no time for
people who suggest that Karzai is a corrupt rogue, whose family
is now the richest in the country, or that he manipulates US
public opinion with the aid of PR companies, friends in
Washington and, of course, Ahmed Rashid himself.
Back to the Rachman blog:
“So it was worrying to
find Ahmed in a distinctly depressed mood. The last time I saw
him was back in April at the Nato summit in Strasbourg, when
he was feeling a bit cheerier. He had been impressed by the
Obama administration’s decision to put more troops into
Afghanistan, and cheered by the Pakistani military’s apparent
willingness to take on the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat
valley. But now, he is seriously worried that the Americans
are having cold feet and will step back - and that Pakistan
itself will be be destablized by a resurgence of the Afghan
Taliban.”
Its astonishing to me why
neither Snow nor Rachman, both intelligent journalists, did not
question Rashid on what are the real problems confronting
Pakistan and whether killing people is the only solution? Rashid
is committed to the current corrupt regime led by Asif Zardari
who together with his cronies and henchmen does the bidding of
the US Embassy in Ialamabad without questioning any instruction.
The US Viceroy in
Pakistan, Anne Patterson 9earlier posting: Colombia) can be
disarmingly frank. Earlier this year, she offered a mid-term
assessment to a visiting Euro-intelligence chief. While
Musharraf had been unreliable, saying one thing in Washington
and doing its opposite back home, Zardari was perfect: ‘He does
everything we ask.’
What is disturbing here is
not Patterson’s candor, but her total lack of judgment. Zardari
may be a willing creature of Washington, but the intense hatred
for him in Pakistan is not confined to his political opponents.
He is despised principally because of his venality. He has
carried on from where he left off as minister of investment in
his late wife’s second government. Within weeks of occupying
President’s House, his minions were ringing the country’s top
businessmen, demanding a share of their profits.
Take the case of Mr X, who
owns one of the country’s largest banks. He got a call.
Apparently the president wanted to know why his bank had sacked
a PPP member soon after Benazir Bhutto’s fall in the late 1990s.
X said he would find out and let them know. It emerged that the
sacked clerk had been caught with his fingers literally in the
till. President’s House was informed. The explanation was
rejected. The banker was told that the clerk had been victimized
for political reasons. The man had to be reinstated and his
salary over the last 18 years paid in full together with the
interest due. The PPP had also to be compensated and would
expect a cheque (the sum was specified) soon. Where the
president leads, his retainers follow. Many members of the
cabinet and their progeny are busy milking businessmen and
foreign companies.
‘If they can do it, so can
we’ is a widely expressed view in Karachi, the country’s largest
city. Muggings, burglaries, murders, many of them part of
protection rackets linked to politicians, have made it the
Naples of the East. A complete failure by the venal Pakistan
elite to educate and provide a social safety net for its
citizens makes it easier for religious extremists who remain a
tiny minority but gain ground because of the war in neighboring
Afghanistan. Rachman writes:
“Personally, I have been
having cold feet myself and wondering whether the West should
pull out of a losing battle in Afghanistan. But Rashid paints
a hair-raising picture of what would happen if the US stepped
away. He foresees a renewed civil war in Afghanistan, with the
Afghan Taliban backed by the Pakistani army, battling it out
with the forces of Karzai and the Northern Alliance, backed by
Iran. Taking a step further back, the Chinese would be
standing in the Afghan-Pakistani- Talib corner, while the
Indians backed the other side. The Pakistanis meanwhile would
find themselves suffering from the Taliban blowback, caused by
the very Afghan war they were sponsoring. It doesn’t sound
great. But how long is Nato prepared to stay in the ring?”
I’m glad that Rachman has
been getting cold feet. He’s not alone. The picture Rashid
paints is deliberately alarmist and based largely on fantasy;
throwing in China is crude but designed to appeal to the
revanchists in the Pentagon. Rashid does need help. How can the
West cure poor Ahmed’s depression? He would recover rapidly if
the US remained permanently in Afghanistan and took over
Pakistan as well but that would require half-a-million US troops
and the killing of a million or more Af-Paks. It’s a heavy price
to pay for making Rashid feel better. A simpler route might be
to get Zardari to give him a big job, failing which, he could
move to the UN since Galbraith’s job is vacant. I remember
Rashid in the old days being extremely sceptical when, after
attending a conference in the Soviet Union in 1985, I told him
that Gorbachev was going to pull out all Russian troops within a
few years. He found that, too, difficult to believe and was, no
doubt, equally depressed.
Some of us have been
arguing for many years that more troops and more Afghan deaths
is totally counter-productive. An exit strategy that involves
Iran, Russia and China as well as Pakistan and a national
coalition in Afghanistan is the only medium-term solution.
Washington has been negotiating privately with the Pashtun
resistance and the neo-Taliban have made it clear that once a
NATO withdrawal began they would work with other groups and
participate in a national government.
Meanwhile the war
continues and Afghans and NATO soldiers continue to die. All
one can offer them is Kipling’s advice to British soldiers
(including Winston Churchill) who were battling the Pashtuns in
the late 19th century:
When you’re wounded and left on
Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come to cut out what remains,
Just roll to your rifle, and blow out your brains.
And go to your God like a soldier.
With thanks from
www.counterpunch.com
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