I am wondering whether Levine actually read more than the executive summary
of the Crisis Group study which he himself cited:
"The insurgents, of course, understand the importance
of violently disrupting the government"s capacity to
provide security and services. Since the Afghan security
forces still lack the ability to counter the insurgents
on their own, the security umbrella provided by
the international community remains vital if Afghanistan
is to stabilise. While it is necessary to emphasise
that foreign troops will stay as long as needed, the international
community must prioritise the building of
Afghan security and administrative capabilities and
assure the Afghan people that there are no long-term
designs on the region. Any talk of long-term U.S.
bases would, for instance, feed into nationalistic resistance
as well as neighbours" apprehensions. International
forces must also demonstrate that they are
accountable, by putting in place more transparent systems
to investigate and report on civilian casualties
and other complaints. Only then will they succeed in
neutralising the Taliban"s attempts to paint the foreign
intervention as an invasion and foreign troops as an
occupation force"
It's obvious to an honest reader of this report and Obama's
statements that they are on the same page. Levine
seems not to have noticed.
Obama and the Taliban
Among its many goals, Barack Obama's historic July 24 speech in Berlin sought to demonstrate the Senator's command of the world stage, particularly with regard to creating a united front with Europe against global terrorism. Given the largely positive reception it has received, the presumptive Democratic nominee likely achieved this goal.
But beneath the lofty rhetoric, Senator Obama's strategy for prosecuting the War on Terror is based on questionable, and potentially flawed premises -- one shared with his Republican opponent John McCain -- which would likely impede the ability of either administration to achieve "victory" against Muslim extremism.
In his speech Senator Obama declared that "America can't [win in Afghanistan] alone... The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, to develop their economy, and to help them rebuild their nation. We have too much at stake to turn back now."
The linkage between al-Qa'eda and the Taliban has been made so often since 2001 that the terms have become almost interchangeable, as if they represent the same overall movement or phenomenon. Indeed, the Taliban regime that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 through 2001 harbored and supported Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'eda, enabling the attacks of September 11.
But their cooperation then (and now) does not mean they can be fought along similar lines. Obama's close association of the two groups, which mirrors Bush Administration policy, simplifies a far more complex reality, against which a strategy based primarily on force and violence will likely fail.
While sharing a similar ideology to a certain extent, personnel, al-Qa'eda and the Taliban are fundamentally distinct entities. Al-Qa'eda is a deterritorialized, stateless organization that claims universal jurisdiction to wage violent, terroristic jihad against whomever its leaders declare to be Islam's external and internal enemies.
However hazy al-Qa'eda's ideology (at least to the uninitiated), bin Laden's organization of al-Qa'eda was based on the advanced and well-defined principles of corporate management he studied as a student of economics and public administration, and afterwards working in his family's transnational construction empire. Even smarter was bin Laden's grasp of al-Qa'eda value as a brand in the era of globalization, one which could -- and ultimately did -- survive and even thrive as a decentralized coalition of various militant groups who shared little besides the jihadi component at the core of the group's "brand identity."
For its part, the Taliban is essentially a territorially rooted and "largely ethno-national phenomenon," as the International Crisis Group describes it. It emerged as a coherent force in the early to mid-1990s, with the support of the Pakistani security services, as a loosely aligned movement of Pashtun Afghans, many of whom had studied at religious schools -- "madrasas" -- in or sponsored by Pakistan, or had fought against the Soviets during the latter's occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.
The Taliban's rapid rise to power owed not merely to the movement's radically conservative ideology. It also stemmed from its support among Afghanistan's politically and economically marginalized Pashtun majority, along with its much-publicized war against the large scale corruption that had long plagued Afghanistan's political system and economy. Even many Afghans who opposed its harsh cultural and moral policies accepted that the Salifization of a previously more open and tolerant Afghan Islam was a price worth paying -- at least temporarily -- for the increased security and reduced corruption that initially accompanied the movement's rise to power.
But once in power the Taliban state, or "Islamic Emirate" declared in 1996, proved an abysmal failure. The movement's leaders and rank and file alike proved uninterested and unable to govern, and spent far more time enforcing moral prescriptions of questionable Islamic legitimacy and harboring extremists from around the Muslim world than building the national institutions and infrastructure Afghanistan so badly needed after a decade of brutal war.
When the US invaded and overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001 the "Taliban" again became a rather shadowy and hard to define -- and therefore fight -- entity. Judging its continued strong presence across the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan and into Pakistan's neighboring (and Pashtun dominated) Northwest Frontier Province, the movement continues to appeal to the most marginalized sectors of the two societies.
In this context, it is troubling that Senator Obama, and most of the US foreign policy establishment with him, chooses to describe the Taliban as if it were a clearly defined, purely terrorist organization with little support among Afghans, which can be targeted and fought with a fair degree of confidence by US, and Obama hopes, increasingly European forces. Such a view, which has also been applied to Hamas and Hezbollah, is equally inaccurate in all three cases. This lack of understanding helps explain why all three movements have remained so difficult to defeat by far superior military forces.
If the United States and its allies are to continue the war against the Taliban well into the next decade (or at least administration), It would behoove Senator Obama, and his Republican counterpart, to explain exactly who are the "Taliban" they plan to fight even more fiercely than before. Is there a hierarchical structure with a clear leadership and chain of command that can be identified and targeted? Is every religiously conservative Pashtun who is fighting against the US occupation a "taliban" and therefore a legitimate military target"? What about the far larger number of Afghans who merely support them; are they "enemy combatants?" Are the 78 Afghan civilians killed just during the month of July acceptable "collateral damage" in such a fight?
As important, does the United States and its allies have the right according to the UN Charter and international law to capture, detain and even kill Afghans merely because they are suspected of subscribing to political or religious beliefs that resemble those of the Taliban, or even have fought with them?
These questions might seem pedantic given the commonly perceived urgency of fighting Islamic extremism. But if we consider that (according to the United Nations) as many as 90 percent of American detainees have never involved in anything resembling terrorist activity, the importance of such questions becomes apparent. Moreover, the same slipshod logic that has governed American detention policies has also governed the use of torture, secret renditions and other policies that clearly violate internationally recognized standards of human rights and justice, and in so doing further frustrate the successful prosecution of the war against terror.
It is equally hard to imagine how the military and civilian strategists planning the ongoing war can design appropriate policies for dealing with the roots causes of the continued popularity of the Taliban without being able to answer these fundamental questions accurately.
The good news is that while we may not know exactly who is part of the Taliban, we do have a fairly good idea of what motivates the continuous stream of new recruits to its ranks. The British-based research group the Senlis Council released a report last month based on extensive research in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, which argued that frustration with war and unemployment was underpinning the insurgency against western forces (http://www.senliscouncil.net/modules/publications/iraq_angry_hearts). Similarly, The International Crisis group's just published report, on Taliban Propaganda (http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5589&l=1), argues that the movement is a local product of the anti-Soviet jihad and the civil war that followed, and linked to transnational extremist groups for "mostly tactical rather than strategic reasons but divided over these links internally." It both lacks a coherent agenda, and survives by exploiting local tribal disputes.
In other words, addressing core economic, development and political needs of the majority of Afghans, and their brethren across the Pakistani border, would go a long way towards "draining the swamp" that feeds the malaria of religious extremism. But such a political reclamation process will not succeed as long as America's leaders don't understand the basic, if harsh, rationality underlying the continued salience of the Taliban message: that the movement will remain rooted in Afghan society, and therefore impossible to defeat, unless and until the large scale poverty, inequality, corruption and other endemic societal problems are addressed by the international community and the Afghan leadership.
In the meantime, among the most important shortcomings of the lack of a precise definition of whom the United States and NATO are fighting in Afghanistan is how much more inefficient it has made the prosecution of the war on terror. While thousands of people remain jailed for no reason and tens of thousands more have been killed, most of the admitted masterminds of the September 11 atrocitie -- a crime not just against the American people, but against humanity -- remain at large.
It would be nice if Senators Obama and McCain could enlighten Americans, Europeans, and Afghans, as to how they plan to rectify this problem without repeating the very mistakes that helped create and sustain the Taliban, and al-Qa'eda, in the first place.
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Obama knows what and who the Taliban is, no doubt.
This article makes several mistakes. First, it does not mention the recent killings of Indian diplomats. Significance? The Taliban cannot be explained as an authentic expression of Pashtun ethnicity. In fact the Pakistani Taliban lost elections recently. The Taliban is financed by the ISI to undercut any Indian influence in what Pakistan considers its backyard. Second, Levine forgets that Obama has called for massive aid for Afghanis, including the Pasthuns, but such programs cannot be implemented without some security. There is no reason to believe that Obama also does not agree with Ahmed Rashid that Musharraf has mishandled questions of Pashtun autonomy. So Levine has made Obama's position seem more mlitaristic than it really is. It is in fact fundamentally political and economic. For example. he has only proposed 7000 additional soliders, many of whom would be involved in reconstruction or training the Afghani National Army. Third, Levine is dangerously naive about the threat emanating from the Taliban sanctuaries on Pakistan's side. Ahmed Rashid has traveled there, and he sees that they have the expertise, money and security to pursue weapons of mass destruction. Do remember the disturbing case of A Khan who has already sold nuclear secrets. Obviously the al Qaeda-Taliban terrorist alliance aims on winning Afghanistan and then moving on to Kashmir, hoping most probably to provoke a nuclear first strike by India. Levine would seemingly have the US sit idly by. Thank goodness Obama has more political courage than the naive, pacifist left.
For a less romantic and apologetic understanding of the Taliban,
see this piece by Z Sardar in a recent New Statesmen. Of course
Sardar is correct that the problem can't be solved through the military
alone, but his own depiction makes it as clear as day that the military
force will have to play an important role.
http://tinyurl.com/66j8s7
Well said!
My position is, we had from what i can tell (who knows any more) a clear mission in Afghanastan, that the people who attaced us were their,. We were actually successful in afghanastan, and i truly believe that if we had given it the true attention that it deserved, we would be leaving there by now or have left already. for all i know If president Bush had stopped worring about a country that was not even on the radar for 911, he may have actually caught bin laden, but he chose not to. we had an opportunity to Win in afghanastan, and win i say Win i mean- let those people develope the jobs they need to suceed. Hell the people started being able to go to school, women were able to get jobs, their government was barely off the ground whene almost did an about face. The point of going over their was to get bin laden. Didn't do that. and all that progress that we made, is really slipping away because their is proof that some of those groups are getting stronger, you know why? because we never truly got rid of them, we diverted our attention and there were enough people there to start it up again, not only that they started to recognize that we were stretched to thin and decided to pounce-Afghanastan did not have to become a "War" but when we went to iraq that is exactly what it became.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You Thank You.
This is a point that nearly everyone, in the Corporate Media anyhow, miss.
The Taliban and al Qaida WERE never the same. Yet the media acts like the terms are synonymous.
How many Taliban who have been imprisoned and tortured are legitimate soldiers fighting for their country and government?
Americans have been very ill served by our Media. In the runup to the wars there was NOT ONE SINGLE television show that delved into the political, social or economic history of the nations we were poised to invade and occupy.
Your average American to this DAY probably can't tell you the difference between Shia and Sunni let alone the difference between Pashtun and Hazaras.
And I would bet that many of the so called Taliban are in actuality opium growers and buyers who are resisting the destruction of their business. Or simply Afghani's who simply don't want a central government. resistance to which is a LONG Afghani tradition.
In addition, the beliefs of the Taliban don't seem to be that much different from many of the War Lords we have empowered.
al Qaida on the other hand is a minority or a minority of a minority of Muslim beliefs. Supported by almost no one in the region. Osama Bin Ladin, after all was driven to the Ends of the Earth. Afghanistan.
How can Americans or their leaders make rational decisions when most don't even know who the players are?
I do not think that we need to know all the various Afghan tribes to know that we cannot afford to let the Taliban regain control of Afghanistan. If they were in control again, al queda would have another safe haven.
Certainly, our policy makers should be well schooled in the nuances if only to help insure success. But the basic issue is simple. The Taliban and al queda are not the same, but they are fast friends who will help each other to our great detriment.
No, you are wrong.
The situation is far from simple. The solution will ultimately to make some kind of deal with elements of the Taliban.
By continuing to confuse the two it makes it much more difficult for any politicians to find a solution.
But my other major point is: The media have played the American public as fools. And have failed to do even the most basic teaching of the people and societies of the Middle East.
Countries we now occupy.
That failure is worse than negligence.
P.S. Do you honestly believe that the average Briton in the heyday of Victorian Empire was any where near as ignorant about the people and places of the British empire as the average American is?
Excellent point, but you're missing the real punchline here. The Taliban is a fundamentally Afghan or Pashtun organization, as you point out. But Al Qaeda is a fundamentally Saudi organization, and we will never make any real progress in the War on Terror until we realize that and conduct our national defense policy accordingly.
To drive the point home, you might want to consider the following:
http://www.asecondlookatthesaudis.com
Mark is exactly right. Obama seems to have the same messianic approach to Afghanistan as Bush had to Iraq . He shows little awareness of the history of the North west frontier hill tribes and the futile attempts to "civilise " them made by a stream of foreign occupiers for centuries. Obama's main plan seems to be to send in more troops in an open ended commitment like that Bush originally made in Iraq.. He should be advocating a speedy political settlement with the Pashtun Taliban who will never go away or submit to foreign domination - we have to leave eventually-. they will still be there then -so why waste years of losses and expense.. Given such a political settlement we can then deal with al Qa'eda and whahabism in appropriate ways either using unconventional military force or political pressure according to their location and strength either in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia.
Both Al Qaeda and the Taliban are important in Washington D.C. only to the extent that they remain free, running around and acting kooky. To that extent, they are valuable because the government can make money from them by draining our treasury and transferring that money half a world away where it disappears into thin air.
This one paragraph explains it all vs. many, many dissertations on what is going to work in Afghanistan. No one in Washington cares what is going to work in Afghanistan because as soon as something works in Afghanistan, then the transfer of wealth ceases.
Which is to explain why every chance that has presented itself for the destruction of Al Qaeda or the Taliban or any other similarly kooky group has been passed on and will continue to be passed on.
Ahmadinejad in Iran? He is a veritable goose laying golden eggs all about.
Why waste time trying to discern the differences between Al Qaeda and the Taliban? If both agreed to disagree and then destroyed each other completely tomorrow, the rush would be on to create new kooks, the kookier the better.
What the American people long to address are the 'core economic, development and political needs of the majority of' Americans, not Afghans. But it's a lot harder to loot the treasury while operating here than while operating there, so these longings go unattended.
Eisenhower is now revealed as the foremost prophet of the 20th century.
911 appears to have been masterminded by a Saudi (bin Laden) and carried out by a force of 19 consisting of 15 Saudis, 2 UAE, 1 Egyptian and 1 Lebanese, no Afghanis. The Taliban, a religious group of Afghanis, commited the crime of providing bin Laden asylum. There is no evidence that the Taliban had anything to do with 911. For harboring bin Laden the U.S. invaded and killed thousands of innocent Afghanis, hundreds of U.S. soldiers and expended billions of dollars.
Wow the taliban must be some pretty peaceful people. This entire time I thought they were one of the most violent terrorist groups on the planet. But thanks for pointing out that they are not.
Didn't read the article did you?
Or maybe you have difficulty in reading comprehension.
The Taliban ARE NOT al Qaida.
They were allies but were not the same.
Personally I believe the USA was more than justified in helping overthrow the Taliban. They were harboring Bin Ladin and his crew.
But THEY WERE NOT AND ARE NOT the same.And without that understanding no solution to the violence in Afghanistan is going to be possible.
"911 appears to have been masterminded by a Saudi (bin Laden)" ???
I don't think so. Yes, Bin Laden knew about it, and gave his blessing, but he didn't "mastermind" the attack. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, born in Kuwait, was "the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks".
The fact that no Afghans took part in 9/11 means only none were available at the time or trained specifically for the operation. This is religious movement and NOT a national one. It has more to do with the notion of the ummah - the collective Muslim world which transcends national borders. al Queda is much like HQ of a transnational terror operations. They can provide support in the way of specialized personnel, money and intel.
To paint the Taliban as being some sort of benign peaceful organization and not the bloodthirsty 7th century Islamist fanatics that they are, is just plain idiotic. Everyone suffered in Afghanistan at the hands of the Taliban ESPECIALLY women !!
Everyone in Afghanistan has suffered tremendously under EVERY REGIME in that country since before the Soviet invasion.
I was stalled by your words "and his Republican counterpart". Exactly who might that be? Is there anyone in the repuke party who has even a smidgen of credibility, honour or care?
by counterpart i mean john mccain, the presumptive republican nominee.
I've listened to our military in Iraq make your point: These so-called insurgents need jobs, a stake in life. Their own life, their own choices. I heard Bill Gates recently state that the military is not the "Peace Corps with rifles".
It worries me that Barack is verbally drained through the funnel of the continuation of the Bushwa "solution". (which has proven corrupt, criminal, and generally unappealing)
I do see some parallel with the IRA. The IRA an infamous terrorist group. George Mitchell and slick Willie (a couple of Irishmen themselves) promulgated something.... which however it is annointed has the empiracle evidence of employed lads instead of unemployed terrorists. In a nutshell, more military only will excaserbate the problem.
(Is this really about a natural gas pipeline accross Afgnstan?)
We're long past the point where we can let the appropriate methods be used to stop the specific terrorists we should have been seeking to stop (we were past that point the moment Bush declared war, unfortunately, and deep in the hole when he targeted Iraq for black gold).
Military means are necessary if only because of the opening we've left for terrorists to move in where ordinary people are kicked out, barely scraping by, or joining the cause. Unless we can let the people return in safety, to find the jobs and everything else they need, leaving now cedes terrorists other people's lands, properties, homes, and all else.
Yes, we need to get out; but first we need to get the place to the point where its own people can return in security, or we've simply created as much of a disaster as we've made of Iraq and of the region by wrongly focusing on Iraq.
But once in power the Taliban state, or "Islamic Emirate" declared in 1996, proved an abysmal failure. The movement's leaders and rank and file alike proved uninterested and unable to govern, and spent far more time enforcing moral prescriptions of questionable Islamic legitimacy and harboring extremists from around the Muslim world than building the national institutions and infrastructure Afghanistan so badly needed after a decade of brutal war.
You sure you are not talking about the US government
well, from what i understand, bush and his handlers have deliberately tried to 'shrink the government till it's small enough to drown in a bath tub", or whatever that saying is... the taliban didn't have a government to shrink, but your point about the similar results is well taken. and the religious ideologies of the two have some similarities, that's for sure (although let's not push this analogy too far. the conservative christian leaders of this country are not stoning adulterers and forcing women into burqahs. on the other hand, they seem to have little problem killing tens of thousands of people for no good reason...)
Sorry, you miss the whole objective. Our (and the West's) enemy is Whahabism, originated and still spawned in Saudi Arabia. This primitive, extremist Islamic cult is the root of the Taliban and Al Qaeda phenomena. The nest bed of this self-propagating poison are the madrassas who turn youngsters into automaton fanatics who are brainwashed into thinking killing Infadels (Jews, Christians, Sufis, Hindus, Sikhs, etc.) is a mission guaranteeing paradise and 70 virgins. Nothing else matters.
This poison has to be eradicated or there will be no peace...
agreed. but how do you eradicate the poison? what's the antidote? illegal invasions and large scale civilian casulaties and supporting corrupt regimes--including the saudis. or actually supporting democracy and development, something no US government has done in the middle east in a very long time, if ever.
It seems to me that the antidote is obvious. Get off of oil as much as possible as quickly as possible. I agree, quit supporting corrupt reigmes. In the long term the leaders of those governments do us no favors. As for illegal invasions, that's a tough one. I'm all in favor of having a plan to remove or destroy Pakistan's nukes if an anti-Western govt. ever comes to power there. We don't want a war to happen between India and Pakistan. While not an Arab country we do need to keep Iran from getting a nucleur weapon (if they don't already have one). I like the big carrot & big stick approach to Iran. Better for it to be the US then Israel, that just angers them that much more. Tell Israel no more settlements ( in fact get out of the ones already built) in disputed territory though after that we need to defend Israel. All Arab countries need to recognize Israel's right to exist. Resolution 242!. Have the UN rebuild Iraq with US dollars. Lord knows we owe them. Did I mention the US needs to reduce it's consumption of oil? Why fund both sides on the war of terror.
Although you make a fair argument, I find the title of your article curious. Why not MCcain and the Taliban? Is this another of those bogus subliminal attempts to connect Obama with terrorists?
i was thinking of titling the post "america's taliban" or something like that. ultimately i chose obama bc the piece was written specifically in response to his speech. also, having been burned by clinton's much hyped discourse of 'hope' back in '92, i feel it's important that progressives understand as early as possible that obama is very likely not the savior they imagine him to be, and that if we don't keep sustained pressure on him to live up to his lofty rhetoric, like clinton before him, hi'll likely abandon most of the progressive aspects of his policies once in office and the huge weight of the status quo bears down on him. clinton once told michael lerner, editor of tikkun magazine, that he would have loved to press forward with a far more progressive agenda, but (and i'm paraphrasing from memory here) "where are the people on the streets. i can only go as far as the people will let me push. you want these policies, you need to put enough people in the streets to give me the political space to push for them."
if we just assume that obama will do the right thing and not keep the pressure on him and the congress, i am not very hopeful that he'll be any more successful than clinton was at pushing through a truly progressive agenda, particular vis-a-vis the middle east, where there's so much money and power at stake in maintaining endless war.
Posted July 25, 2008 | 09:02 AM (EST)