Review: Ahmed Rashid's Descent Into Chaos

Typically, American books on foreign policy, be they from the right or the left, see every foreign policy endeavor through the eyes of the American political system, tying action half a world away to the sturm and derang of the two-party system here. Very rarely are we treated to books about foreign nations by scholars actually acquainted with those nations and their inhabitants, and as a result we remain fatally detached from the realities of most foreign conflicts.

Ahmad Rashid, however, has lived in Pakistan for the whole of his life, and has journalistic and personal relationships with personalities on both sides of the various conflicts enveloping Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the whole of Central Asia. His ability to elicit frank statements from both Hamid Karzai and members of various Islamic terrorist organizations gives the reader a glimpse of that world rarely offered to the Western Hemisphere. His freedom from the American political system is a definite bonus, as he is under no obligation to artificially tailor all his arguments to suit its bi-polar nature, and is free to simply recount the facts and realities of the situation.

The overwhelming theme that I took away from the book is the continual doublespeak on the part of the ISI and the Pakistani military. Musharraf has welcomed American aid in all its forms -- debt forgiveness, cash, and arms -- while presiding over a nation that has continued its long-standing cozy relationship with Islamic terror.

The Taliban maintained power in Afghanistan in no small part because the ISI allowed it to. Even as the American bombing campaign wore on, the Pakistanis asked for a brief reprieve so that they might escort the ISI agents still aiding the Taliban out of Afghanistan. The Pakistanis have allowed the Taliban safe haven in Waziristan and refrained from turning its members over to NATO forces, choosing instead to collect Arabs and call them al Qaeda. The ISI also believes itself to be combating growing Indian influence in the region and still maintains a vast expanse of madrassas in which to train future Kashmiri militants or fight the Indian presence in Afghanistan.

For its part, the US has for the most part avoided calling Musharraf on any of it, afraid that doing so might result in the loss of the strongest ally in the region. But, as Rashid exhaustively details, Pakistan has remained an ally in name only. The Pakistanis have welcomed American aid and arms willfully, to be sure, but when it comes time to fulfill their end of the bargain they have failed catastrophically.

In Afghanistan Proper, the US chose to fund various warlords in lieu of sending its own troops, resulting in a weak central government and even weaker security. The side project in Iraq not only siphoned off troops, but space-bound intelligence apparatuses as well, leaving the return of the Taliban essentially unchecked for years.

Rashid's book is full of immense detail and exhibits a wealth of knowledge about the region one would be hard-pressed to find in any contemporary American writer. Anyone who looks to better understand the true components of the resurgence of the Taliban and the failure of the Pakistanis to thwart an al Qaeda safe haven owes themselves the purchase of Descent Into Chaos.

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Fumbling in the Dark

Much as a sixteen year old would fumble and grope in the dark when presented with his first potential catch, the overwhelming legacy of the Bush administration's newfound legal and logistical toys is one of incoherency and incompetence. Although the government has had more tools at its disposal, and less incursions from the Constitution, than any previous administration, it has parlayed those advantages into a bumbling policy which invariably fails to heed the reality of world affairs, is prone to distractions, and has accomplished next to nothing, if not in fact overseeing a growth in the virility of terrorism around the world.

Nothing exemplifies this reality more than the thorny relationship with Pakistan, the earliest and most enduring of the international relationships forged after the WTC attacks in 2001, a relationship which brings into clear focus the inability of the Bush administration to perceive any specifics in foreign affairs and its propensity to rely instead on a worldview consisting only of good versus evil, us versus them. This worldview become prohibitive in practice, all but eliminating the ability to discern the difference between the population and leaders of Pakistan and its intelligence apparatus, the ISI.

A top Central Intelligence Agency official traveled secretly to Islamabad this month to confront Pakistan’s most senior officials with new information about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, according to American military and intelligence officials.

The C.I.A. emissary presented evidence showing that members of the spy service had deepened their ties with some militant groups that were responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, the officials said.

[...]

The C.I.A. assessment specifically points to links between members of the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, and the militant network led by Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The C.I.A. has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan, despite longstanding concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks.

It defies credulity to infer that the CIA is just now getting wind of this relationship, but it is not hard to believe that any concerns among the US intelligence structure may well have been downplayed by the Bush administration. Although polarization is a prevailing curse of American politics, it tends to ebb in the area of foreign policy, but the current power structure has seen a reluctance to rely on the career bureaucrats in agencies like the CIA and seek the substitution of analysts and advisers with loyalties closer to Bush's wishes than realities dictate.

The Iraq war cannot be divorced from the American policy toward Pakistan. In order to push for the distraction to the West, the administration needed to portray Afghanistan as under control, and a significant part of that policy was misguided reliance on the efforts of Pakistan and the ISI. Having forced the Taliban and al Qaeda to seek refuge in Pakistan, the US talked up the Pakistanis, assuring the world that the Taliban were sure to find the border region less than hospitable. For all intents and purposes, the policy worked, as the public remained largely unobtrusive on the topic for the better part of 5 years.

The ISI has long associated itself with anti-American militants, whom they utilized to advance their shared aims on targets in Afghanistan and India. Now, the ISI is drunk with American funds and free to pursue those long-standing policies with even greater fervor, and the US as usual is surprised to find that not everyone who accepts funding is necessarily as dedicated to orthodoxy as we would like. To that end, the ISI is believed to have played a significant role in last month's bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.

Aside from using American money to pursue enmity with India, the ISI has been playing both sides of the fence, warning militants in the border region of impending US attacks and "in some cases allowing militants to avoid American missile strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas."

Although this reality is sure to place a strain on US-Pakistani relations, there is of course no expectation that the tap will be turned off. Barbs will be traded for a short period, to be sure, but the situation will soon return to normal, with American funds and arms flowing into Pakistan only to find their way back at the point of an RPG. Throwing money at problems, though, is all the US really attempts to solve them. Examining the underlying causes might require a but of introspection, of self-criticism which in American foreign policy is sacrilege. Thus the wheel continues to roll unabated, America throwing out money and then throwing up its hands when it comes back at it, never sure just what to make of it all, never willing to truly investigate the core of international relations.

All the US is left with for its efforts, half-hearted as they were, is a narco-state in no better shape than it was in 2001. The per-capita, post-war investment in Afghanistan pales in comparison to all other such situations, significantly less than that for post-conflict and post-natural-disaster rebuilding in every other part of the world. Left alone to reconstitute in Pakistan, the Taliban has renewed its assault on Kabul, forcing even more investors to flee along with any Afghans of any intellectual import or promise.

Although it has not happened, even had the Taliban been eliminated the situation would scarcely be different. The specific propagator of violence is of less importance than the arena of economic devastation left in the wake of destruction followed by inattention. Until the US learns to fight the root causes of terrorism in addition to its contemporary perpetrators, it is doomed to remain tied to merry-go-round, with little hope of getting off.

Related:

Surge II: Afghanistan, July 15
Afghanistan: Right War or No, It's Still War, July 21

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What Iraqi Democracy Looks Like

*Update Appended, 7/16 @ 1100*

As I've said before, the only (publicly stated) rationale for the invasion of Iraq still on the table is the drive to establish a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, if only because its the only one not definitively disprovable by facts. (Wherever tangible reality meets the Bush worldview, the latter is brutally swept aside.) That said, there has been scant discussion of the probable outcome of the exercise in Iraqi democracy.

John McCain has made a living out of saying the US must stay in Iraq until 'victory' occurs, though a definition of victory seems perpetually elusive for him. Now Obama, in his desire to slink his way ever closer to McCain in the foreign policy arena has declared that victory is imminent. Yet, like McCain, Obama's vision of victory is founded on a set of circumstances clearly contradicted by facts on the ground (forgive the cliche).

For Mr. Obama, that status quo is close to what he is now calling "victory." In his speech yesterday, he said, "True success will take place when we leave Iraq to a government that is taking responsibility for its future — a government that prevents sectarian conflict, and ensures that the Al Qaeda threat which has been beaten back by our troops does not reemerge. That is an achievable goal if we pursue a comprehensive plan to press the Iraqis to stand up."

Suggesting that a democratic exercise in Iraq would "prevent sectarian conflict" is not a goal to be taken lightly, as the power struggles surrounding elections exacerbate sectarian tensions as much as they quell them. Whereas McCain offers the promise of victory without definition, Obama counters with a vision of success fatally wedded to circumstances not likely to appear.

I've alluded to the tenuous state of the upcoming provincial elections in previous posts, indicating that much of Maliki's recent pushes in Basra, Sadr City and elsewhere have been thinly-veiled power plays meant to affect the results of those elections. Marc Lynch examines other aspects in more detail here:

It appears that the long-anticipated Iraqi Parliament vote on a law governing the provincial elections scheduled for the beginning of October has been postponed until Thursday and probably longer. Parliamentary Speaker Mahmoud al-Mashhadani postponed discussions after the Kurds walked out in protest over the treatment of Kirkuk; leaders from the Shia UIA were reportedly huddling with their Kurdish partners in the governing coalition, trying to reach an agreement on how to proceed.

This isn't a great shock: the government had submitted a multiple-choice draft for the Parliament to debate, leaving the most contentious issues unresolved. It didn't seem likely that the divided and contentious Parliament would quickly arrive at a consensus which eluded Maliki's relatively tight ruling Shia-Kurd coalition....

The issues raised by the provincial election law cut to the heart of competing visions of Iraq's political future. Kurds are fuming over the plans for voting in Kirkuk, which they feel might prejudice the future of the contested area (the three official Kurdish provinces will almost certainly not take part at all in the provincial elections). The question of open vs closed lists may seem technocratic, but will have major implications for voting: many people think that (for better or worse) closed lists strengthen the role of parties at the expense of individual candidates and could heighten the salience of sectarian appeals.

Clearly, more than a few issues, with many of the contentious issues promising to stoke sectarian strife rather than soften the blow, as Obama hopes. As it stands, Iraq is not a centralized government, but a collection of different concentrations of power, a situation not likely to change as a result of the elections. Part of that relationship is the status of Kirkuk, a city which the Kurds feel should be part of their semi-autonomous region, making the prospect of holding elections there a "thorny subject."

Likewise, the use of closed lists, where voters are only given a choice of parties rather than individual candidates, will almost by definition promote sectarian divides. The Sadrists are also barred from participating as a party, leaving them out completely should closed lists be used, and one can imagine that would have some effect on the Mahdi Army cease fire, which has no small bearing on the so-called "success" of the Surge.

Also receiving little attention is the status of the 5 million displaced Iraqis, victims of the years of ethnic cleansing. Unless the election law allows them to vote in their previous areas of residence, the elections would be a de facto codification of that cleansing. Eric Martin, remarking on Lynch's piece, expresses his pessimistic outlook:

The reason for time's inadequacy as a facilitator of resolution stems from the stubbornness of the convoluted and cross-cutting matrix of conflicts that continue to plague Iraq: various groups of Iraqis are battling to determine the political future of their country (unitary state vs. fragmented state, Islamist vs. secular, etc.), to dictate their roles in it (various ethnic/sectarian groups vying for safety, survival, economic and political power) to determine the level of foreign occupation/involvement (American, Iranian, etc.) and to redress crimes and injustices both recent (5 million internal/external refugees, hundreds of thousands dead, etc.) and historical (Shiite/Kurdish suffering at the hands of Saddam). How does more time to discuss the various positions/demands undo that? The answer is, generally, it doesn't.

If that wasn't problem enough, Saddam's VP made an appearance today, taunting not only Bush, but Muqtada al Sadr and al Qaeda, throwing yet another obstacle in the way of the administration's attempts to paint Iraqi resistance as a homogeneous bloc. The taunts also further exemplify the probability that the provincial elections portend of a powder keg of sectarian tensions.

That, essentially, is what Obama is trying to gloss over in saying success is close at hand, and it's surely an aspect of the Iraqi reality that needs more attention paid to it. Obama sees a future with a less-than-perfect democracy, but he ties that to the supposition that any democracy will temper internal conflict. All available evidence, however, points to precisely the opposite conclusion, a reality that should force Obama to explain just how he plans to avoid it.

Empty platitudes pervade American political discourse, sure, but on issues as significant as the Iraqi elections, the public deserves much more. The last 5 years has been an exercise in trading actual understanding of reality for a strong gale of hollow rhetoric, and if the overwhelming success of that tactic doesn't call for a change of course, nothing will. While Obama's definition of 'success' may be short on specifics, at least he deigns to make an attempt. Thus far, McCain has yet to offer even a token milestone for his goal of 'victory.'

*Update*

The fighting has begun to materialize, with Kurdish lawmakers protesting on Tuesday. There is virtually no chance of the election happening before the Presidential elections in November, but how much that affects the American enterprise I'm not sure.


Related:

The Myth of the Surge, March 27
Changing the Rules of the Game, April 1

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More Bad News on the Real Terror Front

The New York Times is reporting that the Pakistani government has grown weary of the United States' bungling of the war in Afghanistan and has scaled back attempts to help prevent cross-border raids from the FATA region.

Pakistani officials are making it increasingly clear that they have no interest in stopping cross-border attacks by militants into Afghanistan, prompting a new level of frustration from Americans who see the infiltration as a crucial strategic priority in the war in Afghanistan.

This comes after a March visit with Pakistani officials by Admiral Eric Olsen in which he was told that the US was not welcome to conduct cross-border raids of its own. Concurrently, the new leaders of Pakistan have called off raids of their own in a renewed effort to negotiate with militants in the tribal areas.

Pakistani officials aren't pulling any punches:

“Pakistan will take care of its own problems, you take care of Afghanistan on your side,” said Owari Ghani, the governor of North-West Frontier Province, who is also President Pervez Musharraf’s representative in charge of the neighboring tribal areas.

Mr. Ghani, a key architect of the pending peace accord, believes along with many other Pakistani leaders that the United States is floundering in the war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, he said, should not be saddled with America’s mistakes, especially if a solution involved breaching Pakistan’s sovereignty, a delicate matter in a nation where sentiment against the Bush administration runs high.

“Pakistan is a sovereign state,” he said. “NATO is in Afghanistan; it’s time they did some soldiering.”

As to the proposed peace accord, the Americans are unlikely to greet it kindly. Aside from halting Pakistani efforts to eliminate militants, it also makes no mention of stopping forays into Afghanistan by the rebels.

The situation is basically thus: The US is being discouraged from launching its own raids, the Pakistanis have grown tired of doing NATO's job, and any peace deal undertaken will not stipulate that cross-border attacks on NATO troops be halted.

While the US military is concentrated in Iraq perpetuating a local war, it has abandoned Afghanistan and allowed a global conflict to fester in its eastern ranges: "The Americans specifically mentioned their concern that Qaeda operatives in the tribal areas were preparing an attack on the United States, [Afrasiab Khattak] said."

Far from making America safer, the Iraq war has allowed danger to reconstitute and simmer unmolested while simultaneously paving the way for an Iranian-led Shite swath across the Middle East.

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Calling Their Shots

The ever-elusive Osama bin Laden has just released a new tape to al Jazeera in which he calls Iraq the "perfect base to set up the jihad to liberate Palestine."

I'm putting the over/under on days it takes John McCain or the administration to completely misinterpret history and use this as a reason our occupation of Iraq is necessary at two.

While anyone with a basic understanding of history and the region will instantly understand that said base was created by the United States and that as long as foreign forces occupy their soil there will be no peace.

As long as Saddam was in power, bin Laden utilizing Iraq as a jumping-off point would have been impossible. It is only into the vacuum created by the US forces that al Qaeda or other groups can slip into. One need only recall how bin Laden obtained the position he's in in the first place. The United States helped drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in the '80s and the Taliban filled the vacuum, creating a safe harbor for terrorism and bin Laden.

Yet, the President and his cronies don't see things in that light. They refuse to acknowledge the correlation between the US occupation and the insurgency. To them, that one is the root cause of the other is sacrilege. Instead, they continue to insist that we must stay until the insurgency comes to a halt, illustrating a willfully-blind belief that cessation is possible without vacation.

In that light, I give the administration or John McCain-whichever strikes first-two days at most to say something to the effect of, "just the other day, bin Laden himself said that Iraq would make a good base for terrorism against our friends and allies. We must not let that happen." And no one will stand up and point out that that sanctuary was created by the same people who decry its existence.

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The Missing Link

The lead up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 was rife with contradictions, misdirection, pandering to innate fears and outright misrepresentation of facts. As the Bush administration reluctantly tried to give an air diplomacy and present a forthright case for war, it ran through an almost-slapstick comedy of errors and erratic ricochets between various attempted justifications for invasion. Five years on, it has become increasingly clear that the justifications were largely a publicity stunt undertaken begrudgingly by an administration that fells it answers to no one and continues to trade in aggregate deception and rhetorical misdirection.

Among the various reasons for invasion given by the Bush administration were the existence of WMDs in Iraq, the intolerable oppression of the Iraqi people, numerous violations of UN resolutions by Saddam (of course, in this instance the UN was seen as legitimate by Bush), and a baseless allegation of a formal connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. The failure to find any WMDs has been widely documented. That the United States is close allies with plenty of oppressive Islamic regimes (read: Saudi Arabia) became a cumbersome reality when testing the waters with that line of reasoning. The public disdain for the UN by the administration made its sudden reliance upon it seem more than a little disingenuous.

What's left but to conflagrate a fear in the American people that the man responsible for the death of thousands on September 11, 2001 was still in power and capable of even more. Bereft of evidence for its case, the administration relied on empty rhetoric and deceptive end-runs around the intelligence community.

September 2001: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States� The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence."

As other justifications were knocked aside by overt reality, the administration gravitated to others, such as the installation of democracy, but still held on to its insistence that there was a link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Really, they had to keep up the charade as they still do in order to lump Operation Iraqi Freedom in with the larger War on Terror. This singular claim is all the administration has in its arsenal to claim that the Iraq war was part of, and not a distraction from, the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Enter the recently-released (well, sort of) report on the accounting of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured from the deposed regime which concludes that there was in fact no formal relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and certainly no active involvement by Saddam's regime in the attack on the World Trade center. It is important to note, because it will be seized upon by the right, that the report absolutely does not suggest that Saddam did not have links to terror. Much of the Iraq Perspective Project's report detailed the various and widespread terrorist groups supported by Saddam both with money and training. It also illustrates the overarching structure surrounding the program. To take away from this report that Saddam and terror were strangers would take an enormous suspension of literacy on the part of the reader.

What the report does say is that Saddam's association with terror was regional in nature and concentrated around achieving his own political aims. Moreover, the report states that the most frequent target of his terrorism were Iraqis, both at home and abroad. Cooperation with groups tied to bin Laden (who had several front groups other than al Qaeda) was undertaken by Iraq insofar as "that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision." So, essentially, Saddam's not going to shy away from supporting an al Qaeda front group if they want to bomb American or Israeli targets in the region or disrupt oil exports, but this support was almost entirely monetary in nature and somewhat tacit. It was not in any way long-term collaboration on a project the size and scale of the WTC attack.

Speaking of a long-term relationship between bin Laden and Hussein, the IPP states:

Both wanted to create a single powerful state that would take its place as a global superpower.

But the similarities ended there: bin Laden wanted-and still wants to-restore the Islamic caliphate while Saddam, despite his later Islamic rhetoric, dreamed more narrowly of being the secular ruler of a united Arab nation. These competing visions made any significant long-term compromise between them highly unlikely. After all, to the fundamentalist leadership of al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of "apostate" regime-a secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.

Considerable operational overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the regional groups involved in terrorism. Saddam provided training and motivation to revolutionary pan-Arab nationalists in the region...That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean
they saw themselves in that light.

Empasis mine

If it had characterized the relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq as a fleeting one borne of a common enemy in the United States, the Bush administration would be correct in its assertions and this report wouldn't be getting the press it's receiving. But that isn't the case they've made.

In order to rope Iraq under the War on Terror umbrella, the administration has baldly claimed that Hussein played a significant role in the planning and execution of the 2001 attack, and that is a position which is impossible to undertake given the documents reviewed for the IPP's publication. It's important to realize that the basis for the writings are primary sources from Saddam's own regime and not intelligence reliant upon un-vetted or biased sources.

One would expect that the release of this information will not be accompanied by a lowering in the tone of the rhetoric coming out of the White House. Quite to the contrary, it has already elicited a defensive response customary to the administration marked by refusing to release the report online and launching a PR campaign in the hopes of downplaying or outright mis-characterizing its conclusions. But there is no mistaking the obvious. The Bush administration's case for war in Iraq was based entirely on an endless stream of empty rhetoric backed by a brazen mis-representation of facts and outright lies. That they still cling to dis-proven tenets of a false pretext should surprise no one but enrage all.

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