International Herald Tribune
October 30, 2001

This War Can't Be Won if Pakistan Dictates the Rules

WASHINGTON The Bush administration has pursued a Pakistan-centered policy toward the war in Afghanistan. It seeks a political solution that will not offend an ally, Pakistan's nimble leader Pervez Musharraf, or his allies, the Pashtun tribes that have supported the Taliban. This policy has been driven in part by the specter of a nuclear-armed Pakistan descending into an Islamic revolution and by a fear that General Musharraf is the last wall against the fundamentalist hordes.

Unfortunately, this Pakistan-centered approach is likely to do the opposite of what Richard Haass, Secretary of State Colin Powell's special Afghan coordinator, intends.

If Osama bin Laden, mollah Omar and the Taliban power structure are still alive and kicking in six months, the U.S.-led coalition will probably have lost the battle in the eyes of the Middle East's ordinary Muslims. We could see Pakistan become even more of a haven for Islamic radicalism.

Fortunately, the United States does not have to get stuck in this "pro-Pakistani" tar pit. A war is always a work in progress, and comments by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about increasing military support to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance may finally be translated into deliveries of Russian and Uzbek Soviet-era tanks and helicopters, which are essential for any successful anti-Taliban war effort.

The increased tactical bombing in coordination with the Northern Alliance offers the hope that Washington (or at least the Pentagon) is beginning to understand that an anti-Taliban victory among the Pashtuns is very unlikely unless preceded by a clear-cut military victory of the Northern Alliance in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat and Sheberghan.

If the months pass and bin Laden and Omar remain alive, and the Pashtun power base behind the Taliban does not fracture, the Bush administration will more acutely understand that the State Department's desire to work out in advance a post-Taliban game plan works against the more important military and strategic objective of actually waging an effective ground war.

Which means, first and foremost, annihilation of the Taliban's fighting forces. That would end the Taliban state. We should not be surprised to have so far seen few Pashtun defections to the Northern Alliance or to General Musharraf's "new" Pakistan. The Taliban hard core are numerous. The ideological elixir of Omar and bin Laden is seductive, and true believers don't switch sides in difficult times.

More important, the U.S. war against terrorism in Afghanistan is not yet really serious, at least from the Afghan perspective. We know this to be true just by listening to Taliban spokesmen. Their announced casualty figures, which are probably exaggerated, have remained quite low - hundreds here and there.

If the coalition is serious about intimidating, let alone destroying, the Taliban, how can it be that they still routinely wage offensive operations against the Northern Alliance? Does condign vengeance for 6,000 dead really now rest with the "formerly" pro-Taliban Pakistani intelligence service and the omnicompetent CIA trying to find some covert way of getting Pashtun Afghans to switch sides? Americans may not like thinking about vengeance (it wasn't a problem for their fathers and grandfathers after Pearl Harbor), but this isn't true for the denizens of the Middle East. The capacity to inflict vengeance is there an essential element of power and dominion.

If the coalition does not scorch all those in the Middle East who gave aid to Qaida, it will mercilessly belittle itself before men who have an acute sense of the jugular.

The Clinton administration repeatedly made the cardinal error of thinking that others saw America as it wanted them to see America, of defining crime and punishment by oh-so-civilized modern standards.

After bin Laden nearly sank the destroyer Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000, the administration solemnly promised with clenched teeth to track down those responsible, but otherwise did nothing. Does it now, after Sept. 11, really seem inhuman to suggest that at a minimum the Clinton administration should have blasted the Taliban front lines for a month as a token repayment for the attack on a U.S. warship?

As the war against terrorism drags on and becomes the protracted battle that the administration keeps warning us about, will America become more or less inclined to use awe-inspiring military force - the only coin of the realm in the Middle East? The State Department fears a "power vacuum" in Afghanistan, yet it is exactly a power vacuum for which Washington should strive. Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Sheberghan and Herat - the four key points of northern Afghanistan - should fall as quickly as possible so that the coalition can clearly signal to the Afghan Pashtuns that a price must be paid for the Taliban's mistakes.

They must know that the geopolitical world is changing rapidly and irreversibly, that the peoples behind the Northern Alliance - the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shi'ite Hazara, who together constitute a majority of Afghanistan's population - will successfully assert on the battlefield, and in any national assembly of elders, that Taliban supremacy is over.

Sooner rather than later, Washington needs to wean itself from its Pakistani dependence. America can't help Pakistan, which is a country full of America's friends, by wishfully hoping that General Musharraf is a closet Ataturk.

America will help neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan by indulging Pakistani preferences among the Afghans. They have been and will remain irreconcilable with America's own.

If the West allows itself to be blackmailed because of fear of chaos in a nuclear-armed Muslim country, then it will surely get blackmailed repeatedly. Even our Pakistani friends would be hard pressed not to take us to the cleaners again and again.

The Talibanization of Pakistan will stop only when the Taliban in Afghanistan have been extirpated. America's enemies in the Middle East must see that it is dead serious about eradicating in Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the Middle East, those who have drawn American blood. If bin Laden, Omar and their Taliban cohorts are still alive come next spring producing videocassettes trenchantly dissecting American weakness and the immorality of America's Muslim "allies," then America will have hell to pay. No sane Muslim in the Middle East would then want to ally himself with it. No non-Muslim, either.

The writer, a former CIA officer who specialized in the Middle East, is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly Magazine. This article is adapted from a longer version in the current issue of The Weekly Standard.