Dexter Filkins wrote was can only be called—per Péter Marton‘s formulation—a must-read. It is worth putting all else aside to read it. It is rare a piece of journalism from the NWFP manages to get both access to some of the main players while avoiding the annoying self-aggrandizement of playing up the danger while repeating little more than platitudes (I’m looking at you, Janine di Giovanni).
I find it hard to discuss this without gushing: it is a work of exception efficiency, summarizing two decades of difficult morass for a mass audience, without dumbing down any of the region’s horrid complexities. One part in particular, however, stood out for me:
“The government cannot do anything to us, because we are fighting the holy war,” he said. “We are fighting the foreigners — it is our obligation. They are killing innocent people.” Namdar’s aides, one of whom spoke fluent English, looked at him and shook their heads to make him speak more cautiously. Namdar carried on.
“When the Americans kill innocent people, we must take revenge,” he said.
Tell me about that, I asked Namdar, and his aides again shook their heads. Finally Namdar changed his line. “Well, we can’t stop anyone from going across” into Afghanistan, he said. “I’m not saying we send them ourselves.” And with that, Namdar raised his hand, declining to offer any more details.
As Filkins go on, we see there are three general groups of militants in Pakistan: those who send fighters to Afghanistan, those who focus on Pakistan or Kashmir, and al-Qaeda. More importantly, Filkins pointedly notes that they are separate movements, with different goals and even methods—it is just that their circumstances happen to have converged. This is a concept some people have mocked me for stating before, but seeing it again brought up in a long-form piece is not just satisfying, it should be highlighting just how dangerous our new forays into Pakistan are.
It is not inappropriate to say we are at war with a not-insignificant percentage of Pakistan’s citizens, even if we are not yet at war with the state itself (and probably won’t be, now that Mr. Ten Percent is running things). But figuring out exactly which of those citizens we are at war with is vitally important, and one I don’t yet trust our government to do reliably—in part because there is no fool-proof way of ensuring the “right” bad guys get killed by U.S. bombs and SOF. This is because, it is important if unpopular to state, all the chips are stacked against us: our mistakes are magnified, our successes ignored. It means we have to try that much harder to be as close to perfect as possible, which is a standard no one can really meet. And it requires looking at ways of undermining these militant leaders without bombs or guns or raids or torture—it requires a socio-political solution, one no one has yet come up with.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.
{ 5 comments }
This is because, it is important if unpopular to state, all the chips are stacked against us: our mistakes are magnified, our successes ignored. It means we have to try that much harder to be as close to perfect as possible, which is a standard no one can really meet. And it requires looking at ways of undermining these militant leaders without bombs or guns or raids or torture—it requires a socio-political solution, one no one has yet come up with.
Sure, it requires a socio-political solution, but at the smaller scale of individual operations US and other militaries need to *train* for fighting insurgency without heavy artillery and air support. i.e. the individual infantryman has to accept a higher risk to his life in order to create a perception of being on the same side as the civilians and not against them.
I sure hope the chaps on ground dont think of themselves as modern day Alexanders. That would be a disaster for US policy in Afghanistan.
See the example of how Indian army has been tackling insurgency in Kashmir and Assam. Its do-able but requires a completely different type of training. I was hoping the Allies would apply the lessons of getting spread out too thin from Iraq, in Afghanistan as well, but they dont seem to be.
It’s probably not so much the individual infantryman but rather the people back home that shy away from high casualty numbers. That’s especially true in Europe and often leads to artillery and CAS applied too liberally.
I fully agree on the necessity of a socio-political solution, in the case of AFG as well as in general in what’s been termed “The Long War”. Military power alone won’t solve these problems. The latter, however, seems to appeal more to decision makers than long-term measures.
Joshua,
How could you have left out this gem from Dexter Filkin’s article:”“We created the Taliban,” Nasrullah Babar, the interior minister under Benazir Bhutto, told me in an interview at his home in Peshawar in 1999. “Mrs. Bhutto had a vision: that through a peaceful Afghanistan, Pakistan could extend its influence into the resource-rich territories of Central Asia.”
The Taliban were supposed to be a tool with which Pakistan would influence Central Asia? Can that be true? If one listens to Ahmed Rashid, one gets the impression that it’s the Uzbek militants that try to influence Pakistan.
al, I share your opinion of Rashid. But frankly, it’s sort of common knowledge the ISI helped to create the Taliban, at least the form of the Taliban that swept the country (the actual movement has its roots in some mujahideen groups in the 80s, and of course the horros of 1994-era Kandahar play a role as well).
Zahid Hussein and Steve Coll have both written better histories of how the Taliban came about, even if they rely on Rashid’s work. I’d quibble at placing sole blame on Bhutto, since Hussein helps to illustrate how politically weak she was in 1994, but still. The point isn’t really wrong.
Filkins article was BS. I talked to his fixers in Peshawar. He met most people in Peshawar. Some were of questionable value. Went into Khyber Agency for an afternoon and then drove the hell out like a little girl. I would question what ANY Western journalist has to write about that region. Sexy cover stories and compelling narratives overtake the quest for fact and truth.