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WHY SHOULD THERE BE AN AFGHANISTAN? |
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Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler
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Thursday, 01 July 2010 |
Last week, we learned that Afghanistan
is The Doormat of
Empires. Yet the ignorant myth of
the mighty invincible Afghan keeps getting repeated - even by conservative
writers who really ought to know better.
Washington Times columnist Jeff
Kuhner is an example, who has proclaimed (6/24) that Petraeus is "doomed to
fail," that "the jihadist iceberg is about to sink the American juggernaut,"
because:
Afghanistan
is not Iraq. It
is the graveyard of empires - a nation whose rugged terrain and collection of
disparate warlords and tribes is ideally suited for guerrilla warfare. The
vaunted Soviet Red Army was crushed in the 1980s. Imperial Britain
was defeated - not once, but twice - during the 19th century. The reason: They
got dragged into protracted wars of attrition. Eventually, the fierce,
primitive mountains, caves and fighters of Afghanistan
wore down much superior forces, slowly bleeding them to death.
This is ridiculously not true. Kuhner has obviously neither been to Afghanistan
nor studied its actual history but is simply repeating memorized slogans. Thus he asks, "Who lost Afghanistan?"
as if this is preordained. Let's ask a
different question instead: "Why should
there be an Afghanistan
at all?"
Afghanistan
is a problem, not a real country. It is
a pain in the world's ass. The solution
to the problem is not a futile effort of "nation-building" - that effort is doomed to fail - it is
nation-building's opposite: get rid of
the problem by getting rid of the country.
It's a salvage operation - carve the wreck up and parcel it out to its
neighbors.
Which means we first have to look at the neighbors. The problem of Afghanistan
cannot be solved in isolation but within its geopolitical context. Those neighbors are: Iran,
Pakistan, Tajikistan,
Uzbekistan, and
Turkmenistan. You can't really count China's
tiny roadless border at the tip of the Wakhan Corridor.
Afghanistan has a 19th century raison d'état - it was created quite
specifically and for no other reason than to be a buffer state between the
British Empire in India and the Russian Empire in Central Asia.
That rationale shifted into a 20th century
context of the Cold War between America
and the Soviet Union - but with the breakup of the Soviet
Union, the rationale has in the 21st century been
rendered totally obsolete.
The world is a better place, clearly and objectively,
because the Soviet Union no longer exists. The world will be a better place if Afghanistan
no longer exists. Just as what ended the
Cold War was the disintegration of the "Union" of Soviet
Socialist Republics,
so the War in Afghanistan
will end with Afghanistan's
disintegration.
There will be new problems afterwards, of course - just as
the end of the Soviet Union was not the end of
history. But let's get rid of this
problem now, this war now, this threat from Moslem crazies now. How to do so begins with the Tajiks.
The Brits created Afghanistan
in the 19th century as a Pushtun Empire - Pushtuns ruling the other
ethnic peoples in the country. Indeed,
"Afghan" is a Pushtun word, another name Pushtuns apply to themselves.
Today, Pushtuns are way less than half of the population -
12.5 out of 30 million - yet they continue to dominate both the government and
the Taliban. The Taliban is essentially
a Pushtun movement.
Ironically, the Afghan Mujahaddin who fought the Soviet
Union in the 1980s were not. The Muj - the ones that did most of the
actual fighting - were Tajik. The main
Muj group was called Jamiat whose
leaders, commanders, and fighters were Tajik - such as Burhunuddin Rabbani,
Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Ismail Khan.
There were Pushtun Muj groups that fought well, like Harakat with commanders like Qari Baba
Taj Mohammad - but the largest Pushtun Muj group were the Hezbis led by Gulbuddin Hekmaktyar, who did no fighting at all
except against other Muj. The CIA gave
most of its money to Gulbuddin.
Tajiks are well over a quarter of Afghans, over 8 million
out of 30. The majority live in the
north of the country, where Afghanistan
and Tajikistan
share 750 miles
of border.
In the capital of Tajikistan,
Dushanbe, the most prominent
monument is to the country's national hero and founder of the Tajik nation,
Ismail Somani (ruled 892-907). The Somanid Empire he founded at its peak in
the 10th century contained all of present-day Afghanistan
and Tajikistan,
plus most of Uzbekistan
and the eastern half of Iran: over one million square miles.
One quarter of the Somanid Empire was thus composed of
present-day Afghanistan,
for it is a quarter-million square miles ( a bit smaller than Texas,
which is 268,000 sq. mi.). Afghan and
Tajikistan Tajiks speak the same Dari dialect of Persian, and most all ascribe
to the Sunni version of Islam.
The president of Tajikistan,
Emomali Rahmon, is encouraging a Tajik cultural revival, which includes
memories of a Somanid "Greater Tajikistan."
Yet he is a secular Moslem who despises Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and
radical Islam in general. He is not
itching for war, and it would come as a shock to him if the US broached the
possibility of expanding his borders to the Hindu Kush - but it would be a
fantasy dream come true for him and his country.
Currently, Tajikistan
is the poorest of the five Central Asian "Stans" that came out of the USSR
(the other four: Kyrgyzstan,
Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan,
and Uzbekistan). The population is only 7.5 million, 80% of
whom are Tajik. That is, there are 6
million Tajiks in Tajikistan
and 8 million Tajiks in Afghanistan.
Adding the latter to the former would increase the Tajik
population of Tajikistan
by 133% - plus give the poorest Stan a major share of the trillion dollars'
worth of mineral wealth the Pentagon claims Afghanistan
has.
(One quid pro quo of the deal would be for US firms to get
priority for resource extraction.)
So getting Tajikistan
to accept Tajik northern Afghanistan
would by a laydown. What about the two
other countries on the north?
Uzbekistan's
Afghan border only runs 85 miles. To the south of it live a bit more than 2.5
million Uzbeks. The Uzbek area of Afghanistan
contains oil and gas. Dictator Islam
Karimov would be overjoyed to be offered it.
Yes, he's a dictator, but he has zero tolerance for Moslem crazies. You can count him in on the deal.
Even though Turkmenistan's
Afghan border runs about 450 miles,
it's mostly uninhabited wasteland. Less
than a million or about 900,000 Turkmen live in the region. The leader of Turkmenistan
is an odd duck dictator, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamadov. Nonetheless, no need to antagonize him by
excluding him - he'll jump at the deal.
You can also bet the Afghan Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen would
love to get out of Afghanistan's
Dodge. They are sick of Pushtun
corruption and tyranny, whether from Kabul
or the Taliban.
So far, so easy. Next
is Iran. Afghanistan's
border with Iran
runs 580 miles
- but although eastern Iran
is ethnic Persian there are almost no Persians in Afghanistan. Western Afghanistan is
mostly Tajik, as is Herat, the
largest city in the region. So there is
no reason to carve up Afghanistan
for Iran's
behalf.
That said, Iran
- or rather the Mullah Regime that runs it - is a major part of the problem,
and not just in Afghanistan
but throughout all of southwest Asia. Thus one necessary - necessary - condition of
a strategy to solve the problem of Afghanistan
is to effect regime change in Iran.
The "Green" (for the color of Islam, not eco-greenie)
democracy movement in Iran
is deep and widespread, but not strong enough to overcome regime
brutality. The only way to catalyze
regime change in Iran
is with a military Decapitation Strike conducted by the Israelis with US
assistance.
The resultant chaos after the destruction of the Pasdaran
(Revolutionary Guards) and Basij (thug militia) centers, communications and
control centers, the Presidential Palace in Tehran, etc. - striking at the
heart of the regime with minimal civilian casualties - would enable democracy
forces to seize control, and no more Mullah Regime.
Okay - now for the core of the problem: Pakistan. It's not a real country either. It's a Punjabi Empire. Punjabis comprise 45% of Pakistan's
177 million or about 80 million, and they are the business/military elite. Their biggest problem, other than maniacal
hatred for India,
is the 27 million Pushtuns among them, primarily along the Afghan "border."
That is, the Durrand Line of the 1600 mile-long Afghan-Pak
border divides the Pushtuns in half.
Thus the great Pak fear of an independent "Pushtunistan" with the loss
of the western third of their country.
Well, as the Forum's Joe Katzman would advise, let's look at this as a
feature, not a bug, and use it to solve the problem.
Our problem in Afghanistan
is essentially the creation of Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence agency or ISI, or
"government-within-a-government." The
ISI created the Taliban after their boy Gulbuddin couldn't form a government in
Kabul in the mid-1990s. Their creation is now slipping beyond their
control and will create their Pushtunistan nightmare unless we win this war.
The ISI and the government in Islamabad
must insist that the Af-Pak border is real - but this provides the Taliban with
a Pak sanctuary that we cannot violate except by drones. This conundrum has got to go. So we must present the Paks with a choice: either we create an independent Pushtunistan,
carving half of it out of your country - or you expand your borders to include
all of Pushtunistan, absorbing eastern and southern Afghanistan.
Adding 12 to 13 million Afghan Pushtuns would bring the
total Pushtun population in Pakistan
to half that of the Punjabis, about 40 million.
There are only two ways for the Paks to handle this. The Punjabi elite can actually democratize
and relinquish full control - or they can call in their buddies, the Chinese.
Offer the Chicoms a lion's share of the mineral wealth in
what was Pushtun Afghanistan
and is now part of Pakistan,
and they will waste little time disposing of any troublesome Taliban left after
ISI support is cut off. No ROEs for
them.
Skye on the Forum provided an example: exterminate any Taliban hiding out in
mountain caves and tunnels with white phosphorus: Fly an expendable RPV with a 100 pound white phosphorous warhead
into a cave and not only does no one get out alive, no one will be able to use
that cave for quite a while. WP is
neurotoxic and can be absorbed through the skin. Exploded in a cave with limited
oxygen, much unburned WP will be left covering every surface. Nasty stuff,
which Chicoms will have no qualms using.
Believe it or not, American soldiers are right now as you read
this risking their lives providing security for the multi-billion-dollar Aynak
copper mine south of Kabul deep in
Taliban country - which is owned and operated by the Chinese. Chicom soldiers can do this from now on.
In sum: Karzai and a
corrupt Kabul government is only a
proximate problem, and it will not help one whit to replace him and it with
some other central klepto-government.
The basic problem is the obsolescence of Afghanistan
as a nation-state.
Our basic goal must not be to build a new improved version
of this nation-state - for that goal is indeed doomed to failure. Our goal must be to ensure that this place is
no longer a threat to us, no longer can be a launching pad for terrorist
atrocities against us. The best way to
remove that threat is to remove the nation-state itself: northern and western Afghanistan
to Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
and Turkmenistan; eastern and southern Afghanistan
to Pakistan.
The US
(along with India
and just maybe Russia)
can assist the three Stans in this absorption - but with no Taliban and
agreeable populations, this has a quite good chance to go pretty smoothly. The Chicoms can assist the Paks in absorbing
and consolidating all of Pushtunistan.
The price we must extract from the Chicoms for allowing
access to Pushtun Afghan mineral wealth and consolidating Pakistan
as their client-state is their guarantee to exterminate the Taliban and Moslem
terrorist threat there. They have a good
track record of doing just that in the Moslem areas of China.
One addendum is that a majority of Pushtuns would agree that the
Afghan carve-up is a good deal for them as well - for at the price of losing
the Tajiks et al, they are no longer divided but united. They can dream of an independent Pushtunistan
- and how they try to effect this is now a Chicom problem, not ours.
One addendum more regards central Afghanistan,
a region called the Hazarajat because it's peopled by descendants of Genghiz
Khan's Mongols called Hazaras. They are
Shia Moslem and number (together with Sunni Hazaras called Aimaqs) about 4
million or 13% of Afghans. Since they
bear an extreme antipathy towards the Taliban and Pushtuns in general, most
likely they would opt to join Tajikistan.
Last Saturday (6/26), the New York Times ran a revelatory
story headlined Overture
to Taliban Jolts Afghan Minorities.
Here's the key excerpt:
Talks between Mr. Karzai and the Pakistani leaders
have been unfolding here and in Islamabad
for several weeks, with some discussions involving bestowing legitimacy on
Taliban insurgents.
"Karzai is giving Afghanistan
back to the Taliban, and he is opening up the old schisms," said Rehman Oghly,
an Uzbek member of Parliament and once a member of an anti-Taliban militia. "If
he wants to bring in the Taliban, and they begin to use force, then we will go
back to civil war and Afghanistan
will be split."
The deepening estrangement of Afghanistan's
non-Pashtun communities presents a paradox for the Americans and their NATO
partners. American commanders have concluded that only a political settlement
can end the war. But in helping Mr. Karzai to make a deal, they risk reigniting
Afghanistan's
ethnic strife.
Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, said he was worried about "the Tajik-Pashtun divide that has been so
strong." American and NATO leaders, he said, are trying to stifle any return to
ethnic violence.
"It has the potential to really tear this country
apart," Admiral Mullen said in an interview. "That's not what we are going to
permit."
Trapped in a 19th century thought-box, Mullen
doesn't grasp that it's exactly what we should not only permit, but should work
to achieve as the solution to this war.
Petraeus is savvy enough not to be in such a box, and has
the moxie to effect what could be called the Dissolution Solution to Afghanistan. He's also canny enough to persuasively pitch
it to Zero as his (Zero's) way to win the war and quickly, so our troops are
home and he can have a victory campaign in 2012.
The diploweenies in our State Department will get the
vapors. Too bad. Do what you're told or be assigned to the
consulate in Malabo, Equatorial
Guinea.
It's time to win, time to get rid of the problem and threat of Afghanistan,
time to end the necessity of putting our soldiers in harm's way there.
It's time to ask, Why should there be an Afghanistan? It's time for the Afghan Dissolution
Solution.
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