(This article is reprinted in its entirety with permission from the author.)

By Bill Harrison

“We have been all over India and we have decided that India isn’t big enough for such as us.”

“We are not little men, and there is nothing that we are afraid of except Drink, and we have signed a Contrack on that. Therefore, we are going away to be Kings.”

British Indian Army Sergeants Danny Dravot (Sean Connery) and “Peachey” Carnehan (Michael Caine) to Rudyard Kipling announcing that they are off to Kafiristan in John Huston’s adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King.

As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan. We need more troops, more helicopters, better intelligence-gathering and more nonmilitary assistance to accomplish the mission there.

Barack Obama in an op-ed appearing in the New York Times on July 14, 2008

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Leaving aside the fact that Barack Obama is not proposing any sort of “new strategy” for Afghanistan, what are the challenges facing the United States, Afghanistan and our NATO partners in stabilizing Afghanistan against a Taliban insurgency allied with al Qaeda that emanates across the border with Pakistan? Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order here.

Tribal map of the region.

The provinces of eastern and southern Afghanistan where most of the trouble is and the sanctuaries for the militants across the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are the realm of the Pashtuns, fiercely independent tribesmen whose resistance to central authority goes back to the time of classical antiquity and Alexander the Great’s inability to bring the area under his control. But while the Pashtuns are uniformly hostile to attempts to control them from afar they are also hospitable to outsiders who come as travelers as is codified in the Pashtunwali, or “Way of the Pashtuns”, their unwritten tribal code. This code governs all forms of Pashtun societal intercourse from the local ruling councils (jirgas) to the conception of honor (nang) and most importantly for our purposes here nanawatey or “truce/asylum”.

We are all now familiar (or should be so) with Osam bin Laden’s “last stand” at Tora Bora in 2001 and his subsequent flight with his band of Uzbek, Chechen and Arab fighters into the FATA back in December of 2001. Not long thereafter a report surfaced in the Washington Post (article no longer available on the web) from an American filmmaker traveling in the region that he encountered foreign militants living openly in the tribal regions as “honored guests“. This would be fully in keeping with the Pashtunwali’s emphasis on giving succor to outsiders provided that they observe tribal customs. Most Americans would be astounded to learn this but until the Soviet war it was quite possible to travel in this region (with connected local escorts, of course) as a Westerner without undue fear as did a friend of mine who was studying Hindi and the local languages and history of the region while we were both graduate students at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s and had traveled there as an undergraduate in the mid 1970s.

In reality the border separating Afghanistan from the FATA is more of an arbitrary division. The Durand Line separating the two has never been accepted in Afghanistan and is merely a British contrivance left over from the days of the “Great Game” in southwest Asia of the mid-nineteeth century. These are Pashtun lands on both sides of this line of demarcation and the Pakistani government and army in Islamabad composed of Punjabis has over the years from time to time encouraged militancy in the area as a form of exerting influence over its neighbor Afghanistan. The Taliban (Pashto for students) originiated in the refugee camps of the FATA during the Soviet-Afghan war and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may or may not be (probably the latter) purged of Taliban-al Qaeda sympathizers with most of this faction allied with the former head of the ISI — Gen. Hamid Gul whose views in this regard should be viewed with alarm.

Under the Musharraf government, Pakistan would make periodic forays into the FATA in brief but bloody engagements with local militants. But the Pakistani army is composed of primarily Punjabi officers and the paramilitary Frontier Corps (which goes back to the famed Khyber Rifles of the British raj) composed of local Pashtuns is poorly equipped and led. Over the past seven years these engagements have brought little in the way of stability to the region or succeeded in neutralizing the troublemakers but they have alienated many of the local tribles. Periodic truces with the militants have accomplished little more. And economic aid projects in the area, of equal importance to security operations, have not really gone forward and planned stepped up US aid to Pakistan in this regard remain mired over questions of possible corruption in Islamabad.

Pashtun tribal soldiers of the “Khyber Rifles” Photo: Wikipedia

Now no one questions the need for additional ISAF forces in Afghanistan. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has made repeated calls for more soldiers from our NATO allies but aside from a battalion of French special forces and the continuing commitment of Danish, Dutch, Canadian and UK soldiers to the spear’s tip in the south and east the rest of NATO continues to sit on its collective hands. Things have gotten so bad in this respect that even former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer has lambasted his fellow Germans and the Merkel government for refusing to allow Bundeswehr soldiers to serve in the fighting area. Nor are things much better on the economic aid front which is just as important as the military effort. At a recent donors conference in Paris in June, while the United States pledged 1/5th of the total $50 billion pledged, the EU contingent’s pledge amounted to a niggardly $770 million.

Notwithstanding the recent spectacular attack that claimed the lives of nine US soldiers, there have been successes in southern and eastern Afghanistan. Aid projects and tribal security have been improved and the militants seldom launch the type of attack mentioned above. Building on the success of similar tactics employed in Iraq, US forces have begun deploying Human Terrain Teams to the area which employ an array of both ’soft” and “hard” power in classic counterinsurgency tactics and strategy.

So while it is clear that what Barack Obama is talking about isn’t any sort of “new” strategy at all the central fact remains that until such time as the Pakistani government alters its approach in the FATA, and indeed its policies in this regard as described by Jim Hoagland yesterday in the Washington Post can best be called delusional, any such beefed up NATO presence across the border is likely to come to very little in solving this problem in the long run. In Vietnam, despite the presence of 500,000 US soldiers and Marines the war effort there even after the change in tactics to “clear and hold” under Gen. Creighton Abrams who replaced Gen. William Westmoreland as MACV CINC in ‘69 and the US incusion into Cambodia as long as North Vietnamese forces were able to use Cambodia and Laos as staging and supply areas there could be no good outcome. At present I am at wit’s end as to offer a suggested plan to get Pakistan off its duff in the FATA or to address the massive problems associated with the growing of opium poppies in both Afghanistan and the FATA that finance much of the instability on both sides of the border and are the source of the world’s heroin supply. If Barack Obama has a plan in this regard, I’m all ears but so far all I’m hearing is the typical lofty and pretty empty rhetoric that isn’t even true as regards recent US actions in the area.

Author’s Note: While the opinions expressed in this piece are mine and mine alone I wish to acknowledge the work of fellow Newsvine members and friends Shaheen Buneri (who reports from the region) and BlaiseP. Their knowledge of the region and its peoples has much to teach us all and I would strongly suggest that fellow Newsviners visit their columns often.

Bill Harrison wrote this article for his column on Newsvine. He has many other great original articles worth checking out. Also, I stumbled the article on Newsvine. If you enjoyed it, please take the time to stumble it as well.