Regional powers need to come together for a peaceful settlement of the conflict
Top intelligence officials of Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan recently met to discuss an anti-ISIS strategy but India wasn’t invited
By M K Bhadrakumar
The wheel has come full circle in Afghanistan. What had first appeared in 1980 as a brilliant brainwave in the thought processes of the late American strategist on the global chessboard (and then US National Security Adviser) Zbigniew Brzezinski deployment of radical Islamist groups as a geopolitical tool to bleed the Red Army in Afghanistan as payoff for the humiliating defeat in the Vietnam War is taking a new avatar. Plainly put, the stunning defeat that the US suffered in Syria will not go unanswered.
This time around, however, a far more brutal form of Islamism than the Afghan Mujahideen of the 1980s is appearing the Islamic State of Khorasan Province. (Khorasan is a historical region that encompasses modern-day Afghanistan, Central Asia and parts of Iran.) To be sure, the regional powers most affected by the IS are circling their wagons Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan. They are profoundly worried that the rough beast from Mesopotamia and the Levant is slouching toward their region to be born. A meeting of top intelligence and security officials of these four countries took place in Islamabad on July 11 to discuss a strategy to meet the threat.
Russia’s state news agency TASS reported that the officials held discussions that “focused on the dangers arising from the buildup of the Islamic State on the Afghan territory” and “reached understanding on the importance of coordinated steps to prevent the trickling of IS terrorists from Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan from where they would pose risks for neighbouring countries”. The report added meaningfully that the meeting “stressed the need for a more active inclusion of regional powers in the efforts to settle the conflict in Afghanistan”.
This last point, which is implicitly addressed to President Trump himself, has an intriguing backdrop to it. It is an open secret that the IS fighters have appeared in Afghanistan following their crushing defeat in Syria at the hands of the Russian-Iranian alliance supporting the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
There have been persistent reports that they were being airlifted to Afghanistan. Russia has repeatedly sought investigation. The former Afghan President Hamid Karzai openly alleges that Afghans have witnessed unmarked helicopters ferrying the IS cadres under cover of darkness. Both Russia and Iran have been alleging brazen US military support for the IS fighters in Syria.
The matter has been raised even in the UN Security Council. But, alas, the US consistently stonewalled, arguing with a straight face that the IS (which in Russian estimation has a strength of 10,000 fighters in Afghanistan) does not pose any serious security threat. Clearly, the meet in Islamabad last Wednesday was an act of sheer despair at the US’ mulish attitude of downplaying the IS surge in Afghanistan lately.
But the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back would have been the dastardly move by the US to invite Saudi Arabia and the UAE to “return” to Afghanistan in a proactive role after a prolonged period of absence. These two petro dollar states used to be the mentors, financiers and philosophers of the Taliban in the 1990s alongside, ironically, American oil companies eyeing the potentials of evacuation of the fabulous untapped hydrocarbon reserves in the newly independent Central Asian states via Afghanistan.
In fact, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were the only two countries (other than Pakistan) to give diplomatic recognition to the Taliban government in Kabul. But then, in an abrupt reversal of policy, a terrible beauty was born following the 9/11 attacks by Osama bin Laden on New York and Washington when the sheikhs ostentatiously distanced themselves from Taliban, fearing American wrath.
In a curious role reversal, the two Gulf allies will now help the US to contain the Taliban. While the UAE, which has experience in fighting hybrid wars (Libya, Yemen, etc.), will join the NATO forces fighting the Taliban, Saudis are useful for de-legitimising the Taliban’s “jihad” from the religious angle and thereby erode the movement’s popular base among the Afghan people steeped in the folklore of traditional Islam.
US Defence Secretary James Mattis personally piloted the project at the highest level in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. In March, the National Security Council in Washington finalised the action plan at a meeting of top security officials from the ‘Quad’ US, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Afghanistan. On June 6, Kabul formally gave approval for deployment of Emirati troops on Afghan soil. On July 10-11, Saudi Arabia hosted in Jeddah and Mecca an international Ulema Conference on Afghanistan.
The Saudi King is the Custodian of the Holy Places and Washington pins hopes that his imprimatur on a fatwa issued by the Jeddah-Mecca conference de-legitimising the Afghan “jihad” and calling on insurgents to join the Kabul government, may sow the seeds of ideological disarray and engineer defections from the Taliban movement.
The bottom line is a Clausewitzean approach of “war by other means” weaken and splinter the Taliban, since the war has been practically lost and a peace process is conditional on meeting the insurgents’ non-negotiable demand of an immediate vacation of US occupation of Afghanistan.
Prima facie, the weakening of the Taliban as such may not be a bad thing. But on the contrary, the spectre that is haunting the regional states today is that the US also has a master plan to have the IS proxy to fill in any vacuum ensuing from Taliban’s retrenchment so that there is an alibi for an open-ended US military presence in Afghanistan and permanent military bases.
How far the Pentagon’s best-laid plans will succeed remains to be seen. Taliban has reacted ferociously by launching a series of attacks Wednesday night, killing dozens of Afghan troops. Meanwhile, much depends on what happens next in the civil war conditions prevailing in US politics too. In particular, how far Trump backs Mattis’ strategy is the key question. The alignments within the Trump administration are in constant flux and there are persistent reports lately that Mattis himself is on a slippery slope. At any rate, Trump is known to disfavour imperial overreach and is on record rejecting an open-ended American military deployment to Afghanistan. Importantly, he prefers a cooperative relationship with Russia.
Therefore, it makes eminent sense that the meet in Islamabad implicitly called on the US, which exercises virtual monopoly over conflict resolution in Afghanistan, to eschew zero-sum mentality and share with the regional powers the political and diplomatic space to work jointly toward a peace process and peaceful settlement that helps counter effectively the looming IS menace.
The writer is a former ambassador.