OP-ED: To Beat Al Qaeda, Look to the East, By SCOTT ATRAN, New York Times, December 12, 2009
Very interesting piece that goes along with the notion, long promoted here, that a successful endgame will invariably result in some level of autonomy for the Pashtun inside Afghanistan, if not a soft border concept that would admit there really is no border worth mentioning among the Pashtun spread across Afghanistan and NW Pakistan (where their autonomy has long been encapsulated in the very concept of the "frontier areas" that are considered different, in ruling terms, from the rest of the country).
The end section is the best:
THE secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and the special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, suggest that victory in Afghanistan is possible if the Taliban who pursue self-interest rather than ideology can be co-opted with material incentives. But as the veteran war reporter Jason Burke of The Observer of London told me: "Today, the logical thing for the Pashtun conservatives is to stop fighting and get rich through narcotics or Western aid, the latter being much lower risk. But many won't sell out."
Why? In part because outsiders who ignore local group dynamics tend to ride roughshod over values they don't grasp. My research with colleagues on group conflict in India, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories found that helping to improve lives materially does little to reduce support for violence, and can even increase it if people feel such help compromises their most cherished values.
Bottom line? Nation-building that seeks to subsume the Pashtun within a larger Afghanistan is doomed to fail. That sort of path historically tends to push the Pashtun toward efforts at controlling Afghanistan as a whole, typically with strong Pakistani backing. The alternative? The Pashtun retain some autonomy within the nation, as they do in Pakistan, and that combo gives Islamabad enough of a feeling of "strategic depth" vis-a-vis India.
Now, the problem with the current overarching surge strategy, in Atran's mind (and I feel like I've met this guy somewhere, at some workshop on this subject)
The original alliance between the Taliban and Al Qaeda was largely one of convenience between a poverty-stricken national movement and a transnational cause that brought it material help. American pressure on Pakistan to attack the Taliban and Al Qaeda in their sanctuary gave birth to the Pakistani Taliban, who forged their own ties to Al Qaeda to fight the Pakistani state.
While some Taliban groups use the rhetoric of global jihad to inspire ranks or enlist foreign fighters, the Pakistani Taliban show no inclination to go after Western interests abroad. Their attacks, which have included at least three assaults near nuclear facilities, warrant concerted action -- but in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan. As Mr. Sageman, the former C.I.A. officer, puts it: "There's no Qaeda in Afghanistan and no Afghans in Qaeda."
So no, we can't fix Afghanistan by pushing Islamabad to quash the sanctuary across the border.
Then, back to history's example of "success"--as it were (sure to warm the hearts of the "coming anarchy" guys):
Pakistan has long preferred a policy of "respect for the independence and sentiment of the tribes" that was advised in 1908 by Lord Curzon, the British viceroy of India who established the North-West Frontier Province as a buffer zone to "conciliate and contain" the Pashtun hill tribes. In 1948, Pakistan's founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, removed all troops from brigade level up in Waziristan and other tribal areas in a plan aptly called Operation Curzon.
The problem today is that Al Qaeda is prodding the Pakistani Taliban to hit state institutions in the hopes of provoking a full-scale invasion of the tribal areas by the Pakistani Army; the idea is that such an assault would rally the tribes to Al Qaeda's cause and threaten the state. The United States has been pushing for exactly that sort of potentially disastrous action by Islamabad. But holding to Curzon's line may still be Pakistan's best bet. The key in the Afghan-Pakistani area, as in Southeast Asia, is to use local customs and networks to our advantage. Of course, counterterrorism measures are only as effective as local governments that execute them. Afghanistan's government is corrupt, unpopular and inept.
Besides, there's really no Taliban central authority to talk to. To be Taliban today means little more than to be a Pashtun tribesman who believes that his fundamental beliefs and customary way of life are threatened. Although most Taliban claim loyalty to Afghanistan's Mullah Omar, this allegiance varies greatly. Many Pakistani Taliban leaders -- including Baitullah Mehsud, who was killed by an American drone in August, and his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud -- rejected Mullah Omar's call to forgo suicide bombings against Pakistani civilians.
Now, on to the conundrum, by which our pushing gets only more pushback:
In fact, it is the United States that holds today's Taliban together. Without us, their deeply divided coalition could well fragment. Taliban resurgence depends on support from those notoriously unruly hill tribes in Pakistan's border regions, who are unsympathetic to the original Taliban program of homogenizing tribal custom and politics under one rule.
It wouldn't be surprising if the Taliban were to sever ties to Mr. bin Laden if he became a bigger headache to them than America. Al Qaeda may have close relations to the network of Jalaluddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader living in Pakistan, and the Shabi Khel branch of the Mehsud tribe in Waziristan, but it isn't wildly popular with many other Taliban factions and forces.
Unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban are interested in their homeland, not ours. Things are different now than before 9/11. The Taliban know how costly Osama bin Laden's friendship can be. There's a good chance that enough factions in the loose Taliban coalition would opt to disinvite their troublesome guest if we forget about trying to subdue them or hold their territory. This would unwind the Taliban coalition into a lot of straggling, loosely networked groups that could be eliminated or contained using the lessons learned in Indonesia and elsewhere. This means tracking down family and tribal networks, gaining a better understanding of family ties and intervening only when we see actions by Taliban and other groups to aid Al Qaeda or act outside their region.
To defeat violent extremism in Afghanistan, less may be more -- just as it has been elsewhere in Asia.
The reference to Asia goes back to the start of the piece, where Atran details how Salafist radicals are tracked and tamed through such basic police work.
You read something like this, and you want America to admit we can and should nation-build in the non-Pashtun parts of Afghanistan, but also grant some serious autonomy to the Pashtun area and, on that basis, wage a very discrete effort to root out al Qaeda such as it still exists across the border in Pakistan, while not pushing Islamabad too hard on taming the Pakistani Taliban per se (for all the same reasons). In the end, the combined result of such an approach would be to recognize, implicitly, a sort of Pashtunistan with acknowledged borders running within both Pakistan and Afghanistan and with those two states acknowledging a soft border between them. On the basis of that understanding, then, you buy people off appropriately with economic assistance and whatever FDI can be mustered for specific exploitation of natural resources (like the Chinese on copper). Pakistan keeps its sense of strategic depth and the world admits Afghanistan will never be a real state in the traditional sense, but rather a bifurcated reality of a north and a south that will only stay together if both sides are given enough autonomy.
Naive, perhaps, but you see a lot of history along these lines and I find myself migrating back, time and time again, to the concept of the soft border solution.
(Thanks: Jack Ryan)
Monday, December 21, 2009 at 9:40PM 
