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Not Exactly the Peaceable Kingdom

Paul Olson
UNL Professor Emeritus

This morning’s paper brings news that former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s followers are marching on Pakistan’s major cities — and that the current Prime Minister, Asif Ali Zardari, is ordering an answering crackdown. We can expect similar news in the days to come as Pakistan continues crumbling. The Taliban now control governing in North and South Waziristan in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and in the beautiful Swat valley of the country’s North-West Frontier Province. Across the border in Afghanistan, the Taliban rule much Pashtun territory in the south and stage raids on the capital of Kabul with impunity. The Karzai government, which has been friendly to the West, is tottering. Everywhere you look in the region, there’s crumbling.

We in Nebraska need to think about our contribution to the crumbling now taking place in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We are complicit in this mess through our state university’s publication back in the ‘80s (with money from the Agency for International Development — a renowned CIA accomplice) of the Jihadist textbooks that encouraged militancy in Afghan children. We have fawningly supported a StratCom that — hand-in-hand with the CIA — flies the unmanned Predator drone aircraft that are regularly bombing and killing civilians. Through its space, intelligence and war-planning activities, StratCom is also integral to the daily combat operations going on there. Some of Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s suffering begins right here in Husker Nation.

Given the mess we’ve made of things, the temptation of course is just to say, ‘Out now. Let’s bring the troops home. The region was always violent. Our being there only makes things worse.’

But that may be too simplistic.

For sure, al-Qaida and the Taliban, the U.S. and NATO have radically disrupted traditional rule in the area. But so did the Soviets and the British before them and the Mongols and the Persians and God only knows how many others who have invaded over the succeeding centuries. The tribes in Afghanistan come from the radically disparate areas and peoples who have invaded it — the Pashtun from the eastern Iranian plateau (about 40 population of the population); the Hazara (10 percent) who are Mongoloid peoples; the Tajiks (30 percent) who hail from another Iranian area; and the Uzbeks (10 percent) from Turkic Central Asia. Nor are these tribes neatly confined to arbitrarily drawn national borders. A significant number of the Pashtun tribal group, for instance, actually lives in western Pakistan, in districts controlled by the Taliban. The nation of Pakistan itself was concocted by the British as a way to hive off the Muslims in India. The region’s sense of nationhood, accordingly, is fragile… As is the security of its nuclear arsenal.

The region as a whole — Pakistan specifically — possesses 30-60 nuclear weapons about the size of the Hiroshima weapon. In short, the weapons of mass destruction that George Bush was so quick on the trigger to attribute to Iraq actually exist in Pakistan.

And the issue of national, ethnic and religious loyalty is even more complicated. Although Pakistan purportedly resists the Taliban, many Pakistani Army segments work with them and other like militias. They arm them, train them and use them along the Kashmiri and Afghani borders. And the Obama Administration policy — persisting with the drone missile attacks, killing civilians while targeting Taliban and al-Qaida operatives — is only weakening the Zardari government further. (Despite repeated Pakistani government protests over the CIA-StratCom drone attacks on its soil, the drones are apparently based and flown from inside from Pakistani territory with the Zardari Adminis-tration’s approval.) As commentators on a recent “Bill Moyers” program warned, every civilian death from a drone attack produces at least five new Taliban.

The Taliban or related fundamentalist forces may soon control most of Afghanistan and much of Pakistan reaching south and east from their present northwestern strongholds.

When the news of the drone attacks and Obama’s decision to send 17,000 more troops was announced, several members of the NFP State Board visited Senator Nelson’s office in Lincoln to talk to his top aide. The coffee was good, the table polished and the chatter polite — but we knew we were talking about possible world-as-we-know-it-ending events.

We commended the senator for saving Obama’s stimulus package, praised his ‘benchmark’ efforts in Iraq and encouraged the like for Afghanistan. (Sen. Nelson has since done this, which will give us at the very least a sense of what we are doing in Afghanistan and whether we are accomplishing anything.) We urged him to also play a moderating role in the Afghanistan-Pakistan war: to urge the replacement of our troops and aircraft with a UN-sponsored Interpol force in Afghanistan, to push for serious economic development that would substitute food-production for Afghan opium-poppy agriculture, and to work for separating indigenous unemployed Taliban from imported, outside-agitating Taliban trying to wage a holy war. We urged respect for indigenous tribal forms of self-government (though they may not rule in our ways), and discussed various means for closing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to military incursion.

We also urged a massive United Nations effort to build schools, roads, economic capacity and civil society in Afghanistan. We left feeling we were heard.

And there is hope in the long run. The Afghan-northwest Pakistan area is not intractably violent. The terrain does not require it. Relatively pacific nearby Tibet is equally mountainous. The conventional narrative of inevitable violence omits the area’s relatively cultivated and stable Greco-Buddhist kingdoms left behind by Alexander the Great when the young ruler drank himself to death. The Buddhist ruler, Ashoka, around 250 B.C., not only urged his realm to practice his religion’s nonviolent Buddhism, but abolished his country’s military without apparent ill effect. Tibetan Buddhism originated in territory that is part of Pakistan-Afghanistan’s most violent area now. Violent invasions from outside came later from the 1200s through the 1900s and destabilized the area. But even recently — during part of the rule of the late King Mohammed Zahir Shah and his uncles — Afghanistan enjoyed a relatively stable government whenever the Soviets, the CIA, the Pakistanis and other outsider groups left it alone.

NFP will have to take a stand as soon as Obama’s review of the region is complete. I propose we adopt a position arguing that:

  1. We end the destabilizing flights of drones and the flow of U.S. military aid to the Afghanistan/Pakistan area;

  2. The U.S. and NATO take the lead in withdrawing from Afghanistan and turning the stabilization process over to United Nations police forces; further, as the UN extends control, all U.S. and NATO military bases in the region of South and Central Asia should be systematically closed;

  3. UN policing be designed to strengthen traditional tribal governments and stabilize the border between the tribes and the multi-ethnic areas where violence commonly flares;

  4. The UN and international agricultural and relief agencies undertake serious economic development in agriculture and small business in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan;

  5. The Pakistani army’s double game of supporting and arming the Taliban, while also claiming to oppose them, be challenged;

  6. The UN participate more thoroughly and effectively in the India-Pakistan-Kashmir negotiations that keep the region destabilized and encourage the formation of Taliban-like groups;

  7. That, as rapidly as possible, we include the nuclear powers of eastern and southern Asia (China, Pakistan, and India) in our present negotiations with the Russians and others to reduce nuclear weaponry around the world. We cannot ask others to reduce nukes until we do.

After that will have to come discussions over such issues as whether the Pashtun need their own nation, or how movement toward the recognition of international human rights is to be gained in the area.

Right now, our job is to move away from being downwind from nuclear holocaust.