Sixty Miles from the Capital
by Michael
Rubin
Weekly Standard
May 11, 2009
http://www.meforum.org/2130/sixty-miles-from-the-capital
On April 22, several hundred Taliban fighters moved from
their stronghold in the Swat Valley to the neighboring district of Buner,
just 60 miles from Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton underscored the seriousness of the crisis, accusing the
Pakistani government of "abdicating to the Taliban" and suggesting that
instability in Pakistan posed a "mortal threat" to international security.
While the Taliban retreated to Swat, the challenge they pose remains.
Indeed, on April 30, General David Petraeus said that the Taliban's
challenge makes the next two weeks critical to Pakistan's survival.
These events illustrate the weakness of the Obama foreign
policy. Addressing the House Foreign Affairs Committee the day of the
Taliban's advance, Clinton declared, "The government of Pakistan must
begin to deliver government services, otherwise they are going to lose out
to those who show up and claim that they can solve people's problems." The
issue in the Swat Valley, however, is not simply lack of government
services.
Throughout his campaign, Barack Obama articulated twin
national security themes. First, he dismissed the decision to liberate
Iraq as "misguided" and promised instead to "refocus our resources on al
Qaeda in Afghanistan and finish the fight with the terrorists who attacked
us on 9/11." Second, he promised "smart diplomacy" toward friend and foe
alike. His advisers spoke of smart power that would enhance aid and
development. "With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign
policy," Clinton declared at her confirmation hearing.
Putting aside the fact that Joseph Nye, who coined the term
smart power, meant it to complement rather than replace the use of hard
power, what the Obama administration misses is the nature of the danger
posed by extremist ideology--especially when combined with diplomacy
allowing Islamists to establish safe havens. Here, the Taliban advance on
Buner is instructive.
On February 15, after fighting for almost two years at a
cost of 1,500 lives, the Pakistanis and the Taliban struck a deal. The
government of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province signed the Malakand
Accord with Sufi Mohammed, head of the radical Tehreek
Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law).
This agreement imposed Islamic law on the Swat Valley, effectively handing
control to the Taliban. This was not the first deal struck between the
Pakistani government and Islamist radicals--Islamabad had reached similar
accords in South Waziristan, North Waziristan, and Bajaur. But it was the
first to test the Obama administration's new approach.
Rather than view the Malakand Accord as a compromise to end
bloodshed, the Taliban interpreted it as a display of weakness to be
exploited. No one should be surprised. In 2004, Abu Bakr Naji, a prominent
jihadist ideologue, published a treatise entitled The Management of
Savagery (Idarat at-Tawahhush) in which he rebuffed earlier al
Qaeda theoreticians to argue that the key to advanced jihad is first to
hold territory and then to impose a government that enforces Islamic
law.
With their safe haven established, the Taliban doubled the
number of fighters in the Swat Valley to at least 6,000, enabling a column
to move on Buner less than 10 days after Pakistani president Asif Ali
Zardari signed legislation implementing the Malakand Accord. As the column
advanced, a Taliban spokesman announced that Osama bin Laden would be
welcome in Swat.
Secretary Clinton is not alone in her refusal to grasp that
the Taliban's challenge is essentially ideological and not
grievance-based. An April 17 article in the New York Times placed
blame for the Taliban's rise on the lack of land reform in the Swat
Valley, where approximately 50 land-owners dominated economic life. True,
Sufi Mohammed and his son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, a former ski lift
worker in Swat who now heads the militia of the Tehreek
Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, exploited the economic angle to win recruits,
but this was only part of their strategy.
They also used torture and execution to intimidate.
Fazlullah is famous for broadcasting over the radio the names of those
deemed inimical to Taliban interests or disobedient to its rule. As the
Taliban murdered their targets in the Swat Valley, they displayed the
mutilated bodies in local markets, promising similar treatment to anyone
who removed the macabre display. Clinton appears unaware that that those
living under such a brutal regime are kept in check by fear.
Nor does the call for land reform show much understanding of
the region. The Swat Valley, a resort area, was relatively well off until
the Taliban took root. Sacrificing property rights to accommodate a
utopian vision of social justice might resolve one Taliban talking point,
but the group would simply find another grievance. Land reform would not
end the Taliban's march--but it would further destabilize a teetering
Pakistan.
Indeed, a constant feature of Islamist insurgency--whether
in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or now Pakistan--is sabotage of economic
development for the purpose of undercutting government control. This is
why Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq's Anbar Province and Moktada al-Sadr in
Baghdad and southern Iraq both directed their forces to destroy schools,
sabotage electrical lines, and target development workers. If the economy
is good, jihadists seek to wreck it. While the West sees brain drain as a
tragedy, radical Islamists see it as a godsend, simultaneously getting rid
of the pesky middle class and gutting the economy so they can fill the
void. The antidote should be to strengthen government control--not to cede
it, as Pakistan did.
So what should the Obama administration learn from the
Taliban's tactical victory? First, soft power and economic development are
irrelevant to this situation unless they are enabled by hard power.
Second, engagement is no panacea. Not all our adversaries
share Obama's good faith. The Taliban--or, for that matter, the Iranian
leadership--are motivated not by earthly desires, but by a religious
ideology, one that brands any government unwilling to bow to their demands
as illegitimate and Satanic. To them, negotiations can be useful only for
gaining immediate advantage: The Taliban might gain safe haven; Tehran
might gain time.
While it would be unfair to suggest that Obama himself has
sought to engage the Taliban, senior officials surrounding the president
do urge talks. (The Clinton administration, it should be remembered,
actually sent an emissary to meet with the Taliban in 1997, and even after
9/11 Secretary of State Colin Powell counseled reaching out to the
"moderate Taliban.") Further, it is clear that the president does not
appreciate the dangers of granting Islamists a safe haven. Weak
condemnations of Zardari for doing this are meaningless, especially when
the administration simultaneously pursues policies that will provide
terrorists and their supporters safe haven in Iraq and Gaza.
Indeed, unless the president and the secretary of state
understand that soft power and accommodation are about as effective at
countering Islamism as lollipops are at curing cancer, the march to Buner
may become the symbol of the Obama presidency, played out repeatedly, from
Baghdad to Basra to Beirut.
Michael
Rubin, editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a
resident scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate
School.
Related Topics: South Asia Michael
Rubin | 
Send
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment