The Daily Sun
Sunday, 24th March, 2013
M.
Serajul Islam
I
picked two new items in the papers on US’ involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan
that made me wonder about what made it go to these faraway lands, what price it
paid and what it has achieved. Ten years ago, the US had started the Iraq war
leaving the war on terror in Afghanistan to take out Saddam Hussein’s weapons
of mass destruction (WMD). It came back to Afghanistan after removing Saddam
Hussein from power and hanging him and achieving a regime change although it
found no trace of the WMD that had took them there in the first instance.
It
is now a decade since the US started the Iraq war and although Saddam Hussein
is history, Iraq is far from becoming that model of democracy that the US
promised to give the country once it became known that it had used the case of
WMD as a false pretext to invade Iraq. In an engrossing article in The
Washington Post, Professor Andrew J Bacevich stated that the United States has
spent US$ 800 billion, sacrificed the lives of 4475 of its service men and
women with an additional 32,221 of its troops injured in Iraq and asked a
provocative question “So did we win?” He did not answer the question directly.
Instead, he discussed a number of wars in modern history, including the First
and Second Great Wars, and concluded that “battlefield outcomes thought to be
conclusive often prove anything but.”
He
discussed the First World War that started 99 years ago to show that although
Great Britain was one of the victors of the war; the results were disastrous
for it eventually. It went to the war among other objectives, “with a pretext
for carving out the Ottoman Empire” but instead, the war “accelerated its
demise.” He also discussed the 1967 Arab-Israel- war to show that although it
ended with Israel victorious, it “saddled Israel with large, restive minority
that it can neither pacify nor assimilate” and that the “ouster of the Soviet
Union from Afghanistan” gave “rise to the Taliban.” In case of the Iraq war too,
although the US has claimed that war ended successfully for it, the claim is a
contested one. Neither peace nor democracy has returned there. The economy of
Iraq is in shambles and by various estimates 1, 50,000 to a million people have
been killed there due to sectarian violence that continues unabated.
Thus
after all the huge sacrifices the USA made in terms of human lives and money, USA’s
claim of victory in Iraq is at best a hollow one. In Afghanistan the US with
its allies are still pursuing their objectives to establish peace and democracy
there together with crushing the Taliban with very little time left to complete
these tasks. In fact, as irony would have it, the US is now talking with the
Taliban behind the back of President Hamid Karzai to ensure its safe exit from
the country that President Obama has said would be achieved by end of 2014. As
for peace and democracy, Afghanistan is as far from both as it was when the US
and its allies entered the country in pursuit of President George’s Bush “war
on terror.”
In
a recent seminar in Dubai, experts on Afghanistan sat on the sidelines of the Emirates
Literary Show to discuss which way the US involvement in Afghanistan was
going. The three speakers there were
Sandy Gall, Abdul Bari Atwan and William Damrymple, all well known experts on
Middle East and Afghanistan who raised the same concerns regarding Afghanistan
that Andrew Bacevich raised in the context of Iraq. The conclusion was again
the same that Andrew Bacevich reached on Iraq and other wars of the past that
he described in the words of F Scott Fitzgerald, “The victor belongs to the
spoils.”
All
three speakers raised the question whether the West has lost the war in
Afghanistan and answered in the affirmative. Abdul Bari Atwan said that “the
Taliban are going to come back once the Americans leave the country.” William
Damrymple reached the same conclusion and used a bit of history to confirm his
conclusion. He said: “The truth be told, no one in history has been able to
control the Afghans for long.” Sandy Gall also reached the same conclusion as
his other two speakers, adding that the reason why Afghanistan will end as a
failure for the West is because they entered the country with “no plan in place
at all.”
It
was thus no surprise that when the new US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel who went
to Afghanistan on his first visit to that country recently could not even hold a joint press
conference with President Hamid Karzai, the first time ever that such an
unbelievable thing happened with a top US visitor . In fact, the Afghan President
postponed his joint press conference with the new US Defense Secretary on what
was blatantly a lame excuse of security although the press conference was
scheduled to be held inside the Presidential, the most secure place in all of
Afghanistan. The Afghan President did not stop there. He blamed the US for
having a hand in the latest violence in Kabul that he used to postpone the
press conference that he said was carried out to create the condition for US
and NATO troops to remain in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 deadline.
The
disappointing fate of US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan has been
acknowledged by the US administration. In his state of the union speech last
February, the US President spoke strongly on the use of drones as a substitute
to sending US troops to fight wars on foreign soil. In fact, the underlying theme of that
important speech was towards making his second administration inward looking
with focus on domestic issues related to the economy, employment and
healthcare. The theme also went well with the general thinking among the
majority of Americans who are no longer interested in sacrificing their own men
and women as well as their money for defending the cause of freedom and
democracy on foreign soil.
The
lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan together with the mood of most Americans
against US’ foreign wars are important as the US administration comes under
increasing pressure from Israel for attacking Iran to take out its alleged
nuclear capabilities. In his state of
the union address, the President spoke firmly on his administration’s
preference for the diplomatic option over the military one on Iran. The results
from Iraq and Afghanistan together with the mood among most Americans should
encourage the US President to push for the diplomatic option in his talks with
the Israeli Prime Minister. The US President is in Israel at the time of
writing this piece.
The writer is a
retired career Ambassador and the Chairman, Centre for Foreign Affairs Studies, CFAS
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