After 9/11, the Taliban said it would negotiate the handing over of Osama bin Laden if the U.S. would share the evidence it claimed it had that he was responsible for the attacks. The Bush administration rejected diplomacy, however, and preferred to use military force. Critics argued that war would only bring more violence and more innocent deaths; and, indeed, more Afghan civilians were estimated to have been killed during the first several months of the U.S. campaign than had been killed in the attacks on 9/11. And, of course, the U.S. never did capture Osama bin Laden.
Terrorist leaders have been captured, but not through the use of military force. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was arrested by Pakistani intelligence and handed over to the U.S.
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, regarded early in the investigation into 9/11 as the money-man behind the plot and infamous for his alleged role in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, was similarly arrested by Pakistani police.
It was not military action, but police work, that resulted in the capture of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in Pakistan in 1995. Yousef was one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a mastermind of the foiled Bojinka plot to hijack airliners and fly them into targets including the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Barnett R. Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation and renowned Pakistani expert on the region Ahmed Rashid explain in the current issue how “The crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan are beyond the point where more troops will help.”
They note that U.S. military action in Afghanistan served to push the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership into Pakistan, which has been increasingly destabilized as a result. “For years,” they acknowledge, “critics of U.S. and NATO strategies have been warning that the region was headed in this direction.”
They criticize the Bush administration’s “Cross-border attacks into Pakistan”, which they state “will not provide security”, but serve rather only to further stir up the region and threaten to spread the conflict “even to other continents – as on 9/11 – or lead to the collapse of a nuclear-armed state” (referring to Pakistan). U.S. reliance on airstrikes, they observe, “cause civilian casualties that recruit fighters and supporters to the insurgency.”
So patently counter-productive and “irrational” has been the U.S. policy in the region that “Many Afghans believe that Washington secretly supports the Taliban as a way to keep a war going to justify a troop presence that is actually aimed at securing the energy resources of Central Asia and countering China.”
Moreover, “the concept of ‘pressuring’ Pakistan is flawed”, they argue, because “No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal.” The Pakistani people and their government view the U.S. “war on terror” as being opposed to their own interests and serving only to generate further militancy and terrorism within their own borders.
“U.S. diplomacy has been paralyzed by the rhetoric of ‘the war on terror’” that “thwarts sound strategic thinking by assimilating opponents into a homogenous ‘terrorist’ enemy. Only a political and diplomatic initiative that distinguishes political opponents of the United States – including violent ones – from global terrorists such as al Qaeda can reduce the threat faced by the Afghan and Pakistani states and secure the rest of the international community from the international terrorist groups based there.”
Furthermore, to make negotiations possible between the Afghan government and the Taliban, “the United States would have to alter its detention policy. Senior officials of the Afghan government say that at least through 2004 they repeatedly received overtures from senior Taliban leaders but that they could never guarantee that these leaders would not be captured by U.S. forces and detained at Guantanamo Bay or the U.S. air force base at Bagram, in Afghanistan.”
In conclusion, they write that “The goal of the next U.S. president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for ‘victory’ as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy.”
But to date, neither candidate for president has expressed their recognition of these facts on the ground in the region, and there is little indication that U.S. policy in the “war on terror” is likely to be significantly altered from its present course under either a McCain or an Obama administration.
[1] Robert G. Kaiser, “Iraq Aside, Nominees Have Like Views on Use of Force”, Washington Post, October 27, 2008; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/26/AR2008102602179.html
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