Hitchens: Afghanistan, or the Karzai Government?
Christopher Hitchens writes:
Friends of his would enjoy disputing whether his heart or his ego was the larger, but it was sad to know, as Richard Holbrooke's heart eventually burst, that he had strained a good deal of it in upholding a policy in which much of his best advice had been, or was being, ignored. He was frequently left off the Obama plane when sensitive talks with Pakistani officials were in prospect. He was publicly rebuked by the administration when he stated that almost every Pashtun family contained at least one Taliban sympathizer. His early warning about the stupidity of incinerating the Afghan poppy crop was often ignored. And his death coincided with the latest confused review of a policy—known as "Af-Pak"—whose very abbreviation contains the seeds of its own negation.
The word Pakistan is already enough of a crude acronym. Cobbled together in the 1930s by an exiled Muslim propagandist named Choudhary Rahmat Ali, it represents Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind, with the last three letters a hasty add-on to mean "land." In the Urdu language, the resulting mouthful means that an Islamic republic made up of fragments is "The Land of the Pure." The Baluchi and Bengali peoples, orphans and victims of partition and of the Punjabi military elite, are simply left out. But the Pakistani claims on Afghanistan and Kashmir are included within the confection. By using the A and the K again, as with "Af-Pak," we echo Pakistan's own claim that it needs its own semi-colony in Afghanistan the better to combat India in India. This is the problem to begin with, and the reason why so many of our forces are permanently endangered by having to fight an enemy—the Taliban—that was created by and is still subsidized by our "friends."
There are policies that might permit victory and policies that merely guarantee defeat. At first sight, a "surge" that emphasizes the date of its own abandonment so well in advance belongs in the latter category. But there are those who say that Afghans are encouraged to resist the Taliban by the assurance that NATO will not remain on their soil indefinitely. Tenuous as that sounds, it could explain why important areas in and around Kandahar have gone so quiet lately. But so does the rival explanation that all the Taliban need do is wait, and rest, and get the local population to synchronize its own timing with the inevitable withdrawal.
The critical political question is now this one: Are we committed to Afghanistan or to the Karzai government? There are many, many Afghans who will fight the Taliban and al-Qaida whether we continue to do so or not: the Hazara and the Tajiks and a good number of the nation's women and city-dwellers. Not to feel some sort of duty and solidarity here would be morally deaf. But in what sense are these allies represented by a regime that cannot any longer even claim to have won an election? Or, even worse, by a predatory regime that may have a mutually hand-washing covert agreement with the Taliban itself?
