Crossing the Crescent: The Good War?

By M. Junaid Levesque-Alam, March 9, 2009

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Column: Why are so few U.S. activists challenging the war in Afghanistan?

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A month after the September 11th attacks, I stood in a public square in Boston as the breath of approaching winter chilled the air. Motorists honked their horns but the glares and grimaces suggested something other than appreciation. A handful made their sentiments more plainly obvious with choice epithets and explicit hand gestures. A few pedestrians glowered at our signs and warned us in threatening tones not to persist. One man even tossed empty beer cans at us; it wasn't hard to guess who had consumed the contents.

Calls for peace and reflection were not popularly received in the aftermath of 9/11. Even tepid and silent protests like the peace vigils I participated in shortly after American air strikes on Afghanistan drew scorn and ire in the prevailing atmosphere of anger and vengeance.

With my bronze skin, black hair and Asian features, I felt like something of a target holding peace signs and handing out literature -- part of an inauspicious start to college that began only weeks after the terrorist attacks.

That was more than seven years ago. In the interim, America has seen a cavalcade of evidence suggesting deep flaws in the response to 9/11: Failure to catch Bin Laden or defeat the Taliban; lies leading to the Iraq war; the chaos that followed its occupation; the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo fiascoes; Iran's empowerment; and, the continued spread of Islamist radicalism.

Barack Obama's election was largely a repudiation of Bush Administration policies and a recognition of its failures. The new president has proposed troop withdrawal from Iraq, crafted plans to close Guantanamo and has spoken of a rapprochement with the Muslim world based on "mutual respect."

But for all this, the viability and wisdom of the long war in Afghanistan has gone mostly unchallenged. The mainstream anti-war movement, having fluctuated over the course of the last seven years, has focused primarily on the war on Iraq, scarcely expressing outrage over the Afghan conflict.

It long ago became a liberal talking point that Iraq is a "diversion" from the "real" war on terrorism being waged in the Afghan hinterlands -- a point most recently reinforced by Obama's pledge to send up to 30,000 more troops to that country just as he brings down troop levels in Iraq.

If the protests I participated in seven years ago were to take place again now, they would likely draw little anger -- but equally little enthusiasm. This war is, as many see it, our "good war."

It's not hard to understand why. Bin Laden and his protectors have yet to be brought to justice for their crimes. The Taliban are still a repressive and terrible force with increasingly brazen designs on controlling nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Yet these realities cannot serve as an endorsement of any and all tactics. That there is greater justification for this war than the Iraq conflict is hardly a stirring defense, and scarcely sufficient grounds to judge it wise or fruitful.

"We have no strategic plan. We never had one."

More Troops, More Troubles

The record of the past seven years is already damning: The Taliban have survived and spread across Afghanistan; Karzai's ministerial corruption has become obvious; and worse, the war effort is destabilizing Afghanistan's neighbor, Pakistan, where people feel they are being pressed by foreigners into a war with no domestic benefit.

Those who believe the war will go more smoothly after sending 30,000 more U.S. troops should recall the Soviet Union's failed campaign in Afghanistan, a disastrous ten-year effort involving some 115,000 soldiers.

Worse still, it seems no one has a clear picture of what we are really fighting for in Afghanistan, and increasingly, in Pakistan.

Perhaps we never knew. A senior U.S. military commander, referring to the Bush years, recently told the Washington Post, "We have no strategic plan. We never had one."

The planned troop increase is not even expected to achieve results, only "help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort." This is a bit like throwing a man off a cliff and later convening a meeting about what to do with him.

While pundits across the political spectrum obligatorily invoke the need to defeat the Taliban, al-Qaeda and Islamic extremism as reasons for bolstering troop numbers, the reality is that the insurgency is rooted in Pashtun nationalism with an Islamist veneer.

As former Pentagon official Pierre Sprey explained to an incredulous Bill Moyers on PBS, "There's 40 million of them. That's a nation, not a tribe. Within it are tribal groupings and so on. But they all speak the common language. And they all have a very similar, rigid, and in lots of ways very admirable code of honor much stronger than their adherence to Islam."

The Pashtun population straddles the Durand Line that separates Pakistan from Afghanistan. Drawn up by the British in 1893, the Pashtuns never really recognized the border and the weak Pakistani state apparatus has essentially left the region to its own devices since the country's founding. Widespread poverty in the area makes it ripe for extremism. The Taliban and assorted allies have filled the political vacuum, recruiting illiterate and poor locals to their cause.

The U.S.-led war effort, far from alleviating this root problem, has exacerbated it. Cajoled by America, Pakistan conducted large-scale military operations in Pashtun border areas last year, causing thousands of locals to flee into the arms of Islamist organizations, which provided relief for victims. "Collateral damage" caused by America's own strikes in Afghanistan have also inflamed Pashtun sentiments.

Unlike Gaza, Sudan, or Iraq, the crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan doesn't easily lend itself to snappy slogans that can be used to mobilize sentiment around a specific demand across college campuses.

Nevertheless, tacit support for the status quo is not an option. While differences in the anti-war camp persist, we should come to a consensus based on common sense, if not common politics: No to escalation. Escalating the war in Afghanistan as some kind of stop-gap measure until the administration comes up with a real plan is extremely unwise given the possible consequences.

60,000 U.S. troops are neither sufficient to transform the country nor are they necessary to capture a handful of al-Qaeda bandits. More disturbingly, while Washington fumbles around for answers, an intensified but ill-defined war effort will foment further unrest in Pakistan and could create a new, and far more intractable crisis: A failed nuclear state overrun by Islamists.

The situation recalls a common expression that summed up the insanity of the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Given the destabilizing impact on Pakistan produced by our faltering efforts in Afghanistan, we may well end up destroying one country while failing to save another.

Levesque-Alam blogs about America and Islam at Crossing the Crescent. Co-founder of Left Hook, he's also a journalism graduate of Northeastern University and has worked for the daily press in suburban Massachusetts and weeklies in Queens, New York. He now works as a communications coordinator for an anti-domestic violence agency in the NYC area.