worldpolicy.org

If inconsistencies are the hallmark of truth—an odd truism suggested by U.S. prosecutor David M. Rody during the recently-concluded trial of Aafia Siddiqui—then there was plenty of “truth” to go around on both sides of the proceeding, which concluded February 3 with guilty verdicts on all seven counts of attempted murder and assault.

At first glance, Siddiqui’s story is a perplexing one, albeit one that shows some familiar patterns, at least on the surface. Siddiqui—a 37-year-old Pakistani woman accused by the United States of associating with al Qaeda—began life with all the trappings of upper-middle class achievement. Born to a well-off family in Karachi, she went on to earn a BA from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Brandeis University, and eventually married a Pakistani physician, with whom she had three children.

While Siddiqui’s life looked like a relatively conventional narrative of success prior to 9/11, after the World Trade Center attacks, Siddiqui became increasingly concerned about American hostility toward Muslims, a concern that eventually pushed her and her husband to move their young family back to Karachi.

At some point after her post-9/11 return to Pakistan, Siddiqui’s story begins to get murky. FBI officials, having suspected her of working as an al Qaeda operative, placed her on a list of suspected al Qaeda affiliates, which prompted her to disappear into thin air in March 2003. (Within Pakistan, it is commonly believed that she was picked up by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI and later handed over to the CIA. In one of her outbursts throughout the trial, Siddiqui claimed she was kept in a secret prison and that her children were tortured.) Read the rest of this entry »

So, this is what it means to be “pat-down.” I first heard the words after the Christmas Day attempt by the 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to blow up a Northwest plane over Detroit, Michigan. It was, however, not until nine days and nearly 9,000 miles later before the meaning of the words hit home, with a personal force.

My daughter and I departed Lagos on the night of January 4 and by morning had cleared two international airports—Lagos and Frankfurt—without fuss. We had one more stop to make at Dulles International Airport, in Washington, on our way to Austin, Texas. At the Lagos airport, little had changed. It was business as usual. Check-in and airport security officials were happy to do things a bit quicker and to return a smile or two in exchange for a Christmas kola nut.

I also did not notice any remarkable changes in security at Frankfurt from when I last passed through in early summer 2009. The officials looked just as cold and stern as they ushered transit passengers through the metal-detectors. Luggage, as usual, was scanned separately. I didn’t observe any fuss, pat downs, or special lanes. The only hint of a tougher time ahead was the frequent announcement at the airport that travelers to the United States must be prepared to comply with restrictions about items they could bring into the country.

For me, that was nothing to worry about. On this trip, I had prepared myself for the worst—or so I thought.

I had excluded from my suitcases anything I suspected could cause delays and totally ruled out all foodstuffs, including noodles, my daughter’s favorite meal. Before we left Lagos, I took the extra precaution of stripping our suitcases and getting familiar with all their contents before padlocking them, just to be sure.

I also recalled the sad experience of another Nigerian traveler who caused alarm (and made headlines) for an overly long stay in the lavatory of a plane some two days later, and on the same route, of that which Abdulmutallab had attempted to bring down. I decided on this trip that once I was boarded, I would not stir for the duration of the flight. No in-flight exercises, no walking up and down the aisle, no food, little or no water. Nothing, I was determined, would make me take a step from my seat.

And so it was that in the six hour and twenty minute flight from Lagos to Frankfurt, I was a self-made couch potato in seat 14A. I was flying Business Class, but it would not have made any difference had I been in the luggage hold. Better to be still than sorry. Yet, nothing could have prepared me for the ordeal at we were to face at Dulles. Read the rest of this entry »

The investigations of U.S. Army major Nidal Malik Hasan’s November 5 murder of 13 soldiers at a military base in Fort Hood, Texas, and of the December 25 failed attempt by a Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to detonate a bomb inside a 300-passenger plane en route to Detroit, have revealed links between these terrorists and a spawning Al Qaeda network in Yemen.

Major Hasan reportedly exchanged e-mails and sought spiritual guidance from a radical U.S.-born Islamic cleric, Anwar Al-Awlaki, who grew up in Yemen. Mr. Abdulmutallab, for his part, said he received training and explosive devices from the Al Qaeda operatives during his four-month stay in Yemen last year.

Yemen’s involvement in these terrorist acts has also shed light on its president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom Washington urged to launch a vast antiterrorist operation, now underway in the volatile Arab nation.

Mr. Saleh is a seasoned war horse. He served as North Yemen’s president for 12 years, before merging the north and south in 1990, following decades of colonial and ideological division. He has been president of this Sunni-dominated nation ever since, although the real extent of his authority is questionable.

The government repeatedly clashed with separatists in the south through the 1990s, and the insurrection flared again in 2008. Moreover, violence has escalated in the country’s northwest, along the border with Saudi Arabia, and repeated attempts to quash these Shiite insurgents (led by Abdul-Malik Al-Houthi) have been largely unsuccessful. In the northwest, Al-Houthi insurgents crossed into Saudi Arabia last month, murdering two Saudi patrol guards and triggering a joint Saudi-Yemeni airstrike against guerrillas. Today, the government’s control is effectively limited to the areas surrounding the capital, Sana’a.

Although newspapers and 24-hour news channels seem keen to highlight Yemen as the new front in the “war on terror,” the nation actually surfaced as a breeding ground for international terrorists in the early 1990s, when impoverished refugees escaping violence in neighboring Somalia were recruited by Al Qaeda in Yemen. In October 2000, Al Qaeda terrorists blasted a hole in the American Navy destroyer USS Cole harbored in the Yemeni port of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors. And, in September 2008, Al Qaeda bombed the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, killing ten non-American citizens.

For the most part, the Bush administration’s engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq prevented it from allocating resources to confront the burgeoning terrorist network in Yemen. One critical mark of escalation in the Bush administration’s counterterrorism tactics was a CIA-sponsored drone strike in Yemen at the end of 2002 that killed six Al Qaeda operatives, including Qaed Sinan Harithi, the suspected organizer of the USS Cole incident. Today, the reoccurrence of domestic terrorism puts pressure on Obama to eradicate the Yemen-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula before it gathers strength and threatens the stability of that nation.

Indeed, the “systemic problems” that President Obama referenced in his speech about intelligence failures leading up to Mr. Abdulmutallab’s attempted bombing could just as well describe the state of affairs within Yemen. The country is plagued by numerous socioeconomic and political ills, including an excessive reliance on rapidly dwindling oil resources, severe water shortage, pervasive corruption, inter-regional tensions, and illiteracy, poverty, unemployment, and population growth rates that are among the highest in the Middle East. While protracted sectarian and territorial disputes have made the task of state-building increasingly difficult for Mr. Saleh, most of the problems the country faces today are the product of his own heavy-handed and short-sighted policies. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent ruling by the Supreme Court of Pakistan, striking down a previous agreement that granted immunity from prosecution for corruption to thousands of bureaucrats and politicians, was greeted with cheers by Pakistanis, both in the streets of Karachi and amongst the diaspora in London, but with discomfort in the West.

More astute analysts, however, are concerned that the Supreme Court ruling doesn’t herald a step forward, but rather a descent back into the tussle of recriminations and accusations that have long characterized Pakistani politics.  Worse, it threatens to distract national attention from far more pressing problems.

The court struck down the National Reconciliation Order (NRO) that was passed in 2007 under Western-backed President Musharraf and was billed at the time as a step towards restoring Pakistan to multiparty democracy. Although political players of all parties benefited from the deal, observers saw it largely as a compromise aimed at enabling the return to Pakistan of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and her husband, Pakistan’s current president, Asif Ali Zardari.

After Mrs. Bhutto was assassinated in December 2007, a wave of sympathy for her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) helped Zardari take over de facto leadership of the PPP and the presidency of the country in quick succession. But Zardari hardly enjoyed a honeymoon with voters or, for that matter, even his own party leadership. Lacking what some would term the demagogic charisma of his late wife or father-in-law, Zardari was hardly Obama-esque.

His reputation as Mr. Ten Percent—earned by his penchant for demanding bribes while serving as his wife’s minister for investment and minister for the environment in the mid-1990s—won him many enemies and, along with his appointments of cronies to top government and party posts, grated on members of the PPP itself.

Upon taking office, Zardari’s reluctance to restore the popular and respected ousted Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry—widely seen as a last-ditch attempt to avoid prosecution for corruption—further eroded what little support he did enjoy. Only after mass, nation-wide protests did Zardari eventually relent and agree to the restoration of the chief justice to his office.

The repeal of the NRO, then, comes as a long-awaited victory for many sections of Pakistani society, from secular middle-class civil society activists to mullahs fed up with Zardari’s poor record and aggravated by his repeated evasion of corruption charges.

The concern, however, is that on a deeper level, the hoopla over the NRO shows just how much Pakistan’s political life is stagnating. Read the rest of this entry »

On the way from Worli to my aunt’s house off Nepean Sea Road, there are two gigantic posters for the new Mont Blanc Mahatma Gandhi commemorative pen. The posters feature a thin and grizzled Gandhi in profile. Against the photograph, rendered in historically appropriate sepia tones, a short quotation written in Gandhi’s own hand is featured in luminous gold: “The way to truth lies through ahimsa (nonviolence).” To the right of the photograph, is an image of the pen itself, uncapped, ready to be used. This pen, designed to honor a man who dedicated himself to the masses of India’s poorest, who dressed and lived in the strictest simplicity as they are forced to dress and live, costs $27,000, more than most Indians will earn in a decade. According to the billboard, it is available in Bombay exclusively at the Taj, the city’s most opulent hotel.

For centuries, India has evoked for Western observers images of extreme wealth existing cheek by jowl with the worst human misery—Maharajahs weighed down by ropes of pearls and rubies the size of pigeon’s eggs using virtual slave labor to build extravagant palaces hung with rich brocades and filled with trinkets of silver and gold, while outside the palace gates skeletal subjects eke out a living with nothing more than their calloused hands and bent backs.

The contrasts of wealth and poverty in India today are less visible but hardly less extreme. On magazine stands and in bookstores across the city of Bombay, a special edition of Forbes magazine featuring “India’s 100 Richest” is on sale. In the last year, a year when the rest of the world, especially the United States, reeled from a massive economic crisis, a year when India’s financial capital Bombay was hit with a devastating terrorist attack, India doubled its number of billionaires, from 27 to 54. These 54 individuals, according to the Forbes special-edition cover, represent 25 percent of India’s total GDP. The country’s remaining 1.2 billion people have to make do with the remaining 75 percent, and that is hardly distributed equally. 800 million Indians still live on less than $2 dollars per day; of those, half live on less than $1.25 per day.

Absent from magazine stands is the recent annual UNDP Human Development Index report. While India’s richest were getting richer, its poor were barely running in place. India, the world’s fourth-largest economy when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), ranks a miserable 134th on the UNDP’s human development index. 47 percent of its children are malnourished. Famed for its brainy software engineers, poised to become a world R&D center, more than a third of Indians are illiterate and only one in 10,000 benefits from higher education.

In the streets of Bombay, these contrasts are visible as ever. During my stay in Bombay, the occasional beggar displaying twisted limbs or a baby with matted, russet hair has accosted my car when it stopped at a red light. Returning home at night from dinner, we have passed the recumbent forms of people too poor even to string a patch of tarpaulin over their heads; men, women, and children curled up in a thin blanket on the sidewalk. On either side of the manicured park where I go to walk each morning with my aunt, the slums still hug the narrow line where the land meets the sea. The stench from the rocks below the park can’t be blocked by the landscaping that screens the hunched backsides of people who have no other toilet.

In the buildings of the rich, where apartments with polished marble floors equipped with wi-fi and flat-screen televisions are elegantly furnished and hung with paintings by contemporary Indian artists, servants are barked at and sleep on kitchen floors, in hallways, or in entry foyers. One does not reach across the table for the salt or pepper; one calls the servant who has retired to the kitchen to come to the dining room and move it nearer. The stark contrast between the physical size, the clothing, and the hairstyles—not to mention the bearing of the rich and the stunted poor—still shocks, though I have known this my whole life. Read the rest of this entry »

I remember returning to New York for the first time after 9/11. It was about a month after the attack. The media saturation that bombarded us all with real-time images and their infinite repetition had not prepared me to for the sight of the two still-smoking craters where the long-familiar twin towers had been, nor the smell of acrid smoke that clung to the downtown air. What shook me more were the candles and flowers on the street—in front of all the fire stations, of course, but also all around my East Village neighborhood and on sidewalks the length and breadth of Manhattan. Improvised posters with details of still missing persons clung to every light pole. The dead were omnipresent. They remained so for a couple of years. Only now, more than eight years later, have the signs of mourning dwindled down to the area around the site of the attack itself and an annual leaving of flowers and candles on the sidewalk in front of the plaques on every fire station listing the men who died trying to save people trapped in the Tower One or Two.

The absence of any kind of similar mass outpouring of grief struck me on my first day back in Bombay after the attacks dubbed “26/11” (since they occurred on November 26, 2008). Where I was staying, there was absolutely no sign of the attack. As we drove toward the specific sites of the mayhem—the Oberoi, the Taj, the railway station, Leopold Café, Nariman House—there was also nothing. It isn’t until you get right up to these buildings where scores were slaughtered that you can see discrete signs of what happened, and even then you have to look.

At the Leopold Café where the gunmen first opened fire, tables were packed, mostly, as always, with foreign tourists eating snacks and drinking cold beers. But there are bullet holes in the concrete wall and in the fractured plate glass window. Outside, on the corner between the two retro-style “Drink Coca-Cola” signboards that frame the café’s roof-line, there is a “Hang Kasab” sign posted by the benevolent-sounding Apna Welfare Foundation. (Ajmal Kasab is the lone surviving attacker whose trial drags on—to the frustration of many Mumbaikars.) Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve become used to entering India via New Delhi, so it was a surprise to land in Mumbai and emerge into a nicer airport than the one I’d left 15 hours earlier in Newark, New Jersey. As in Newark, the now ubiquitous HSBC advertisements adorned the jet way, but the corridors were well-lit and freshly carpeted. There were no long lines at the ample row of stations at immigration where I was treated cordially, bags were delivered promptly, customs was a breeze with “Green: Nothing to Declare” channels. The airport I remembered from arrivals long past—with its fetid odor of malfunctioning air-conditioning, its dark red splats of betel juice in the corners, and its random groups of men loitering around in grimy khaki uniforms—was gone.

Mumbai has performed a serious upgrade on its point of entry, becoming one more international airport against which Newark not to mention the dismally down-at-its-heels JFK (New York’s “Gateway to the World” and my usual point of leave-taking of the United States) unfavorably compare. But, clearly, the city is not stopping there. On exiting, there was construction everywhere. The taxi driver explained that additional terminals and parking garages were under construction.

I’d picked up a bottle of scotch for my Mumbai hosts at the duty-free shop in Newark. I needn’t have bothered. One of the features of the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport is a gleaming duty-free hall through which one must pass between immigration and baggage claim with a far bigger selection of booze, perfume and chocolate than the cute little spot at the Newark Airport where I’d stopped. Cheaper too: I’d paid $37.00 for my bottle of 12-year-old Chivas in Newark, and was dismayed to see the same on offer in Mumbai for $29.00.

As an old-time adopted daughter of this Indian port, I still can’t bear to call the city I have sometimes called home “Mumbai.” For me, it will always be Bombay. Bombay is the name of the cosmopolitan, multi-cultural, live-and-let-live-so-we-can-all-make-a-living city that welcomed my Gujarati family in the early 1960s. Mumbai is the name of a city run by the criminal-political nexus of the Shiv Sena, the pro-Maharashtrian, proto-fascist party that has made life infinitely more difficult for anyone it deems a foreigner—e.g. anyone who is not a Maharasthrian Hindu. Hence the name of the new international airport, Chhatrapati Shivaji, the very same name that Shiv Sena has rechristened the fabulous old Victoria Terminus railway station. Apparently, there was a link between the martial hero of the Marattes and mass-transportation hubs which my reading of Indian history had not made evident.

As two of the city’s most famous native sons now living in voluntary exile in New York, Salman Rushdie and Suketu Mehta, concurred during a panel discussion in which we all participated following the terrorist attack of November 2008, the target of the terrorists was Bombay, not Mumbai. It was to Bombay I had come because of that attack. Read the rest of this entry »

President Barack Obama’s long-awaited shift in strategy on the war in Afghanistan has received praise from European leaders, but getting more troops from them to help support the additional 30,000 U.S. forces now planned for deployment may prove more difficult. While British Prime Minister Gordon Brown pledged 500 more troops in Afghanistan, and NATO promised at least 5,000 more, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said in an interview that he would send “not a single solider more.” However, the newspaper quoted an unnamed senior French official saying President Sarkozy may reconsider. Germany, which has 4,400 troops in Afghanistan, said it would be ready to do more police training but was reluctant to commit more troops. The deployment will bring the total number of American troops to 98,000, while Britain will now have about 10,000 soldiers in the region. U.S. officials have said they’re looking for an additional 5,000 to 7,000 troops from allies. The Taliban released a statement following President Obama’s announcement, saying the extra troops “will provoke stronger resistance and fighting. [The U.S. forces] will withdraw shamefully.”

In an apparent attempt to crack down on inflation and its small but growing free market economy, North Korea revalued its currency and froze all cash transactions. The move, the first in 17 years by North Korea, caused confusion within the country, according to reports. The official exchange rate between the old won and the new is now 100 to one. Some analysts see the burgeoning free market economy threatening Kim Jong-Il’s hold on power and that the aim of the revaluation is to redistribute wealth throughout the country—a single family will reportedly be allowed to hold no more than 150,000 new won (roughly $1100) in hard currency. According to reports, all cash enterprises and services have been suspended by the government. North Korea took tentative steps to liberalize its economy after a famine in the late 1990s. Since then, the black market economy has grown and illicit currency exchanges have profited. The move seems intended to wipe clean the fortunes of these underground entrepreneurs and reestablish a more “perfect” socialist state.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) began public hearings on the legality of Kosovo’s independence from Serbia, which Pristina declared in February, 2008. Kosovo, which had been under a provisional UN administration since 1999, has been recognized as independent by 63 countries (including the United States) since its unilateral secession, and is expected to argue that it was never part of Serbia. “Kosovo’s independence is irreversible and that will remain the case, not only for the sake of Kosovo, but also for the sake of sustainable regional peace and security,” Kosovo’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Skender Hyensi said on Tuesday. “We are certain the court will confirm the will of Kosovo’s people to be independent and free.” Serbia, however, has argued that Kosovo’s secession was a “flagrant violation” of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and has claimed the move was ethnically motivated and thus illegal under international law. The UN General Assembly had asked the ICJ, which is the United Nations’ highest judicial body, for an advisory ruling on the matter at the request of Serbia. The ICJ will hear testimony from 29 countries over the next nine days before issuing its ruling. Though it will not be binding, the decision is expected to set a precedent for other secessionist movements around the world, such as in Chechnya and Basque Country in Spain.

In another jab at the United States and its Western allies, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would enrich its uranium itself rather than send it to Russia and France under a UN-brokered deal. The agreement was supposed to calm fears over Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon by offering Tehran the option of letting foreign countries (which already possess enrichment technology) process Iranian uranium. This would theoretically prevent Iran from developing its own indigenous capacity for enrichment, and would ensure that the uranium provided to Iran’s civil nuclear program would fall short of levels required for weapons production. But Iran has repeatedly been backing down from the UN deal. “The Iranian nation will produce 20 percent enriched uranium and anything it needs (itself),” President Ahmadinejad said. He also called the recent International Atomic Energy Agency censure of Iran’s secret construction of a second enrichment plant “illegal.” “The Zionist regime [Israel] and its backer [the United States] cannot do a damn thing to stop Iran’s nuclear work,” he said.

Tonight, America’s commander-in-chief will address the nation to outline his new Afghanistan strategy. Among other things, this means many of the West Point cadets in the audience will learn what their immediate futures have in store.

According to White House officials, President Obama will comply with General McChrystal’s request for more soldiers, deploying 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan over the next six months. Obama has reportedly said that these young men and women will be asked to “finish the job.”

Of course, the question remains: What exactly is the “job”?

For eight years, forces on the ground have been struggling to find the mission. Hopefully, all of us will soon hear what their “job” is and why it will entail deploying thousands of extra soldiers. Thanks to McChrystal’s assessment, we now understand some of what more soldiers will do. The influx of troops will certainly build and train the Afghan army and police forces and arm militia-style provincial patrols. They will also use counterinsurgency tactics to target Al Qaeda and/or the Taliban while protecting average Afghans, as well as add a dash of nation building.

Unfortunately, this multi-billion dollar strategy ignores the reality of Afghanistan. No one can easily summarize the challenges and complexities there. The country comprises a conglomeration of cultures, ethnicities, languages, and beliefs, and is surrounded by problematic neighbors. History has shown that large-scale interventions there never work and that treading more lightly makes a difference.

Hopefully, President Obama kept this in mind during the strategic deliberations leading up to tonight’s announcement. The provincial successes we have seen thus far have come from small, non-governmental institutions that work with little, but give everything they have to empower the local people—not the warlords or corrupt government officials. Further, Afghanistan cannot be governed by military force alone, unless the goal is to establish an extended period of martial law. Without a functioning government, all those troops training and arming the Afghan forces will make little difference.

U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry recently urged the U.S. to delay sending more troops. His argument was colored by the mismanagement and corruption he’s seen within the Afghan government, afflictions that have also affected many international aid organizations. To date, billions of dollars have been poured into fighting a war without clearly defined objectives, and to building a central government without first drafting a sensible blueprint. Both military and civilian leaders need to revisit their management and cooperation efforts, and better define their “jobs” if any progress is to be made.

Unfortunately, the military solution seems to be moving forward without first determining its overall aim. Without that, there is no way to “fix” the problem, win public support (domestic and foreign), and smoothly exit the country once the insurgency is quelled.

It would behoove President Obama to remember the old adage, “Afghanistan is a graveyard of empires.” Despite the lessons of our predecessors, Washington seems bent on re-enacting past failures by shooting first and asking critical questions later. President Obama’s speech must be concise about the job he is asking our soldiers to endure while explaining how his team asked the right questions to come to this conclusion—before the final tally in money and blood climbs higher on all sides.

Patricia DeGennaro is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, focusing on Afghanistan, the Middle East, and civil-military affairs. She is also an adjunct assistant professor at New York University where she teaches courses on international security and U.S. foreign policy.

This article was originally published by The Huffington Post.

Have you noticed? More and more people are falling off the war in Afghanistan: George Will, Andrew Bacevich, Gary Wills, John Mearsheimer, and now Karl Eikenberry, former American commander Afghanistan and present ambassador there. Eikenberry, though not advocating a pullout, is reportedly not in favor of a troop increase unless President Hamid Karzai will reform his government with new and competent people, and eliminate the rampant corruption. The Ambassador’s position goes distinctly against the recommendation of the Spartan-limned Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the present American commander in Afghanistan, who wants to put in upwards of 40,000 more U.S. troops into the country.

Have you read the McChrystal report? It is quite an eye-opener. It says relatively little about al-Qaeda, which President Obama has rightly singled out as the enemy. Al-Qaeda is not even in Afghanistan anymore but in Pakistan’s tribal regions. Al-Qaeda’s strength may not number more than a couple of hundred. The retrospective truth is that Afghanistan ceased to be a “necessary war” in late 2001, when al-Qaeda escaped into Pakistan.

The McChrystal report lists three principal opponents: the Quetta Shura (the Afghan Taliban, based in Quetta, in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province); the network of Jalaladin Haqqani, operating in Afghanistan; and the followers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, also operating in Afghanistan. What do these three groups have in common? They all have had connections with the Pakistani Intelligence Service (ISI). The Afghan Taliban were created by the ISI in 1994 in order to bring Afghanistan out of anarchy and assure that country as Pakistan’s “near abroad,” away from Indian influence. Haqqani and Gulbuddin are former Mujahidin comanders in the war in the 1980’s against the Soviets, supported by the ISI and behind it, the U.S. and several other interested countries. One may ask, what are we doing in this galere? We seem to have gotten ourselves involved, almost by inadvertence, in a civil war in Afghanistan.

These three groups are an expression of discontent on the part of the leading ethnic group in Afghanistan, the Pashtuns, comprising some 40 percent of the population. Their discontent is focused on the government in Kabul where, though President Karzai is a Pashtun, the main security and military positions are held by the Northern Alliance, the expression of the second largest ethnic group, the Tadjiks. It was the Northern Alliance, together with American conventional and unconventional forces, that overthrew the Taliban as the protector of al-Qaeda in the Fall of 2001, after the 9/11 atttacks.

What we should be thinking about, and what more and more observers are talking about, is how do we get out of this mess? If the Taliban were to take back control in Afghanistan, would they allow al-Qaeda back in, considering what happened to them in the fall of 2001? Perhaps not. In any event, and what seems to escape the public, is that in today’s world, you don’t need training camps in Afghanistan in order to carry out terrorist attacks.

If the Taliban were to take over in Afghanistan, would the ISI stand idly by or would it try to assert some kind of control over, or at least strengthen its relationship with, the Taliban? Probably.

Gordon Brown has said it, and Karl Eikenberry has aparently said it too: Why throw more troops into the fire in Afghanistan to support a corrupt government?

Especially when the main enemy isn’t even there.

Dr. Charles G. Cogan was the chief of the Near East South Asia Division in the Directorate of Operations of the CIA from August 1979 to August 1984. It was from this Division that was run the covert action operation against the Soviets in Afghanistan. He is currently an Associate at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School.