Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 

Last week, Scotland Yard (alas, working without their chief sleuth, the late Sherlock Holmes) uncovered a major bomb plot. Those arrested were all Pakistanis. However, unlike the current U.S. policy, they chose to arrest the suspects, after months of carefully tracking their movements (notwithstanding Bob Quick, Britain’s senior counterterrorism expert, whose comical slip-up required the accelerating of planned raids and resulted in his resignation), not bomb them from 30,000 feet. Likewise, when four years ago bombers blew up trains entering Madrid's central station, the Spanish police laboriously ran them down, eventually cornering a number of the ringleaders in a safehouse. That time, the perpetrators were mainly Algerians and Moroccans. Those arrested, and later convicted and imprisoned, had no formal links with Al Qaeda. In fact, their ties were non existent, a government-appointed commission later found. Doubtless, however, it was the example of Al Qaeda that prompted their horrific attacks. The Spanish, on their manhunt, did not choose to bomb them, or even blast them out of their hideaways. (Seven suspects did, however, blow themselves up when they found themselves surrounded by Spanish authorities.) But the investigation took careful police work, backed by the latest in forensic and technological tools. Couldn't the Americans and NATO have done the same at the onset of their intervention in Afghanistan? Certainly, investigating domestic terrorism isn’t the same as stamping it out in a hostile and foreign land, but allied forces could have found informers and probably help from the rank and file of locals who wanted to have nothing to do with those who blew up New York's World Trade Center. Even many in the ranks of the Taliban may have been privately uneasy by the Al Qaeda attack. Moreover, Osama bin Laden was a distant, shadowy figure for most of them. Instead, we had a blanket armed invasion. The UN has reported that, in 2008, the number of civilian casualties rose by 40 percent. Surely there is a better way of finding bin Laden. Western forces are not there to reform Islam, to liberate women, or to install democracy. Afghan society must choose for itself whether or not it wants to pursue these lofty goals.

“We must have an exit strategy [for Afghanistan],” said President Barack Obama on 60 Minutes this past Sunday night. But after seven years of steadily losing the war in Afghanistan isn't a "re-entry strategy" more appropriate? In a month's time, Obama will descend on NATO at its Brussels headquarters and insist that the Europeans help out. Well before then, Obama will have on his desk the interagency policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan that he has requested. We should be able to guess its bias, if not every detail of its contents. The review committee is being chaired by Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and a senior advisor to three U.S. presidents on Middle East and South Asian issues. His views are easily accessible on the Brookings Institution website. My first reaction upon reading them is why on earth didn't Obama give the job to his old mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski or to Brent Scowcroft, the wise owl of previous Republican administrations (but not the last one). Why choose some lower level official who is used to being bossed around and told what to do? Both Brzezinski and Scowcroft have experience in standing close to a president and also, when necessary, standing up to him. The answer, I fear, is that the two most practiced men on foreign policy (excepting perhaps Henry Kissinger, who has already made clear his doubts on Washington's Afghanistan policy) wouldn't tow the White House party line. Obama made the decision to raise the stakes in Afghanistan and Pakistan way back in his presidential campaign. Was it to counterbalance his Iraq withdrawal position to show that he wasn't soft on the use of military power abroad? Bill Clinton used this gambit, calling for the expansion of NATO to win crucial votes in the American midwest from Poles and other Eastern Europeans in the diaspora, even though hardly anyone in the U.S. or European foreign affairs community was calling for it? Riedel, to his credit, does say some sensible things: “The war in Afghanistan is going badly, the southern half of the country is in chaos...and in Pakistan, the jihadist Frankenstein monster that was created by the Pakistani army and Pakistani intelligence service is now increasingly turning on its creators.” He goes on to say that the missile attacks inside Pakistan “have a counterproductive element in them...the American brand image has been badly eroded.” Nevertheless, says Riedel, the momentum of the Taliban “has to be broken.” But we know all that. So what does he advocate as a solution?

Today Pakistan is probably the most dangerous country in the world. But it is India, not Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, that now bears much of the responsibility for this and arguably is the country that holds the key to the beginnings of a solution. More the pity that President Barack Obama backed straight down when India protested at the mandate he wanted for his sharpshooting diplomat, Richard Holbrooke­—including India, as well as Pakistan and Afghanistan. So Holbrooke is reduced to dealing with only two sides of the triangle of madness. Of course, it is an over simplification to finger India first. It ignores history, not least the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, which left behind a raging civil war in Afghanistan, enabling the rise of the dogmatic Taliban, who in turn gave a home to Osama bin Laden. In 1986 I visited Peshawar, capital of the North-West Frontier Province in northern Pakistan, at the eastern end of the Khyber pass. The town, even then, was full of armed encampments in its outer suburbs settled by Pashtun chiefs who had escaped from the Afghanistan war with their people, building huge, well-defended compounds to house the refugees from their kin group. It was clear then that the hospitality Pakistan felt it had to extend to the displaced Pashtuns would cause trouble up ahead. Two million such refugees bred violence and extremism.