US success in Afghanistan requires a change in strategy.

Last week’s Bonn Conference was another lost opportunity to promote a genuine multilateral approach to Afghanistan. For the past decade, and especially after President Obama took office, the West has pinned its entire Afghan strategy on Pakistan.

Yet, despite spending US$ 386 billion and losses of 1,774 lives since 2001, America’s return on investment has been truly dismal. The reasons for this have been clear all along – America overinvested in Pakistan and underinvested in the rest of the region.  

It is important to revisit why the West’s “Af-Pak” strategy collapsed and what is the best way forward.

To eradicate radicalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a purely counter-terrorism mission could not have worked, at least in the initial phase. In the tumultuous political setting in which state sovereignty has eroded over the decades, especially in the case of Pakistan’s borderlands – in which it was never established – neutralising terrorism requires some element of state building on both sides of the Durand Line. Thus, the Afghan question logically evolved into a counter-insurgency mission that could only be fulfilled via a limited nation-building project.

Yet, the massive boots required for such a strategy have not been deemed domestically sustainable in the West. This mismatch of ends and means led directly to the heart of the problem - adopting a counter-insurgency strategy that depended on the collaboration of Pakistani boots across the Durand Line. In this sense, the American geostrategy has clearly been Pakistan-centric.

The next challenge before the American planner was to persuade Pakistan to abandon its hedging strategy of supporting proxy militias on their western front. Normalising Pakistani threat perceptions, therefore, became a logical extension of the Afghan strategy.

How did the US respond to this reshaping of Pakistani threat perceptions? This involved cajoling India to reassure Pakistan. Here India’s restraint and reassurance has been stretched to the limit. Nevertheless, we have seen that reassurance that satisfies Pakistan, if taken to its logical conclusion, implies outright capitulation by its immediate neighbours. The US also directly reassured Pakistan by signalling a long-term commitment to address Pakistan’s fear of abandonment, and provided capacity-building support to help Pakistan help itself.

Changing Pakistan’s worldview and reconstruction of its identity, however, has proved impossible for three reasons.

First, lack of intent - Pakistan has been reluctant to fully cooperate with America to break the back of the insurgency. It hopes to retain some leverage via the Afghan Taliban not only for potential influence in Afghanistan but also in ensuring that Pakistan’s 27 million Pashtuns do not create a blowback for the Pakistani state. In fact, it is Pakistan’s Pashtun problem that is the principal driver for its “strategic depth” policies, which are then legitimised by the “India threat”.

Second, lack of capacity - an important assumption was that the Pakistani state, including its military, had the capacity and discipline to prosecute a counter-insurgency strategy, which to be politically useful must be followed up with an administrative absorption of the ungoverned frontier regions into the Pakistani state. Again, Pakistan has not demonstrated sovereign governance capabilities to “hold and build” western Pakistan. For all practical purposes, the writ of the Pakistani state does not extend beyond the Indus.

Third, an ideational paralysis - the objective of the permanently changing Pakistani calculus presumed that Pakistan’s fuedal elite could change course by dismantling its strategic reliance on radical Islam. And this in turn presumed that Pakistan would be able to substitute the diabolical use of Islam and ideologically reinvent itself as a normal nation-state with normal threat perceptions.

This was always a tall order because it implied an ambitious geopolitical reconstruction of the post-1947 subcontinent and body politic. Ironically, what the post-transition phase actually needs is a predictable transactional relationship between the US and Pakistan where all western aid is conditioned on sustained anti-terrorist measures by Pakistan against groups targeting the international community.

Now if a Pakistan-centric approach has reached a dead-end, we need to have a look at what can be done differently on the Afghan side of the equation.

First, western discourse focuses on breaking the link between Al-Qaida and the Taliban so that the latter can be accommodated in a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan. But to execute this top-down reconciliation strategy would require Pakistani intent, capacity, and real governance being extended to the tribal areas and the safe havens in western Pakistan. The prospect of this happening is structurally nearly impossible.

But what about pursuing an alternative strategy that can actually be implemented from within Afghanistan? Breaking the Pashtun link from the Taliban or at least de-legitimising the narrative that the Taliban factions are the sole voice for the Afghan Pashtun is something that has not been pursued seriously. The main reason for this is the US strategic establishment has held on to the optimistic scenario that Pakistan would ultimately emerge as an intermediary in a grand top-down bargain with the Taliban confederacy.