WASHINGTON – A unique , though stringing critique – near indictment – ofthe US-led Nation-Building project in Afghanistan has surfaced from the topUS General.
It came from none other than- John Sopko, the current US special inspectorgeneral for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), and the four-star GeneralJohn Rutherford Allen, who commanded 150,000 U.S. and NATO forces (fromJuly 2011 to February 2013) in the war-battered country.
Both Sopko and Allen also – by default – came to the rescue of Pakistan andpoked holes in the US-Afghan narrative on Pakistan too.
Here is what John Sopko, who has since 2012 meticulously been laying barethe systemic fraud and lacunas in the US security and development efforts,said when asked about Pakistan’s role in the Afghan insurgency.
“We keep referring to Pakistan as being the key problem. But the problemalso was that the Afghan government at times was viewed very negatively bytheir local people and what you really need is to insert a government thatthe people support, a government that is not predatory, a government thatis not a bunch of lawless warlords. That is a key thing and that was one ofthe things I did not talk about. When we poured so much money into theseunstable environments we contributed to the problem of creating morewarlords, more powerful people who basically take the law into their ownhands. So, in essence, the government we introduced, particularly some ofthe Afghan local police forces, which were nothing other than warlordmilitias with some uniforms on, were just as bad as the terrorists beforethem.”
Sopko continued: “the sheer amount of money spent … had no correlation withoutcome.” He characterised past reconstruction efforts as trying to build‘a diplomatic Norway’ that emphasised the construction of ‘schools,highways, etc’. The question to be answered should have been, “what werethe services the insurgents were providing” that gained the public’s trustin a village, district or province and go from there.
General John, the president of the Brookings Institution, who had commandedthe US-NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan(July 2011-Feb 2013) also offered a sobre assessment of the intricacies ofUS-Pakistan relations.
For a long time, I believed that peace in Afghanistan passed throughIslamabad and Rawalpindi. In many respects, I now think that the longtermstability of Pakistan passes not just through Islamabad and Rawalpindi butalso through Kabul. So, getting the Pakistanis, the Afghans and theinternational community to have a similar view that a stable Afghanistan,one that has the capacity both for governmental stability, security to thepopulation, and very importantly, a viable reinvigorated economy, is notjust important to Afghanistan it is also important to the long termstability of Pakistan.”
General Allen also pointed to another triangular threat that Afghanistanfaces i.e. inextricable link between criminality, corruption, and theinsurgency.
“In my mind, there was a triangular threat to Afghanistan’s future butalso, in a military context, you had the ideological insurgency, which wewould euphemistically called the Taliban, you had the drug enterprise whichfueled an awful lot of insurgent and criminal behaviour and then you hadthe criminal patronage network. I don’t believe we were properly organisedfrankly to deal with that.”
Allen cautioned, “we will fool ourselves to believing we have defeated theTaliban in a particular area only to find out that now we got the criminalpatronage networks to work in.
They are deeply embedded in the society and they are well fueled with theirdrug enterprise.”
Coming from two top American officials, these statements are quiteinstructive, particularly for all those who tend to dump the entire blameat Pakistan’s doorstep. They, of course, should not deflect from Pakistan’spolicy failures and administrative missteps which have only added toacrimony and mistrust between the two countries. Islamabad and Rawalpindineed to act in unison vis-à-vis Afghanistan, also because the latterdefines the Indian and the US narrative on Pakistan. APAPPS has created agood momentum and both countries can now build on it to defy the externalfactors that have been ominously shadowing their bilateral relations.