Choosing Sides and Guiding Policy United States’ and Pakistan’S Wars in Afghanistan
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UNIVERSITY OF FLORDA Choosing Sides and Guiding Policy United States’ and Pakistan’s Wars in Afghanistan Azhar Merchant 4/24/2019 Table of Contents I. Introduction… 2 II. Political Settlement of the Mujahedeen War… 7 III. The Emergence of the Taliban and the Lack of U.S. Policy… 27 IV. The George W. Bush Administration… 50 V. Conclusion… 68 1 I. Introduction Forty years of war in Afghanistan has encouraged the most extensive periods of diplomatic and military cooperation between the United States and Pakistan. The communist overthrow of a relatively peaceful Afghan government and the subsequent Soviet invasion in 1979 prompted the United States and Pakistan to cooperate in funding and training Afghan mujahedeen in their struggle against the USSR. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Afghanistan entered a period of civil war throughout the 1990s that nurtured Islamic extremism, foreign intervention, and the rise of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, ultimately culminating in the devastating attacks against Americans on September 11th. Seventeen years later, the United States continues its war in Afghanistan while its relationship with Pakistan has deteriorated to an all-time low. The mutual fear of Soviet expansionism was the unifying cause for Americans and Pakistanis to work together in the 1980s, yet as the wars in Afghanistan evolved, so did the countries’ respective aims and objectives.1 After the Soviets were successfully pushed out of the region by the mujahedeen, the United States felt it no longer had any reason to stay. The initial policy aim of destabilizing the USSR through prolonged covert conflict in Afghanistan was achieved. However, the following political settlement of Kabul failed and turned into a gruesome civil war between former mujahedeen. Securing a fully representational interim government that achieved self-determination for the Afghan people became the new official policy objective of the United States from 1988 onwards, yet this objective never came to fruition. The Americans 1 Dennis Kux, The United States and Pakistan, 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies (Washington, D.C: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2001), 256-257. 2 left the region and Afghanistan became much less of a foreign policy priority for the administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The attacks faced by Americans on September 11th then reignited United States’ interest in Afghanistan and the country became the first among many battlefields in the United States’ Global War on Terror. The United States articulated an objective to rid of terrorists and their sponsors all around the world, but especially in Afghanistan where the raids on Manhattan and the Pentagon were planned and organized. While the United Nations and certain Americans advocated for the reconstruction of Afghan political and civilian institutions, the George W. Bush administration largely depended on regional warlords to try to stabilize the country while American joint military forces could continue the search for Osama bin Laden. Pakistan, meanwhile, felt it had to continue funding its own proxies during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s. Pakistan backed its allies in the Hezbi Islami faction of mujahedeen on their march to Kabul, and then switched to supporting a more direct proxy—the Taliban. Other factions in the civil war, such as the Ahmed Shah Massoud’s Shura-e-Nazar, were perceived to be ripe with enemies in the eyes of Pakistani military figureheads. The fear was that the new government in Kabul could potentially become dominated by Indian influence, something that Pakistan considers as a dire threat to its own existence. Pakistani army generals perceived warlords favored by the United States post 9/11 as agents in cahoots with their enemy India. The greatest national security concern for Pakistan has always been its giant neighbor to the east with whom it fought four devastating wars and suffered numerous other military conflicts. The two South Asian neighbors still had unresolved conflicts dating back to issues caused by the Partition of 1947 when the two nations were split at birth. The principle issue between Pakistan and India can be attributed to the status of the former princly state of Kashmir, whose ruler did not declare 3 for Pakistan nor India during the partition and so propelled the two new nations to claim its sovereignty. The promised further discussions on settling Muslim-dominated Kashmir never came to be and instead Pakistan and India occupied the regions they conquered after the Indo- Pakistani wars of 1947 and 1965. To this day, Kashmiris are caught in between military aggression from both sides and suffer from a non-citizenship status that stifles their own chances to represent themselves in either government. Pakistan’s army generals, many of whom fought directly in the many wars with India, became enamored with the possibility that Afghanistan would become an Indian proxy power. Pakistan was worried that this would cause its Kashmiri movement to suffer, as India would gain a diplomatic upper hand with a government in Kabul that could pressure the international community in settling Kashmir on Indian terms. Pakistan’s objectives in Afghanistan throughout its period of instability was therefore one aspect of Pakistan’s foreign policy designed to limit Indian influence in the region and promote its own. The fundamentalist mujahedeen factions that sprang up in the 1980s, largely due to funding from the ISI and CIA, thus were empowered by Pakistan to carry out covert military expeditions against India in its administrative areas of Kashmir. The jihadis exported by Pakistan’s military and intelligence officials to fight in Kashmir generated stark backlash from India and resulted in escalations of war that repeat up to this day. India in turn refuses to negotiate a settlement with Pakistan claiming such deals could not be made since Pakistan continues to promote terrorism and anti-Indian sentiment in the region. Therefore, Pakistan always viewed its efforts in Afghanistan through the prism of its never-ending conflict with India. The United States did not share this concern and so its purposes in Afghanistan would divert with Pakistan eventually. After the September 11th attacks against 4 Americans in 2001, Pakistan and the United States worked closely in Afghanistan but now faced issues regarding who is an enemy and who is a friend. Pakistan continued to support the Taliban in the region even after the Americans declared them an enemy for protecting the terrorists that committed the acts of 9/11—Al-Qaeda. Pakistan played a double game that resulted in a blowback of internal pressure and homegrown militancy spurring an increase in suicide attacks on Pakistani soil against its own citizens. It also resulted in international condemnation and a deterioration of relations with the United States culminating in the end of all U.S. foreign assistance to Pakistan in 2017. With Pakistan and the United States pursuing such different policies in Afghanistan, ever since the late 1980s, one questions how the alliance was kept intact for so long when their respective policies were often working against each other. Looking at the periods of settling the Mujahedeen-Soviet war, the Afghan civil war, and the subsequent War on Terror, one can analyze the nature of how U.S.-Pakistani efforts diverged. In this analysis, my research questions beg to ask how much the United States-Pakistan alliance is based on institutional principles/policy goals versus it being based on actions by major players in either country? Why did the U.S.-Pakistani strategy favor warlords and regional leaders in Afghanistan sometimes at a disadvantage of the elected Afghan government? Is the U.S. warlord policy comparable to the Taliban policy enacted by Pakistan? The findings largely indicate that major players in the alliance have repeatedly overrode efforts initiated by policy goals that were set by institutions. These major players varied in the positions they held within the American and Pakistani governments and were still able to guide policy in a direction that benefited their own agendas even if civilians and lawmakers protested at home. As a result of policy being dictated largely by major players, the United States’ Afghan 5 policy drifted towards supporting regional warlords just as Pakistan was empowering the Taliban. When the United States gave the warlords support and unbridled monetary funds, they would prove to be just as ruthless as the Taliban in the areas they conquered. 6 II. Political Settlement of the Mujahedeen War The relationship between the United States and Pakistan during the 1980s was primarily led by the intelligence agencies of both countries and key leaders within them. Institutional principles and policy goals directed at ending the war and establishing a new independent government in Kabul were forced to take a backseat as the CIA asserted its military campaign that attempted to install a Pakistan proxy as the new head of state. This alliance between the Central Intelligence Agency and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) failed to politically settle the Soviet-Mujahedeen War while managing to stifle diplomatic strategies proposed by American Congressmen, Pakistani civilian leaders, and secular Afghan commanders. Despite the efforts of the State Department and the newly elected civilian government in Pakistan, major actors such as Milton Bearden, Robert Oakley, and General Hamid Gul were able to pursue efforts in Afghanistan that ignored policy directives aiming for a broad political solution. The settlement of the mujahedeen war was thus never accomplished, a goal set by the UN-mandated Geneva Accords and ratified by the United States in 1988, because key players in both Pakistan and the United States were able to command foreign policy even as there was considerable opposition within their respective governments. The active efforts of leading CIA officers to misguide official US policy are evident in scenarios that involved an untimely dismissal of a US special envoy and the rejection of an inter- agency effort to establish a more representative government than the one Pakistan’s intelligence had produced.