Descent into chaos

The US invasions of two Muslim countries, billions of dollars, armies of security guards and new technology have so far failed to contain either the original organisation or the threat that now comes from its copycats – unemployed young Muslim men in urban slums in British or French cities who have been mobilised through the Internet. The al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden – now a global inspirational figure – is still at large despite the largest manhunt in history.

In the region that spawned al-Qaeda and which the United States had promised to transform after 9/11, the crisis is even more dangerous. Afghanistan is once again staring down the abyss of state collapse despite billions of dollars in aid, 45,000 western troops and the deaths of thousands of people. The Taliban have made a dramatic comeback, enlisting the help of al-Qaeda and Islamic extremists in Pakistan and getting a boost from the explosion in heroin production that has helped fund their movement.

The UN representative, Lakhdar Brahimi, had promised what he termed "a light footprint" for the UN presence in Afghanistan while some US officials eventually promised that they would carry out "nation building". In fact, barely enough was done by any organisation in the first few years when 90 per cent of the Afghan population continued to welcome foreign troops and aid workers with open arms. The international community had an extended window of opportunity for several years to help the Afghan people – they failed to take advantage of it.

Pakistan’s military regime, led by President Pervez Musharraf, has undergone a slower but equally bloody meltdown. The military has refused to allow a genuinely representative government to take root. In 2007 Musharraf, after massive public demonstrations, suspended the Constitution, sacked the senior judiciary, imprisoned more than 12,000 lawyers and members of civil society and muzzled the media in an attempt to stay in power and ensure that any elections favoured him rather than the opposition.

The country is beset by a major political crisis and the spread of Islamic extremism that now sees its chance to topple the state. Musharraf’s plunge from hero to villain was compounded by the assassination of the country’s larger-than-life opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in December 2007, followed by a wave of suicide bombings and mayhem.

Across the five independent states of Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – dictatorships have ruled continuously since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The lack of basic political freedoms, grinding poverty, huge economic disparities and an Islamic extremist political underground are set to plunge Central Asia, despite its oil and gas reserves, into ever greater turmoil.

The consequences of state failure in any single country are unimaginable.

At stake in Afghanistan is not just the future of President Hamid Karzai and the Afghan people yearning for stability, development and education but also the entire global alliance that is trying to keep Afghanistan together. At stake are the futures of the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the European Union and, of course, America’s own power and prestige. It is difficult to imagine how NATO could survive as the West’s leading military alliance if the Taliban are not defeated in Afghanistan or if bin Laden remains at large indefinitely. Yet the international community’s lukewarm commitment to Afghanistan after 9/11 has been matched only by its incompetence, incoherence and conflicting strategies – all led by the United States.

What is at stake in Pakistan is even greater. A nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive and double-dealing policies after 9/11, even under the watchful eye of the CIA. The recent blow-back from these policies is now threatening the state, undermining the army, decapitating the political elite and drowning the country in a sea of blood. In 2007 there were 56 suicide bombings in Pakistan that killed 640 people, compared to just six bombings in the previous year.

President Bush’s embrace of Musharraf and the military rather than of the Pakistani people and the development of state institutions and a democratic process has created immense hatred for the US army and America, hatred that penetrates all classes of society. Ninety per cent of the $10 billion in aid that the United States has provided Pakistan with since 9/11 has gone to the military rather than to development. Moreover, anti-Americanism has hit Pakistani society’s core values, undermining people’s understanding of democracy, secular education, modernisation and civil society – because all these facets of society are deemed to be American.

When the Bush administration continued to back Musharraf in late 2007 despite the general’s rampage against the judiciary and civil society, Pakistan’s middle class was overtaken by feelings of anti-Americanism, making it impossible to persuade Pakistanis to resist the extremists. Neither was it possible to convince people that the struggle against extremism was not just America’s war but equally Pakistan’s.

With a population of 175 million, Pakistan is the fifth largest country in the world. Its society is riddled with deep ethnic, social and economic fissures. Quite apart from the Islamists, there are grave dangers of secular separatist movements in the provinces of Balochistan and Sindh that could divide the nation just as ethnic nationalism did in 1971 when East Pakistan became an independent Bangladesh. With such threats, is it surprising that foreign experts are worried about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?

(The) United States ignored consolidating South and Central Asia – the homeland of global terrorism – in favour of invading Iraq. American resources and military manpower that Afghanistan should have received went to Iraq. "Iraq was more than just a major distraction to Afghanistan," says Kofi Annan in retrospect. "Huge resources were devoted to Iraq, which focused away from nation building in Afghanistan. The billions spent in Iraq were the billions that were not spent in Afghanistan." Moreover, the US attack on Iraq was critical to convincing Musharraf that the United States was not serious about stabilising the region and that it was safer for Pakistan to preserve its own national interest by clandestinely giving the Taliban refuge.

What makes the war in Iraq and the enormous human losses there even more tragic is that all the mistakes made by the Bush administration in Iraq had already been made in Afghanistan – yet nothing was learnt. First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, not enough US troops were deployed nor were enough planning and resources devoted to the immediate post-war resuscitation of people’s lives. There was no coherence to US tactics and strategy, which led to vitally wrong decisions being taken at critical moments – whether it was reviving the warlords in Afghanistan or dismantling the army and bureaucracy in Iraq.

America failed to secure the region after 9/11, to carry out nation building on a scale that could have reversed the appeal of terrorism and Islamic extremism and averted state collapse on a more calamitous scale than could ever have happened before 9/11.

…The quick American victory in Afghanistan in 2001 created the feeling that a new era was now inevitable. Despite their cowboy president, the Americans were momentarily humbled by their own vulnerability and felt guilty about having ignored Afghanistan for the past decade. US TV networks suddenly began to cover the Muslim world and the Koran became a best-seller in US bookshops. The rest of the world rallied around America as international organisations such as the UN sanctioned the US invasion of Afghanistan.

(But) within a few months of 9/11 Bush had added to his counterterrorism agenda the "axis of evil" (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) and the ideas of "pre-emption" and "regime change" in which the United States could presume a nation’s guilt and attack it before it had carried out any hostile act. Never before had the United States presented the world with such an aggressive global strategy that reeked of overt imperialism, alienated Europeans and Muslims alike and made the job of winning hearts and minds around the globe virtually impossible. Bush was now truly the global cowboy. "The problem is that President Bush has reframed his initial question. Instead of simply asking others to oppose al-Qaeda, he now asks them to oppose al-Qaeda, support the invasion of an Arab country and endorse the doctrine of pre-emption – all as part of a single package," said former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright.

At home Bush presented his global agenda as a result of sudden worldwide anti-Americanism rather than a result of past American policy failures. "Why do they hate us? They hate our freedoms – our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other," Bush told Congress on September 20, 2001. Such words ignored past failures and created a culture of fear and hysteria among many Americans even as it created disdain and ridicule abroad. The unspoken implication of such rhetoric was that if they hated us then Americans should hate Muslims back and retaliate not just against the terrorists but against Islam in general. By generating such fears it was virtually impossible to gain American public attention and support for long-term nation building.

The Bush doctrine was also doggedly to sweep under the carpet any discussion or understanding of the "root causes" of terrorism – the growing poverty, repression and sense of injustice that many Muslims felt at the hands of their US-backed governments, which in turn boosted anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism. The Bush administration was determined to prevent any alternative views on US foreign policy from emerging and the Washington-based media was cowed from asking awkward questions until the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan became too obvious. It took four years before anyone in the Bush administration admitted that the United States had failed to carry out nation building. "We didn’t have the right skills, the right capacity to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind," said Condoleezza Rice, speaking of both Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005.

Bush did more to keep Americans blind to world affairs than any American leader in recent history. In 2004 a strategic think tank supported by the Pentagon issued a damning report saying that America’s strategic communications with the world had broken down and a total reorganisation of public diplomacy was needed. The Department of Defence Science Board said the United States was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world: "Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom’ but rather, they hate our policies… The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed towards the Muslim world is not one of ‘dissemination of information’ or even one of crafting and delivering the ‘right’ message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none – the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam."

In Europe, there was a vastly different approach to dealing with the terrorist threat… Even the 2004 and 2005 bombings, in Madrid and London respectively, never generated the governmental hysteria regarding the fundamental rights of their citizens that 9/11 did in the United States. There were calls to improve the integration of Muslim citizens into Spanish and British societies rather than isolate them. European governments treaded slowly before they introduced new antiterrorism laws. An enormous respect was shown to civil liberties and human rights for all their citizens – Muslims included.

In the early months of 2002 no outsider, least of all myself, had any idea that Iraq rather than Afghanistan was the real focus of the Bush administration’s attention and that the "war on terrorism" would be fought in Baghdad rather than Kabul or Islamabad. The reluctance of the Pentagon to commit more American troops to Afghanistan should have alerted us that either the US military was very stupid or it had preoccupations other than Afghanistan. Yet at the time few people I spoke to, including US officials, could believe that the neocons would wilfully give up tracking down al-Qaeda leaders and would move on to Iraq. We now know that the chase was given up in March 2002 – just three months after the fall of Kandahar – when the Arabic- and Persian-speaking US SOF (Special Operations Forces) teams were moved out of Afghanistan to train for Iraq and surveillance satellites were pulled from the skies over Afghanistan and redirected to Iraq.

The American failure to rebuild Afghanistan and Iraq or to move Pakistan and Central Asia toward reform and democracy made it almost impossible for Muslim moderates to support the West’s struggle against Islamic extremism or to bring about change in their own countries. The US campaign to eliminate al-Qaeda had turned into a much larger American intervention across the Islamic world that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda and that Muslims could not support or tolerate. The treatment of prisoners by the US military at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib were symptoms of an ever expanding war that alienated the entire globe. By 2007 a decisive shift had taken place in key countries such as Pakistan where hatred for Musharraf and the Americans took precedence over hatred for al-Qaeda even as Pakistanis died in large numbers from al-Qaeda-sponsored suicide bombings. This made fighting the extremists much more difficult.

As the Bush era nears its end in 2008, American power lies shattered. The US army is overstretched and broken, the American people are disillusioned and rudderless, US credibility lies in ruins and the world is a far more dangerous place. The Iraq war has bankrupted the United States, consuming up to $11 billion a month. Ultimately, the strategies of the Bush administration have created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9/11. There are now full-blown Taliban insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the next locus could be Uzbekistan. The safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is uppermost in the minds of western governments. There are more failing states in the Muslim world while al-Qaeda has expanded around the world.

The American people have understood the tragedy associated with Bush’s imperial overreach and, as the 2008 US elections will doubtless show, they are no longer as naive, ignorant or scared as they were after 9/11. However, it has taken the American people time to learn such lessons and in the meantime American power has been squandered and hatred for Americans has become a global phenomenon. Bush’s historical legacy will be one of failure. (My) book is an attempt to explain how that came about in Washington and on the ground in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.

(Pakistan-based Ahmed Rashid is also the author of the best-seller, Taliban. The above piece is an excerpt from the introduction to his new book, Descent into Chaos: How the War against Islamic extremism is being lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, published in 2008.)