Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single front and more dangerous than Iraq: Is anyone listening?

Today at Informed Comment Global Affairs, Barnett Rubin, a highly regarded expert on Afghanistan and Director of Studies and Senior Fellow at the Center on International Cooperation, posted Karachi Bombing: Afghanistan and Pakistan Are a Single Front:

“The bombing of Benazir Bhutto's motorcade in Karachi signals a new level of integration of the political arena of Afghanistan and Pakistan. If, as now seems likely, the attack is traced back to the 'Pakistani' Taliban of South Waziristan and al-Qaida, it will constitute a strike at the center of the Pakistani political process by groups based on the frontier who are part of both the transnational Afghan-Pakistani Taliban movement and the transnational global al-Qaida movement.”

Rubin quotes Lord Paddy Ashdown, former United Nations high representative and European Union special representative for Bosnia and Herzegovin, who warned in a recent Reuters interview that failure by the NATO-led force in Aghanistan would have far wider repercussions than any losses in Iraq:

"I think we are losing in Afghanistan now, we have lost I think and success is now unlikely.

"I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite, Sunni regional war on a grand scale.

"Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this (failure) to match this magnitude."

Rubin concludes, “Those who tried to kill Benazir Bhutto clearly perceive that a democratic Pakistan is the greatest threat their movement has faced in the region….Paddy Ashdown correctly warns that this situation is more dangerous than Iraq. Is anyone listening?"

(map of Pakistan: Desi Chat)

The Places In Between

If you want to learn more about the lives of Afghans, read Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between . It’s also a great adventure story since Rory walks from Herat in western Afghanistan to Kabul in eastern Afghanistan, through the mountains in winter and shortly after the Taliban were removed from power.

This is what I learned about Afghans:
1. Most of them, especially in the villages, are fiercely tribal;
2. The custom is to accommodate travelers, not always willingly. Life is so harsh that people are forced to help one another whether they want to or not.
3. Even the meanest huts have “guest” rooms, which I suspect are intended to keep strangers who are traveling, all male, away from the women. It was rare that Rory was allowed in the presence of women.
4. A vast majority of Afghans are not ready to western-style democracy.

In a chapter titled “Pale Circles in Walls,” Stewart describes the disconnect between the U.N. objectives of “the creation of a centralized, broad-based, multiethnic government committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law” and the differences between the many tribes he encountered, which were “deep, elusive, and difficult to overcome."

Stewart had a half-dozen friends who worked in Afghanistan in embassies, think tanks, international development agencies, etc., and found them all well-meaning. However, “Policy makers did not have the time, structure, or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist. They acted as though villagers were interested in all the priorities of international organizations, even when those priorities were mutually contradictory.”

The Places In Between is a thoughtful book which has done more to inform me about the lives of Afghans than everything else that I have come across.

(photo of book cover – Vuvzela.blog.co.uk)
(photo of Rory Stewart and Babur, the mastiff who walked many miles with him – Graphics8.nytimes.com)