THE WRONG ENEMY
America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014
Carlotta Gall
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
329 pages; Rs 1,369
Reading Carlotta Gall's fascinating account of US involvement in Afghanistan from surge to dirge leaves one with a wearied sense of dejà vu. Taken together with Husain Haqqani's Magnificent Delusions, which covers similar ground, The Wrong Enemy plots a pattern of US acquiescence to Pakistan's lethal pursuit of its perceived, but mostly exaggerated, national interests. This "national interest" has been pursued through cross-border terrorism using carefully nurtured non-state actors, the use of the "victimhood" complex to persuade a guilt-ridden America to readily offer compensation in exchange for previous "abandonment", and through deception and deflection if caught with its hand in the metaphorical cookie jar.
Much of what the book records concerning the activities of the Pakistan military and the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is already well known, but the author has done a commendable job providing clinching and corroborative evidence of their active involvement in repeated terrorist violence against Indian and Afghan targets, including against US military forces deployed in Afghanistan. For Indian readers, Ms Gall provides a disturbing account of the Indian Embassy bombing in July 2008, pointing to telephone intercepts gathered by US and Afghan intelligence that traced the plot to senior handlers in Islamabad.
Then there is the curious case of Osama bin Laden hiding in plain sight in an Abbottabad suburb, of which the Pakistanis denied any knowledge. It now appears that there was actually a special desk within the ISI to look after this very special guest. When I visited Washington soon after the US Navy Seal raid that killed bin Laden, senior US officials expressed no doubts about Pakistan's complicity. Soon, however, the official narrative changed, exonerating the Pakistani establishment and claiming that no evidence had been found of its role in sheltering the Al Qaeda leader.
Ms Gall has put forward a compelling case for Pakistan's close links with the Taliban and its sponsorship of the Taliban leadership based in Quetta. As she points out, the extraordinary lengths to which the Pakistani military and intelligence have gone to protect their long-term investment in the Taliban, and the risks they have taken in aiding and abetting violent raids against US forces in Afghanistan, do not augur well for the political future and security of an Afghanistan in transition. Pakistan is unlikely to contribute to a genuine Afghan reconciliation process, as some Americans still naively believe, or to lean on its Taliban proxies to settle for anything less than a resumption of their rule over Kabul when conditions are propitious after US troop withdrawal by the end of this year.
Another important conclusion in the book is that there are many links and affiliations that bind the different Islamist and terrorist groups that, at first sight, appear to have separate and distinct identities. This includes the Al Qaeda, which the US portrays as its priority target in the war against counter-terrorism. The segmentation of the war against terrorism - the temptation to look away if violence is perpetrated by so-called India-specific groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba or the Jaish-e-Mohammed or to rate the Haqqani group a greater danger while engaging the Taliban in dialogue - is a symptom of a fundamental misreading of the terrorist challenge, which is now radiating outwards from its breeding grounds in Pakistan. These are interconnected entities, often sharing the foot soldiers, if not always the leaders, and emerging from the same infrastructure of terrorism - including the vast network of madrasas created, nurtured and deployed by the Pakistani establishment. Pakistan is not ready to uproot this infrastructure even when some of the groups bite the hand that feeds them, such as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
Although Ms Gall records the serial instances of Pakistani perfidy and US willingness to look the other way, her book lacks a proper analysis explaining US behaviour. After all, there has been a consistent pattern in US policies towards Pakistan for several decades. The US supplied arms to Pakistan in its Cold War contest with the Soviet Union, even though it knew well that these arms would only be used against India. During the first Afghan war in the 1980s, the US president certified each year that Pakistan was not pursuing a nuclear weapons programme, though his own intelligence agencies were not only aware but often complicit in the country's race to build such capabilities. And during the second Afghan war, the US shielded Pakistan against sanctions by accepting the myth that it was A Q Khan, rather than the Pakistani establishment, who was running a clandestine nuclear supermarket. While bearing the brunt of attacks against its soldiers in Afghanistan from insurgents supported and facilitated by Pakistan, the US nevertheless portrays the country as a most reliable ally in the war against terrorism. What US compulsions explain such behaviour? Ms Gall avoids a deeper analysis of the factors underlying these contradictions, beyond the short-term and tactical compulsions that are apparent. Nevertheless, this book is vital reading for those who now await the end of the story or, should one say, a story without end in Afghanistan.
The reviewer, a former foreign secretary, is chairman of the National Security Advisory Board and of RIS as well as a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
