Afghanistan: A War won and lost.

This is an interesting account of the Afghanistan occupation. I am not sure that Karzai ever had that much power outside Kabul even in regions that were not run by the Taliban. As long as there are foreign troops in Afghanistan I am not sure that many Taliban will be willing to settle with the government but as Dwyer says if the occupiers admit they have lost and clear out Karzai might even survive. As I recall he did have some connections with the Taliban and they wanted him to be part of the government but he refused. This is from the NZherald.


Gwynne Dyer: Afghanistan - A war won and lost
5:00AM Friday October 12, 2007
By Gwynne Dyer



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We have just had the sixth anniversary of the start of US air strikes against al Qaeda and its Taleban hosts in Afghanistan.

It was a very clever politico-military operation, and by December of 2001 all of Afghanistan was under the control of the United States and its local allies for a total cost of 12 American dead. Then, for no good reason, it fell apart, and now the war is lost.

In the days after 9/11 George Tenet, the Central Intelligence Agency's chief, came up with a bold proposal. Why invade Afghanistan with a large American army, deploying massive firepower that kills large numbers of locals and alienates the population?

Why give Osama bin Laden the long anti-American guerrilla war that he was undoubtedly counting on? Instead, Tenet proposed sending teams of CIA agents and special forces into the country to win the support of the various militias, loosely linked as the Northern Alliance, that still dominated the northern regions of the country.

Although the Taleban had controlled most of the country since 1996, they had never decisively won the civil war. So why not intervene in that war, shower their opponents with money and weapons, and tip the balance against the Taleban?


worked like a charm. Pakistan, whose intelligence services had originally created the Taleban, withdrew its support, the regime fled Kabul, and most of the Taleban troops melted back into their villages. The Government of a country of 27 million people was taken down for a death toll that probably did not exceed 4000 on all sides.

By mid-December 2001 the United States effectively controlled Afghanistan through its local allies, all drawn from the northern minority groups: Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazara. There had not been the mass killing of innocent bystanders that would inevitably have accompanied a conventional US invasion, so there was no guerrilla war.


The traditional ruling group and biggest minority, the Pashtun, who had put their money on the Taleban and lost, would have to be brought back into the game somehow, but the usual Afghan deal-making would suffice.

Washington had the wit to make Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun from a clan that never had much to do with the Taleban, its puppet President in Kabul, but it didn't carry through. It froze out all the prominent Pashtun political and religious leaders who had had dealings with the Taleban - which was, of course, almost all of them.

The Taleban had been the Government of Afghanistan for almost five years, and were at the time the political vehicle of the Pashtun ascendancy in the country. If you were a traditional Pashtun leader, how could you not have had dealings with them?

An amnesty that turned a blind eye to the past, plus pressure by the United States on its recent allies to grant the Pashtuns a fair share of the national pie, would have created a regime in Kabul to which Pashtuns could give their loyalty, even if they were less dominant than usual.

But that never happened. The United States had so closely identified the Taleban with al Qaeda (although bin Laden probably never told the Taleban leadership what he was planning) that it would not talk to Pashtun leaders who had been linked to the Taleban.

Six years after the invasion that wasn't, the Pashtuns are still largely frozen out. That is why the Taleban are coming back.

Afghanistan has usually been run by regional and tribal warlords with little central control. Nothing new there.

But now it is also a country where the biggest minority has been largely excluded from power by foreign invaders who sided with the smaller minorities, and then blocked the process of accommodation by which the various Afghan ethnic groups normally make power-sharing deals.

The Taleban are still the main political vehicle of the Pashtuns, because there has been no time to build another. It doesn't mean that all Pashtuns are fanatics or terrorists. Indeed, not all the Taleban are fanatics (though many of them are), and hardly any of them nurse the desire to carry out terrorist acts in other countries.

That was the specialty of their (rather ungrateful) Arab guests, who fled across the border into the tribal areas of Pakistan almost six years ago. The current fighting in the south, the Pashtun heartland, which is causing a steady dribble of American, British and Canadian casualties, will continue until the Western countries pull out.

(Most other Nato members sent their troops to various parts of northern Afghanistan, where non-Pashtun warlords rule non-Pashtun populations and nobody dares attack the foreigners.) Then, after the foreigners are gone, the Afghans will make the traditional inter-ethnic deals and something like peace will return.

Will Karzai still be the President after that? Yes, if he can convince the Pashtuns that he is open to such a deal once the foreigners leave.

Will the Taleban come back to power? No, only to a share of power, and only to the extent that they can still command the loyalty of the Pashtuns once it is no longer a question of resistance to foreigners.

Will Osama bin Laden return and recreate a "nest of terrorists" in Afghanistan. Very unlikely. The Afghans paid too high a price for their hospitality the first time round.

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Gwynne Dyer on the Middle East

We will have to wait and see whether more Islamist states will arise in the Middle East. It seems likely that the US would rush in to help put down any attempt to form a new Islamic state anywhere in the Middle East. In the short run the only new Islamist State would be the southern part of Iraq. However, Dyer may have a point that the more the West intervenes in the area the stronger the Islamist forces may become. It seems to me though that in the West we may have a flawed view of Islamist states as completely fundamentalist and lacking in any freedom. This is certainly wrong in respect to Iran which is spite of its fundamentalism is still a mosaic of many different viewpoints in the face of repression.

The Middle East after Iraq will see more Islamist states
Gwynne Dyer
Article Launched: 06/30/2007 12:00:00 AM MDT


Israeli historian Benny Morris is famous in his country for reopening the forgotten history of the expulsion of the Palestinians during the 1948 "war of independence" and deconstructing the Israeli myth that they freely chose to abandon their homes. By five years ago, however, he had lost faith in a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians and was openly saying that everybody would have been better off in the long run if one side or the other had won a decisive victory in 1948.
If Israel had conquered all of Palestine and expelled all the Palestinians in 1948, Morris wrote, "today's Middle East would be a healthier, less violent place, with a Jewish state between Jordan and the Mediterranean and a Palestinian Arab state in Transjordan. Alternatively, Arab success in the 1948 war, with the Jews driven into the sea, would have obtained the same, historically calming result. Perhaps it was the very indecisiveness of the geographical and demographic outcome of 1948 that underlies the persisting tragedy of Palestine."
Well, of course, but most outcomes are indecisive. Like many knowledgeable people in the Middle East, Morris's mood was strikingly pessimistic even before the invasion of Iraq, but five years later the mood is darker still. Beyond forecasts of civil war in Iraq, however, there has been little effort to discern what the Middle East will actually look like after the troops go home.
There is
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already a civil war in Iraq, and it might even get worse for a time after American troops leave, but these things always sputter out in the end. There will still be an Iraqi state, plus or minus Kurdistan, and regardless of whether or not the central government in Baghdad exercises real control over the Sunni-majority areas between Baghdad, Mosul and the Syrian border.
The Sunni Arab parts of Iraq have been turned into a training ground for Islamist extremists from all parts of the Arab world by the American invasion. Once the American troops are gone, however, the action will soon move elsewhere, for the U.S. defeat in Iraq has dramatically raised the prestige of Islamist revolutionaries throughout the Arab world and beyond.
It's not possible to predict which Arab states will fall under Islamist control, and they certainly aren't all going to: The pipe-dream of a world-spanning Islamic empire remains precisely that. But it will be astonishing if one or more of the Arab regimes does not fall to an Islamist revolution in the next few years.
For the citizens of the country or countries in question, that could be quite a big problem, since it would probably mean not democracy and prosperity, but just more decades of poverty and a different kind of tyranny. For people living outside the Middle East, however, it would probably make little difference.
Islamist-ruled states are not the same as bands of freelance fanatics. If they have oil to export, then they will go on exporting it, because no major oil producer can do without the income that those exports provide; they need it to feed their people. And they would have little incentive to sponsor terrorism outside the region, for they would have fixed addresses and interests to protect.
For Israel, however, the situation has changed fundamentally. For the first 20 years of its existence, Israel was a state under siege. For the past 40 years, since the conquests of 1967, it has had the luxury of debating with itself how much of those conquered lands it should return to the Arabs in return for a permanent peace settlement. (The answer was always "all of them," but that was not an answer many Israelis would hear.)
Now the window is closing. Before long, some of the Arab states that Israel needs to make peace with are likely to fall to Islamist regimes that have an ideological commitment to its destruction. (Hamas's capture of the Gaza Strip is a foretaste.) Israelis trying to evade hard choices have long complained that they had "nobody to negotiate with." It is about to become true.
Israel faces another generation of confrontation and quite possibly of war, and the Palestinians face another generation of military occupation. Significant chunks of the Arab world face Islamist revolutions that would bring more poverty and a new kind of oppression. It is a mess, and it's too late to fix it.

Gwynn Dyer: Iran-How to Start a War

Not only is the suggestion that the US would have fired on the Iranians provocative but the US has already created a provocation by raiding the quasi-consulate in Irbil and almost getting into a firefight with Kurds at the Irbil airport when they attempted to apprehend another Iranian. The Iranians have already made it clear that they may boycott the upcoming conference on Iraq security if the Iranians are not released. The Iraq government has called for their release but where is the new coverage and outrage about the US provocation? It is the arrest of Britons in disputed waters that causes all the chatter in the media.


Iran — How To Start A War

By Gwynne Dyer

03/30/07 "Jordan Times" -- - -“I don’t want to second-guess the British after the fact,” said US Navy Lieutenant-Commander Erik Horner, “but our rules of engagement allow a little more latitude. Our boarding team’s training is a little bit more towards self-preservation.”

Does that mean that one of his American boarding teams would have opened fire if it had been them in the two inflatable boats that were surrounded by Iranian Revolutionary Guard fast patrol boats off the coast of Iraq last Friday?

“Agreed. Yes.”

Just as well that it was a British boarding team, then. The 15 British sailors and Marines who were captured and taken to Tehran for “questioning” last week are undoubtedly having an unpleasant time, but they are alive, and Britain is only involved in two wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. If it had been one of Eriik Horner’s boarding teams, they would all be dead, and the United States and Iran would now be at war.

Horner is the executive officer of the USS Underwood, the American frigate that works together with HMS Cornwall, the British ship that the captive boarding party came from. Interviewed after the incident by Terri Judd of The Independent, the only British print journalist on HMS Cornwall, he was obviously struggling to be polite about the gutless Brits, but he wasn’t having much success.

“The US navy rules of engagement say we have not only a right to self-defence but also an obligation to self-defence,” Horner explained. “(The British) had every right in my mind and every justification to defend themselves rather than allow themselves to be taken. Our reaction was, Why didn’t your guys defend themselves?”

So there they are, eight sailors and seven Marines in two rubber boats, with personal weapons and no protection whatever, sitting about 30cm above the water, surrounded by six or seven Iranian attack boats with mounted machineguns. “Defend yourself” by opening fire, and after a single long burst from half a dozen heavy machineguns there will be 14 dead young men and one dead young woman in two rapidly sinking inflatables, and your country will be at war. Seems a bit pointless, really.

It’s a cultural thing, at bottom. Britain has a long history of fighting wars and taking casualties, but the combat doctrines are less hairy chested. British rules of engagement “are very much de-escalatory, because we don’t want wars starting”, explained Admiral Sir Alan West, former First Sea Lord.

“Rather than roaring into action and sinking everything in sight we try to step back, and that, of course, is why our chaps were... able to be captured and taken away.”

That emollient British approach is probably why the Iranian Revolutionary Guard chose to grab British troops rather than Americans. It was obviously a snatch operation: the Iranians would not normally have half-a-dozen attack boats ready to go even if some “coalition” boat checking Iraq-bound ships for contraband did stray across the invisible dividing line into Iranian waters (which the British insist they didn’t).

But it was not necessarily an operation ordered from the top of Iran’s government. In fact, there is no single source of authority in Iran’s curious system of “multiple governments”, as one observer labelled the impenetrably complex division of responsibilities and powers between elected civilians and unelected mullahs. The Revolutionary Guards (who are quite different from the regular armed forces) enjoy considerable autonomy within this system.

According to the US authorities in Iraq, the five Iranian diplomats arrested by US troops in a raid in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan last January were actually Revolutionary Guards, and it would seem that their colleagues want them back. Kidnapping American troops as hostages for an exchange could cause a war, so they decided to grab some Brits instead. And it will probably work, after a certain delay.

In this episode, the American reputation for belligerence served US troops well, diverting Iranian attention to the British instead. In the larger scheme of things, it is a bit more problematic.

A quite similar snatch operation against the equally belligerent Israelis last July led to a monthlong Israeli aerial bombardment of Lebanon and a retaliatory hail of Hizbollah rockets on northern Israeli cities. Well over a thousand people were dead by the end, although nothing was settled.

Any day now, a minor clash along Iraq’s land or sea frontier with Iran could kill some American troops and give President Bush an excuse to attack Iran, if he wants one — and he certainly seems to. If the Revolutionary Guards had got it wrong last Friday and attacked an American boarding party by mistake, he would have his excuse now, and bombs might already be falling on Iran. All the pieces are in place, and the war could start at any time.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

Gwynne Dyer on Somalia

This is a perceptive article. It seems the air strikes did not kill any significant Al Qaeda targets but did kill over a dozen nomads. The timing of the attack just before Bush's speech was probably meant to show how effective Bush is in the war on terror. The Islamic Courts are supposedly run by Al Qaeda!



Gwynne Dyer:
A new war in Africa
Gwynne DyerSaturday, January 13, 2007“The Ethiopians now are advancing, but that is not the end,” Omar Idris, a senior official of Somalia’s Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), told the BBC on Wednesday. “We know what happened in Iraq, the experience of the Americans... I think this is very, very early to say that the Islamic Court forces were defeated.” The war is starting in Somalia, but it may end up being fought in Ethiopia and Eritrea, too. Together, the three countries contain almost a hundred million of the poorest people on the planet.On Thursday, the Ethiopian army took Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, and the UIC, the closest thing to a government that Somalia has had since the country collapsed into anarchy fifteen years ago, retreated south towards the border with Kenya. Ethiopia has tanks, jet fighters and the tacit support of the United States; the UIC has only light weapons and the support of Somalis who distrust Ethiopians (i.e. almost all of them). So the UIC will probably win in the end, but it will take a long guerilla war.This is a war founded on a misconception and driven by paranoid fantasies. The misconception was the US government’s belief that the Islamic Courts, local religious authorities backed by merchants in Mogadishu who wanted someone to curb the warlords, punish thieves, and enforce contracts, were just a cover for al-Qaeda. So the US instead backed the warlords who were making Somalis’ lives a misery.American support is the kiss of death in Somalia, so the warlords were finally dislodged in Mogadishu last June by an uprising led by the UIC and supported by most of the population. The warlords fled to an American ship offshore, their clansmen went to ground, and the UIC rapidly took control of most of southern Somalia, bringing order for the first time since 1991. But the US immediately started plotting its overthrow.Washington’s principal instrument in this enterprise was Ethiopia, Somalia’s giant neighbour to the west. Ethiopia’s 75 million people outnumber Somalis by more than seven-to-one — but although the Christians of the highlands have always dominated Ethiopia, almost half of its people are Muslims, like the Somalis. In Ethiopia’s sparsely populated eastern desert, the Ogaden, most of the people are not only Muslim but ethnically Somali. This is where the paranoid fantasies kick in.Most of Ethiopia’s Muslims are too busy scratching a living to challenge the Christian near-monopoly of power in their country, but the last thing Ethiopia’s rulers want to see is an Islamic regime next-door in Somalia. To make matters worse, the Ethiopians suspected that their enemies, the Eritreans, were sending troops and arms to help the Islamic Courts regime in Somalia.Ethiopia has fought and won two wars with Somalia over the Ogaden, in 1964 and 1977 (back when Somalia had a government and an army). It fought a bitter border war in 1998-2000 with Eritrea, a breakaway province that won its independence in 1993. (Ethiopia has rejected the decision of an independent panel on the border, and that war is just waiting to start again.) So over the past year, Ethiopia’s paranoid fantasies have come together with Washington’s.The official American position, stated last week by Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, is that the UIC is now “controlled by al-Qaeda cell individuals. The top layer of the Court are extremists. They are terrorists.” Even US diplomats in the region privately reject this assertion, but it is now an article of faith in Washington.Ethiopia accuses the UIC of “threatening Ethiopian sovereignty,” which merely means that senior UIC members make the same claims about the Somali-Ethiopian border that all Somali nationalists of every party have always made. No UIC troops have even approached that border — but just after the UIC took control of Mogadishu in June, Ethiopia started sending troops into Somalia.The Ethiopians said they were there to support the so-called “transitional government” of Somalia, a body led by Abdullahi Yusuf, a Somali warlord who is a long-standing ally of Addis Ababa. But the “transitional government,” which emerged from UN-backed talks between Somali factions in 2004, lacked popular support and never controlled much except the town of Baidoa, near the Ethiopian border.In early December, Islamic Court troops moved on Baidoa with the declared intention of driving the Ethiopian troops out. On 24 December, Ethiopia responded with the offensive that has now taken Mogadishu. With overwhelming material superiority and US-supplied satellite surveillance data, the Ethiopians have won an easy victory, and already the warlords who used to dominate the capital are reasserting their control under the shelter of the “transitional government.”But this is just the start of a long guerilla war that will sap the strength of the Ethiopian army, a Christian-led force backing unpopular warlords in a Muslim country. It will radicalise the Islamic Courts and turn them into exactly the extremist force that Washington and Addis Ababa fear. It will probably radicalise Ethiopian Muslims and start insurrections there. It will almost certainly trigger a new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea (which has sent troops to Somalia to back the UIC).The Ethiopian invasion is illegal, unjustified and deeply, deeply stupid, but it has Washington’s strong support. From the same folks who brought you Iraq....