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Thursday March 28, 2024

Why Obama is right

By Shahzad Chaudhry
February 05, 2016

Last Monday Iowa set the direction of how the US might shape out in the next four years. In its caucus to determine the leading presidential nominees to replace President Obama, the choices it threw up included Ted Cruz, a moderate Republican – more Democratic on issues like immigration, but hawkish on Syria; and Bernie Sanders of the Democratic Party, far more progressive and socialist than what the US may have known for a long time with interests centred on American society, but disinvested in America’s foreign ventures and interests abroad.

Hillary Clinton is of course the epitome of the American political establishment, committed to persisting with Obama’s foreign policy objectives. Trump, on the other hand, remains a dark horse despite Iowa; he can upset the apple cart with his cavalier ways, which includes the possibility of nuking Isis.

But what does that do to us here in the region? More particularly, Afghanistan and Pakistan. From among the top four ‘probables’, both Cruz and Sanders will likely opt out of Afghanistan because Cruz will need to handle Syria on priority and will need the forces there, and Sanders would like to have the least distractions from his work within. Hillary will be the halfway house, reducing the troops stationed in Afghanistan to 5,500 as per the Obama schedule, and then holding on to that number for a year more as a policy tweak till she too is exhausted with pretensions and must find other interests to pursue. Trump doesn’t know if Afghanistan exists; if he doe, he woud like to nuke the problem out.

That tells you that beginning 2017, and within that year, Afghanistan will be on its own, on auto-cruise – if indeed cruise is what will explain its new normal – with Ashraf Ghani, Abdullah, and the NDS locked in a three-way battle to wrest power and assert control in Kabul, while just outside the rest of Afghanistan will be in a turmoil under a burgeoning Taliban and a weakening ANSF. In short the Afghan state will be in a shambles – dissolving, fragmenting and debilitated. Think the Taliban and the locally franchised Isis – a breakaway Taliban mutant – both contending for power in the same geographical space.

If things go bad for Baghdadi in the Levant, the badlands of the Af-Pak contiguity could be his next redoubt. If that makes for another challenge to the world will be seen later, but what it will surely unleash could be an even bigger, deadlier and un-quashable strife; nay, another bedevilling war which will in all probability consume the region with its intensity and deadliness.

The Pakistani military, having already staved off one serious challenge against the TTP, may simply not be able to repeat the resolve in such quick succession. Militaries that remain engaged in unending battles without ends soon begin to wither from within.

How resolute, or fragile, is the Pakistani nation-state in comparison? Significantly so, one might suggest. Without the slightest sense of how resolutely the Pakistani state has withstood reverberations that began with militant Islam attempting at forced conversion of state and society into a more theocratic mode, both state and society have survived but have come out battered and severely damaged. Society remains highly fractious and vulnerable with enough residual sentiment supporting radicalism and extremism even as the state battles its militant mutation. The schisms make society vulnerable to divergent narratives.

Little is being done by the state to repair the damage. Instead what ensues is a free for all for competing religious narratives which rule the roost as the state regresses further for fear of rousing further contention leading to violence. Those vested in religious cleavages hope to gain space for their respective bents by either directly challenging or abetting those challenging the state to subsequently lay claim over the political power and the leverage to benefit from the state largesse.

Society also has other divides; chief among them between the rich and the poor, and the fact that the nation-state compact has itself weakened where the state has been unable to relate to society at large. Powerful elites manipulate and exploit the system to exclusively advantage their class leaving the dispossessed majority to languish with no attention. The weak and the poor then resort to their own means of survival and challenge the writ of the state with abandon. Law and order thus has suffered badly in the recent decades and absent governance has forced people to seek their own means of redeeming their interests.

Weak governance continues to weaken institutions despite their inherent strength that has held the state in good stead against growing regional phenomenon such as the Arab Spring which has swept most of the Muslim world. Gradual denudation of credibility, reputation and performance by state institutions leads to their irrelevance. This has weakened the state.

If the army too were to gradually show signs of fatigue in a prolonged war and be impacted in its resolve, if not in spirit but in structures and operational readiness, the state would really stand denuded off all its protection. Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan have all done that to the world’s best military. But then these locations were not even their backyard. Pakistan will have an existential challenge were this to ever materialise.

Pakistani politics remains mired in narrow and selfish interests. Neither is it interested in conceptualising these possibilities nor does it have the vision to steer the state away from such looming possibilities. A disinvested leadership and an uninspiring vision in a fragmenting society with weak societal and institutional structures make for a harrowing future. What I state here is in the works already, and thus is foreboding.

If not reversed, chaos, fragmentation, turmoil and recourse to widespread militancy and factionalism may become this region’s only reality. That will engender regional chaos, war and strife. Obama knows something we are not even ready to acknowledge.

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.

Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com