POLITICS-U.S.: After the Fireworks, Who Picks Up the Pieces?

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Analysis - Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Feb 24 2002 (IPS) - Evicting al-Qaeda and the Taliban was the easy part; the aftermath is turning out to be much more difficult.

The U.S. military so far has failed to find Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders. Most of Afghanistan appears to have fallen back under the control of tribal and ethnic warlords – the same people who made the rise of the Taliban possible in the first place.

These are the conclusions of a classified report by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), parts of which were leaked this week to the New York Times. The report went on to warn that the “seeds of possible internal chaos” have been planted.

Not only have the warlords, armed and empowered by the U.S. military campaign itself, begun to jostle and skirmish for position in post-Taliban Afghanistan, but also foreign powers – including Russia, Uzbekistan, Iran, and Turkey – are providing aid to their favourites, setting the stage for a broader and potentially more violent set of conflicts.

While the countryside prepares for the chaos to come, the central government headed by Hamid Karzai is forced to beg the United States and other Western powers for money to pay the salaries of its officials, even as the donors spend week after week arguing over whether the British-led international security force should be deployed outside Kabul, or a new Afghan army should be built over the next six months.

The report illustrates the degree to which the administration of President George W. Bush has failed to think through the consequences of its “war against terrorism,” not only in Afghanistan, which at the moment has the most to lose from the administration’s lack of planning, but also in other regions where it is intervening with U.S. troops and other assets to fight alleged terrorists.

Thursday’s fatal crash of a helicopter ferrying newly arrived U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) to the southern Philippines as part of an “anti-terrorism exercise,” for example, drew renewed attention to the deployment of some 650 U.S. troops to the country’s most impoverished region.

While the specific target of U.S. intervention is a small rebel group, Abu Sayyaf, which holds two U.S. kidnap victims, the same region is home to two much larger armies, the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), only one of which has negotiated peace with the central government.

Local officials in the area have already complained that the mere presence of U.S. troops, which fought a bloody counter-insurgency against the Moros a century ago, could weaken still-fragile peace efforts between the army, whose tactics have become more aggressive in recent weeks, and the two movements, according to published reports.

“The arrival of U.S. troops plays into the anti-American sentiment of a lot of ideologues who otherwise would be against the Abu Sayyaf,” Glenda Gloria, an expert on Muslim insurgencies in the Philippines, told the Washington Post earlier this month. “These are Muslims who have been very opposed to the Abu Sayyaf. But if the American soldiers get into combat, there’s a risk the political landscape could change.”

“The real aim of the American mission is political: to demonstrate momentum in the war on terror, deploy troops in a country where they are welcome, show the flag in Southeast Asia, and find an enemy that can be quickly beaten,” noted New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.

But, according to Kristof, the reality there is much different and more dangerous, particularly for an enduring peace in the area, than what Pentagon policymakers appear to believe.

The same pattern is clear with respect to Iraq, for which military and intelligence planners are even now drawing up options for an intervention designed to oust long-time Bush nemesis and charter member of the current President Bush’s “axis of evil,” President Saddam Hussein.

Bush’s father decided against invading Iraq during the Gulf War precisely because the potential consequences of ousting Saddam — indefinite occupation, the break-up of the country along religious and ethnic lines, or its effective carving up by more powerful neighbours Iran and Turkey — were far too destabilising and expensive for Washington to take on.

But this President Bush’s closest advisers seem hardly daunted by such considerations and are clearly focusing instead on the mechanics of a successful campaign (by coup, ground invasion, or the Afghan model?) and rounding up more diplomatic support, the aim of next month’s trip to the region by Vice President Dick Cheney.

“There’s nothing stable about Iraq now,” Richard Perle, the head of the Pentagon’s Defence Policy Board and one of the chief cheerleaders for including Iraq in the “war against terrorism,” told the New York Times recently in answer to a question about the possible destabilising consequences of unilateral military action against Baghdad.

Any externally induced change of regime in Iraq will have major regional repercussions which will require a huge investment in time, thought, money, and possibly blood to manage in a way that furthers long-term U.S. and western interests, according to independent regional experts as well as Washington’s closest Mideast and European allies.

“How can the Bush administration think it can just go and change the regime in Baghdad and everything will turn out fine, when it can’t even stabilise Afghanistan, whose needs are much more modest?” noted a Western European diplomat here.

“We are capable of destroying many enemies, including Iran, Iraq, North Korea and more,” wrote Shibley Telhami, a Mideast expert at the University of Maryland in the Los Angeles Times recently, “but we do not have the resources to bring stability or the desired outcome in every region after such wars. And instability is where terrorism thrives.”

Or, as noted by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, “The easy part is going to be, in a bizarre sense, taking Saddam out. The hard part is what do you do after that?”

Just like Afghanistan.