Big Picture: Resolving Afghanistan-Pakistan
Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 05:11AM Is will be easier to establish unity among the great and rising powers surrounding Afghanistan and Pakistan than in the two ailing countries themselves. AF-PAK are dysfunctional dualist states whose events affect one another.
Regional powers and transnational organizations, including NATO, should coordinate conditions that contain conflict and foster prosperity in Pakistan and Afghanistan without occupying them. It is going to take a long time for a passive, containing, engaging, and deterrent policy to bring change in what may accurately be called a chronic historical PTSD zone.
The collective containment and engagement approach would foster better relationships among the great regional powers, their organizations and alliances and NATO members while diffusing blame that inevitably comes from indigenous populations when bad things happen during an occupation.
Without such a joint effort, NATO countries will eventually have to pull out and leave potentially failed states. That is exactly NATO's selling point to get China, Russia and India more involved. China and India, once adversaries, have a chance to work together on a common cause. However, a NATO pullout requires trust that the authoritarian great powers of the region will cooperate with each other rather than use buffer states as pawns.
ABP Analyst
NATO Airstrikes Kill 11 Civilians
This is the sort of predictable, recurring event that will continually delay occupation goals by giving the guerillas more influence in the back woods. The insidious argument to village elders by those who speak their native tongue or share their religious ID is: are you sure that 'collateral damage' was truly an accident? Tribal or village leaders who goes on trusting while that doubt is circulated among his villagers may not be long for the world.
Let's look at the Marine deployment. It is there because air strikes that miss the mark can be so corrosive of past counter-insurgency gains.
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Reader Comments (2)
Reuters reports the highest level of Afghan violence since 2001 today. It follows US troop influx. 10,000 marines have landed and are engaging insurgents. This is the same historical trend seen in colonial occupations in which there is a significant resistance to the occupier, and the occupiers are over-extended. In time, the locals know it will become too expensive.
Revisit the regional containment, investment and policing model, and you have interested nations with direct supply lines investing in their own secure borders.
The Uigher uprising in the Xinjiang Province illumines what is at stake for the Chinese in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as noted in the principal bluepaper.