Experts Challenge Military, Political Tacks in Central Asia

Less than three weeks after the onset of military operations, some prominent experts on Afghanistan are starting to question, even challenge, the deepening U.S. intervention in Central Asia.

Many are already calling for an end to or sharp reduction in the military campaign.

The experts, including former senior U.S. officials and ambassadors, are warning that both the political and military elements of Operation Enduring Freedom are doomed to slip into a quagmire--or fail entirely--unless U.S. policy is quickly amended, goals reduced and the air war soon curtailed.

“The military bombing in and around populated areas should stop now because it does more damage to the political goals than we achieve militarily by a bomb hitting a car with some Taliban [forces] in it,” said Peter Tomsen, the last senior U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, who served in the post from 1989 to 1992.

He also cautioned that bombing the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar plays into the hands of Osama bin Laden and his radical allies in the propaganda war by making it easier to portray the United States as attacking Afghanistan--not a clique of hardened terrorists and their state supporters.

“The only way to replace the Taliban is to support a political alternative to them,” said Barnett Rubin, director of studies at New York University’s Center on International Cooperation. “And the more these attacks continue . . . the more you’ll find people siding with the Taliban to defend the country.”

The experts also are concerned about how the bombing campaign is being viewed in the broader Islamic world, where the U.S. has an array of interests, including access to reasonably priced oil.

“In Muslim countries we started off with up to 80% of the populations against us,” said Henri Barkey, a former State Department official who is chairman of Lehigh University’s International Relations Department. “Our objective is to retain the 20% to 30% who are still with us. . . . And the longer the bombing lasts, the more hemorrhaging we’ll suffer.”

So far, the military efforts do not seem to have produced the anticipated results, he noted. The assumption was that a massive air campaign would spark significant Taliban defections, which hasn’t yet happened. “And we have to face the danger that it won’t happen,” Barkey added.

The growing chorus of concern among the relatively small community of American experts on Afghanistan mirrors the first cracks within the U.S. political wall of support for the airstrikes.

On Tuesday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) warned that unless the air attacks end “sooner rather than later” the U.S. risks appearing to be a “high-tech bully. Every moment it goes on, it makes the aftermath problems more severe,” he said.

The efforts to remake Afghanistan politically--perhaps with a role for the long-ago deposed monarch, Mohammad Zaher Shah--face daunting challenges, experts say. Attempts to cobble together a strong or united government that could rule if the Taliban regime falls may be overly ambitious, especially considering the nation’s enduring tribal, ethnic and religious fragmentation.

“Our biggest vulnerability is that we are not in a position to deliver the end result we want: an Afghanistan with a minimally competent government able to pursue stability and internal reconstruction without excessive manipulation from outside powers,” said Teresita Schaffer, a former U.S. ambassador now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank.

Added Barkey: “Afghans were involved in a civil war for a very long time, and now we want to impose on them a king who has not been in power since 1973 and when he was there he didn’t do much. So why should factions that have spilled so much blood in the meantime accept an outsider? Even if they pretend to accept him, they will still vie among themselves for power.”