Descent Into Chaos

by Ahmed Rashid

  Today some retired American generals and historians call the U.S. invasion of Iraq the greatest strategic military disaster in American history, a massive squandering of lives and resources that will affect the Middle East and reduce the power of the United States for years to come. Yet compared with what is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq may well turn out to be a mere sideshow, a historical folly that diverted global attention for some years but had little impact in changing the real nature of power and politics in the Middle East. The U.S. failure to secure this region may well lead to global terrorism, nuclear proliferation, and a drug epidemic on a scale that we have not yet experienced and I can only hope we never will.

  This book is about American failure to secure the region after 9/11, to carry out nation building on a scale that could have reversed the appeal of terrorism and Islamic extremism and averted state collapse on a more calamitous scale than could ever have happened before 9/11. The World Bank estimates that there are now twenty-six failing states in the world that could breed terrorism, as opposed to seventeen such states in 2003. Clearly we have gotten a great deal wrong about the post-9 /11 world.2 This book is an attempt to frame events and their consequences across the largest landmass in the world, and to show what went wrong on the ground and why, while describing how such poor decisions were made in Washington. It tries to answer the question of why the world is less secure seven years after 9/11.

  The quick American victory in Afghanistan in 2001 created the feeling that a new era was now inevitable. Despite their cowboy president, the Americans were momentarily humbled by their own vulnerability and felt guilty about having ignored Afghanistan for the past decade. U.S. TV networks suddenly began to cover the Muslim world, and the Koran became a bestseller in U.S. bookshops. The rest of the world rallied around America as international organizations such as the UN sanctioned the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

  At the time of the invasion, I broke with many of my colleagues by arguing that the war in Afghanistan was a just war and not an imperialist intervention, because only external intervention could save the Afghan people from the Taliban and al Qaeda and prevent the spread of al Qaeda ideology. My book Taliban, which had been published in 2000, criticized the United States for abandoning Afghanistan for too long and argued for just such an intervention. At the time my conclusions were strongly criticized by Islamic fundamentalists, the liberal left, and the Pakistani military, who considered my critique of their interventions in Afghanistan as traitorous.

  I had seen the accumulating dangers posed by al Qaeda’s expansion in Afghanistan and Pakistan early on, due to my intense involvement with the Afghan saga. I had seen firsthand Afghans’ fortitude during a quarter century of war.3 Afghanistan had become an incubator for al Qaeda, but so had my own country, Pakistan, because of the nexus between Islamic extremists and the army, both of which tolerated an al Qaeda presence before 9/11. The army backed the Taliban and encouraged thousands of Pakistani youngsters to fight and die for the Taliban, just as it mobilized thousands of Pakistanis to fight in the Kashmiri insurgency against India. I warned that armed with nuclear weapons and fueled by jihadism, a military regime led by the rash and impetuous General Musharraf was capable of creating a perfect storm of circumstances and events that could plunge the region into even greater danger and chaos and undermine Pakistan’s very existence. That is what we are seeing today.

  To the north of Afghanistan, in Central Asia, five states newly independent from the Soviet Union remained largely isolated from world events. Economic misery in four of these states was now far worse than it was during the Soviet era. These four were ruled by dictators, holdovers from the Soviet era, but the region was ripe for reform and democratic change. The increased birth rate of the 1980s had produced an alienated, angry, and jobless mass of young people under age twenty-five who were looking for change. The longer such change was delayed, the greater the chances that underground Islamic extremist movements linked to al Qaeda could exploit the coming crisis.

  The major center of any turmoil would be Uzbekistan, the most populated state, where the twin forces of severe state repression and Islamic fundamentalism were in conflict. Ignored by the world and in turmoil, Uzbekistan could destabilize an immense zone lying between the vast landmasses of Russia and China; al Qaeda could exploit the situation readily.

  After the overthrow of the Taliban regime, optimists like me expected that the U.S.-led international community would commit to rebuild Afghanistan and help undertake reforms and nation building in Pakistan and throughout Central Asia. The region had to be seen as a single entity because it was beset by many of the same problems. Rebuilding Afghanistan alone would only push its problems into neighboring states. Ending the “failing states syndrome” in the region and integrating those states into the world economy would require massive aid, internal economic reforms, democratization, and literacy. This would need nothing less than a Western-led Marshall Plan for the region and a commitment that would have to be measured in not months or years but decades. The leaders in the region would be persuaded to change their autocratic ways only if they saw an unfaltering Western military and aid presence on their doorstep.

  It was equally important to wean Muslims away from the message of al Qaeda and its perversion of Islam. As I saw al Qaeda evolve in Afghanistan in the 1990s, I considered it nothing more than a blatant power grab by men whose naked political aims were cloaked in the garb of Islamic ideology. Yet to a handful of Muslims, al Qaeda posed a civilizational solution—albeit an extreme one—to the issue of justice denied to Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, and elsewhere. Now Muslims had to be in the forefront of changing their own environment and governments, and taking responsibility for creating the mechanisms in which the rule of law and civil society could grow and flourish.

  The American response to events in the region was not encouraging. The Republicans had won the 2000 U.S. elections on the basis of not more but less involvement in the world and a shortsighted “go it alone” philosophy that ignored existing alliances and treaties. Condoleezza Rice wrote in a January 2000 article for Foreign Affairs that a Bush presidency would focus on the national interest instead of international humanitarian actions, as Clinton had done. Muslim leaders in the region read this as a lack of U.S. interest. Bush said he would avoid “open-ended deployments and unclear military missions,” adding, “I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation-building—I think our troops ought to be used to fight and win wars.”4 These words were to haunt Bush after 9/11.

  Bush became president with no knowledge of or interest in the outside world—reflective of the attitude of most Americans at the time. He had barely traveled outside the United States, did not read about other countries, and knew no foreign leaders, frequently mixing up their names and designations. During his election campaign in 2000, he committed two grand faux pas—the first when he did not know the name of General Pervez Musharraf, who was then president of Pakistan, and the second when he thought the Taliban were an all-girls pop group. His ignorance toward the region was on full display every time these jokes were told.5

  The ease with which Bush’s lack of interest in foreign policy was accepted by the American political elite was unfortunately also a reflection of the attitude of President Bill Clinton to global problems. During his eight years in office, Clinton had cherry-picked his way through a whole raft of foreign policy issues, determining that intervention was a good idea when the polls told him that Americans supported intervention and doing nothing when the polls indicated the contrary. Thus, intervening in the former Yugoslavia was a good idea once the U.S. media had built up traction for the case, while the Rwanda genocide was ignored.

  Clinton blew hot and cold when it came to Afghanistan and chasing al Qaeda. There were long periods of inaction; whimsical plans, such as the CIA hiring hit squads from Pakistan and Uzbekistan to capture bin Laden; and a sudden decision to use cruise missiles to hit al Qaeda camps af
ter the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa. But there was no clear American determination to get rid of al Qaeda or the Taliban, and there was even less of a policy toward Pakistan, especially one that addressed the military’s support to the Taliban. In the second Clinton term, U.S. government departments seemed to have different agendas for the region. For the State Department the main issue was easing India-Pakistan tensions, deterring nuclear proliferation, and persuading both countries to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty after they had both tested nuclear weapons. The CIA focus was on bin Laden and the threat of the Pakistani military supporting causes that were deemed to be terrorist by the outside world. Yet the CIA refused to support the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and mistrusted its leader, Ahmad Shah Masud. The Pentagon declined to get involved either way and did not even bother to draw up contingency plans for any possible military action in Afghanistan.

  Nevertheless, Clinton was affable, a brilliant speaker, and a firm believer in sharing decision making with his European allies. In contrast, Bush was seen around the world as brash, cocky, profoundly unreflective, and unresponsive when it came to sharing decision making on global issues. There was a total absence of debate with European partners. Within the first few months of taking office in 2001, Bush was conducting a unilateralist foreign policy that aimed to force allies to accept a U.S. agenda. A senior Bush official called it “the doctrine of integration,” which was aimed at integrating “other countries and organizations into arrangements that will sustain a world consistent with U.S. interests and values, and thereby promote peace, prosperity and justice, as widely as possible.”6 Bush’s message to the rest of the world was “it’s either my way or the highway.”

  Bush immediately broke with the international community on several issues. In December 2000 Clinton had signed the treaty that created the International Criminal Court, the world’s first war crimes tribunal. Bush’s first act was to refuse to send the treaty to the Senate for ratification. After 9/11 Washington threatened those countries that signed up to the Court with the loss of U.S. military aid. The Bush administration said it was opposed to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which 150 countries had signed and which was the bedrock of nuclear nonproliferation. In March 2001 the United States refused to support ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which would reduce global warming, and in June the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. Europe was shell-shocked. Allies were unable to understand how to structure their relationship with the Bush White House and with the neoconservatives, or “neocons,” who dominated policymaking.

  The neocons carried complex political baggage. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, and others were archconservatives who considered themselves as radicals with a messianic vision of using American military power to reshape the world according to their own interests. Many of them had military backgrounds—G. W. Bush’s first administration had appointed sixty-three retired military officers into senior government positions. To some outsiders the neocons were classic imperialists who were influenced by neofascist writings from the 1930s about the use of state power. For others their intellectual roots lay in Trotskyism or America’s past, making them “a complex amalgam of the military imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt and the idealistic imperialism of Woodrow Wilson.”7 They claimed that in the post-cold war era, the United States was now running an empire and needed to project the kind of power that went with being the sole global imperial force.

  The anger, grief, and rage felt by many Americans after 9/11, and the determination to hit back under any circumstances, was the perfect playing field for the neocons, who were to exploit retaliation for 9/11 into a much broader foreign and domestic agenda. They saw the war on terrorism as a means to fulfill a long-desired venture to remodel the Middle East, starting with destroying Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, securing more of the region’s oil fields for American companies, and propping up the state of Israel. At home they saw the war as a means of carving out greater presidential power by ignoring legal constraints and the checks and balances of the U.S. political system.8 The neocons were to use 9/11 as justification for making themselves exempt from American or international law.

  The neocons deliberately manipulated the worldwide sympathy for the United States after 9/11 as an endorsement of their ideas. Overnight the U.S.-led war on terrorism could become, according to Zbigniew Brzezinski, “the central organizing principle of the West’s global security policy.”9 It was a chronic mistake, as all other global issues were subsumed in a monolithic view of fighting terrorism. The vast majority of Europeans and Muslims could not connect with the militarized, self-obsessed policies of the neocons, who cared nothing for the rest of the world or its problems. When others wanted to discuss development or global warming, Bush wanted to discuss terrorism.

  Naming the adversary as “terrorism” enabled the neocons to broaden the specific struggle against a bunch of murderous criminals (al Qaeda) into a global conflict with Islam. The neocons identified “state sponsors” of terrorism such as Iraq and Iran, who suddenly became part of the al Qaeda network, even as they overturned international law in the process. All this tapped into the fear and anger of a largely ignorant and accepting American public still in shock over how easily a small group of terrorists had destroyed so many lives on American soil.

  Even the phrase “war on terrorism” was a misnomer, a rhetorical device, an emotive manipulation of the public’s horror after 9/11. It had no more legal or practical meaning than would a war on cancer, drugs, or poverty.10 Terrorism cannot be party to a conflict, so there can be no war against it. Moreover, there was no internationally accepted definition of what constituted terrorism, given the cliché that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. And the war, which is fought by soldiers, ignored all other policies needed to fight Islamic extremism—political, economic, and social reforms. Al Qaeda had a political strategy wrapped in the flag of Islam, so defeating al Qaeda required an equally broad political strategy, one that would win hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

  Instead, the phraseology of the neocons became more and more disturbing as it aimed to terrify the American public. Paul Wolfowitz, then U.S. deputy secretary of defense, warned about ending states. “It’s not just simply a matter of capturing people and holding them accountable but removing the sanctuaries, removing the support systems, ending states who sponsor terrorism,” he said as the war in Afghanistan got under way.11 Not surprisingly such comments were hated and ridiculed by Muslims everywhere, and helped convince many Muslims that the United States was out to target all Muslim civilization.12

  In the heady days after 9/11 the neocons sold Bush a predetermined foreign policy based not on reality, good intelligence, and analysis but on an ideology. “We’re an empire now and when we act, we create our own reality,” a Bush adviser told Ron Suskind—a quote that historians will doubtlessly use as a defining one for the Bush era.13 “And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” The neocons truly believed that 9/11 was a God-given opportunity to make up history as they went along, and so changing the target from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, from Afghanistan to Iraq, was their prerogative to rearrange their own reality.

  For all their intellectualism, the neocons seemed to have no knowledge of what history had taught us about empires. The great empire builders quickly learned that when it came to ruling newly conquered lands, they had to put back in almost as much as they took out. If the conquerer was to extract the raw materials, taxes, and manpower he needed from the colony, he had to establish a system of security and law and order over the conquered and help his subjects maintain their economic livelihoods. Most significantly, empire builders from Alexander the Great to Queen Victoria had to learn about their s
ubjects if they were to rule over them with any authority. At the very least they had to be curious about them. In the nineteenth century the British epitomized a colonialism that exploited with responsibility, used force judiciously, and yet learned about its subject peoples.

  In comparison, the first thought of the Bush administration after the Afghan war ended was how to declare victory, get out, and move on to Iraq. The administration wanted no responsibility for reconstructing the now-occupied nation of Afghanistan and was unwilling to learn about the people or the country. In their haste to move on, security in Afghanistan was handed over to warlords and drug barons, who were supported lavishly by the CIA and the Pentagon with a one-billion-dollar budget, because Washington wanted to focus on the upcoming war in Iraq.

  In 2003 the misinformation the Bush administration fed to the American people through a pliant and mostly willing media confirmed Saddam Hussein’s possession of nuclear weapons and his links to al Qaeda. “You can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” said a confident Bush in 2002.14 A completely false justification for going to war in Iraq and abandoning Afghanistan had just been created. It was only after the U.S. invasion that al Qaeda truly arrived in Iraq, luring in extremists from all over the world to act as suicide bombers.