by Ahmed Rashid
It was an Orwellian experience to visit Washington during Bush’s first term. Outsiders like me found it remarkable that a U.S. president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning—all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public. “Official intelligence analysis was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions,“ wrote Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA official.15 I feared the worst kind of criticism when I made these points to young American students during a lecture tour of U.S. university campuses just before the Iraq war began. However, my ideas were well received and applauded. It became apparent to me that most Americans had the right instincts, but they were so poorly educated about world history, geography, and politics that they could not make political decisions for themselves about the world outside and left such choices to their leaders. The neocons counted on just this ignorance and compliance to conduct their foreign policy.
Compared to the pre-9/11 isolationism, the neocon ideology now focused on keeping the American public in a constant state of fear, with looming exaggerated threats and potential war. The administration was helped by the fact that it had arrived on the political stage when the United States had unquestioned military prowess around the globe. In the decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Department of Defense or the Pentagon had been steadily displacing and obscuring the State Department in the formulation and conduct of U.S. foreign policy in the third world. “The military simply filled a vacuum left by an indecisive White House, an atrophied State Department, and a distracted Congress,” wrote journalist Dana Priest.16 Well before 9/11, military treaties with foreign armies eclipsed political agreements between the State Department and foreign ministries.
Under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s influence in the U.S. decision-making process was to become overwhelming, as the State Department, led weakly by Secretary of State Colin Powell, was steadily bypassed. The wars after 9/11 gave the Pentagon even more power and money. In 2001 the U.S. defense budget was $293 billion—still more than the aggregate budget of the next fifteen ranked countries in the world, including all the European powers and China. In 2003 the defense budget reached $360 billion, and in 2006 it topped $427 billion, growing by a phenomenal 40 percent in the five years since 9/11. In 2008 it reached $647 billion, by which time the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were expected to have cost more than $1 trillion.17 By now the U.S. defense budget was equivalent to what the entire rest of the world spent on defense.
Meanwhile, the State Department’s budget was a mere fraction of the defense budget. In 2003 State received $26 billion, or just 6 percent of the defense budget. “We are conducting diplomacy on a shoestring in an era when . . . we depend on diplomats to build alliances,” berated Richard Lugar, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.18 By 2008 State’s total budget, including its loan and aid programs, amounted to $42 billion, or 6.5 percent of the defense budget. Even the foreign aid traditionally distributed by the State Department was being undercut by the Pentagon. Between 2001 and 2007, a virtually unknown Pentagon department called the Defense Security Cooperation Agency had secured 20 percent of Washington’s $15 billion in foreign aid, while also managing some $12 billion in foreign arms sales.19
The might of the U.S. military should not be underestimated. The 1.37-million -strong U.S. armed forces divided up the world into regional commands that have more assets and facilities than similar divisions in the State Department or the CIA. The combined U.S. military has joint command operations stretched right around the world, including CENTCOM, or Central Command, in the Middle East, which fought the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; PACOM, in the Pacific; EUCOM, in Europe; and SOUTH-COM, in Latin America. Each of these joint command headquarters has a staff of more than a thousand officers, far larger than the staffs of most U.S. embassies. The U.S. Navy has thirteen aircraft carrier battle groups, whereas no navy in the world has even one such carrier group. Before 9/11 the U.S. military deployed more than a quarter of a million men at 725 bases in 38 foreign countries, and during the war in Afghanistan it acquired 14 more bases, in Pakistan and Central Asia. CENTCOM had the widest theater of operations, covering 25 countries stretching from Kenya through the Middle East to China’s western borders.
After the war in Afghanistan, the forty-seven-thousand-strong Special Operations Forces (SOF), involving soldiers from all three armed services, led the worldwide attack on Islamic extremists. The SOF budget of $3.0 billion in 2001 more than doubled, to $6.5 billion in 2004, and then doubled again four years later. Even before 9/11, SOF were operating in 140 countries, acting as virtual ambassadors to allied armies, offering specialized training and other support.20 In sharp contrast, the one group of American soldiers considered essential for nation building—army civil affairs units, which rebuild bombed villages, bridges, power lines, and water supplies— were downgraded by Rumsfeld. When the terrorists struck the Twin Towers, most civil affairs units had been relegated to the U.S. Army Reserves and few were mobilized when the United States invaded Afghanistan. It was not until 2007, after the massive failure in Iraq, that the Pentagon decided to increase civil affairs officers by 33 percent, to 3,500 men.
Rumsfeld was involved not just in fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but in expanding his powers even further. He tried to undermine the FBI by secretly encouraging the Pentagon to carry out large-scale domestic intelligence gathering and he undercut the CIA by creating a new spy agency within the Pentagon, although the agency was later dissolved. In the immortal words of Maureen Dowd, “First he [Rumsfeld] and his brainy advisers, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, set up their own State Department within the Defense Department . . . then they set up their own Defense Department within the Defense Department staging a civilian coup. . . . And now they have set up their own C.I.A. within the Defense Department.”21
To outsiders it appeared that when Rumsfeld wanted to do something he just went ahead and did it, disregarding everyone else in the U.S. government. That message was not lost on authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world, who preferred to deal with the all-powerful but accommodating Rumsfeld and his generals rather than U.S. diplomats who might raise issues of human rights and democracy. A visiting CENTCOM chief, who arrived in his own plane with twenty staff officers, was given a guard of honor as though he were a head of state. How could the local U.S. ambassador compete with such a demonstration of power before autocratic rulers in the region?
When General Musharraf carried out his coup in 1999, he did not bother to get in touch with the U.S. ambassador in Islamabad, but instead telephoned Gen. Anthony Zinni, the CENTCOM chief at the time.22 In Uzbekistan, after massacring hundreds of his own citizens in Andijan in 2005, President Islam Karimov continued a dialogue with the Pentagon, which was trying to keep the State Department’s criticism of his actions to a minimum. Rumsfeld constantly used his generals to deliver strong political messages of support to heads of state in the region, undermining what the State Department or the White House was telling them.
Historically when the United States has intervened in the third world— largely in Latin America and Southeast Asia—it has never been much concerned with nation building or rebuilding shattered societies. Regime change during the cold war was all about replacing one pro-American corrupt dictator with another, while societies trundled on in their misery. As I’ve said, some observers hoped that after regime change in Afghanistan, the Americans would do more simply because the U.S. homeland had suffered such terrible consequences. The neocons, obsessed with the mechanics of regime change and instant gratification, never linked successful regime change with nation building. As a direct result, Afghanistan and Iraq both witnessed renewed insurgencies after the quick victories by U.S. forces precisely because of the failure first to plan and then to pursue nation-building policies the moment the war was won. A military doc
trine of “shock and awe” could not substitute for boots on the ground and an inclusive strategy that would win hearts and minds.
Moreover, Pakistan, the base area, recruiting ground, and logistics center for both al Qaeda and the Taliban, needed major help in both state and nation building if it was to overcome past legacies. By state building, I mean the opportunity for countries to rebuild their infrastructure such as the army, police, civil service, and judiciary, which would provide security and services to its citizens. However, state building is prolonged, expensive, and requires a long-term commitment from international donors as well as a democratic culture prevailing at home—something the Pakistan army was to deny its citizens. Defined in the broadest possible way, nation building involves aid and support to civil society to rebuild the shattered economy, provide livelihoods, create social and political structures, and introduce democracy. The process of democratization is about not just holding elections but creating institutions and a culture of tolerance and shared responsibility among rulers and citizens alike.
Since the end of the cold war, the United States has been wary of getting involved in nation-building exercises. Washington has been involved in six such operations—Cambodia, East Timor, Haiti, Somalia, and the states of the former Yugoslavia. None of them was initiated by the United States, except for Somalia, which failed. The United States never took part in UN peacekeeping operations, although it has funded and supported many of them. Out of fifteen such UN peacekeeping operations worldwide in 2007, which involved more than one hundred thousand troops wearing UN blue helmets, just ten American soldiers were involved. Ironically, Pakistan is the largest provider of peacekeeping troops, contributing more than ten thousand in 2007. 23
Its unwillingness to take part in nation-building exercises, and the lack of importance it gave the issue, fed into the Bush administration’s growing conviction that it could fight and win the war on terrorism on its own. The United States refused the offers of help and shared responsibility made by multinational bodies such as NATO. Bush’s formula was to create “a coalition of the willing.” Only those countries willing to surrender decision making to the U.S. command could join.
After 9/11 the United States ignored the UN until after the bombing campaign against the Taliban had begun. Only when it realized that somebody had to pick up the pieces and put together a new Afghan government did Washington approach Secretary-General Kofi Annan. Four days after the bombing campaign began, a reluctant Bush admitted that “it would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the ‘nation building. ’ I would call it the stabilization of a future government after our military mission is completed.”24 Afghanistan later became a multinational effort, but the United States refused to take its partners seriously and continued to make all major military and aid decisions on its own.
Under difficult conditions, working against a deadline that was brought even closer by the unexpected collapse of the Taliban, the UN effort was remarkable for its creativity. The UN had been set up to prevent wars between states, not to mediate civil wars or set up postinvasion governments. Today the UN is having to do far more than it was ever mandated for. Today’s global threats include civil wars, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, organized crime, disease, poverty, and mass starvation. Many of these issues are interconnected, making the role of a multinational organization such as the UN indispensable, yet the organization was essentially ignored by the neocons.
In the giddy days after the Afghan victory, outsiders could not believe that the U.S. administration would undermine its own war in Afghanistan by failing to carry out nation building. After the success of my book Taliban, European foreign ministers, aid organizations, the media, and think tanks invited me to meetings and conferences. I visited Washington several times, hoping that the administration would want to do good in Afghanistan and convinced it just needed the right ideas as to how to proceed. I spent much time in the office of the U.S. Agency for International Development, whose boss Andrew Natsios was enthusiastic about helping the Afghans and needed ideas as to where to start. However, USAID was to be swiftly superseded by the CIA and the Pentagon.
Everywhere I went after 9/11, I urged governments and experts to devote resources for nation building in Afghanistan so that the country could emerge as a bastion of development and democracy to counter the growing trends of extremism and state repression in the Islamic world. The United States and the West had the opportunity to show Muslims and the world that they may be bombing a country to free it from Taliban tyranny, but they also had the willingness and patience to help rebuild it. I strongly countered the myths being circulated in the Western media at the time that the Afghans would oppose the presence of Western troops. Instead, after being battered by twenty-five years of war, most Afghans saw the presence of Western forces as a way forward to stability and development.
I urged audiences that warlords should not be empowered, that disarming the militias was a priority task for U.S. forces, that international peacekeepers should be deployed outside Kabul, that Pakistan must not give refuge to the retreating Taliban, and that developing Afghan agriculture to ward off a revival of poppy cultivation should be a priority. I also advocated a regional view of development and reconstruction that looked at the problems of development in Pakistan and Central Asia. Much of what I spoke about was commonsense stuff and should have been obvious to Western governments—or so I thought.
Most experts reckoned that Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas, needed about $4 to 5 billion every year for the next ten years to put it on its feet—a small amount in geopolitical donor terms and a pittance compared to what was later spent in Iraq. Such an act of sustained commitment by the international community would also help undermine support for extremism in the neighboring states and encourage them to pursue reforms.
Every item on my checklist was studiously ignored by Washington.
Within a few months of 9/11, Bush had added to his counterterrorism agenda the “axis of evil” (Iran, Iraq, North Korea) and the ideas of “preemption” and “regime change” in which the United States could presume a nation’s guilt and attack it before it had carried out any hostile act. Never before had the United States presented the world with such an aggressive global strategy that reeked of overt imperialism, alienated Europeans and Muslims alike, and made the job of winning hearts and minds around the globe virtually impossible. Bush was now truly the global cowboy. “The problem is that President Bush has reframed his initial question. Instead of simply asking others to oppose al Qaeda, he now asks them to oppose al Qaeda, support the invasion of an Arab country, and endorse the doctrine of preemption—all as part of a single package,” said former secretary of state Madeleine Albright.25
At home Bush presented his global agenda as a result of sudden worldwide anti-Americanism rather than a result of past American policy failures. “Why do they hate us? . . . They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other,” Bush told Congress on September 20, 2001.26 Such words ignored past failures and created a culture of fear and hysteria among many Americans, even as it created disdain and ridicule abroad. The unspoken implication of such rhetoric was that if they hated us, then Americans should hate Muslims back and retaliate not just against the terrorists but against Islam in general. By generating such fears it was virtually impossible to gain American public attention and support for long-term nation building.
The Bush doctrine was also doggedly to sweep under the carpet any discussion or understanding of the “root causes” of terrorism—the growing poverty, repression, and sense of injustice that many Muslims felt at the hands of their U.S.-backed governments, which in turn boosted anti-Americanism and Islamic extremism. The Bush administration was determined to prevent any alternative views on U.S. foreign policy from emerging, and the Washington-based media was cowed from asking awkward questions until
the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan became too obvious. It took four years before anyone in the Bush administration admitted that the United States had failed to carry out nation building. “We didn’t have the right skills, the right capacity to deal with a reconstruction effort of this kind,” said Condoleezza Rice, speaking of both Iraq and Afghanistan in 2005.27
Bush did more to keep Americans blind to world affairs than any American leader in recent history.28 In 2004 a strategic think tank supported by the Pentagon issued a damning report saying that America’s strategic communications with the world had broken down and a total reorganization of public diplomacy was needed. The Department of Defense Science Board said the United States was losing the war of ideas in the Muslim world: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies. . . . The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed towards the Muslim world is not one of ‘dissemination of information’ or even one of crafting and delivering the ‘right’ message. Rather it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply there is none—the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam.”29
In Europe there was a vastly different approach to dealing with the terrorist threat. The continent was deeply divided over supporting the invasion of Iraq, but those divisions led to intense debate, saturation media coverage, and protest movements, which led to public mobilization and deep introspection about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The European public was far better educated about the wars than the American public ever was. Whereas draconian laws were swiftly introduced in America after 9/11, as thousands of American Muslims were rounded up and many were deported for visa infringements, there was a far more careful attitude in Europe. Even the 2004 and 2005 bombings in Madrid and London, respectively, never generated the governmental hysteria regarding the fundamental rights of their citizens that 9/11 did in the United States. There were calls to improve the integration of Muslim citizens into Spanish and British societies rather than isolate them. European governments treaded slowly before they introduced new anti-terrorism laws. An enormous respect was shown to civil liberties and human rights for all their citizens— Muslims included.