[R-G] Juan Cole: Obama's Domino Theory

[Sid Shniad]

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22321.htm 

Obama's Domino Theory 

Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and fell back on 
Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories. 

By Juan Cole 

March 31, 2009 "Salon" -- President Barack Obama may or may not be doing the 
right thing in Afghanistan, but the rationale he gave for it on Friday is 
almost certainly wrong. Obama has presented us with a 21st century version 
of the domino theory. The U.S. is not, contrary to what the president said, 
mainly fighting "al-Qaida" in Afghanistan. In blaming everything on 
al-Qaida, Obama broke with his pledge of straight talk to the public and 
fell back on Bush-style boogeymen and implausible conspiracy theories. 

Obama realizes that after seven years, Afghanistan war fatigue has begun to 
set in with the American people. Some 51 percent of Americans now oppose the 
Afghanistan war, and 64 percent of Democrats do. The president is therefore 
escalating in the teeth of substantial domestic opposition, especially from 
his own party, as voters worry about spending billions more dollars abroad 
while the U.S. economy is in serious trouble. 

He acknowledged that we deserve a "straightforward answer" as to why the 
U.S. and NATO are still fighting there. "So let me be clear," he said, 
"Al-Qaida and its allies -- the terrorists who planned and supported the 
9/11 attacks -- are in Pakistan and Afghanistan." But his characterization 
of what is going on now in Afghanistan, almost eight years after 9/11, was 
simply not true, and was, indeed, positively misleading. "And if the Afghan 
government falls to the Taliban," he said, "or allows al-Qaida to go 
unchallenged -- that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to 
kill as many of our people as they possibly can." 

Obama described the same sort of domino effect that Washington elites used 
to ascribe to international communism. In the updated, al-Qaida version, the 
Taliban might take Kunar Province, and then all of Afghanistan, and might 
again host al-Qaida, and might then threaten the shores of the United 
States. He even managed to add an analog to Cambodia to the scenario, 
saying, "The future of Afghanistan is inextricably linked to the future of 
its neighbor, Pakistan," and warned, "Make no mistake: Al-Qaida and its 
extremist allies are a cancer that risks killing Pakistan from within." 

This latter-day domino theory of al-Qaida takeovers in South Asia is just as 
implausible as its earlier iteration in Southeast Asia (ask Thailand or the 
Philippines). Most of the allegations are not true or are vastly 
exaggerated. There are very few al-Qaida fighters based in Afghanistan 
proper. What is being called the "Taliban" is mostly not Taliban at all (in 
the sense of seminary graduates loyal to Mullah Omar). The groups being 
branded "Taliban" only have substantial influence in 8 to 10 percent of 
Afghanistan, and only 4 percent of Afghans say they support them. Some 58 
percent of Afghans say that a return of the Taliban is the biggest threat to 
their country, but almost no one expects it to happen. Moreover, with regard 
to Pakistan, there is no danger of militants based in the remote Federally 
Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) taking over that country or "killing" it. 

The Kabul government is not on the verge of falling to the Taliban. The 
Afghan government has 80,000 troops, who benefit from close U.S. air 
support, and the total number of Taliban fighters in the Pashtun provinces 
is estimated at 10,000 to 15,000. Kabul is in danger of losing control of 
some villages in the provinces to dissident Pashtun warlords styled 
"Taliban," though it is not clear why the new Afghan army could not expel 
them if they did so. A smaller, poorly equipped Northern Alliance army 
defeated 60,000 Taliban with U.S. air support in 2001. And there is no 
prospect of "al-Qaida" reestablishing bases in Afghanistan from which it 
could attack the United States. If al-Qaida did come back to Afghanistan, it 
could simply be bombed and would be attacked by the new Afghan army. 

While the emergence of "Pakistani Taliban" in the Federally Administered 
Tribal Areas is a blow to Pakistan's security, they have just been defeated 
in one of the seven major tribal agencies, Bajaur, by a concerted and 
months-long campaign of the highly professional and well-equipped Pakistani 
army. United States Secretary of Defense Robert Gates replied last summer to 
the idea that al-Qaida is regrouping in Pakistan and forms a new and vital 
threat to the West: "Actually, I don't agree with that assessment, because 
when al-Qaida was in Afghanistan, they had the partnership of a government. 
They had ready access to international communications, ready access to 
travel, and so on. Their circumstances in the FATA (Federally Administered 
Tribal Areas) and on the Pakistani side of the border are much more 
primitive. And it's much more difficult for them to move around, much more 
difficult for them to communicate." 

As for a threat to Pakistan, the FATA areas are smaller than Connecticut, 
with a total population of a little over 3 million, while Pakistan itself is 
bigger than Texas, with a population more than half that of the entire 
United States. A few thousand Pashtun tribesmen cannot take over Pakistan, 
nor can they "kill" it. The Pakistani public just forced a military dictator 
out of office and forced the reinstatement of the Supreme Court, which 
oversees secular law. Over three-quarters of Pakistanis said in a poll last 
summer that they had an unfavorable view of the Taliban, and a recent poll 
found that 90 percent of them worried about terrorism. To be sure, 
Pakistanis are on the whole highly opposed to the U.S. military presence in 
the region, and most outside the tribal areas object to U.S. Predator drone 
strikes on Pakistani territory. The danger is that the U.S. strikes may make 
the radicals seem victims of Western imperialism and so sympathetic to the 
Pakistani public. 

Obama's dark vision of the overthrow of the Afghanistan government by 
al-Qaida-linked Taliban or the "killing" of Pakistan by small tribal groups 
differs little from the equally apocalyptic and implausible warnings issued 
by John McCain and Dick Cheney about an "al-Qaida" victory in Iraq. 
Ominously, the president's views are contradicted by those of his own 
secretary of defense. Pashtun tribes in northwestern Pakistan and southern 
Afghanistan have a long history of dissidence, feuding and rebellion, which 
is now being branded Talibanism and configured as a dire menace to the 
Western way of life. Obama has added yet another domino theory to the 
history of Washington's justifications for massive military interventions in 
Asia. When a policymaker gets the rationale for action wrong, he is at 
particular risk of falling into mission creep and stubborn commitment to a 
doomed and unnecessary enterprise. 

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University 
of Michigan. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.