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On August 22nd, missile strikes were launched on intelligence from local clansmen in remote villages of Herat province and aimed to target a cluster of radical insurgents. Acting on the tip, U.S.-led coalition forces calling in quick-response airstrikes, which killed, instead, ninety civilians - including 61 children, 15 women and 15 men. So far, no mistakes: the victims were rivals of the clans-folk who initially tipped the U.S.-coalition forces. At least one party was happy with the results. This is not the first time that "allies" planes make costly maneuvers in the Afghan skies to settle inter-clan feuds in far-flung villages, bombing to smithereens hundreds of civilians who might be celebrating wedding parties, mourning at funerals or gatherings for various community affairs.
This time, a sorry Karzai promised to bring justice to the mourning villagers and called for punishment of those responsible for the attack. He did not clarify who will be brought to justice or what the punishment ought to be. My wild guess is that he did not mention "foreign soldiers" because he knows that U.S.-led coalition troops, including U.S. armed forces operating in Afghanistan, are immune from criminal prosecution by Afghan authorities or international bodies. In response to my blog on Huffington Post, several people queried me about the deadly chaos in Afghanistan. It is puzzling to some that the once poster child of Bush's victory in the war on terror might be wizening so quickly. Are we losing in Afghanistan? The good news is that Afghanistan is not yet lost. The bad news is that - and the Pentagon agrees - US is "not wining" or without spin is losing in Afghanistan. My opinion is that US is Lost in Afghanistan. Scapegoating the coalition forces on the ground is tempting, of course, but not fair: after all, these 'little guys' are mostly Western citizen who responded to the call of duty to keep peace on the rugged terrain and among the - so far - unfathomable people of Afghanistan. For all their high-tech military equipment, cutting-edge transportation and communications systems, though, they are still in the dark. For years they have been supplied with high-tech, made-in-the-bible-belt night-vision goggles and wrong binoculars to help them distinguish friend from foe and win the war. But they have failed to reclaim approximately seventy percent of Afghanistan currently under the control of a few thousand barefoot ragtag insurgents. In one of the most important books ever written on waging successful warfare, "The Art of War, the Chinese general Sun Tzu wrote about 2,500 years ago: "Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disasters." Sun Tzu's sharpshooting manual was well known to commanders-in-chief such as Mao Zedong, who went on to found the People's Republic of China after trashing his enemies with his signature "mobile warfare." It was also a favorite book of Ahmad Shah Massoud, the legendary Afghan guerrilla commander who triumphed over the mighty Soviet Army in the 80's, and at the head of under-resourced and under-equipped troops, kept at bay for four years Taliban and Alqaeda forces combined, who were backed by the Pakistani army. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bush administration officials were quick to identify the enemy as Bin Laden and his Alqaeda organization. But seven years later, do they 'know' the enemy? Taking their parts from their Washington counterparts, Americans and U.S.-led coalition forces on the ground in Afghanistan could not tell friend from foe even though their lives depended on it. Instead of striving to know its enemies absolutely, all Washington seems interested in knowing is how to mint an image of them for easy fit on a two-sided coin. The final product is packaged and transmitted by the Media to the public in the form of this durable dichotomous dogma: head, it's radical; tail, it's moderate. Like the dollar, it is a kind of currency that easily inflates or deflates on a bi-polar toggle to suit the goals of the administration, and the perception that ought to be had of the enemy. No wonder that soon the difference between an innocent Afghan taxi driver and an evil Egyptian surgeon known as Dr. Al-Zawahiri became blurred (his promotion to lieutenant came from former Secretary of Defense - Donald Rumsfeld). In the process, Washington arbitrarily bestowed ordinal ranks (Alqaeda No. 1, 2, etc.). By all standards, September 11 was a real tragedy, but the Republican administration mythologized its sponsors until it managed to turn walking men into creatures of otherworldly powers, and reach. The myth translated into many more epics and tragedies around the world.Now the myth is a different phenomenon - one that has real repercussions nonetheless, capable of killing Afghans, Americans and Europeans in Afghanistan in September 2008. What we know today about our enemy is that Alqaeda in September 2008 is a totally different organization from the Alqaeda (possibly coined in Manhattan) of September 2001: Alqaeda in Iraq did not exist, then. We know that the former Taliban were history by 2002 and that the Neo-Taliban of September 2008 is a totally a different movement from the Taliban of September 2001: back then, the Taliban never used to resort to suicide attacks in Afghanistan. They do now. After all these years, all we know, still, is that our enemy is radical whereas our friend is liberal/moderate. How we tell them apart, is a toss of the old coin.Still, the Bush administration and the US media have integrated this dichotomous dogma into their rhetoric and policy. Republicans stand on this faltering strategy to win the global war on terror. They rely on this hollow tactic to win the general elections. In a speech in 2005, President Bush defined the enemy as "evil Islamic radicalism", "militant Jihadism" or "Islamo-fascism", and the friends as "moderate Muslim". A year later, Rand Corp, a leading American think tank offering research and analysis to the U.S. Armed Forces provided Bush's crude definitions some academic context in a strategy paper called "Building Moderate Muslim Networks". Among other things, the paper recommends to identify and fund, as well as "guide, support, oversee, and continuously monitor," local and global liberal Muslim networks for an indefinite period of time, in order to "retrieve Islam from the radicals." It also states that: "What is needed at this stage is to derive lessons from the experience of the Cold War." And that: "The U.S. government and its allies need, but thus far have failed, to develop clear criteria for partnerships with authentic moderates...With regard to geographic focus, we propose a shift of priorities from the Middle East to the regions of the Muslim world......in Turkey, Indonesia."
What about Afghanistan?
By the time Rand strategy paper came out, President Bush had already begun warning that the insurgency in Afghanistan was metastasizing into a far broader struggle against radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to Indonesia. But he seemed prepared for a struggle of cold war proportions. Really, the Cold War and the war on terror are too far apart to merit an analogy. For the sake of argument, during the Cold War the Polish American expert on communism, Zbigniew Brezsinski worked for Carter's administration. He agreed with some of Carter's earlier foreign policy but disagreed when he perceived it to be ineffective. But he was never called a "communist sympathizer", put on any watch lists or excluded for his ideas. During the War on terror, Brigitte Gabriel, a Lebanese American 'terrorism expert' who has addressed audiences at the FBI, the US Special Operations Command, the Parliament of the UK, the Joint Forces Staff College, among others, offered a definition for 'moderate Muslim': “A moderate Muslim is a non-practicing Muslim.” According to Gabriel. "A non-practicing or non-devout Muslim is a man who doesn't pray five times a day, does drink alcohol, doesn't attend a mosque regularly..." By Gabriel's definition, 99.9 percent of Afghans would fall in the 'radical' category. It is quite likely that one of her U.S. Special Command audience members is later deployed to Afghanistan. Would it be fair, to blame the little guy if based on the 'terrorism expert's opinion he actually considers 99.9 percent of Afghans the enemy and acts on it? It is ironic that Republican officials continue to repeat similar rhetoric? On September 4, 2008, speaking in the Republican Party Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota, Republican candidate John McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani joined the chorus to give us an insight into what the post-Bush Republican strategy might look like. "For four days in Denver, the Democrats were afraid to use the words 'Islamic terrorism,'" Giuliani said. "I imagine they believe it is politically incorrect to say it. I think they believe it will insult someone. Please, tell me, who are they insulting, if they say 'Islamic terrorism?' They are insulting terrorists." McCain jumped on the bandwagon: "Radical violent Islam is evil, and we will defeat it." So, we're back on the high-tech night goggles with impaired vision, also popular it seems, with wannabe Commanders-in-Chief, native experts, media, policy makers, academic think tanks, Republican leaders, and their ilk. The problem with these goggles is that they come with two built-in lenses that can only recognize moderate or radical Muslims- and they tell them apart based on how they dress and what they say. Not on how they act. If they relied on their naked eyes, even, the U.S.-led coalition soldiers would get a much clearer picture. They could see that there are more than a dozen ethnic groups in Afghanistan, divided along hundreds of tribes, sub-tribes, and clans. They could recognize that these diverse groups of Afghans forge wholly secular horizontal and vertical alliances when their interests align, or engage in rivalries when their interests clash. They might appreciate American commonalities with Afghans and embrace differences. Like many traditional Americans, most traditional Afghans have historically owned at least one gun. Unlike Americans, Afghans have never had the tradition of liberals vs. conservative (or moderate vs. radical). It may be wishful thinking but Rand Corp. could come up with a new study to help the armed forces of the U.S., at least, recognize the friends first, so as to better juxtapose them to the enemy. Many lives would be saved if existing networks of friends were studied and capitalized on. The numbers are small, the geographical area even smaller and the strategy is likely to produce desirable outcomes. These are friends who do not dress like us, and may not say things we like to hear. But it is not rocket science to figure their ethnic, tribal, clan codes, links and structures and how that can be counted on to made some advances. To quote Sun Tzu: "Foreknowledge cannot be had from ghosts, and spirits, deduced by comparison with past events" (i.e. Cold War). And also: "There has never been a protracted war from which the nation has benefited."  Shoaib Harris is an studies Economics at Columbia University in New York. He is also freelance researcher concerned with Afghanistan's development, culture and linguistics.
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