By Aram Roston
The Nation, 11/11/09

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban’s rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime’s ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat’s right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal’s cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals’ private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan’s enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military’s contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. “It’s a big part of their income,” one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon’s logistics contracts-hundreds of millions of dollars-consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which “private security” ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren’t ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals’ Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan’s current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak’s connections there. On NCL’s advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as “a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer.” It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got-the contract that brought it into Afghanistan’s major leagues-was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming “surge” and a new doctrine, “Money as a Weapons System,” the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: “service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require.” Each of the military’s six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister’s well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. “We supply everything the army needs to survive here,” one American trucking executive told me. “We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles.” The epicenter is Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army calls “the Battlespace”-that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: “The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money.” That is something everyone seems to agree on.

Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: “You are paying the people in the local areas-some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force-to move your trucks through.”

Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: “We’re basically being extorted. Where you don’t pay, you’re going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to.” Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. “Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It’s based on the number of trucks and what you’re carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they’re not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more.”

Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. “If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially.”

Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. “Every warlord has his security company,” is the way one executive explained it to me.

In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai’s cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker’s son, sources say. And so on.

In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations, is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official’s plea agreement in US court in August. AIT is a very well-connected firm: it is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief. In an interview, Baba Jan, a cheerful and charismatic leader, insisted he had nothing to do with his nephew’s corporate enterprise.

But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don’t really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can’t; they need the Taliban’s cooperation.

One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. “They are shooting the drivers from 3,000 feet away with PKMs,” a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. “They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that’s just a joke. I carry an AK-and that’s just to shoot myself if I have to!”

The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan American Army Services points out, “An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade-you are going to lose!” That said, at least one of the Host Nation Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International. Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I’ve been told by insiders in the security industry that FHI’s convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.

For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, “What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat.” He’s an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he’s not happy about what’s being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.

“Most escorting is done by the Taliban,” an Afghan private security official told me. He’s a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. “Now the government is so weak,” he added, “everyone is paying the Taliban.”

To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. “Two Taliban is enough,” she told me. “One in the front and one in the back.” She shrugged. “You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible.”

Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war-to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.

Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road. Watan’s company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel “are diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other group opposed to international support of the democratic process.” Whatever screening methods it uses, Watan’s secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.

It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had competition-a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was killed in an ambush.

So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway. According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4×4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah “charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers.”

It’s hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly-security, extortion or a form of “insurance.” Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That’s impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, “He works both sides… whatever is most profitable. He’s the main commander. He’s got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows.”

Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan’s and Ruhullah’s convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan’s services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister’s son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai’s cousins, for protection.

Hamed Wardak wouldn’t return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA officer affiliated with the company, wouldn’t speak with me either. There’s nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US policy-makers.

It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking questions. “Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the son of the minister of defense?” That’s what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak had little security or trucking background before his company received security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. “That’s a questionable business practice,” he said. “They shouldn’t give it to him. How come that’s not questioned?”

I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed’s father, about it. He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair “Gucci commander” Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. “I’ve tried to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life,” the defense minister said. “This has been something people have tried to use against me, so it has been painful.”

Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced a rift with his son. “I was against it from the beginning, and that’s why we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to use my power or influence that he should benefit.”

When I told Wardak that his son’s company had a US contract worth as much as $360 million, he did a double take. “This is impossible,” he said. “I do not believe this.”

I believed the general when he said he really didn’t know what his son was up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to potential insurgents.

Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I’m told are “very detailed” reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.

The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.

The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? “The American soldier in me is repulsed by it,” he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. “But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, ’Hey, don’t hassle me.’ I don’t like it, but it is what it is.”

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, “We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics.”

In a statement to The Nation about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in Afghanistan, said that military officials are “aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring.” He added that, despite oversight, “the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent.”

In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that-as with so much in Afghanistan-the United States doesn’t seem to know how to fix it.

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

In an unstable Pakistan, can nuclear warheads be kept safe
By Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker, 16/11/09

In the tumultuous days leading up to the Pakistan Army’s ground offensive in the tribal area of South Waziristan, which began on October 17th, the Pakistani Taliban attacked what should have been some of the country’s best-guarded targets. In the most brazen strike, ten gunmen penetrated the Army’s main headquarters, in Rawalpindi, instigating a twenty-two-hour standoff that left twenty-three dead and the military thoroughly embarrassed. The terrorists had been dressed in Army uniforms. There were also attacks on police installations in Peshawar and Lahore, and, once the offensive began, an Army general was shot dead by gunmen on motorcycles on the streets of Islamabad, the capital. The assassins clearly had advance knowledge of the general’s route, indicating that they had contacts and allies inside the security forces.

Pakistan has been a nuclear power for two decades, and has an estimated eighty to a hundred warheads, scattered in facilities around the country. The success of the latest attacks raised an obvious question: Are the bombs safe? Asked this question the day after the Rawalpindi raid, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said, “We have confidence in the Pakistani government and the military’s control over nuclear weapons.” Clinton-whose own visit to Pakistan, two weeks later, would be disrupted by more terrorist bombs-added that, despite the attacks by the Taliban, “we see no evidence that they are going to take over the state.”

Clinton’s words sounded reassuring, and several current and former officials also said in interviews that the Pakistan Army was in full control of the nuclear arsenal. But the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny-that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead.

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On April 29th, President Obama was asked at a news conference whether he could reassure the American people that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal could be kept away from terrorists. Obama’s answer remains the clearest delineation of the Administration’s public posture. He was, he said, “gravely concerned” about the fragility of the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. “Their biggest threat right now comes internally,” Obama said. “We have huge . . . national-security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear-armed militant state.” The United States, he said, could “make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure-primarily, initially, because the Pakistan Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons’ falling into the wrong hands.”

The questioner, Chuck Todd, of NBC, began asking whether the American military could, if necessary, move in and secure Pakistan’s bombs. Obama did not let Todd finish. “I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort,” he said. “I feel confident that the nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands. O.K.?”

Obama did not say so, but current and former officials said in interviews in Washington and Pakistan that his Administration has been negotiating highly sensitive understandings with the Pakistani military. These would allow specially trained American units to provide added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis. At the same time, the Pakistani military would be given money to equip and train Pakistani soldiers and to improve their housing and facilities-goals that General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the chief of the Pakistan Army, has long desired. In June, Congress approved a four-hundred-million-dollar request for what the Administration called the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, providing immediate assistance to the Pakistan Army for equipment, training, and “renovation and construction.”

The secrecy surrounding the understandings was important because there is growing antipathy toward America in Pakistan, as well as a history of distrust. Many Pakistanis believe that America’s true goal is not to keep their weapons safe but to diminish or destroy the Pakistani nuclear complex. The arsenal is a source of great pride among Pakistanis, who view the weapons as symbols of their nation’s status and as an essential deterrent against an attack by India. (India’s first nuclear test took place in 1974, Pakistan’s in 1998.)

A senior Pakistani official who has close ties to Zardari exploded with anger during an interview when the subject turned to the American demands for more information about the arsenal. After the September 11th attacks, he said, there had been an understanding between the Bush Administration and then President Pervez Musharraf “over what Pakistan had and did not have.” Today, he said, “you’d like control of our day-to-day deployment. But why should we give it to you? Even if there was a military coup d’état in Pakistan, no one is going to give up total control of our nuclear weapons. Never. Why are you not afraid of India’s nuclear weapons?” the official asked. “Because India is your friend, and the longtime policies of America and India converge. Between you and the Indians, you will fuck us in every way. The truth is that our weapons are less of a problem for the Obama Administration than finding a respectable way out of Afghanistan.”

The ongoing consultation on nuclear security between Washington and Islamabad intensified after the announcement in March of President Obama’s so-called Af-Pak policy, which called upon the Pakistan Army to take more aggressive action against Taliban enclaves inside Pakistan. I was told that the understandings on nuclear coöperation benefitted from the increasingly close relationship between Admiral Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and General Kayani, his counterpart, although the C.I.A. and the Departments of Defense, State, and Energy have also been involved. (All three departments declined to comment for this article. The national-security council and the C.I.A. denied that there were any agreements in place.)

In response to a series of questions, Admiral Mullen acknowledged that he and Kayani were, in his spokesman’s words, “very close.” The spokesman said that Mullen is deeply involved in day-to-day Pakistani developments and “is almost an action officer for all things Pakistan.” But he denied that he and Kayani, or their staffs, had reached an understanding about the availability of American forces in case of mutiny or a terrorist threat to a nuclear facility. “To my knowledge, we have no military units, special forces or otherwise, involved in such an assignment,” Mullen said through his spokesman. The spokesman added that Mullen had not seen any evidence of growing fundamentalism inside the Pakistani military. In a news conference on May 4th, however, Mullen responded to a query about growing radicalism in Pakistan by saying that “what has clearly happened over the [past] twelve months is the continual decline, gradual decline, in security.” The Admiral also spoke openly about the increased coöperation on nuclear security between the United States and Pakistan: “I know what we’ve done over the last three years, specifically to both invest, assist, and I’ve watched them improve their security fairly dramatically. . . . I’ve looked at this, you know, as hard as I can, over a period of time.” Seventeen days later, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “We have invested a significant amount of resources through the Department of Energy in the last several years” to help Pakistan improve the controls on its arsenal. “They still have to improve them,” he said.

In interviews in Pakistan, I obtained confirmation that there were continuing conversations with the United States on nuclear-security plans-as well as evidence that the Pakistani leadership put much less weight on them than the Americans did. In some cases, Pakistani officials spoke of the talks principally as a means of placating anxious American politicians. “You needed it,” a senior Pakistani official, who said that he had been briefed on the nuclear issue, told me. His tone was caustic. “We have twenty thousand people working in the nuclear-weapons industry in Pakistan, and here is this American view that Pakistan is bound to fail.” The official added, “The Americans are saying, ‘We want to help protect your weapons.’ We say, ‘Fine. Tell us what you can do for us.’ It’s part of a quid pro quo. You say, also, ‘Come clean on the nuclear program and we’ll insure that India doesn’t put pressure on it.’ So we say, ‘O.K.’ ”

But, the Pakistani official said, “both sides are lying to each other.” The information that the Pakistanis handed over was not as complete as the Americans believed. “We haven’t told you anything that you don’t know,” he said. The Americans didn’t realize that Pakistan would never cede control of its arsenal: “If you try to take the weapons away, you will fail.”

High-level coöperation between Islamabad and Washington on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal began at least eight years ago. Former President Musharraf, when I interviewed him in London recently, acknowledged that his government had held extensive discussions with the Bush Administration after the September 11th attacks, and had given State Department nonproliferation experts insight into the command and control of the Pakistani arsenal and its on-site safety and security procedures. Musharraf also confirmed that Pakistan had constructed a huge tunnel system for the transport and storage of nuclear weaponry. “The tunnels are so deep that a nuclear attack will not touch them,” Musharraf told me, with obvious pride. The tunnels would make it impossible for the American intelligence community-”Big Uncle,” as a Pakistani nuclear-weapons expert called it-to monitor the movements of nuclear components by satellite.

Safeguards have been built into the system. Pakistani nuclear doctrine calls for the warheads (containing an enriched radioactive core) and their triggers (sophisticated devices containing highly explosive lenses, detonators, and krytrons) to be stored separately from each other and from their delivery devices (missiles or aircraft). The goal is to insure that no one can launch a warhead-in the heat of a showdown with India, for example-without pausing to put it together. Final authority to order a nuclear strike requires consensus within Pakistan’s ten-member National Command Authority, with the chairman-by statute, President Zardari-casting the deciding vote.

But the safeguards meant to keep a confrontation with India from escalating too quickly could make the arsenal more vulnerable to terrorists. Nuclear-security experts have war-gamed the process and concluded that the triggers and other elements are most exposed when they are being moved and reassembled-at those moments there would be fewer barriers between an outside group and the bomb. A consultant to the intelligence community said that in one war-gamed scenario disaffected members of the Pakistani military could instigate a terrorist attack inside India, and that the ensuing crisis would give them “a chance to pick up bombs and triggers-in the name of protecting the assets from extremists.”

The triggers are a key element in American contingency plans. An American former senior intelligence official said that a team that has trained for years to remove or dismantle parts of the Pakistani arsenal has now been augmented by a unit of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the élite counterterrorism group. He added that the unit, which had earlier focussed on the warheads’ cores, has begun to concentrate on evacuating the triggers, which have no radioactive material and are thus much easier to handle.

“The Pakistanis gave us a virtual look at the number of warheads, some of their locations, and their command-and-control system,” the former senior intelligence official told me. “We saw their target list and their mobilization plans. We got their security plans, so we could augment them in case of a breach of security,” he said. “We’re there to help the Pakistanis, but we’re also there to extend our own axis of security to their nuclear stockpile.” The detailed American planning even includes an estimate of how many nuclear triggers could be placed inside a C-17 cargo plane, the former official said, and where the triggers could be sequestered. Admiral Mullen, asked about increased American insight into the arsenal, said, through his spokesman, “I am not aware of our receipt of any such information.” (A senior military officer added that the information, if it had been conveyed, would most likely “have gone to another government agency.”)

A spokesman for the Pakistani military said, in an official denial, “Pakistan neither needs any American unit for enhancing the security for its arsenal nor would accept it.” The spokesman added that the Pakistani military “has been providing protection to U.S. troops in a situation of crisis”-a reference to Pakistan’s role in the war on terror-”and hence is quite capable to deal with any untoward situation.”

Early this summer, a consultant to the Department of Defense said, a highly classified military and civil-emergency response team was put on alert after receiving an urgent report from American intelligence officials indicating that a Pakistani nuclear component had gone astray. The team, which operates clandestinely and includes terrorism and nonproliferation experts from the intelligence community, the Pentagon, the F.B.I., and the D.O.E., is under standing orders to deploy from Andrews Air Force Base, in Maryland, within four hours of an alert. When the report turned out to be a false alarm, the mission was aborted, the consultant said. By the time the team got the message, it was already in Dubai.

In an actual crisis, would the Pakistanis give an American team direct access to their arsenal? An adviser to the Pentagon on counterinsurgency said that some analysts suspected that the Pakistani military had taken steps to move elements of the nuclear arsenal “out of the count”-to shift them to a storage facility known only to a very few-as a hedge against mutiny or an American or Indian effort to seize them. “If you thought your American ally was telling your enemy where the weapons were, you’d do the same thing,” the adviser said.

“Let me say this about our nuclear deterrent,” President Zardari told me, when asked about any recent understandings between Pakistan and the United States. “We give comfort to each other, and the comfort level is good, because everybody respects everybody’s integrity. We’re all big boys.”

Zardari and I met twice, first in his office, in the grand but isolated Presidential compound in Islamabad, and then, a few days later, alone over dinner in his personal quarters. Zardari, who became President after the assassination, in December, 2007, of his charismatic wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, spent nearly eleven years in jail on corruption charges. He is widely known in Pakistan as Mr. Ten Per Cent, a reference to the commissions he allegedly took on government contracts when Bhutto was in power, and is seen by many Pakistanis as little more than a crook who has grown too close to America; his approval ratings are in the teens. He is chatty but guarded, proud but defensive, and, like many Pakistanis, convinced that the United States will always favor India. Over dinner, he spoke of his suspicions regarding his wife’s death. He said that, despite rumors to the contrary, he would complete his five-year term.

Zardari spoke with derision about what he depicted as America’s obsession with the vulnerability of his nation’s nuclear arsenal. “In your country, you feel that you have to hold the fort for us,” he said. “The American people want a lot of answers for the errors of the past, and it’s very easy to spread fear. Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security? A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan. It’s a fear being spread by the few who seek to scare the many.”

Zardari offered some advice to Barack Obama: instead of fretting about nuclear security in Pakistan, his Administration should deal with the military disparity between Pakistan and India, which has a much larger army. “You should help us get conventional weapons,” he said. “It’s a balance-of-power issue.”

In May, Zardari, at the urging of the United States, approved a major offensive against the Taliban, sending thirty thousand troops into the Swat Valley, which lies a hundred miles northwest of Islamabad. “The enemy that we were fighting in Swat was made up of twenty per cent thieves and thugs and eighty per cent with the same mind-set as the Taliban,” Zardari said. He depicted the operation as a complete success, but added that his government was not “ready” to kill all the Taliban. His long-term solution, Zardari said, was to provide new business opportunities in Swat and turn the Taliban into entrepreneurs. “Money is the best incentive,” he said. “They can be rented.”

Zardari’s view of the Swat offensive was striking, given that many Pakistanis had been angered by the excessive use of force and the ensuing refugee crisis. The lives of about two million people were torn apart, and, during a summer in which temperatures soared to a hundred and twenty degrees, hundreds of thousands of civilians were crowded into government-run tent cities. Idris Khattak, a former student radical who now works with Amnesty International, said in Peshawar that residents had described nights of heavy, indiscriminate bombing and shelling, followed in the morning by Army sweeps. The villagers, and not the Taliban, had been hit the hardest. “People told us that the bombing the night before was a signal for the Taliban to get out,” he said.

Zardari did not dispute that there were difficulties in the refugee camps-the heat, the lack of facilities. But he insisted that the fault lay with the civilians, who, he said, had been far too tolerant of the Taliban. The suffering could serve a useful purpose: after a summer in the tents, the citizens of Swat might have learned a lesson and would not “let the Taliban back into their cities.”

Rahimullah Yusufzai, an eminent Pakistani journalist, who has twice interviewed Osama bin Laden, had a different explanation for the conditions that led to the offensive. “The Taliban were initially trying to win public support in Swat by delivering justice and peace,” Yusufzai said. “But when they got into power they went crazy and became brutal. Many are from the lowest ranks of society, and they began killing and terrorizing their opponents. The people were afraid.”

The turmoil did not end with the Army’s invasion. “Most of the people who were in the refugee camps told us that the Army was equally bad. There was so much killing,” Yusufzai said. The government had placed limits on reporters who tried to enter the Swat Valley during the attack, but afterward Yusufzai and his colleagues were able to interview officers. “They told us they hated what they were doing-‘We were trained to fight Indians.’ ” But that changed when they sustained heavy losses, especially of junior officers. “They were killing everybody after their colleagues were killed-just like the Americans with their Predator missiles,” Yusufzai said. “What the Army did not understand, and what the Americans don’t understand, is that by demolishing the house of a suspected Taliban or their supporters you are making an enemy of the whole family.” What looked like a tactical victory could turn out to be a strategic failure.

The Obama Administration has had difficulty coming to terms with how unhappy many Pakistanis are with the United States. Secretary of State Clinton, during her three-day “good-will visit” to Pakistan, late last month, seemed taken aback by the angry and, at times, provocative criticism of American policies that dominated many of her public appearances, and responded defensively.

Last year, the Washington Times ran an article about the Pressler Amendment, a 1985 law cutting off most military aid to Pakistan as long as it continued its nuclear program. The measure didn’t stop Pakistan from getting the bomb, or from buying certain weapons, but it did reduce the number of Pakistani officers who were permitted to train with American units. The article quoted Major General John Custer as saying, “The older military leaders love us. They understand American culture and they know we are not the enemy.” The General’s assessment provoked a barrage of e-mail among American officers with experience in Pakistan, and a former member of a Special Forces unit provided me with copies. “The fact that a two-star would make a statement [like] that . . . is at best naïve and actually pure bullshit,” a senior Special Forces officer on duty in Pakistan wrote. He went on:

I have met and interacted with the entire military staff from General Kayani on down and all the general officers on their joint staff and in all the services, and I haven’t spoken to one that “loves us”-whatever that means. In fact, I have read most of the TS [top secret] assessments of all their General Officers and I haven’t read one that comes close to their “loving” us. They play us for everything they can get, and we trip over ourselves trying to give them everything they ask for, and cannot pay for.

Some military men who know Pakistan well believe that, whatever the officer corps’s personal views, the Pakistan Army remains reliable. “They cannot be described as pro-American, but this doesn’t mean they don’t know which side their bread is buttered on,” Brian Cloughley, who served six years as Australia’s defense attaché to Pakistan and is now a contributor to Jane’s Sentinel, told me. “The chance of mutiny is slim. Were this to happen, there would be the most severe reaction” by special security units in the Pakistani military, Cloughley said. “But worry feeds irrationality, and the international consequences could be dire.”

The recollections of Bush Administration officials who dealt with Pakistan in the first round of nuclear consultations after September 11th do not inspire confidence. The Americans’ main contact was Lieutenant General Khalid Kidwai, the head of Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, the agency that is responsible for nuclear strategy and operations and for the physical security of the weapons complex. At first, a former high-level Bush Administration official told me, Kidwai was reassuring; his professionalism increased their faith in the soundness of Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine and its fail-safe procedures. The Army was controlled by Punjabis who, the Americans thought, “did not put up with Pashtuns,” as the former Bush Administration official put it. (The Taliban are mostly Pashtun.) But by the time the official left, at the beginning of George W. Bush’s second term, he had a much darker assessment: “They don’t trust us and they will not tell you the truth.”

No American, for example, was permitted access to A. Q. Khan, the metallurgist and so-called father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, who traded crucial nuclear-weapons components on the international black market. Musharraf placed him under house arrest in early 2004, claiming to have been shocked to learn of Khan’s dealings. At the time, it was widely understood that those activities had been sanctioned by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (I.S.I.). Khan was freed in February, although there are restrictions on his travel. (In an interview last year, Kidwai told David Sanger, for his book “The Inheritance,” that “our security systems are foolproof,” thanks to technical controls; Sanger noted that Bush Administration officials were “not as confident in private as they sound in public.”)

A former State Department official who worked on nuclear issues with Pakistan after September 11th said that he’d come to understand that the Pakistanis “believe that any information we get from them would be shared with others-perhaps even the Indians. To know the command-and-control processes of their nuclear weapons is one thing. To know where the weapons actually are is another thing.”

The former State Department official cited the large Pakistan Air Force base outside Sargodha, west of Lahore, where many of Pakistan’s nuclear-capable F-16s are thought to be stationed. “Is there a nuke ready to go at Sargodha?” the former official asked. “If there is, and Sargodha is the size of Andrews Air Force Base, would we know where to go? Are the warheads stored in Bunker X?” Ignorance could be dangerous. “If our people don’t know where to go and we suddenly show up at a base, there will be a lot of people shooting at them,” he said. “And even if the Pakistanis may have told us that the triggers will be at Bunker X, is it true?”

In the July/August issue of Arms Control Today, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who recently retired after three years as the Department of Energy’s director of intelligence and counter-intelligence, preceded by two decades at the C.I.A., wrote vividly about the “lethal proximity between terrorists, extremists, and nuclear weapons insiders” in Pakistan. “Insiders have facilitated terrorist attacks. Suicide bombings have occurred at air force bases that reportedly serve as nuclear weapons storage sites. It is difficult to ignore such trends,” Mowatt-Larssen wrote. “Purely in actuarial terms, there is a strong possibility that bad apples in the nuclear establishment are willing to cooperate with outsiders for personal gain or out of sympathy for their cause. Nowhere in the world is this threat greater than in Pakistan. . . . Anything that helps upgrade Pakistan’s nuclear security is an investment” in America’s security.

Leslie H. Gelb, a president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, said, “I don’t think there’s any kind of an agreement we can count on. The Pakistanis have learned how to deal with us, and they understand that if they don’t tell us what we want to hear we’ll cut off their goodies.” Gelb added, “In all these years, the C.I.A. never built up assets, but it talks as if there were ‘access.’ I don’t know if Obama understands that the Agency doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”

The former high-level Bush Administration official was just as blunt. “If a Pakistani general is talking to you about nuclear issues, and his lips are moving, he’s lying,” he said. “The Pakistanis wouldn’t share their secrets with anybody, and certainly not with a country that, from their point of view, used them like a Dixie cup and then threw them away.”

Sultan Amir Tarar, known to many as Colonel Imam, is the archetype of the disillusioned Pakistani officer. Tarar spent eighteen years with the I.S.I. in Afghanistan, most of them as an undercover operative. In the mujahideen war against the Soviet Union, in the eighties, he worked closely with C.I.A. agents, and liked the experience. “They were honest and thoughtful and provided the finest equipment,” Tarar said during an interview in Rawalpindi. He spoke with pride of shaking hands with Robert Gates in Afghanistan in 1985. Gates, now the Secretary of Defense, was then a senior C.I.A. official. “I’ve heard all about you,” Gates said, according to Tarar. “Good or bad?” “Oh, my. All good,” Gates replied. Tarar’s view changed after the Russians withdrew and, in his opinion, “the Americans abandoned us.” When I asked if he’d seen “Charlie Wilson’s War,” the movie depicting that abandonment and a Texas congressman’s futile efforts to change the policy, Tarar laughed and said, “I’ve seen Charlie Wilson. I didn’t need to see the movie.”

Tarar, who retired in 1995 and has a son in the Army, believed-as did many Pakistani military men-that the American campaign to draw Pakistan deeper into the war against the Taliban would backfire. “The Americans are trying to rent out their war to us,” he said. If the Obama Administration persists, “there will be an uprising here, and this corrupt government will collapse. Every Pakistani will then be his own nuclear bomb-a suicide bomber,” Tarar said. “The longer the war goes on, the longer it will spill over in the tribal territories, and it will lead to a revolutionary stage. People there will flee to the big cities like Lahore and Islamabad.”

Tarar believed that the Obama Administration had to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, even if that meant direct talks with Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. Tarar knew Mullah Omar well. “Omar trained as a young man in my camp in 1985,” he told me. “He was physically fit and mission-oriented-a very honest man who was a practicing Muslim. Nothing beyond that. He was a Talib-a student, and not a mullah. But people respected him. Today, among all the Afghan leaders, Omar has the biggest audience, and this is the right time for you to talk to him.”

Speaking to Tarar and other officers gave a glimpse of the acrimony at the top of the Pakistani government, which has complicated the nuclear equation. Tarar spoke bitterly about the position that General Kayani found himself in, carrying out the “corrupt” policies of the Americans and of Zardari, while Pakistan’s soldiers “were fighting gallantly in Swat against their own people.”

A $7.5-billion American aid package, approved by Congress in September, was, to the surprise of many in Washington, controversial in Pakistan, because it contained provisions seen as strengthening Zardari at the expense of the military. Shaheen Sehbai, a senior editor of the newspaper International, said that Zardari’s “problem is that he’s besieged domestically on all sides, and he thinks only the Americans can save him,” and, as a result, “he’ll open his pants for them.” Sehbai noted that Kayani’s term as Army chief ends in the fall of 2010. If Zardari tried to replace him before then, Kayani’s colleagues would not accept his choice, and there could be “a generals’ coup,” Sehbai said. “America should worry more about the structure and organization of the Army-and keep it intact.”

Lieutenant General Hamid Gul was the director general of the I.S.I. in the late eighties and worked with the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Gul, who is retired, is a devout Muslim and had been accused by the Bush Administration of having ties to the Taliban and Al Qaeda-allegations he has denied. “What would happen if, in a crisis, you tried to get-or did not get-our nuclear triggers? What happens then?” Gul asked when we met. “You will have us as an enemy, with the Chinese and Russians behind us.”

If Pakistani officers had given any assurances about the nuclear arsenal, Gul said, “they are cheating you and they would be right to do so. We should not be aiding and abetting Americans.”

Persuading the Pakistan Army to concentrate on fighting the Taliban, and not India, is crucial to the Obama Administration’s plans for the region. There has been enmity between India and Pakistan since 1947, when Britain’s withdrawal led to the partition of the subcontinent. The state of Kashmir, which was three-quarters Muslim but acceded to Hindu-majority India, has been in dispute ever since, and India and Pakistan have twice gone to war over the territory. Through the years, the Pakistan Army and the I.S.I. have relied on Pakistan-based jihadist groups, most notably Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, to carry out a guerrilla war against the Indians in Kashmir. Many in the Pakistani military consider the groups to be an important strategic reserve.

A retired senior Pakistani intelligence officer, who worked with his C.I.A. counterparts to track down Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, said that he was deeply troubled by the prospect of Pakistan ceding any control over its nuclear deterrent. “Suppose the jihadis strike at India again-another attack on the parliament. India will tell the United States to stay out of it, and ‘We’ll sort it out on our own,’ ” he said. “Then there would be a ground attack into Pakistan. As we begin to react, the Americans will be interested in protecting our nuclear assets, and urge us not to go nuclear-‘Let the Indians attack and do not respond!’ They would urge us instead to find those responsible for the attack on India. Our nuclear arsenal was supposed to be our savior, but we would end up protecting it. It doesn’t protect us,” he said.

“My belief today is that it’s better to have the Americans as an enemy rather than as a friend, because you cannot be trusted,” the former officer concluded. “The only good thing the United States did for us was to look the other way about an atomic bomb when it suited the United States to do so.”

Pakistan’s fears about the United States coöperating with India are not irrational. Last year, Congress approved a controversial agreement that enabled India to purchase nuclear fuel and technology from the United States without joining the Non-Proliferation Treaty, making India the only non-signatory to the N.P.T. permitted to do so. Concern about the Pakistani arsenal has since led to greater coöperation between the United States and India in missile defense; the training of the Indian Air Force to use bunker-busting bombs; and “the collection of intelligence on the Pakistani nuclear arsenal,” according to the consultant to the intelligence community. (The Pentagon declined to comment.)

I flew to New Delhi after my stay in Pakistan and met with two senior officials from the Research and Analysis Wing, India’s national intelligence agency. (Of course, as in Pakistan, no allegation about the other side should be taken at face value.) “Our worries are about the nuclear weapons in Pakistan,” one of the officials said. “Not because we are worried about the mullahs taking over the country; we’re worried about those senior officers in the Pakistan Army who are Caliphates”-believers in a fundamentalist pan-Islamic state. “We know some of them and we have names,” he said. “We’ve been watching colonels who are now brigadiers. These are the guys who could blackmail the whole world”-that is, by seizing a nuclear weapon.

The Indian intelligence official went on, “Do we know if the Americans have that intelligence? This is not in the scheme of the way you Americans look at things-‘Kayani is a great guy! Let’s have a drink and smoke a cigar with him and his buddies.’ Some of the men we are watching have notions of leading an Islamic army.”

In an interview the next afternoon, an Indian official who has dealt diplomatically with Pakistan for years said, “Pakistan is in trouble, and it’s worrisome to us because an unstable Pakistan is the worst thing we can have.” But he wasn’t sure what America could do. “They like us better in Pakistan than you Americans,” he said. “I can tell you that in a public-opinion poll we, India, will beat you.”

India and Pakistan, he added, have had back-channel talks for years in an effort to resolve the dispute over Kashmir, but “Pakistan wants talks for the sake of talks, and it does not carry out the agreements already reached.” (In late October, Manmohan Singh, the Indian Prime Minister, publicly renewed an offer of talks, but tied it to a request that Pakistan crack down on terrorism; Pakistan’s official response was to welcome the overture.)

The Indian official, like his counterparts in Pakistan, believed that Americans did not appreciate what his government had done for them. “Why did the Pakistanis remove two divisions from the border with us?” He was referring to the shifting of Pakistani forces, at the request of the United States, to better engage the Taliban. “It means they have confidence that we will not take advantage of the situation. We deserve a pat on the back for this.” Instead, the official said, with a shrug, “you are too concerned with your relationship with Pakistan.”

Pervez Musharraf lives in unpretentious exile with his wife in an apartment in London, near Hyde Park. Officials who had dealt with him cautioned that, along with his many faults, he had a disarmingly open manner. At the beginning of our talk, I asked him why, on a visit to Washington in late January, he had not met with any senior Obama Administration officials. “I did not ask for a meeting because I was afraid of being told no,” he said. At another point, Musharraf, dressed casually in slacks and a sports shirt, said that he had been troubled by the American-controlled Predator drone attacks on targets inside Pakistan, which began in 2005. “I said to the Americans, ‘Give us the Predators.’ It was refused. I told the Americans, ‘Then just say publicly that you’re giving them to us. You keep on firing them but put Pakistan Air Force markings on them.’ That, too, was denied.”

Musharraf, who was forced out of office in August, 2008, under threat of impeachment, did not spare his successor. “Asif Zardari is a criminal and a fraud,” Musharraf told me. “He’ll do anything to save himself. He’s not a patriot and he’s got no love for Pakistan. He’s a third-rater.”

Musharraf said that he and General Kayani, who had been his nominee for Chief of Army Staff, were still in telephone contact. Musharraf came to power in a military coup in 1999, and remained in uniform until near the end of his Presidency. He said that he didn’t think the Army was capable of mutiny-not the Army he knew. “There are people with fundamentalist ideas in the Army, but I don’t think there is any possibility of these people getting organized and doing an uprising. These ‘fundos’ were disliked and not popular.”

He added, “Muslims think highly of Obama, and he should use his acceptability-even with the Taliban-and try to deal with them politically.”

Musharraf spoke of two prior attempts to create a fundamentalist uprising in the Army. In both cases, he said, the officers involved were arrested and prosecuted. “I created the strategic force that controls all the strategic assets-eighteen to twenty thousand strong. They are monitored for character and for potential fundamentalism,” he said. He acknowledged, however, that things had changed since he’d left office. “People have become alarmed because of the Taliban and what they have done,” he said. “Everyone is now alarmed.”

The rise in militancy is a sensitive subject, and many inside Pakistan insist that American fears, and the implied threat to the nuclear arsenal, are overwrought. Amélie Blom, a political sociologist at Lahore University of Management Sciences, noted that the Army continues to support an unpopular President. “The survival of the coalition government shows that the present Army leadership has an interest in making it work,” she said in an e-mail.

Others are less sure. “Nuclear weapons are only as safe as the people who handle them,” Pervez Hoodbhoy, an eminent nuclear physicist in Pakistan, said in a talk last summer at a Nation and Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy forum in New York. For more than two decades, Hoodbhoy said, “the Pakistan Army has been recruiting on the basis of faithfulness to Islam. As a consequence, there is now a different character present among Army officers and ordinary soldiers. There are half a dozen scenarios that one can imagine.” There was no proof either that the most dire scenarios would be realized or that the arsenal was safe, he said.

The current offensive in South Waziristan marked a significant success for the Obama Administration, which had urged Zardari to take greater control of the tribal areas. There was a risk, too-that the fighting would further radicalize Pakistan. Last week, another Pakistan Army general was the victim of a drive-by assassination attempt, as he was leaving his home in Islamabad. Since the Waziristan operation was announced, more than three hundred people have been killed in a dozen terrorist attacks. “If we push too hard there, we could trigger a social revolution,” the Special Forces adviser said. “We are playing into Al Qaeda’s deep game here. If we blow it, Al Qaeda could come in and scoop up a nuke or two.” He added, “The Pakistani military knows that if there’s any kind of instability there will be a traffic jam to seize their nukes.” More escalation in Pakistan, he said, “will take us to the brink.”

During my stay in Pakistan-my first in five years-there were undeniable signs that militancy and the influence of fundamentalist Islam had grown. In the past, military officers, politicians, and journalists routinely served Johnnie Walker Black during our talks, and drank it themselves. This time, even the most senior retired Army generals offered only juice or tea, even in their own homes. Officials and journalists said that soldiers and middle-level officers were increasingly attracted to the preaching of Zaid Hamid, who joined the mujahideen and fought for nine years in Afghanistan. On CDs and on television, Hamid exhorts soldiers to think of themselves as Muslims first and Pakistanis second. He claims that terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year were staged by India and Western Zionists, aided by the Mossad. Another proselytizer, Dr. Israr Ahmed, writes a column in the Urdu press in which he depicts the Holocaust as “divine punishment,” and advocates the extermination of the Jews. He, too, is said to be popular with the officer corps.

A senior Obama Administration official brought up Hizb ut-Tahrir, a Sunni organization whose goal is to establish the Caliphate. “They’ve penetrated the Pakistani military and now have cells in the Army,” he said. (The Pakistan Army denies this.) In one case, according to the official, Hizb ut-Tahrir had recruited members of a junior officer group, from the most élite Pakistani military academy, who had been sent to England for additional training.

“Where do these guys get socialized and exposed to Islamic evangelism and the fundamentalism narrative?” the Obama Administration official asked. “In services every Friday for Army officers, and at corps and unit meetings where they are addressed by senior commanders and clerics.”

“The tribes consider the king rather differently to the Tajiks, the latter vesting the king with many powers, whereas for the tribes he has limited prerogatives; the tribes are largely selfgoverning.” (Elphinstone 1815)

State and nation

A nation is, wrote Benedict Anderson (1991), ‘an imagined political community’. Although the state exists as a political entity with recognized territory and institutions of governance, the nation exists in people’s heads and provides a sense of belonging. Nationalism, the sense of attachment to a nation, has often been a driving force for state formation; a force that in recent times has had so many negative associations that it is hard to remember it was once viewed positively.

In some ways it is remarkable that after a quarter of a century of war many Afghans’ imagining of their nation is still so strong. Despite the intense conflict people have been through and the fact that all ethnic groups except the Hazaras also spread across into neighbouring countries, people continue to see themselves as Afghans and do not generally wish to secede or to join neighbouring states. Yet the sense of nationhood is not equal across territory. What it means to an uneducated, older woman up a mountain valley is not what it means to a young man returned from the refugee camps of Pakistan, nor an educated person in Kabul. Nor are the geographical bounds of the nation always clear. The Pashtuns have ignored the frontier along the Durand Line in the south and east ever since the British drew it in the late nineteenth century. The physical porosity of the border-once off the main roads people travel across it as if it does not exist-is mirrored in the sense of belonging: the tribes here owe more loyalty to kinsmen across the border than they do to Kabul. This does not mean that they are not Afghan, nor that they want a separate state; rather, it is that being Pashtun is not a subset of being Afghan but a separate and overlapping identity-and, of the two, being Afghan is for many the less tangible, and therefore the less important.

Notions of belonging do not only change with distance, they change with education. Belonging for most Afghans is still created through the spoken word, through legend and story, parable and precept, and much of this goes from the local to the universal Islam, passing nation by. It is thus not surprising that those who have the strongest sense of themselves as Afghan-rather than, for example, as inhabitants of a valley or tribe-are those who have had access to education, and thus who can access more directly the world beyond. Where the noneducated, rural Afghan does connect to nation, it is often not in the sense of being part of a political community but rather through some form of engagement with its bureaucratic embodiment, the state, and this relationship is normally dealt with via a representative. Thus historically the state not only governed through the representatives of communities, but the whole concept of nation, and of the political legitimacy of its rulers, was mediated through these representatives. A friend in Qandahar, who is now the deputy head of the Electoral Commission, was asked in February 2004 whether people would register and, in the end, vote. ‘If the tribal leaders encourage them,’ he said. ‘Otherwise it is impossible. If someone from outside tries, it cannot be done.’
This relationship sets the parameters of what the state today can be, and how it can operate. To envisage a state that has meaning only for a minority of educated citizens and then assume that it can somehow be rolled out to the whole of the country in the space of a couple of years is asking for problems. Yet that is largely what the Bonn agreement has set in train. It also has implications for how those who seek to rule the nation might gain legitimacy among its people. Legitimacy implies being regarded as an acceptable person for the job by those with influence, and at least having the passive acquiescence of the majority of citizens. Without this, conflict is likely to ensue. For, given the fractured nature of politics in Afghanistan and the endless scope for contenders to power-or even simply disenfranchised groups-to gain support from neighbouring countries, it is unlikely that any one group could rule by force.

Discussions about issues of legitimacy in presentday Afghanistan often prompt people to recall an idealized past. It remains unclear whether this is due to an innate conservatism-a fear of new political notions-or whether it can simply be put down to the evident failure of the politics of the last three decades. There is an overwhelming sense that the political actors that have dominated in the recent past lacked legitimacy in the eyes of most of the population, who also find it hard to have much confidence that the present is any better. The gun is seen to rule, the term ‘faction’ is used rather than ‘party’-and factions are associated with guns, not with politics. It was the failure to provide even basic security that more than anything undermined the legitimacy of the mujahideen, and conversely it was their ability to provide this most essential condition that gave the Taliban some legitimacy in the eyes of many, despite dislike of their other policies.

In Afghan history the state has tended to be regarded as having legitimacy if it fulfils three requirements: it embodies the concept of Afghanistan as an independent Islamic territory; it acts as a broker between clans, tribes and ethnic groups-although not necessarily on equal terms; and it provides a certain level of benefits to citizens, including security and access to public services and infrastructure.

A presumptive leader needs to straddle two worlds: to understand, be part of, and value tradition, and balance this with the requirements of a modern state. The notion of a hereditary ruling class is part of Afghan political culture. With the exception of the very brief reign of Bacha i Saqao, members of the Durrani tribe led the nation from 1747 to 1978. David Edwards (2002), writing about the PDPA takeover of power, notes that the fact that Nur Muhammad Taraki was the son of a poor semipeasant, semishepherd family, about whom little was known before he became president in 1979, was a marked departure from previous practice and highly radical in terms of a society where background was extremely important. The most profound innovation introduced by the PDPA, he writes, was not land reform or women’s rights, but ‘the notion that kinship didn’t matter, that literally anyone could lead the nation’. The perception that where a person comes from is important still persists. Commenting on the current political situation, a highly educated and welltravelled clan leader from the Jalalabad area spoke of how: ‘Rootless people are now in power. In the West the root is education. We do not have that, so the root was those who were known, the khans, the malik, business people. People who come from poverty to be king, they only work for their own and those around them.’

A short history

The history of the Afghan state extends back little more than a hundred years, to the reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (1881-1901) who, with the help of British cash, created a wellequipped army and used it ruthlessly to crush internal dissent and turn Afghanistan from a tribal confederacy into a centralized state. However, the tribal areas were never brought totally under central control and continued to retain a measure of independence. The country’s borders conformed more to imperial needs than internal logic; its northern frontier was the outcome of negotiations between the British and the Russians, while the Durand Line reflected the strategic fringe of imperial India.

Succeeding rulers opened up the country to trade, undertook land reform, regularized taxes, improved roads and increased educational provision. Yet tribal society remained strong and, as none of the leaders was prepared to use might to govern to the same extent as Abdur Rahman Khan, the state remained weak. In a pattern that was to be repeated throughout the history of the modern Afghan state, Abdur Rahman Khan was able to build a strong state only by dint of foreign financial backing. The price of this, in the wake of the second AngloAfghan war, was the ceding of control of external affairs to the British. After the First World War, resistance to this outside interference in the country’s affairs grew and led to the assassination of Abdur Rahman Khan’s son and successor, Habibullah, in 1919. His son, Amanullah, seized the throne, declared the country’s independence which, after a brief war, the British conceded. Amanullah tried hard to transform Afghanistan into a modern nationstate, reversing the isolationist economic policies and opening up the country to trade. He undertook land reform, regularized taxes, improved roads, increased educational provision and, in 1921, gave the country its first constitution. But his ambitious plans were ahead of both the state’s capacity to implement and of society’s acceptance of direct state intrusion in family or community affairs. Amanullah’s attempts to shift power away from village elders and the religious establishment and his liberal stance on women’s issues led in 1928 to a series of regional insurrections which finally toppled him. It was a movement led by the Tajik Bacha i Saqao that was the first to move on Kabul and seize power. The rule of this Tajik usurper, however, lasted less than a year, before Nadir Khan, eldest of the Pashtun Musahiban brothers, deposed him. Thus began a dynasty that lasted until 1978.

The strategic position of Afghanistan, first as a buffer state between the Russian and British empires, then as a site of Cold War politics, allowed Afghanistan to develop as a classic rentier state. From 1956 to 1973 foreign grants and loans accounted for 80 per cent of the country’s investment and development expenditure (Rubin 1995). This relieved the state of the need to confront resistance to taxes from rural landowners and merchants in order to build up a domestic taxation base and so made it less important to set up governmental structures to control the country. In Amanullah’s time, taxes on land and animals were believed to represent some twothirds of government expenditure (Fry 1974); by the 1950s they did not even cover the operational costs of local government. Instead, external funds were used to build a modern state sector in Kabul that bypassed the rural power holders, leaving them with a large measure of local autonomy. The political elite neither organized the rural majority, nor represented their interests. Far from attempting to govern the country effectively, they simply acted as one link in a chain of patronage for a few areas that were deemed to be of strategic importance. Just as it had been at the turn of the century, Afghanistan’s rulers continued to fragment tribal power and manoeuvre round it, rather than confront it. Part of that manoeuvring was to bring the tribes into government. From Abdur Rahman Khan onwards, the business of politics was conducted through informal, vertical channels of client-patron relations and kinship networks were important in obtaining state posts. It has resulted in what one writer has called the ‘tribalisation’ of the state (Shahrani 1998), a process which aimed to detribalize society by coopting key players into the state structure.

Meanwhile, at village level, people continued to rely on local power networks; the state had little authority and largely used local leadership to govern. A contract existed: a minimal level of loyalty for a minimal level of services. As an NGO worker put it: ‘The government made roads, built karezes, planted gardens and made a school in the district centres. What it did not do was interfere in the domestic sphere.’

The provision of these services, along with the continued maintenance of Afghanistan’s independence and a reasonable level of security (even if in many cases this had more to do with traditional structures than the state itself) gave the state a certain measure of acceptance. This, however, was always liable to be contested, and a sense that there was a need to increase legitimacy among key constituencies, for example urban intellectuals and rural traditional leaders, led to provisions for elected upper and lower houses of a consultative parliament in the 1964 constitution. However, the legislation permitting the existence of political parties was never signed, and the king retained control over the executive, which was neither selected from, nor responsible to, parliament. Parliament was seen not as an institution for nationwide democracy but as a means of gaining legitimacy and political support. At this it failed. Although those interested in politics had more freedom than at any time in the past, in the absence of formalized parties to regulate political conduct, politics was both disorderly and inefficient. At the same time, the bureaucracy of government was highly dysfunctional (Maley 2002). In addition to endemic financial corruption, there were serious problems of nepotism (Kakar 1978). Finally, the state’s failure to respond adequately to the famine of 1972 underscored just how little concern its leaders had for the Afghan people. This paved the way for the overthrow of Zahir Shah by his cousin and former prime minister, Mohammad Daoud.

For all his energy, Daoud failed to stem the disillusionment with the old order. In some ways his regime was seen as even less legitimate than the one that preceded it. Traditional authority at least still carried some weight, but in dissolving the monarchy Daoud forfeited this association with the authority of the ruling class while failing to develop alternative sources of legitimacy. There was increasing suppression of opposition; it was at this time that the infamous Pul i Charkhi prison was built, in which many opponents of this and succeeding regimes were incarcerated or lost their lives. Daoud coopted the language of revolution (inqilab) without backing it up with muchneeded reforms, despite allying himself with radical groups such as the extreme leftist Parcham group, whose members would later betray him (Maley 2002). Like those before him, he needed foreign cash for his strong state and therefore became increasingly dependent on Soviet aid. The state, however, continued to fail to bring visible benefits to the majority of the population. Ironically, greater access to education served only to increase frustration. Universities were full of students experiencing for the first time the dislocation between their rural, traditional backgrounds and life in a big city; and once graduated, jobs in keeping with their skills and aspirations remained scarce. The oil boom of the early 1970s also led to unprecedented opportunities for labour migration, even for those without formal education, and this altered patterns of social control and exposed people to new ideas. The time for change had come.

The principal communist organization in Afghanistan, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), overthrew Daoud in the Saur Revolution of 27 April 1978 but was immediately beset by internal struggles. In addition to the personal differences of its leaders, the Parchamis wanted a more gradual approach to change, while the Khalqis wanted it now (Maley 2002). Although the Khalqis initially won the struggle, there was little popular support for their illconceived programme of radical reform, and no state machinery capable of properly implementing their ambitious plans. Unsurprisingly, botched efforts at land redistribution and attempts to radically reorder gender relations soon led to revolt in the countryside. The reforms not only threatened the status quo but were perceived by conservatives to challenge Islamic values. Meanwhile in the cities, in one of the worst periods of internal oppression that Afghanistan had experienced, those deemed to be opponents of the regime were imprisoned, tortured and sometimes executed. Alarmed by the growing disorder and fearful of an attempt by the USA to regain in Afghanistan the influence it had recently lost in Iran, Soviet President Brezhnev sent troops across the border in December 1979.

For many Afghans, this was to destroy any last shred of legitimacy that the PDPA government might have retained, for despite the fact that the troops had technically been ‘invited’ by the Afghan government they were widely perceived as foreign invaders. Afghanistan had lost its independence, and resistance to the occupation soon spread. From 1979 until the mid1980s the Soviets virtually controlled the Afghan state structure. All major offices were staffed with Soviet advisers and, in economic terms, governmentcontrolled Afghanistan became a Soviet republic. The USSR paid the government’s deficits and gave financial and technical assistance to state investment. Afghanistan’s natural gas supplies, developed with Soviet money and expertise, were sold directly to the USSR at subeconomic prices. As with the Soviet Union itself (Lieven 1999), the nature of the Sovietcontrolled Afghan state was as a social network providing access to goods, services and patronage; a base of political power in its own right. As the conflict deepened, the contrast between the plight of rural and urban communities was stark. Because the war had led to shortages of food and fuel in Kabul, the Soviets provided 100,000 tons of wheat annually as a gift, and the same again in exchange for goods. Despite continued political repression, the major cities became enclaves where the state continued to function relatively well, markets thrived, people had health services, jobs, food rations and education. Thousands departed to undertake advanced studies in Soviet countries. Even though they lived under constant fear of rocketing, for many urban Afghans it was, comparatively speaking, a good time.

The political war, however, was lost. In sacrificing Afghanistan’s independence, the regime also lost its legitimacy. Despite removing the more radical elements of PDPA and moderating their policies, nothing the Soviets could do-short of leaving the country-could redeem it.

One last attempt was made. The old Soviet protégé, Babrak Karmal, was in 1986 replaced by Najibullah, who had been head of state intelligence, KhAD. Under the banner of ‘national reconciliation’, Najibullah publicly embraced Islam as the religion of Afghanistan, abandoned plans for the transformation of the countryside and proclaimed the importance of the private sector (Rubin 2002). The old Soviet ideology of class struggle was replaced with the concept of nationhood through cooperation. But it was too late. Kabul and other governmentcontrolled cities were increasingly vulnerable, as Soviet support began to dry up; while across the frontlines the mujadiheen increasingly used revenue from opium to supplement the foreign assistance that was funding their wars. In order to maintain military control of key enclaves and access to the highways, Najibullah increasingly had to cut deals with local militias, rather than rely on the conventional chain of command. In the end they sealed his fate.

Finally, faced with the huge cost of the conflict, and the internal political changes that were taking place in the USSR, the Soviets gave up. The signing of the Geneva Accords paved the way for Gorbachev to order his forces out, and by February 1989 the last Soviet troops left northwards over the Amu Darya river. Their departure allowed factionalism to come to the surface within government ranks, but Najibullah used the military assets left behind by his sponsors to retain control for another three years. To this day, many Afghans refer to Najibullah as the last strong leader they can remember, whose regime they believe had the potential to establish a stable state had it received wider international political support: ‘Najib was very smart, if he had had support from the western powers he could have brought peace to Afghanistan, he was flexible. The UN should have forced the neighbouring countries to reach consensus and to stop supplying weapons to Afghanistan.’

Even his past, it seems, could be forgotten by some: ‘One big weakness was that Najib was head of KhAD. People remembered this and at first they did not trust him. But then gradually people started to trust him-everything has a time and when it has gone it has gone. For the US and the UN it would have been a good opportunity to support Najib: systems were established, even corruption was low.’

But support was not forthcoming, and it soon became clear that Najibullah’s government was being undermined from too many directions to survive. As things began to unravel, the discipline of those involved in state structures was affected. And there was a corresponding loss of faith in government:

“People expected the government to bring stability and security. From the state they expected health and education. But the people were weakening every year, they became so warhit that in the end they were not much interested in education: ‘we are hungry, we have no future’, they would say. After 12th grade they would join the army; it was a bleak future. Teachers were very poor. In the government no one was working, they were just sitting, chatting, talking of the government.”

And yet as the mujahideen drew closer to Kabul, many of those involved in the state also became afraid of the future. The account of a friend captures something of the fears and feelings around at the time:

“I was thinking, ‘this [Soviet] regime is terrible’. At that time we had to go to the army, we couldn’t go to our villages. There was lots of propa ganda from the West, through the radio, against the Soviet Union. We were thinking of freedom. There were leaflets, saying that the mujahideen were heroes, and we expected freedom and a flow of money. We were dreaming of the time the mujahideen would come. But there was also concern that if the mujahideen came there would be many assassinations, that was the big worry. In the village there was no protection, the mujahideen came, took the father in the night and killed him. The things that happened at that time, it was terrible, it is hard to tell those stories, they were brutal, men killed in front of people. Human rights? Where were they? Not only the mujahideen but the Communists also, torturing anyone connected with the mujahideen.”

Despite the international recognition of the new Islamic State of Afghanistan, made up from the mujahideen groups, the departure of Najibullah signalled the effective end of a functioning state. In its place, the struggle for territory and political power seemed to become an end in itself for the various factions. It was as if the jihad justified each faction’s exclusive, and therefore fruitless, claim to power.

Graffiti that appeared on walls in central Kabul months after the fall of Najibullah perhaps summed up the feeling of many. Referring to Najib’s student nickname of ‘the cow’, and the track record of the incoming administration, it said simply, ‘Give us back our cow, and take away your donkeys…’

Although the mujahideen parties had had varied success at organizing at a local level while in opposition, like those before them they subscribed to the concept of a centralized state and once in power immediately began to battle for its control. Kabul had both symbolic and actual value, for which the factions competed and in the process tore the city apart in a frenzy of fighting and looting. Across the country, ethnic and tribal alliances were used in the pursuit of power (Roy 1986; Rubin 1995) and, with no single force strong enough to take control, they led to the disintegration of the state.

With the division of Afghanistan along largely military lines, the state fragmented into autonomous units with their own networks of power; fiefdoms that were largely based on regional groupings of commanders or factions. Some of these worked better than others. The Shura e Nazar, or Supervisory Council of the North, which had been set up precisely to be a counterbalance to Najib’s government, proved unable to cope with the shift to real political power (and responsibility) in Kabul. In the north, on the other hand, Dostum ran a virtual ministate, centred on Mazar i Sharif. His rule was often authoritarian and brutal, but this ensured a relative security which enabled the bureaucracy of the state to continue to function. Trade with the CIS states was buoyant and Mazar i Sharif came to be regarded by many foreign aid agencies as an island of peace and prosperity in an otherwise turbulent country. Having established a separate currency for the region and even his own airline, few people in those days called Dostum a warlord. In the east, the Nangarhar shura in Jalalabad, under the leadership of Haji Abdul Qadeer, also looked across the frontier for the means to maintain its autonomy from Kabul, raising significant revenue from the transit trade with Pakistan and establishing a virtual air bridge with the Gulf, which was reportedly also used for the illicit export of narcotics.

The war saw civilian authority become subordinate to military authority, which was often highly abusive. It was this abuse of power, which went on at all levels, coupled with a serial failure to provide any benefits to the wider population, that destroyed the legitimacy of all those who pretended to govern. There was no reason to trust the country’s leadership any longer. Some rural areas continued to run their affairs without a state, with justice being dispensed by elders or a shura of commanders. With a few exceptions, services, where they existed, were provided by aid agencies, primarily NGOs. Other parts of the country, however, were under the control of rival commanders who looted, pillaged and raped. This was certainly the case in Qandahar, where the factions preyed upon the population to the extent that, in the words of a friend, they ‘were happy for any change’.

The Taliban state

Thus was created the space into which came the Taliban. In response to the chaos and anarchy of the mujahideen, their avowed goal was to reassert central control by some form of state structure, initially in Qandahar. Although the picture often painted of their rule is one of unrelieved oppression, it was in fact more varied than that. While in many places they governed harshly, even brutally, in others-whether because these palces were marginal to their project or because they recognized their inherent ungovernability-they negotiated compromises with the local leadership. As did many regimes before them, they often left the remote areas to govern themselves. ‘Tribal people just carried on their own affairs,’ as one elder from Zabul put it. On the other hand, elders in a village close to Qandahar spoke of how, ‘during the Taliban time no tribal system could function, they didn’t want it’. Others, too, saw that they had failed their people: ‘The Taliban became cruel, threatening people, not respecting order, not wanting educated people, making forced conscription. People were fond of music, but they stopped all celebrations. They forced the people to grow beards and brought them to the mosque for prayers. They took money from people. Village leaders were afraid of the Taliban, but they could do nothing. The Taliban wanted to finish such people.’

Reactions to their rule were similarly varied, and at times surprising. Some Pashtuns felt betrayed, as hopes of a better government proved illfounded, local customs and ways of working were not respected, and increasing numbers of foreigners joined their ranks. Moreover, many recalled how the Taliban had said they would bring back Zahir Shah, which is why they had given their support.

Yet in some places in Hazarajat, where the Taliban’s arrival had been anticipated with real fear, they governed better than people had anticipated. Not in the towns of Yakawlang and Bamiyan, where the persistent struggle with Hizbe Wahdat for control led to a string of atrocities, but in the rest of the region where they effectively passed control to local leadership. In contrast to Kabul and urban centres, aid agencies often found they could circumvent rules and regulations. ‘The Taliban, they didn’t ask us what we were doing,’ said a worker from Oxfam, ‘they just said, “Are you an agency?” We said, “Yes, we are an agency.” They never bothered us. Only with one district governor did we have problems. He said, “You cannot have a girls’ school.” We said, “It is not a girls’ school, it is a mosque.” He said, “OK”.’

For those of us who lived in Kabul at the time, the image of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that the Taliban established after taking over Kabul in 1996 seemed at times to owe more to conjecture on the part of the outside world than to the reality of policy enacted on the ground. Despite impressions of an intolerant regime that swept away everything connected with previous administrations, change was far from wholesale and there was a good deal of flexibility in practice. Aspects of the old state apparatus that were deemed not to compromise Islamic precepts were simply left alone. As well as being expedient, this allowed the Emirate to reclaim the formal authority of the state, whose specific policies were then defined or clarified by edict. The fact that these edicts often emanated from Qandahar rather than from Kabul, and that they usually bore the imprimatur of a group of ulema or similar religious authority-rather than that of the presumptive head of state and protector of the faithful-served to make the whole process of governance seem all the more mysterious to Talibanwatchers at that time.

In addition to the young footsoldiers who gave the movement its name, the Taliban drew upon disaffected-and in some cases opportunistic-mujahideen. As a result, the administration inevitably faced pressure to reconcile the interests of disparate groups, based on religious, factional or geographical affiliations. Where this situation differed from the earlier mujahideen administration, however, was in the general acceptance, at least initially, of a primary loyalty to the Emirate, which should come before personal or factional interests.

Having failed to understand the phenomenon of the Taliban movement, the regime that they strove to put in place was quickly characterized by the western world as ‘failed’. As the deputy leader, Mullah Rabbani, pointed out in response to a question from a UN envoy about human rights during 1999: ‘You do not seem to understand that we are Afghans. We try to take responsibility for our people, while those who you choose to recognise as representatives of Afghanistan sign international agreements on behalf of their people, while having limited control. You treat us like an armed faction, while expecting us to behave like a government.’ Yet although often publicly dismissive of the opinion of the international community, the issue of UN recognition seemed to remain curiously important to the Taliban leadership.

While abhorring the excesses of the regime-and ridiculing both its presumptions and its apparently simple operating practices-there was an enduring fascination on the part of outsiders as to how the Taliban maintained control with such ruthless effect. The primitive outward face of the Emirate in fact hid a somewhat more worldly structure that was integrated into regional trading networks that provided them and others with an important source of revenue. There seems little doubt that these networks grew in strength during the mid1990s, and that this involved a web of commercial players with far better international contacts and market access than the Taliban themselves.

Aid and the state

Aid has long been part of the strategy by which outside nations have gained influence in Afghanistan. This is not unusual. From the 1950s onwards, the global pattern was for official development aid to be given as part of a postcolonial framework that was not only concerned with reducing poverty in the South through economic growth but also fitted with the interest of western countries in maintaining their influence in the world. Thus, in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, countries from both the West and East jostled for influence, adopting the different departments of Kabul University and funding a raft of development projects. Many of these were part of the state’s modernization project, and many were failures-or at the best only partial successes.

The Soviet invasion changed the nature of things. Thereafter, the battle lines of the conflict were mirrored in aid flows, as Soviet aid to the Kabul government was pitched against western aid to the mujahideen. Though presented as solidarity aid to freedom fighters engaged in a just cause, the truth was that the aid to the mujahideen was often an instrument of government policy, and NGOs were established as fronts for this. AfghanAid, for example, was set up largely to implement the agenda of the UK government, while the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan emerged from antiSoviet feelings among the public, tinged with a hardline Calvinist edge. Few questions were asked about the nature of the crossborder operations, and neither the fundamentalism of the mujahideen nor the conservatism of rural society appeared to be an issue to those who two decades later were to decry the Taliban and seek to use aid as a means to moderate their behaviour. On the contrary, it provided an unassailable-and romantic-cause célèbre. Guests at dinner parties in Peshawar were entranced by stories about the ‘inside’ from heroic aid workers who, dressed in local garb, had trekked over the mountains with bearded mujahideen, battling against the might of the Soviets. In many ways, NGOs followed the factions, competing both for territory and the protection of their commanders, apparently with little idea of how much this compromised them in the eyes of the population. The fact that much of the humanitarian assistance was given in ways that were deeply damaging to the future of the country passed the majority of NGO staff by.

At this stage of Afghanistan’s history, aid not only supported war but contributed to the future fragmentation of the state. Individual commanders boosted their standing by the aid that they could bring to the areas under their control. While efforts were latterly made by donors to create a unified structure among the mujahideen that might form the basis for a future government, this was secondary to the overwhelming need to destroy the Soviets.

The UN and the failed state model

By the mid1990s, the rationale that had been driving global aid since the 1950s was looking distinctly flawed. Bilateral development aid depended on having a government to give it to; yet in a number of the poorest countries of the world the nationstate had all but disintegrated, or at least was the site of serious conflict. Afghanistan was a case in point. Meanwhile the humanitarian crises associated with such longdrawnout conflicts-variously known as complex emergencies, complex political emergencies, or situations of chronic conflict and political instability-called into question many of the assumptions of classic emergency aid. As crises stretched out across the years, the notion of what was development aid and what emergency aid became blurred. Rather than being an operational distinction based on types of need, it now frequently became a political issue of recognition. Debates became polarized between the notion of giving aid for ‘humanitarian’ purposes, argued by its proponents to be free of politics and based only on need (at least in intent, though most would recognize the practice as being more complicated), and the attempt to take account of outcomes-the extent to which giving or withholding aid might improve the situation of the beneficiary group. A critique of humanitarian assistance was developed that highlighted how aid could do harm as well as good (Anderson 1996).

At the same time, the need to address the issue of conflict became a central concern of development policy (Duffield 2001b). Part of the role of international organizations came to be seen as rebuilding wartorn societies in a way that would help to avert future conflict, such engagement being seen as necessary if peace and stability were to prevail. In line with this, the UN started to reconsider the role it should be playing in longterm conflict countries. The problem was that, in the absence of any form of local representative political organization, the desired outcomes were decided by outsiders, as was the means to reach them. Unlike in South Africa, where the ANC clearly articulated the way in which it wanted assistance to support the struggle for liberation, in most crisis countries there was no movement to speak on behalf of the people. The benchmarks to which these outcomes were therefore tethered, and which were their claim to legitimacy, were the various international instruments that indicated some bottom line of welfare and security. It was in this context that the notion of rights came increasingly to be heard in the debate about aid.

The evident collapse of much of the state bureaucracy, the descent of parts of the country into chaos, and the continued internecine fighting in Kabul prompted the UN to characterize Afghanistan as a ‘failed state’. The longstanding humanitarian emergency had now become an ‘emergency of governance’. While special envoys continued to shuttle between factions in an effort to find a political solution, the UN agencies moved into the vacuum to assume responsibilities as an almost surrogate government. They not only provided assistance but also attempted to take on systemwide policy and planning functions and acted as the country’s spokesperson in dealings with journalists and foreign diplomats. In keeping with the global move towards addressing issues of conflict, the UN developed a new approach, the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan (SFA), designed to bring together the political and assistance wings of the UN in common pursuit of a peaceful solution to the Afghanistan crisis.

Adopted in 1998, the SFA aimed to provide ‘a more coherent, effective and integrated political strategy and assistance programme’ through a ‘common conceptual tool that identifies key activities…on the basis of shared principles and objectives’. The overarching goal of the UN was articulated as one of facilitating ‘the transition from a state of internal conflict to a just and sustainable peace through mutually reinforcing political and assistance initiatives’ and ensuring ‘no “disconnects” between political, human rights, humanitarian and developmental aspects of the [international] response’.

The UN’s work in Afghanistan was seen as having two components: an assistance pillar and a political pillar (in later versions there was a third pillar, human rights, whereas in the earlier version human rights was seen as integral). Within the assistance pillar the key operational element was known as Principled Common Programming. Although an intent of this was to agree common principles to which the aid community could sign up, thus establishing ‘bottom lines’ for negotiations, both donors and agencies found this difficult in practice. Not only were there many different sets of principles-Common Programming principles, agency principles, donor principles-but there was no agreement as to what took precedence when principles contradicted each other. Was the imperative, for example, to provide humanitarian assistance or to support women’s rights?

In order to realize the goals of the SFA, a comprehensive restructuring of aid coordination mechanisms was undertaken after 1998. This, it was felt by donors and agencies alike, would result in greater coherence and effectiveness through processes of collective analysis and common operational programming. In keeping with the aims of the SFA, this restructuring envisaged more systematic links between the wider humanitarian community and political actors within the UN. The extent to which opportunities for consultation between the political and aid wings of the UN were taken up, or resulted in greater coherence, was limited, due in part to the failure of the UN to undertake comprehensive reform of the management within and between the agencies concerned. By not undertaking reform, the UN also limited its ability to determine a common position on a range of key assistance issues.

An examination of aid behaviour between 1998 and late 2001 suggests that, regardless of the SFA, donor policy and practice in Afghanistan were driven by priorities set in capital cities, rather than by collective positions agreed on the ground. Furthermore, most donors maintained a degree of ambivalence towards collective positions, especially where these might compromise their independence of action. Funding priorities were found to bear only an incidental relationship to the priorities articulated in the SFA and PCP. Instead, funding patterns appeared in many cases to relate to specific issues of concern to the donor country and its broad political attitudes towards Afghanistan. The lack of commitment to a collective position was perhaps the most evident at the Afghanistan Support Group meeting in Stockholm in 1999 when, in response to efforts to define an appropriate process of engagement on rights issues, the USA assertively stated its intention to act unilaterally if necessary.

Even as the Taliban asserted the authority of their central administration, and took on an increasing range of functions of government, the UN continued to pursue the failed state model in its dealings with the country. While this might partly be explained by the fact that only three countries had accorded formal recognition to the Emirate, there was evident confusion on the part of key UN memberstates as to how to respond to the presumptions of the Taliban, and an increasing dislike of what they saw of their policies. Donors and aid agencies alike tied themselves in knots over how to deal this. On the one hand they refused to recognize the government’s existence, yet on the other they insisted it should be responsible for the provisions of international treaties signed by previous Afghan governments. This led to what one commentator described as a

strange absence of authorities as authorities. The Taliban appear as the object of advocacy and of conditionality, but not as authorities that are in fact already engaged in the running of a country. It is as if UN assistance activities can continue in a vacuum without engaging the authorities except to advocate to them. The fact that they are not recognised means almost that they are not seen, a situation bound to lead to unrealistic goals. (Leader 2000)

Even though most memberstates of the UN did not recognize the Taliban government, the operational agencies ended up working with them. For if the UN wanted to work in Afghanistan, which it clearly did, there was no alternative: by the end of the 1990s the Taliban controlled 90 per cent of the country’s territory.

Nowhere was the confusion about how to engage with Afghanistan more apparent than in the issue of what was called ‘capacity building’.

Despite the fact that investments had in the past been made in strengthening a range of institutions, inside and outside the formal state, donors and the UN now came to perceive that ‘capacity building’ of government departments risked lending legitimacy to the Taliban state. As a result, UN official policy as stated in the SFA indicated that:

“Institution and capacitybuilding activities must advance human rights and will not seek to provide support to any presumptive state authority which does not fully subscribe to the principles contained in the founding instruments of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women and International Humanitarian Law.” (UNOCHA 1998)

This implied working where possible with communities rather than authorities, in effect to try and bypass the Taliban. Yet aid agencies wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to a country in longterm need. For this to happen, departments had to function, at least to some extent, and the UN and other agencies had to engage with them. Constructing a mode of service delivery that ignored state structures simply wasn’t feasible. So, for example, UNICEF implemented its expanded programme of immunization with and through the Ministry of Public Health, UNHabitat conducted its water and sanitation work through municipalities, UNHCR had joint projects with the Ministry of Martyrs and Repatriation, FAO had a contract with the Ministry of Agriculture for seed multiplication and WFP programmed its food through the Ministry of Rehabilitation and Rural Development and the Ministry of Public Health.

Assistance that was provided to sustain, even if not build, the capacity of relevant departments to undertake this work included both technical and salary support; for civil servants continued to be paid next to nothing and, without some remuneration, could hardly be expected to work. This led to a remarkable set of double standards. In order to sustain health structures at a time when support from the central or regional administration was negligible or nonexistent, direct payments of ‘incentives’ to public health professionals and support staff became routine throughout the 1990s. Following the controversy about female healthcare in Kabul in 1997, and more general concern about the discriminatory policies of the Taliban, some donors expressed dismay at payments to civil servants through presumptive governmental structures, while others went as far as specifically to preclude any such payments from their contributions. In order to maintain support for public health staff providing vital services, therefore, both UN agencies and NGOs began to pay such incentives to individuals, rather than through the local health structures. However, despite their attempt to register disapproval of the Taliban administration, at least one major donor who had restricted payments via UN and NGOs continued to fund the ICRC to pay incentives for hospital staff. The payment of these incentives was generally acknowledged to have been instrumental in ensuring continued access for female patients in the two largest hospitals in the city. As was noted at the time, the

combination of a formal policy which does not accommodate the political realities of the situation, and a multitude of UN agencies with their own mandates, has led to a situation where policy…is confused and indecisive. This confusion is most apparent in terms of engagement with the administrative structures. In effect, each agency has pursued its own line in determining if and how it will work with the authorities. (Leader 2000)

The legacy of centralization

By 2001, when the international spotlight again focused on the nature of the Afghan state, Afghanistan had been through a number of different versions of statehood, ranging from the modernizing 1960s and 1970s, through the Soviet model, to the accommodations of Najibullah and finally, via the collapsed state of the early 1990s, to the Taliban’s strict version of an Islamic state.

Throughout all, however, the model of statehood remained that of a unitary central authority; the devolution of power from the centre has never been part of the Afghan political imagining, much less practice. Even at the time when the factions were dismembering the country, a central state remained the ideal, and the prize to be fought for. One of the key reasons given by Afghans for this has been that a strong state is needed to save the country from interfering neighbours. Yet history has shown that whenever the Afghan state was said to be ‘strong’, it was a strength that was bought with foreign money-and at the price of foreign interference. Moreover, these resources were used not against Afghanistan’s neighbours but against its people. From Abdur Rahman Khan, through Daoud, the communists, and finally the Taliban, administrations that have aspired to be strong have also been politically repressive.

The bureaucracy of the state is extraordinary in the degree of centralization of its formal structure and fiscal arrangements. Provincial authorities have neither taxraising powers nor can they raise loans. Outside central government, the only tax autonomy is at the municipal level, and that is minimal. Provinces do, of course, collect taxes-most notably customs taxes-but that is theoretically on behalf of central government, and should be remitted to Kabul. The provincial government structure is a mirror of the central structure (although not all ministries are represented) and heads of departments report to their parent ministry in Kabul rather than to the provincial governor. The districts again replicate the same system, although even fewer ministries are represented-indeed, some districts have only an uluswal. Staffing establishments are set centrally, as are rates of pay. In the past, particularly in the communist times, budget requests were prepared at the provincial level, and the governor and heads of departments would review proposals before sending them up to the centre. This no longer happens and the entire process is now topdown, with the provincial budget being simply the sum of various ministry decisions. That in other countries systems exist where significant budgetary and taxraising powers are devolved to the local level is a matter of surprise to many Afghans.

Another legacy of the succession of centralized administrations is that local politics has often been used less to deal with local issues than to increase the influence of dominant groups at the centre. The central mountain region of Hazarajat was effectively split up and apportioned between different provinces in order to prevent Hazaras developing a strong regional voice that could make itself heard at the centre. All groups have gerrymandered provincial and district boundaries whenever they have had the chance. The Pashtuns did it to ensure they dominated the liberal parliament in the early 1970s; in the 1980s and 1990s the Tajiks split Badakhshan into ever more districts and the Hazaras created new districts in southern Hazarajat. The trend continues today, with the creation of a new province of Panjshir and another of Dai Kundi. The actual interests of regions, far less communities, has been of little concern to those seeking to pursue their interests in this way.

The challenge facing those involved in reconstructing the ‘new’ Afghanistan will be how to rebuild a recognizable state from the threadbare institutions and systems that survive. This implies not only a functional state that actually works for ordinary people but also a symbolic state that represents the interests of the many, and can therefore be a source of confidence and pride.

(Source: Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie, “AFGHANISTAN: The Mirage Of Peace,” Zed Books, London – New York, 2004)

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

Reasons for war

A pickup bearing formless, faceless women drives into the stadium. They get out and walk to their execution. The crowd looks on. Overlaying all is heavy music, heralding death.

Nothing epitomized the way in which the Taliban were portrayed in the West, and specifically in the USA, better than this clip from Behind the Veil. The film itself was one woman’s story, the fragment of truth that belonged to that particular woman in one particular time and place, but it became representative of the oppression of all women in Afghanistan. There were other stories like it, but there were also many more that were different. This story, though, suited a purpose; it came at a particular historical moment when the West needed a narrative to justify war. For many, certainly, simple retaliation was enough, but not for all. Others had to be brought on board by an appeal at a different level; this was to be a humanitarian war, a war fought only for the best of motives and with the best of intentions. For this it was necessary that the Taliban were portrayed as the personification of evil, and Afghans, particularly women, as their victims. To underscore the point, the fragment of a fragment was endlessly repeated, over and over again at prime time on CNN and beamed around the world. In a way that was to be repeated before the US invasion of Iraq, the media coverage created a picture of a regime that was unremittingly brutal and from which its people had to be rescued. It served as a rallying cry for a war that had to be shown to have a moral purpose; it screamed ‘We are justified’.

Such imagery did not, however, come out of a void, or in simple reaction to the events of 9/11, rather it was something that had been building momentum for several years. By the time the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, the Taliban were already imprinted on the world’s media as unrepentant abusers of human rights, unscrupulous drug dealers and harbourers of terrorists; people beyond the pale. This enabled a whole range of people to feel righteous in their denunciations and ultimately justified in their war. Even though it was alQa’eda and not the Taliban that planned and executed the attacks, this caused little concern; the terrorism of one was easily elided with oppression of the other, and the war on terror conveniently also became a war for the liberation of a people, its morality so hard to challenge that scarcely a voice was raised against it.

In the outpouring of solidarity with the USA that followed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, few stopped to question America’s strategy of attacking Afghanistan. Yet if the United States’ aim was simply to cripple alQa’eda and to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, this was an expensive and risky way to go about it. It was-or at least should have been-clear from the beginning that the chances of bin Laden escaping across the border into Pakistan, where he would be much more difficult to deal with, were high. The war was also of debatable legality and set a dangerous precedent: Israel was not slow to claim the war on terrorism as justification for its ever increasingly brutal attacks on Palestinians, and even for its raids into Syria. More effective, and far safer in terms of global security, would have been to do what any other country would have been expected to do: to pursue legal and diplomatic channels to bring the perpetrators to justice. The Taliban indicated that if the USA provided evidence that Osama bin Laden was involved in the attacks, they would be prepared to hand him over to a third country for trial, but at no time was this option tested.
A number of factors, each of which reinforced the other, seem to have lain behind the determined rush to war. There was the straightforward display of power, a deterrent to any other nation thinking of allowing its territory to be used as a base for actions against America. There was also the domestic agenda. Bush was a not very popular president who had gained office in an election widely thought to be fraudulent, and going to war has always been a good move for leaders with domestic difficulties. In the aftermath of 11 September his ratings soared dramatically. More than this, it has been cogently argued (Krugman 2003) that the war was shamelessly exploited not only to cover up misdeeds of the past but also to provide a smokescreen for a whole set of ruthless decisions which would hand great wealth to the people who put Bush in office. It was, in short, payback time hidden under the flag of patriotism. The war not only provided the perfect excuse for having turned a large budget surplus into a deficit, but it gave cover to Bush when he continued to push through huge tax cuts for the very rich despite this deficit. It justified massive increases in defence spending, even though more defence spending would have made no difference to 11 September; that would have required better intelligence and better airport security. It enabled energy policies that dismantled pollution controls and allowed drilling in the Arctic to slide through with little debate, because to question the Bush administration at a time of war was to be ‘unpatriotic’.

Yet somehow it seemed more than all these things. Although the attacks on the USA were the trigger for action, living in Afghanistan in the period up to autumn 2001 it seemed that America had for some time been gunning for a fight. Had the phrase ‘the axis of evil’ been coined then, Afghanistan would surely have been part of it. In a manner reminiscent of the runup to the war against Saddam, or the bellicosity towards Iran, it mattered little what the Taliban did-they were damned. It is hard to pin down the host of ways in which it was made clear that they were beyond the pale, condemned utterly. The choice of language in itself is interesting; they were always a ‘regime’, a term intrinsically signifying illegitimacy, though in truth, to the people of Afghanistan, they were no more illegitimate than those they had succeeded. Nevertheless, two things stood out in particular. The first was the response to the Taliban’s banning of opium production in accordance with international demands. As with Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, at first the USA refused to believe that their conditions had been complied with. Then, when the facts could no longer be denied, the goalposts were changed. Just as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ initially referred to nuclear weapons and then when none could be found it was redefined to include chemical weapons, so the demands on the Taliban were initially that they stopped growing opium poppy, and then when they did this the requirement shifted and became about their trading in it. The second, which followed on from the first and rubbed salt into wounds, was the onesided arms embargo imposed as part of the second round of UN sanctions against the Taliban regime. To the Taliban it was, not unreasonably, seen as the international community joining in on one side of the conflict.

Early courtship

It had not always been like this. When the Taliban began their advance through Afghanistan, the Americans greeted them with a degree of welcome. Shortly after they took Kabul, acting State Department spokesman Glyn Davies said he could see ‘nothing objectionable’¹ in the version of Islamic law the Taliban had imposed on areas they controlled. Assistant Secretary of State Robin Raphel urged all states not to isolate them, saying: ‘The Taliban control more than twothirds of the country, they are Afghan, they are indigenous, they have demonstrated staying power.’² Twice in 1997 the Taliban met with State Department officials in Washington. They were then, it seems, seen as useful.

The reason for this courtship, which followed years of indifference to the country’s fate, was its strategic position between the Central Asian states and international markets. While opening up trading opportunities with these new markets was in itself not insignificant, the really big profits were to be made from oil and gas pipelines. The Taliban’s most important function was to ‘provide security for roads and, potentially, oil and gas pipelines that would link the states of Central Asia to the international market through Pakistan rather than Iran’ (Rubin 1997).

America has 4 per cent of the world’s population and consumes more than 25 per cent of all energy, much of which it has to import (Kleveman 2003). Not only are very powerful interests involved in the oil industry, but without plentiful and secure supplies of cheap oil the American way of life simply cannot continue. The Caspian Sea and Central Asian states (collectively known as the Caspian region in the oil trade) have some of what are believed to be the last large unexploited oil and gas reserves in the world, and by the mid1990s the scramble for a share of the profits they could yield was already under way. As Sheila Heslin, energy expert at the National Security Council, noted in a testimony to the Senate in 1997: ‘US policy was to promote the rapid development of Caspian energy…We did so specifically to promote the independence of these oilrich countries, to in essence break Russia’s monopoly control over transportation of oil from that region, and frankly, to promote Western energy security through diversification of supply’ (quoted in Rashid 2000: 174).

Oil and gas are of no use if there is no way to get them out, and Afghanistan potentially offered advantages over all the alternative pipeline routes. Most crucially, it meant that a pipeline would not go through Iran, towards which the USA had long been antagonistic. By providing an alternative to existing routes flowing north through Russia, it would also serve to reduce the latter’s influence in the region. The alternative route, from Baku across to Ceyhan in Turkey, was longer and meant traversing the unstable southern Caucasus.³

There was only one problem with the Afghan option: the warlords continued to fight. Insecurity was not good for business, especially the expensive business of building pipelines, and for a time the Taliban were seen as the answer, as a chance for stability. For as long as they were perceived as useful, their harsh interpretation of Islam and their denial of women’s rights did not seem overly to bother the US administration. In the words of one US diplomat: ‘The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did. There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with that’ (Rashid 2000: 179).

Oil was a strategic as well as a commercial issue, and the Clinton administration weighed in heavily on behalf of UNOCAL in its tussle with the Argentinian firm Bridas over contracts to build pipelines through Afghanistan.⁴ In February 1997, and again in November of that year, Taliban representatives were in Washington meeting both UNOCAL and State Department officials. UNOCAL estimated it had spent some $15–20 million on the pipeline project (ibid., p. 171), bringing in highprofile, exState Department officials to help devise its strategy with the Taliban. Among the experts it hired was Zalmay Khalilzad, an Afghan American who has been a key figure in the development of US policy towards Afghanistan and the Middle East. A member of the National Security Council, Khalilzad was appointed Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan at the end of 2001 and is now the US Ambassador in Kabul; so strong is his influence that Afghans joke that he, not Karzai, is the president of Afghanistan. Khalilzad served out the time of the Clinton administration working for the Rand Corporation and for UNOCAL, where he undertook an elaborate risk analysis for the Afghan pipeline project (Rashid 2000; Kleveman 2003). Since 2001, he also served as special presidential envoy to the Iraqi opposition, and from December 2002 as special envoy for the civil reconstruction of a postwar Iraq. Khalilzad initially urged engagement: ‘I am confident that [the Taliban] would welcome an American reengagement. The Taliban does not practice the antiUS style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran-it is closer to the Saudi model.’ It was only much later, after UNOCAL had put its Afghan plans on hold, that he shifted his stance to one of condemnation. Another figure from that time is President Hamid Karzai, who in 1997 represented UNOCAL in negotiations with the Taliban leadership.

Changing attitudes

By late 1997 US attitudes to the Taliban had changed. In a testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee in October 1997, Assistant Secretary of State Karl Inderfurth spoke of America wanting to see an Afghan government that was ‘multiethnic, broadbased, and that observes international norms of behaviour’. Visiting an Afghan refugee camp in Pakistan in the November, US Secretary of State Madeline Albright put it more bluntly: ‘I think it is very clear why we are opposed to the Taliban. Because of their approach to human rights, their despicable treatment of women and children and their general lack of respect for human dignity.’⁵

While officially the reasons for this change of heart were women, drugs and terrorists, in reality it was much more complex and multi layered. Certainly the highly influential women’s lobby had an effect. In a twopronged campaign they targeted both UNOCAL and the president. The oil company was attacked in a highprofile lobbying campaign that helped persuade them that the public relations costs of continuing to court the Taliban were not worth it, especially as the drop in oil prices was beginning to undermine the pipeline’s financial viability. Clinton, with his political career already rocked by the Lewinsky scandal, decided he could not afford to alienate female voters further, especially after Hollywood’s liberal stars-key backers of the Democratic campaigns-made Afghan women’s rights a cause célèbre. Yet given the United States’ record elsewhere, it is hard not to question its real commitment to the rights of Afghan women. Saudi Arabia, for example, has an atrocious record on women’s rights, and indeed human rights more generally. It has no qualms about stoning women to death for ‘adultery’, prisoners are routinely tortured, over 200 people were beheaded in 2000 and 2001. But Saudi Arabia is a friend, a guardian of the West’s oil, and thus it has been decided that, ‘a patient and discreet dialogue with the Saudi authorities is the best way to make progress’ (Curtis 2003).

A further reason given for the tough stand taken in relation to the Taliban was their involvement in the production of opium. Yet as a reason for the change, it is less than convincing. The surge in opium poppy growing began in the 1980s under America’s allies, the mujahideen, and little concern was then paid to it by the superpower. Drugs out and arms in proved too profitable a formula to interfere with, and as in Vietnam where the CIA ignored the drug trafficking of the anticommunist guerrillas they were financing, they ignored both the activities of the mujahideen and the involvement of the Pakistani ISI. The US Drugs Enforcement Agency uncovered forty major heroin syndicates in Pakistan at that time,6 but not a single one was broken up (Rashid 2000).

The third reason, as put forward in the UN resolutions authorizing sanctions, was that the Taliban provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden. The 1998 suicide bomb attacks on the US embassies in DaresSalaam and Nairobi in many ways marked the beginning of the new phase in American relations with Afghanistan. The USA quickly retaliated with Cruise missile attacks on Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Khost, an attack that inevitably brought outrage from some of the more militant Taliban supporters in the country. Yet here, too, the story does not quite add up. If the real concern was terrorism, far more attention ought to have been paid to Saudi Arabia. Osama was Saudiborn and known still to have links there, most of those involved in the 11 September hijackings were Saudi, and Saudi Arabia remains a key organizational base for alQa’eda. The Saudi connections were known, but they were also highly politically damaging for they led to the heart of American business interests.

Behind the issue of drugs, women’s rights and terrorism, there seemed to be another more fundamental reason: the Taliban simply did not fit with how America thought the world should be run. For the USA there is only one acceptable model of statehood, as expressed in the recent National Security Strategy (2002): ‘a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise’. But although this is being articulated ever more forcibly, the idea itself is not new. As has been shown consistently from America’s involvement in the overthrow of the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954, and Allende’s in Chile in 1973, to the long bitter struggle of Vietnam and its opposition to the democratically elected president of Venezuela, challenge to the dominant liberal capitalist system is simply not allowed. And if it is not to be allowed in countries that are relatively marginal in the global economic system, it is certainly not to be allowed in an oilrich region. The Taliban’s fault seemed to be less that they abused human rights (so do many others) or that they did not stop the growing of opium poppy (neither does Afghanistan’s current government) but that their whole way of being was a challenge to western liberal democracy and free market capitalism. Their vision of returning Afghanistan to Allah and the rule of the shari’a was as radical a challenge as communism or the mullahs of Iran. Here was a country in an enormously strategic location for the global energy market, and its rulers simply weren’t interested in playing the game. Nor could they be bought. For while the Taliban were certainly prepared to take money from the West, as was shown in their early dealings with UNOCAL, they did not want it enough to sacrifice their beliefs for it.

Antagonism to the Taliban began in the Clinton years, but it intensified after Bush became president. This is not surprising; those now in power had long been pushing for a much harder line towards the Islamic Middle East (from which, politically, events in Afghanistan cannot be separated). In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then UnderSecretary of Defense, wrote a document calling for intervention in Iraq and legitimizing preemptive attacks on other countries. Dick Cheney also endorsed this view, and although he later backed off in the face of public protest, he and others now in key positions continued to push throughout the 1990s for both a war on Iraq and the adoption of a policy of preemption (Krugman 2003).

As with the earlier courtship, so too were oil interests a driving force in the change of policy. The Bush government is dominated by oilmen. Dick Cheney used to be chief executive officer for the oil supply corporation Halliburton, Condoleeza Rice served on the board of directors for Chevron, acting as their principal expert on Kazakhstan; Robert Finn, the US Ambassador to Afghanistan in the immediate postTaliban period, was a Caspian oil expert. Immediately after taking office, the administration made oil politics a new priority. In May 2001, Dick Cheney presented the National Energy Policy, which recommended that ‘the President make energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy’. It went on to say, ‘our engagement will be global, spotlighting existing and emerging regions that will have a major impact on the global energy balance’ (US Department of Energy 2001). Reliance on the Gulf, and in particular on Saudi Arabia, had long been a concern for the USA and this was becoming increasingly critical as alternative sources of production started to dry up. The corrupt and unpopular House of Saud is well known to be a key target of Osama bin Laden and the chance of it being overthrown and the rich oil reserves falling into the hands of an antiUS administration, as happened in Iran, must represent a nightmare scenario to the USA.

At the same time, developments in the Caspian region were increasing its importance to the USA. In July 2000 geologists discovered a massive oil bubble in the Kazakh part of the Caspian Sea. With a 25milewide oil bubble, experts believe that this, the Kashagan oil field, represents some 30 billion barrels of crude oil. Only the Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia is larger. Not only does this represent huge profits, but it means that Kashagan has the potential to become what the industry calls a ‘swing supplier’, a supplier big enough to be able quickly to boost production to make up for any sudden cutbacks in supply. Currently only Saudi Arabia can do this, although Iraq (sitting on a total of 112 billion barrels) also has the potential. The US Department of Energy report reaffirmed Afghanistan’s significance ‘as a potential transit route for oil and natural gas exports from central Asia to the Arabian Sea’.

The war on terror therefore presented the USA with a double opportunity: to bring about regime change in Afghanistan, and to establish bases in a number of strategic locations in Central Asia. As Mahfouz Nedai, Afghanistan’s deputy Minister of Industry, noted: ‘Washington has sent their men into our government for good reason. The Americans have not come to Central Asia just for the terrorists’ (Kleveman 2003).

Isolating the Taliban

Once it had been decided that the Taliban did not fit with US interests, the strategy shifted to one of isolating them in every way possible. This was pursued not only through normal diplomatic channels, such as sanctions, but also by a process of rendering them in the public eye as dangerous fanatics. Given a long history in the West of depicting the Orient as simultaneously exotic and barbarous (Said 1992), this was not an unduly difficult task. Nevertheless, no avenue was left untrod in pursuit of the objective: the meaning of security was turned on its head; the concern for human rights exploited; the use of assistance warped. Most of the media proved to be alltoowilling accomplices-again in keeping with a long history of misrepresenting Islam (Said 1997). None of this is to say that the Taliban did not have some very nasty characteristics; as Mark Duffield (2001b) notes: ‘all discourse contains truths. It is in the nature of discourse, however, to select some truths and neglect others, and to rework those that have been adopted into a coherent and functional world view.’ And the discourse built up about the Taliban was to prove very functional indeed.

After 1998, as Afghanistan became the focus of more political attention, the UN became the conduit for more direct censure. This culminated in October 1999 in the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1267, which imposed sanctions aimed at freezing Taliban assets while also withdrawing landing rights to the national airline. The measures were aimed at the Taliban rather than the population at large, although the demonstrations that took place suggested that this was not perceived to be the case by some Afghans. Key memberstates were at pains to ensure that, at a time when the humanitarian situation was becoming the focus of international attention, such measures could not be portrayed as worsening the plight of Afghans. The second round of sanctions, imposed under Security Council Resolution1333 in December 2000, put in place a onesided arms embargo-which all members of the Security Council knew was unworkable because there was no way of enforcing the ban on crossborder supplies-on the Taliban. The military impact was thus minimal. By now the Taliban had come to the realization that, whatever they did, the western powers were against them, while ordinary Afghans felt increasingly isolated by the outside world.

The creation of a security problem One of the most striking things about the move towards isolating the Taliban was the way in which the security situation was manipulated. As NGOs and locally based UN staff repeatedly pointed out, the security situation under the Taliban was better for agency staff (and in many ways for ordinary Afghans) than it had been throughout the mujahideen time. For the first time in many years, it was possible to travel the roads at any time of the day or night without fear of being held up by gunmen. Yet one incident was to trigger a fundamental change in the way security was managed in Afghanistan. Once the news broke that the USA had launched a Cruise missile attack on the alleged sites of terrorist training camps in Khost, it was clear that there was the potential for trouble on the streets of Kabul. In consultation with their Taliban hosts, who were aware both of the risks of freelance retribution and their responsibility for the security of the small international contingent in Kabul, those in charge of UN security decided that all UN staff should be confined to their quarters until the situation was clarified. Despite this, an Italian assigned as a military adviser to UNSMA, Lieutenant Carmine Calo, and a French colleague took a marked UN vehicle out of the guarded UN compound, and on their way through the streets of Kabul were fired on after a staged accident. Both UNSMA staff were injured and Calo, though rushed to hospital, died some hours later.

Although the UN had experienced a number of other attacks over the previous decade and had still carried on working, and despite the fact that there was little to suggest that the general security situation had deteriorated, this tragic incident resulted in a complete evacuation of international UN staff from the country. It ushered in a new security era, as Afghanistan came to be portrayed as a dangerous country, where the security of foreigners could not be guaranteed. The UN took the unprecedented step of acceding to pressure to forbid US and UK nationals from serving in Afghanistan. After protracted negotiations with the Taliban, the return of UN staff to Kabul began in early 2000, followed by other areas, but with strict limits on numbers. While UN headquarters seemed unwilling to challenge the ban on UK and US nationals entering Afghanistan, some British staff in the field resorted to rediscovering their Irish ancestry, and one went so far as to buy herself a Somali passport. The policy appeared to be degenerating into a farce. Meanwhile, in the absence of any specific details about the alleged risks faced by USA and UK citizens, the ICRC politely resisted pressure to introduce similar restrictions on the deployment of its staff.

The UK went even further in its restrictions than the USA, with the Department for International Development withdrawing funding from NGOs that let international staff even visit the country. It is hard to know, even with the benefit of hindsight, how much this was due to political manipulation and how much it was due simply to illinformed and prejudiced judgements. The Foreign Office insisted it had specific evidence that there were threats, but would never elaborate on what these were. From the beginning, NGOs strongly challenged the UK government line, pointing out that security was both better than it had been in the past and better than it was in many other countries where no such draconian restrictions were in place. The British refused to budge and most NGOs, believing the issue was more about politics than security, found their money elsewhere. The funding restriction was finally lifted by the UK in mid2001, but only upon stringent security assessments of the agencies concerned.

While the result of all the regulations was to paint a picture of a country that was irredeemably dangerous, security on the ground actually remained quite good. Although there were some holdups of vehicles, mainly associated with the looting of Codan radios, the incidents were neither as frequent nor as violent as those that had happened in the past. Even after 11 September, when it was clear that Afghanistan would face retaliatory attacks, the Taliban stuck by the security guarantees they had given the international community and facilitated an orderly evacuation of international staff, leaving Afghans to face the American bombs alone.

Aid, rights and the US project

Aid has long been part of the strategy by which outside nations have gained influence in Afghanistan. But whereas in the 1960s and ’70s this had been essentially a bilateral endeavour, and in the 1980s it had been linked to Cold War alliances, by the mid’90s there was a move towards all organizations involved in assistance-donors, the UN and NGOs-pulling together in one systemwide effort in pursuit of peace in Afghanistan. Not all organizations bought into the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan (discussed in detail in Chapter 3),⁷ and of those who did a number were somewhat reluctant partners. Nevertheless, officially at least, the assistance community aspired to ‘speak with one voice’.

While the initial impetus for this effort came from the perceived need both to address the deepseated conflict and to improve the effectiveness of assistance in what was seen as a ‘failed state’, once international policy became driven by efforts to isolate and demonize the Taliban, the modalities of the SFA could also be used to this end. The anchor for the common approach was seen as a set of shared principles by which decisions would be made as to when and how to give assistance. In the quest to define these, the notion of rights became central: people had a right to humanitarian assistance; a right to protection; women had equal rights with men. But the emergence of an assistance community bent on ‘principled’ and ‘rightsbased’ programming at the very time that the Taliban were gaining control of the country and seeking to impose their own, rather different, notion of principles, meant that a clash was inevitable. This confrontation, though often stemming from a different set of priorities to the US agenda, played into the move to isolate the Taliban. For though the motives may have been different, the assistance community and the US body politic were both party to building up the discourse that the Taliban were evil and dangerous.

In part this was due to confusion on the ground as to how to achieve supposedly universal rights in someone else’s country, one in which by custom as well as diktat these rights were not always recognized. But it was also due to overlapping agendas. The assistance community did not speak with one voice, not even within one organization. As the UN’s senior human rights adviser at that time noted, any real progress on human rights issues was undermined by ‘a high level of rhetoric at the international level that had more to do with external political agendas than development of interventions that would actually help erode discriminatory attitudes and practices’ (Niland 2003).

One such example of how rights became an instrument of political agendas lies in a highprofile confrontation that seems to have gone down in international folklore as a truly heroic stance against evil. In 1997 Emma Bonino, then head of the European Community Office for Humanitarian Assistance (ECHO), visited Kabul, accompanied by celebrity CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour. They had asked to see the health facility, Rabbia Balkhi hospital, that the Taliban had declared would be dedicated to the provision of services to women. This followed a protracted controversy that had centred on allegations by the aid community that the Ministry of Public Health planned to centralize female healthcare, whereas in fact it had proposed the strengthening of one facility, which would be reserved for women. As would be the case in any other Muslim country, the visitors and accompanying press contingent were asked specifically not to film inside the hospital with a male crew. They chose to ignore this request, and proceeded to film at will in the female wards, whereupon the female head of the hospital called the police. Not surprisingly, the saga of the brief detention of Bonino became headline news.

Inevitably, it was the Taliban, rather than the visitors, who were accused of unacceptable behaviour. Most aid workers in the city agreed with Afghan health professionals in seeing this as a crude selfserving stunt that served only to obscure the real story, which was about the need to improve health facilities for women. Apart from leaving the Afghans who were accompanying her on her visit (and who had tried to halt the filming) in detention, the legacy of Bonino was to make the work of Afghan medical professionals much more difficult. As the female head of the hospital said months later, ‘the outside world has scored its points, but the ones who will pay the price are my patients’.⁸

Having decided that the Taliban were unacceptable, few opportunities were lost to point out their failings. The advocacy organization Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) (2001) launched a report claiming that 95 per cent of women in Kabul saw a decline in their mental health during the rule of the Taliban. Though they later admitted that the data collection was flawed, by then the damage was done.⁹ The findings were highlighted in the press and soon became ‘facts’, to be used by a range of organizations and individuals as evidence of how bad the Taliban were. A later report issued by PHR, which drew a more nuanced picture and was based on much more thorough research, drew no press interest whatsoever. UN reports also regularly admonished the Taliban for not meeting some perfect moral standard. They were castigated for doing things that are the common behaviour of politicians worldwide, such as wanting to control assistance, or only spending their own money on public goods when it was ‘roads and other infrastructure that benefits their supporters’ (Leader 2000). While they were regularly denounced for what they did wrong, they never received credit for the things they managed well, most of which were quickly forgotten as inconvenient.

Hazarajat was a case in point. Some terrible things happened in this part of Afghanistan and they were rightly condemned. But some good things happened also. Women did not have to wear burqas, the Shi’a Hazaras were left in peace to pray as they chose, and when there were problems with the kuchis returning to claim their old grazing rights, the Taliban, at least in cases we knew of in Nawor and Panjao, helped to resolve them. And just as in the jihad, when NGOs were vocal about the crimes of the government side but anyone criticizing the mujahideen for their human rights violations was automatically seen as an apologist for the Soviets (Baitenmann 1990: 62), so now only the Taliban could be criticized. When the Taliban massacred 200 people in Yakawlang they were rightly condemned; but no one spoke out against Hizbe Wahdat for the initial attack on the town that precipitated this incident, even though Wahdat must have known they could not hold the town and that civilians would pay the price for their actions. The onesided approach not only demonized the Taliban but it also allowed the other side to feel it had impunity, that whatever it did it would not be taken to task.

As in the fight against the Soviets, the USA was happy to ally itself with whoever suited its interests, whether it was the military or the propaganda war. This produced some interesting bedfellows. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is a hardleft group of urban, educated women of the type that establishment interests in the USA, conservative or liberal, would normally waste no time in condemning. Based in Quetta, it has always represented only a minority of Afghan women. In America, however, it became for many the voice of all. Its members were not slow to see the advantages offered to them by the interest of highprofile western women and a media hungry for the latest atrocity, and they used every opportunity they could to highlight the attacks on women’s rights. On one memorable occasion, at a starstudded $1,000aticket New York production of The Vagina Monologues, a shrouded RAWA delegate ascended to the stage, dramatically lifted her burqa and delivered a fiery speech to the cheers of the assembled audience (Thrupkaew 2002). The cynicism with which the women were, in turn, used can be seen in the way that, while in those days the USA thought their evidence against the Taliban credible enough to cite, today there is no mention of their documentation of the crimes of the Northern Alliance (Kolhatkar 2003). After 11 September, the crescendo of feeling against the Taliban accelerated. The American media, largely owned by the right, fell into line, with few dissenters. We were based in Islamabad in September and October 2001. Despite doing almost daily interviews with the international media, it was impossible not to observe how the US media almost never wanted interviews. It wasn’t just that we were not American; even US colleagues received no callers. There simply was no room for views that might call into question, let alone be critical of, what the USA was doing. The British media tried harder. Locally based reporters searched out those who might tell a different story, who might know how it was for Afghans left behind, who knew something of the history of the country; but the BBC team reported that it fought a constant battle with London to present a more critical perspective-and, despite their efforts, those viewing the domestic news in the UK found little to challenge the party line.

Stitching up a country

“The Americans won’t ever give up their military bases in Afghanistan. From here they will control the entire region.” (Farhang, Minister for Reconstruction, quoted in Kleveman 2003)

The events of 11 September presented the USA with the opportunity to start again, to build a pliable state in Afghanistan that would conform, at least outwardly, to liberal notions of ‘democracy and free enterprise’. Given that the new administration was brought into being not by any political struggle but rather by the space opened up by American bombs, it was perhaps not surprising that it offered no coherent vision of what a future Afghanistan might look like. But if the Interim Administration lacked a clear ideology, the same could not be said for the country’s ‘liberators’. In the gap that ought to have been filled by political debate, they were already busy trying to establish a client state that would serve their interests.

At the same time as real political debate on the future of Afghanistan was failing to happen, the rhetoric of democracy was being used to hide the pursuit of western interests, not only in securing oil routes, but also in refashioning the whole economy in the market economy mode. Policies were being made on the ground by a few key ministers and their many foreign advisers. The Minister of Finance, Ashraf Ghani, was a longtime World Bank employee and devotee of the economic liberalization argument; the desire to parcel out the Afghan economy to the private sector ran through everything he touched. The draft National Development Framework produced in April 200210 was followed by the National Development Budget. Both were about turning Afghanistan into an economy where ‘a competitive private sector becomes the engine of growth’. The government’s role was seen as promotion of the private sector, government assets would be privatized and international firms were seen as partners in all major projects.

The documents sat well with the dogma of America and its favourite ally, the UK. In its National Security Strategy, America boldly declared it would bring ‘free trade to every corner of the world’, igniting ‘a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade’. For the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, the poorest countries’ ‘obligations’ were to ‘pursue stability and create the opportunities for new investment’.¹¹ In a similar vein Margaret Beckett claimed Britain’s businesses needed to be able to trade throughout the world ‘without facing high tariffs, discriminatory regulations or unnecessarily burdensome procedures’.12 How well such a strategy serves Afghanistan is another issue.

The USA and its allies, along with the international financial institutions, which they largely control, have long been telling developing countries that what they need is to open up their markets, to privatize their industries, and to end government’s role as a service provider. Whether it is Argentina, Afghanistan or Angola, the message is the same. Yet while such a prescription is undoubtedly good for First World trade, there is little evidence to suggest that it will lead to growth in the countries concerned. On the contrary, all the evidence to date suggests that the private sector alone is unlikely to be a sufficient engine for growth. The countries where by far the highest levels of economic growth have been seen over recent decades have been those of East Asia, particularly China and South Korea, but also Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. Though all of these countries are very different and there is no one blueprint that can be drawn from them, they do show some interesting contrasts to the strategy being proposed for Afghanistan. None of these countries started its strategy for growth from the position of being a completely open economy; all had carefully structured barriers to protect their fledgling industries and only later, once industry was established, did they liberalize. Japan, somewhat earlier in the twentieth century, followed the same pattern, as of course did the USA itself. Even now, America quickly dumps its free trade policy as soon as its own industries are threatened. In January 2002 it introduced tariffs of as much as 30 per cent on imported steel in order to try and protect its steel industry; tariffs which were ruled by the WTO to be illegal and inconsistent with free trade.¹³ In a similar vein it continues to grant massive subsidies to its agricultural sector, whose excess wheat then becomes food aid for the poor world, often depressing local prices and depriving farmers of their livelihoods.

In addition, East Asian countries not only invested heavily in health and education, but also in strategies that ensured that everyone had access to these essential services, thus producing an educated and healthy workforce.

Jobs for the boys While most Afghans have so far seen little benefit from reconstruction, US companies have been doing very well indeed. According to a report published by the Centre for Public Integrity, US firms received over US$8 billion in contracts for work in postwar Iraq and Afghanistan. The top recipient was Kellogg, Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, of which Dick Cheney was chief executive officer prior to being chosen as George W. Bush’s running mate. It was awarded contracts worth $2.3 billion. Almost all of the companies that won contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan were political players, giving some $12.7 million to the various Republican committees, and $7.1 million to the Democratic ones. George Bush alone reportedly received over $0.5 million. Although USAID has a public duty to ensure that taxpayers’ dollars are used ‘efficiently and effectively’, an examination of contracts awarded would seem to suggest that other factors also come into play. In

January 2003 Creative Associates International Inc., an organization that had no experience of working in the country, bid for a major education contract as part of a consortium with two NGOs, neither of which was an expert in education. They won the bid over another consortium comprised of DAI and the three international NGOs that have the strongest track record of education development work in Afghanistan. Creative Associates is one of the many private consulting firms that developed in the 1970s and ’80s in response to the US government’s decision that it needed to subcontract much of its assistance work. Commonly known as ‘Beltway Bandits’, because they all have offices inside Washington’s beltway, they are often staffed by former government employees and their main business is contracts from government organizations such as USAID. In addition to the Afghanistan contract, in March 2003 Creative Associates won an Iraq education contract worth up to $157 million. The organization, which has several former USAID officials on its staff, is the eleventh largest recipient of government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis (CPI 2003). While it is the big fish that will clearly benefit most, even the smaller enterprises are confident of a killing. As the manager of a company bidding for the new US funds that were the talk of Kabul in early 2004 put it: ‘We cannot lose-the guys in Washington have not only insured our assets in this place, but also our profits.’

Aid and the pursuit of liberal governance Aid, said USAID head Andrew Natsios in 2001, is ‘a key foreign policy instrument’. And in case there was any doubt about what this meant, he elaborated: ‘Foreign assistance helps developing and transition nations move towards democratic systems and market economies; it helps nations prepare for participation in the global trading system and become better markets for US exports’ (Kaplan 2003).

From a bilateral perspective this is perhaps neither surprising nor new. What is notable in Afghanistan is how far both the multilateral agencies, and even many of the supposedly independent NGOs, have been pulled into the free market project. This is in part only an intensification of a trend that has long been under way. For years now, liberal governance has made its way in the world via a whole network of agencies that manage what Mark Duffield (2001b) called ‘the borderlands’. On the margins of the global system lie a whole raft of countries where poverty and longrunning conflicts seem endemic. This, the excluded South, has for some time been seen as a danger to the international system because of the risk of conflict, criminality and terrorism spilling out over its borders. It also, to those concerned with justice, remains an unacceptable scar on the face of a rich world, an everpresent reminder that the policies work only for some. But in a unipolar world, where there is no longer any radical political challenge to the status quo, both those concerned with justice and those concerned with the advancement of the free market roll out the same solution: to try and manage the troublesome South through strategic networks that involve the UN and NGOs in a shift away from simply providing humanitarian assistance towards programmes to reduce conflict and increase stability.

Even so, 9/11 brought about a change of gear. The terms of engagement were set by Bush’s famous ‘you are either for us or against us’. The statement at a stroke removed the independent space in which the UN and NGOs might have been able to operate. While in the past it was often suspected that the UN was just part of the US project, undertaking its operational work in parts of the world where the US preferred to be ‘hands off’, now it was official. Agencies have been slow to realize the implications of this, and of how much more dangerous it has made the world for them. There is, it seems, at times a wilful donning of blinkers, a refusal to see the political project, far less the role they have come to play in it.
The UN in particular continued to pretend, even while the everincreasing layers of razor wire on top of the walls of their buildings, the concrete bollards and ‘no stopping’ signs that surround them, showed that on one level it understood all too well. The price of this pretending was already being paid in Afghanistan, with an ICRC international staff member and a number of NGO national staff murdered, but it was not until the bombing of the UN’s HQ in Baghdad that it seemed to sink in. Awful though the attack was, it was not, to anyone who has any understanding of the situation, surprising. The UN had not only overseen more than a decade of crippling sanctions, but had gone into Iraq in the wake of an illegal occupation of a country, and as such was bound to be a target. To pretend otherwise was, at best, dangerously naive. Yet at a memorial service in Mazar, held by the UN staff for their dead and injured colleagues and friends, the repeated question was: Why us?

A more courageous UN could, of course, have refused to accept this diktat, could have insisted on its independence and gone out of its way to prove this. But complicity is a hard habit to break, and cooption seductive. The postCold War dominance of a single worldview has made it if not easy, at least necessary, to persuade oneself that the only option is change from within. Once there it is all too easy to have one’s critical faculties blunted. As Peter Griffiths notes in the foreword to his book about the World Bank, The Economist’s Tale (2003):

“Some individuals chose to be incompetent, dishonest or downright evil. Some are pressed by the employers, their family or their society. Others tolerate incompetence, dishonesty or evil because they are afraid. They may be afraid they will lose their jobs and starve. They may be afraid that they will be beaten up or killed. Or they may be afraid that they will be seen to be making a fuss.”

Human rights

Rights have long been a victim of the war in Afghanistan, but only sometimes have outside powers chosen to recognize this. The diligent concern for human rights abuses displayed by donors and senior UN officials when Afghanistan was under the Taliban evaporated with the signing of the Bonn agreements. In the months following, a number of frontline workers tried to raise human rights issues within the UN, only to be silenced. That rights are only ever invoked by mainstream politicians when it suits their purposes is not, perhaps, surprising; what is more shocking is the way in which the UN failed to challenge this. The overarching statements paid dutiful lipservice, stressing the importance of the full and equal participation of women in political, economic, cultural and social life. Action on the ground, however, suggested priorities were otherwise. The Special Representative of the UN Secretary General, Lakhdar Brahimi, stated that Afghanistan could not at this time have both justice and peace, and UN workers who tried to raise these issues found themselves blocked. An independent human rights commission was set up but was given little political support.

If one thing symbolized rights issues under the Taliban, it was the burqa. Images of shrouded women flooded the press, the embodiment of rights denied. Yet arriving back in Kabul in December 2001 one could not help but notice that every woman was still wearing it. As the months rolled by a few got rid of the burqa, but they were still in a minority. Outside Kabul, little has changed. By the summer of 2004 some women still wore it out of custom, or said they had just come to feel more comfortable that way, but for many there was no choice, they said simply: ‘We do not feel safe.’ Even those educated women who had been strong defenders of women’s rights for many years did not always feel they could choose.

The burqa, of course, was always more symbolic than a substantive issue. For most Afghan women the rights to education and to paid work were far more important. But here, too, for all the publicity about girls going back to school, the actual improvements have been limited. In part that has been due to the lack of a coherent education policy, but conservative forces have also burned girls’ schools and banned females from attending. Yet the international community has been largely silent.

A similar silence descended on the human rights abuses in the northern provinces. From Qunduz in the east to Faryab in the west, this area is a patchwork of different peoples with a long and complex history. At different times different groups gained access to land, displacing others and often themselves being displaced later, either by yet another group or by the return of earlier incumbents. In accordance with this longestablished pattern, when the Taliban ruled in Kabul the Pashtuns were in the ascendancy in the north. Then, when the Taliban were defeated the Pashtuns bore the brunt of retributions, often for no other reason than that they came from the same ethnic group. Yet despite the fact that this situation was predictable, the international community failed to protect them and it was not until much later that the UN managed to intervene successfully to reduce the violence targeted at local Pashtun communities. Yet there were sizeable coalition forces in the north, and the Afghan forces accused of the violations were their military partners. Why did they not use their influence better to protect the civilian population? Why also did they not ensure protection for the hundreds of Taliban and other combatants who surrendered to the Northern Alliance after the fall of Qunduz and who are believed to have met their death either by suffocation in the containers in which they were transported or by summary execution? Bodies from this massacre, and from earlier ones, lie in mass graves in northern Afghanistan. Yet despite the fact that many believe that a proper investigation of the graves and a dignified burial of the remains are an essential part of any accountability and reconciliation process, so far UNAMA has been reluctant to act, stating that the decision whether or not to investigate lay with the Afghan authorities and the Human Rights Commission. Concern was also expressed that it would not be possible to protect witnesses and that responsibility to the living had to take precedence over justice to the dead. International human rights groups disagreed, as did the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions, who visited Afghanistan in midOctober 2002 and called for an international inquiry into past human rights violations, including the graves in the north (UN 2002a). Finally, a decision was taken by the UN in September 2001 to authorize an official investigation into the sites but this was to be limited to ‘finding and preserving evidence’ and would have a ‘low profile’ since systematic and full investigations ‘would seriously disrupt the fragile peace that the Government and international community are striving to foster and reinforce’. Since then a number of witnesses to the fate of Taliban captives at Dashte Leili are reported to have disappeared or have been tortured. As a human rights worker interviewed in December 2002 noted: ‘Every time someone comes and looks, someone disappears.’

As with rights, so too have standards on security changed since the fall of the Taliban. The string of attacks on UN and NGO staff have included both expatriates-the gang rape of a female NGO worker in the north, the murder of an ICRC engineer in Uruzgan in early 2003 and a UNHCR worker in Ghazni in November 2003-and Afghans, of whom many have been killed and many more wounded. Some of these attacks have been ugly in the extreme, with groups of workers hauled from their ambushed vehicles and summarily executed. Ye t there has been no evacuation.

In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the worsening security situation is conveniently blamed on ‘remnants’ of the old disorder. The truth is far more complex. The military intervention opened up a security vacuum, which the USA blocked an international force from filling as it feared it would interfere with its pursuit of alQa’eda. As a result, two distinct security problems now exist in Afghanistan. In the south and east, groups opposed to the current administration, many of which are finding shelter over the border in Pakistan, deliberately target anyone linked to the new administration. Their task is made easier by the political disenfranchisement of a large part of the population and the discontent caused by the heavyhanded tactics of the coalition forces. Meanwhile, in other parts of the country warlords who are nominally part of the government continue to fight each other. Those who recall the evacuation of UN staff in 1998, in response to a tragic but single casualty, can be forgiven for questioning the meaning of security when more than a third of rural districts are out of bounds to aid agencies and when, due to security concerns, all but one NGO has evacuated Qandahar.

NGOs-wanting it both ways

Beneath the cloak of having ‘come to help’, NGOs are also often part of the selloff of the country’s assets and the privatization of its services. The agencies themselves appear confused and uncomfortable with the position they find themselves in. Although unhappy at being associated with the government through involvement with projects such as the flagship National Solidarity Programme, they continue to take the money, slow to recognize the implications of the change in the political landscape. The years in which the mujahideen first fought for, and then fought over, Afghanistan left them the space to work as they chose, the Afghan government not being in a position to control their activities; the notion of independent NGOs working directly with communities took root. The Taliban days, if anything, entrenched this; NGOs were paid by donors to be ‘independent’ agencies working with communities in the face of a repressive government. They could retain their moral stance and be paid for it; for the agenda of donors and the agenda of NGOs was substantially one and the same. That is no longer the case.

Donors have clearly embarked on a political project to reconstruct Afghanistan in a certain mould, and while they are more than willing to fund NGOs to be implementers of projects within this framework, it is clear that there is no longer big money on the table for those who choose to remain outside. NGOs face a difficult choice, which few of them as yet seem to have recognized. The years of funding to do development work according to their own beliefs and priorities are over. Either they become part of the political project, with all its faults, or they retain their independence but lose largescale funding and, perhaps even more importantly to some, a seat at the table of the powerbrokers.

For USAID, the new role is clearly expressed in the shift from grants to contracting. Rather than being given resources to engage in development processes, agencies will now be given contracts to deliver to specified outcomes. Targets will be set-for example, the number of children to be vaccinated against measles-and if the agency does not meet them its funding will be cut accordingly. While this may be an attempt to get some accountability into the system, which in itself is no bad thing, it is accountability according to the donor’s priorities, not the NGO’s. To bemoan that more meaningful development indicators are not part of the picture is to miss the point-this is not a development process. For many donors, NGOs are now being funded not as development agencies but as subcontractors for specific programmes.

Failing the Afghans

The gap between the American values that are being pushed and the values of the majority of Afghans is enormous. For all America’s attempts to promote its cultural values, the emphasis on individualism does not sit well with Afghan society. This is not just an issue of old versus new, rural versus urban, educated versus illiterate; even many welleducated, urban Afghans holding down wellpaid jobs, those who are doing well out of the current dispensation and who could be called ‘modern’, do not subscribe to the US dream. They may not as yet have worked out a coherent alternative, but this does not mean they do not know that there is something wrong with what has been offered. Although for the moment America may still be more welcomed as liberator than hated as occupier, the line is a fine one. Already there are clear signs of unhappiness with what is happening. As one friend observed: ‘The new generation of Afghans will not be really educated, but trained not to stand in the way of US interests.’

Meanwhile, for the majority of the country’s citizens, the ordinary people who do not have access to wellpaid jobs, there is simply a deep yearning for life to be better, to live in safety, to have healthcare and education, and the means of making a reasonable living. As yet, little has been offered in the way of meeting these aspirations. For all the fine words about economic growth relieving poverty, there is little indication that this might happen; nor are the models of services being put forward likely to produce much for the poor. The danger for America, with its all too visible presence in the country, is that it will be held responsible for these failures.

There is not only an immediate frustration but also a longterm problem of a lack of political leadership and of any vision as to how these aspirations could be met. This is more than just an Afghan problem; the absence of any models to challenge liberal capitalism is a global issue. At least until the 1970s alternative statebased models of modernity and of economic development existed, socialist and nationalist. Alongside them were models of political action by means of which people might hope to achieve change. Now all these have gone. In the 1980s economic liberalism increasingly became the dominant economic paradigm among southern elites as well as in the West, and coherent political action splintered into singleissue protest movements. While part of the reason for the decline of alternative modes of statehood was their own corruption and their failure to understand the systems they were trying to reform, their decline nevertheless leaves an enormous gap. To acknowledge that they had faults does not mean that their critique of the status quo was not valid. But, as Mark Duffield notes: ‘From its position of dominance, liberal discourse has suppressed those aspects…that argued the existence of inequalities within the global system, and most importantly, that the way in which wealth is created has a direct bearing on the extent and nature of poverty’ (Duffield 2001b: 28). In its dominance, the West and the system it embodies has allowed itself to think it has the answers, even as it is failing so many people. Rather than ask how the system must be changed, the question has now become how to make southern societies fit the system. The notion that underdevelopment may be a function of the relationship between rich and poor countries has been more or less erased from the development discourse. The notion that any form of governance other than the market state might be valid has been excised from the global discourse (Gray 2003).

The danger of such a lacuna was ably illustrated by the outburst of a young Afghan friend. Karim is in his early twenties, a graduate of law from Balkh University and currently in a good job, giving him both a reasonable salary and interesting work. We were travelling together in the north of the country along the, admittedly dreadful, road between Pul i Khumri and Qunduz when he burst out: ‘This country is completely corrupt, look at this road! What can we do-there is nothing for it but terrorism.’ While it is unlikely that he would ever join up with alQa’eda, his burst of anger came from a deep well of despair at ever seeing any real improvement in his country. It was a powerful wakeup call to the price that will have to be paid if things do not get better. In the conversation about political change that followed, it became very clear that the models of political struggle and change that were part of the fabric of life for those of us who grew up in the West in the1960s and ’70s, whether or not we were activists, no longer exist for today’s young people. There is no longer a Mozambique with its brave vision of the future as it struggled to free itself from Portuguese colonialism, no longer a South Africa with its Nelson Mandela. The alternative visions of societies in which resources would be used to allow the poor to attain the basic requirements of a decent life, to be free of fear, to have enough to eat and safe water to drink, to have basic healthcare and education for their children, are no longer put forward. Yet the market state will never be able to meet the aspirations of most Afghans. Little wonder terrorism has a recruiting ground.

Notes

Notes

1. Voice of America, 27 September 1996.
2. Statement by Robin Raphel, head of US delegation, United Nations meeting on Afghanistan, 18 November 1996.
3. In 2002 BP Amoco finally took the decision to go ahead with this route. Construction will take about three years and is estimated to cost $3.2 billion.
4. The story is well documented in Rashid (2000).
5. Reuters, 18 November 1997.
6. In those days conversion into heroin was done in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan; the CIA’s allies the ISI were heavily involved in the trade.
7. Notably, ICRC and MSF formally stayed outside, believing it compromised their neutrality.
8. Personal communication.
9. Personal communication with PHR senior staff member, 2001.
10. Ashraf Ghani was then head of the AACA, which produced the NDF. He became Minister of Finance after the ELJ issued in the ATA.
11. Speech to the Federal Reserve Bank, New York, 16 November 2001.
12. ‘Towards full market access’, Financial Times, 10 July 1997.
13. ‘Fear of trade war after US steel tariffs ruled illegal’, Guardian, 1 November 2003.

(Source: Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie, “AFGHANISTAN: The Mirage Of Peace,” Zed Books, London – New York, 2004)

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

“In Afghan history the communists had an ideology and the Taliban had an ideology, they were fighting for something they believed in. It is good to believe, to have an aim. You didn’t see that with the mujahideen, or even now. In the communist time the people in key positions had just a few possessions, they didn’t want to misuse government property, or to have bribes. It was the same at the beginning with the Taliban. Now, the government does not have a strategy, an ideology, a goal. This is a disaster. Where is the sense of value, the spirit of building a country, the honour?” (Exgovernment employee, now NGO worker, Kabul, 2003)

During the twentieth century the outside world has offered Afghans a succession of ideological frameworks as models for change. From the revolutionary to the regressive, however, the transformations that these ideologies imply have provided a pretext for conflict, rather than a focus for unity. This experience helps to explain why many Afghans feel ambivalent towards ideas or values that lie outside of, or are perceived to intrude on, their collective frame of reference.

Islam and the sense of belonging to a community, group or tribe have shaped how Afghans relate to their immediate environment and how they deal (or not) with alien ideology. Until the jihad this remained relatively unchallenged. The impact of the technologyinspired vision of the 1960s and 1970s that, it was hoped, would catapult the country into the modern world, was confined primarily to an urban elite. Despite the push for liberal values by some educated Afghans, the social base of liberalism was always very narrow. However, by the mid1970s, the social foundations of the old order were eroding and both Islamist and communist parties were actively organizing, especially among the students and the armed forces. When the Afghan communists took power in 1978, their attempts to move rural communities from feudalism to socialism sparked a nationwide jihad that had its roots in local reactions to what were perceived as intrusions on established values and traditions. This uprising in turn provided a base from which the various parties could organize and recruit as political and military organizations.

As Soviet support for President Najibullah dried up, he was forced to buy support through the militias and to make accommodation with a range of Afghan groups that did not subscribe to communist ideals. By the 1990s little was left of the communist policies the regime once fought for. Meanwhile, on the other side of the frontlines, the common cause that had held together the resistance groups for more than a decade evaporated with the departure of the Soviet troops. This lack of unity was already manifest in the deep differences that existed within the interim government that briefly replaced Najibullah’s regime. By the time that the full successor administration, the Islamic State of Afghanistan, came into being, disunity had descended into bitter internecine fighting. As old scores were settled and allegiances between groups shifted, it was difficult for Afghans to distinguish between ideology and political expediency; peace remained a mirage.

It was into this landscape that the Taliban first emerged, offering to restore stability and order to those parts of the country beset by anarchy. As with the mujahideen who had preceded them, they portrayed themselves as protectors of the faith, and it was with an appeal to a ‘true Islam’ and a reassertion of Afghan identity and traditions that they staked their claim to govern the country and issued a series of edicts that aimed to codify the terms of their rule. Although their vision of Afghan society was routinely portrayed as an anachronism, their attempts to draw on their past resonated with the values of many conservative rural communities. With time, however, the uncompromising imposition of their interpretation of Islam came to be seen by many as equally intrusive as the depredations of the factions that they had replaced. While most Afghans are deeply conformist in their belief and attach great importance to rituals such as regular prayer, the notion of the state-which, in time, the Taliban claimed to represent-imposing strictures over this belief was seen as an anathema to all but the most conservative Sunni elements of society. In particular the activities of the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice, which was established (allegedly under the influence of Saudi clerics) during the late 1990s, came to be seen by some Afghans as intrusive. Virtue has customarily been protected at the level of the family, community or tribe, not imposed from the outside, and certainly not by the state.

While the Taliban edicts covered issues from law and order to property ownership, it was those that imposed requirements for prayer, dress and social interaction that were the most intrusive, particularly on the urban population. But it was the formal exclusion of women from employment and girls from education that triggered a response from the aid community.

Confronting the Taliban

The first real confrontation occurred in 1995 after the Taliban had taken Herat and banned girls from attending school and women from working. Agencies saw this as a direct attack not only on their values but also on what they believed to be universal rights. Finding it impossible to continue running programmes in keeping with the agency’s principles, the British NGO Save the Children suspended its programmes in health and education, while UNICEF took a policy decision not to fund education in parts of the country where girls were barred from going to school. This provoked a debate as to whether withholding resources to try and achieve change was simply a denial of education to boys, or whether it represented a shift of the organizations’ resources to parts of the country where they could be better used.

It was not until the Taliban took Kabul a year later that the issue of their restrictions on women and girls hit the headlines. Even then few aid organizations were prepared to speak out. One exception was Oxfam, whose country representative defended women’s rights on CNN and went on to announce that Oxfam would close its programme in Afghanistan if the Taliban did not moderate their position. Oxfam formally suspended its Kabul programme on 4 October and issued a press statement saying that Oxfam would ‘work with women in Kabul, or not at all’. Despite attempts to rally other agencies to the cause, there was little enthusiasm for following suit.

The Logar water supply project was Oxfam’s major programme in the capital. The scheme, originally built in 1970s, had been badly damaged and looted after the mujahideen took over the city in 1992, and its repair and recommissioning seemed a logical response to the city’s worsening water problems. Its rehabilitation, at a cost of several million dollars, had the potential to restore piped water to 40 per cent of the city’s residents. For Oxfam, however, committed as it was to gender equity and with a firm belief that programmes to provide safe drinking water were of little benefit without concomitant programmes of health education with women, proceeding with work on Logar without the involvement of women made no sense.

The Taliban, however, proved impervious to pressure and Oxfam had little idea what to do next. Despite the hardline stand taken on CNN, the agency was not prepared to pay the price of closing its country office. There were also strong differences of opinion within the organization as to whether Oxfam should in fact be suspending work on Logar. While one side argued the stand on gender, others argued the humanitarian case for supplying safe drinking water to the city’s residents. In the end those advocating suspension won the day and the official position became that Oxfam would not undertake programme work in the capital but would maintain its country office there, believing it could have an influence on the Taliban’s behaviour through a programme of advocacy and bearing witness, aimed largely at donors and the international community. Its female Afghan staff, meanwhile, remained at home on full pay. By this time a number of other NGOs had found ways of employing their female staff, through redefining them as health workers or letting them work from home. Oxfam’s representative in Kabul refused to adopt this strategy, holding that without express permission for Oxfam staff to resume their jobs they would be at risk. She also refused to explore the compromise of having female staff from the Ministry of Public Health undertake the programming with women, insisting that Oxfam had the right to employ its own female staff. Oxfam’s male staff, however, were soon back at work-the contradiction of which seemed lost on those who advocated taking a hard line on the gender issue. It was believed that the Taliban would eventually decide they wanted the water project sufficiently to agree to Oxfam’s terms; but they refused to relent. In spring of 1998 Oxfam ceased to pay the salaries of its female Afghan staff, who by this time had been at home on full pay for eighteen months. An independent evaluation of the project, which was critical of the organization’s actions, was suppressed.

Other organizations fared no better in attempts to confront the Taliban. Neither Save the Children nor UNICEF achieved any change on the position of girls’ education, and Save the Children ended up closing its Herat office. It then moved to Mazar i Sharif, thinking it could continue to run programmes for women in a Northern Alliancecontrolled part of the country. The programmes were only just up and running when the Taliban attacked Mazar, precipitating a period of fighting and instability that only ended eighteen months later when they finally captured the city.

In the meantime, a number of other aid agencies in Kabul tried to negotiate their way around the stream of regulations issued by the Taliban. It was clear from the way in which some agencies were able to deal with their official counterparts that there was no clear Taliban partyline on the work of external aid agencies. Neither did it seem that the restrictions were deliberately intended to make their presence untenable, so that agencies would leave. Many Afghans who continued to work in the administration negotiated to retain the support of aid agencies in their work and thereby managed to continue employing women, notably in healthcare. Even the hardline Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, which was the most prolific in issuing edicts, was not immune to arguments about need and allowed emergency programmes such as distributions to widows to continue. The edicts did, however, combine to make it a difficult working environment, especially in Kabul where the lines were most strongly drawn. Even here, there was potential to explore differing interpretations of the restrictions, but the agencies that had the savvy to explore it were few. Outside the cities, where edicts were less keenly observed, it was often easier to continue activities, and a number of agencies focused on places where they felt they could still get something done.

The very diversity of the NGO community made it difficult for them even to agree, much less hold, a common position on issues. Despite intense soulsearching, the respective positions and priorities of the NGOs ruled out a common strategy on how to work (or not) under the watchful gaze of the Taliban. The severest test of their resolve came in the summer of 1998, when in a context of worsening relations the Taliban issued a directive that all NGOs should move their offices in the Kabul Polytechnic. The official reason for this decision was that it would enable NGOs to make better use of available resources by sharing common services and reducing their overheads, while allowing the authorities to ensure effective security-which they had been repeatedly reminded was their responsibility. Most NGOs refused to move and claimed that the proposal infringed on their operational effectiveness. Just as with Oxfam and the Logar project, few aid workers seemed to have thought through what they would do if the Taliban did not back down-which they did not. Instead, they ordered the closure of most NGO offices in Kabul, resulting in an exodus of expatriate staff to Pakistan.

As had been the case earlier, few agencies were prepared to lose their programmes in Afghanistan, especially as the capture of Mazar i Sharif and Hazarajat in the weeks following the NGO retreat from Kabul had limited the options for working in areas outside Taliban control. Most agencies soon started negotiating terms for their return to Kabul and, forming a consortium, they met a demand that they deposit money into an account to cover the costs of the repairs to the polytechnic buildings, where work soon began. As a condition of the agencies’ return to Kabul and reopening of their offices and programmes, the Taliban insisted that they all sign statements agreeing to relocate to the polytechnic. Few refused. However, concern for the security of international staff following the death of Lieutenant Calo (see Chapter 4) meant that it was months before most NGOs fully returned to Kabul. By the time they did, the Taliban had moved military personnel into the now partially refurbished polytechnic buildings, leaving the NGOs free to return to their original offices. In the aftermath of this episode, the more seasoned aid workers reflected that a different strategy might have got them to the same place with a lot less trouble. Although lessons were clearly learned within the NGO community, the same was not the case with UN headquarters, which pushed for ‘tough’ stands in subsequent standoffs with the Taliban.

The UN and the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan

The many difficulties the assistance community experienced in trying to work out how to relate to the Taliban coincided with a growing concern about the evident failure of international political, assistance and human rights strategies to work effectively in the cause of peace in Afghanistan. At the same time the UN was struggling with the wider issue of what role it should play globally in countries with longrunning conflicts. This had already prompted the Secretary General to consider proposals for systemwide reform (Macrae and Leader 2000), as part of which a decision was taken to use Afghanistan to test an innovative approach in the form of a Strategic Framework for Afghanistan. In seeking to link the political and assistance efforts, the underlying assumption was that an impartial political strategy could be pursued. The cost of this became clear only later. Acknowledging that the system did not know if assistance was part of the problem or the solution, the Strategic Framework set out a series of objectives, based on common ‘rightsbased’ principles which were endorsed by the UN and donors alike. These principles represented the terms on which international assistance could be provided in the country, and stated that assistance should not be subject to any form of discrimination. In asserting that cooperation would be extended only to authorities that ‘fully supported’ the principles contained in the UN Charter, the Strategic Framework attempted, on the Afghan stage at least, to transform what had started as ad hoc reactions to discrimination into a coherent systemwide policy (UN 1998b).

Integral to the Strategic Framework from the beginning, and later to be elevated to the status of one of its three pillars (the other two being politics and assistance), the concept of rights was always key to attempts to define a principled stance in negotiating with the Taliban. Rights became the lens through which assistance was viewed, whether it was the question of humanitarian space (the right to assistance) or discrimination against women.

Behind the response to the string of edicts issued by the authorities in Kabul and Qandahar lay a game of game of catandmouse, as aid workers looked into the implications of restrictions, while testing the resolve of the authorities to enforce them. This is perhaps best illustrated by the furore that surrounded the edict issued early in 1998 that required expatriate Muslim women working in Afghanistan to be accompanied by a male relative or mahram-as was already the case for their Afghan colleagues. Within the international community, there were those who held that the mere application for a visa for an expatriate Muslim woman was unacceptable (even though all visitors needed a visa) as it risked discrimination because the Taliban might ask for her mahram to be identified. Meanwhile, those who were trying to negotiate the revocation of the edict were quietly assured by their Taliban interlocutors that the requirement was unworkable and would not be applied. The issue of a visa in June 1999 to the (Muslim) gender adviser for the UN without any question of a mahram suggested that the Taliban had again provided the rope with which the aid community tied itself in knots.

With the spotlight on the behaviour of the Taliban, acts of war came under increasing scrutiny. The issue of scorchedearth tactics in the Shamali plains north of Kabul during 1999 illustrates some of the problems encountered in trying to put this rights focus into practice. The rich, densely populated Shamali plains, which straddle the road north from Kabul, had been devastated in fighting between the Soviets and the resistance after 1979 and had witnessed widespread displacement. While there had been a significant return of refugees during the mid1990s, the continuing conflict in the area had discouraged extensive reconstruction. As fighting intensified along the frontlines at the end of July 1999, residents of the affected areas fled north to the Panjshir or south to Kabul. Both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance appealed to the international community for support in assisting these displaced people. The numbers involved lent credence to the stories of those displaced of forcible clearances of villages by Taliban fighters. Worse still, there were reports of the systematic burning of homes and vineyards, as well as the felling of fruit trees, apparently to render the area uninhabitable.

As was routine, the UN issued calls for both sides to show restraint; it also added its specific concerns for the protection of civilians. Prompted by the Northern Alliance’s claims of 200,000 displaced people in the Panjshir valley, the initial focus of the relief efforts was on the largely Tajik population who had been displaced north. The figures were, however, soon found to be a gross exaggeration-the actual numbers were in the tens of thousands. The Alliance also portrayed the Taliban advance as an act of ethnic cleansing, despite the fact that many Pashtun communities had also been forced out of their villages in the Shamali plains.

Meanwhile, some 30,000 people had made their way either on foot from the southern side of the frontlines in Shamali to Kabul, or had been trucked there by the Taliban. Most found refuge with relatives in the city. The fraught experience of managing camps for the displaced during the interfactional fighting of the mid1990s prompted aid agencies in Kabul to refuse requests from the Taliban to establish camps for those fleeing Shamali. Moreover, in setting up camps, they feared being accused of facilitating forced displacement. While UN field staff tried to extract from the Taliban guarantees that the villagers might return to their homes in Shamali as a precondition for providing assistance to those sheltering with families, those with nowhere to go were brought by the Taliban to the compound of the former USSR embassy in southern Kabul. Faced with this, aid agencies could do little but attempt to render the bleak ruins of the embassy blocks habitable for 13,000 of the displaced, most of whom were ethnic Pashtuns. The embassy site, which became a focus in the city for visiting delegations, divided the humanitarian community between those who perceived the relief effort as an uncomplicated response to need and a vindication of core humanitarian principles, and those who felt that as the Taliban had caused the problem they should deal with the consequences. One of the few issues on which the Taliban and those aid agencies who agreed to assist families in the embassy compound agreed was on exclusion of the press, which they feared would run stories of agencies being complicit in forced depopulation. No such concerns, it seems, troubled visitors to the second compound for the displaced, set up by the Northern Alliance in an unused textile factory on the north side of the frontlines.

For the Kabuli families who took in the majority of the displaced there were no such dilemmas. They had themselves sought refuge in Shamali during the turmoil in Kabul after 1992 and it was a straightforward obligation to look after those in need. As one elderly woman arriving in Kabul, having lost the village house that had only five years earlier been a refuge for her relatives from Kabul, said ruefully: ‘My house is nothing; we rebuilt it after it was destroyed by the communists and again after the mujahideen and shall do the same after the Taliban; what is important is family.’

Trying to engage It was in the midst of this confusion that a UN team was despatched to Kabul in May 1999 to try to reach agreement with the authorities on an operational framework for UN agency activities in the country. The very initiation of negotiations on a Memorandum of Understanding (UN 1998a) with the Taliban was regarded by some as an accommodation with unacceptable values. On the other hand, there were those who genuinely believed that guarantees from the Taliban of appropriate levels of operational independence would allow access to vulnerable populations. In many ways both parties needed some form of agreement. The Taliban needed to maintain what they perceived as an appropriate level of control in order to ensure that assistance activities were carried out without contravening Islamic traditions. The UN, on the other hand, needed to show that ‘principled’ engagement could result in a relaxation of the more intrusive restrictions, including the ban on female employment and education. Although the gulf between the two positions was clear, the Taliban needed the UN, which in turn needed a written agreement on which to base continued activities in the face of increased political hostility towards the regime. The memorandum, which was negotiated over ten days between the UN and Taliban teams, was distinguished as much by substantive differences in the English and Pashtun versions of the document-the latter intended to mollify the Taliban’s hardline constituency-as by the common ground that it staked out.

Few in the aid community were happy with the memorandum. Certain of its provisions, such as Article 13 that stated that ‘women’s access to, and participation in health and education, will need to be gradual’, were met with righteous indignation. Even though this gradualist approach represented the reality of the situation on the ground-where universal access was clearly not feasible overnight, as much because of shortage of resources as restrictions-the wording was perceived to be a betrayal of international human rights standards (Physicians for Human Rights 2001).

In many ways, the controversy that followed the signing of the memorandum was rather convenient for the Taliban, for whom the very notion of a written agreement with the UN, no matter how vaguely worded, was something of an anathema. In the ensuing discussions, which went on for months, about the implementation of its provisions, they were justifiably able to claim that the international community could not agree on what they wanted for Afghanistan.

The continuing failure of the UN to sort out either its position or its tactics was borne out by yet another longstanding controversy, this time regarding widows’ bakeries. Believing that there were a significant proportion of vulnerable femaleheaded households in need in urban areas-particularly when formal employment was ruled out under the Taliban-the aid community directed a significant amount of assistance to them.

Unfortunately, international workers failed to understand Afghan social relations. The Afghan custom is for a widow to be remarried to a close relative of her late husband, or simply taken in by relatives. They therefore were not in need of food assistance simply because of loss of a husband. But twenty years of war and associated relief efforts have taught Afghans that the way to obtain relief is to define yourself into whatever category is currently receiving the goods. So if the international community were giving food to ‘widows’, Afghans were quite prepared to define their social categories (though not their practice) accordingly. It was, of course, very difficult to distinguish who was a real widow with no family support and who was a widow in a, quite possibly welloff, family group.

Over and above this, there was evidence of serious corruption within WFP, including widows’ bakeries cards being sold by their own staff. The scale of abuse was such that it was picked up by representatives of the Taliban who-even though it was hardly in their interests-urged WFP to undertake a review of beneficiaries, to enable resources to be used more effectively.

Feeding widows had, however, become the UN’s symbol of what was possible in the face of Taliban intransigence and was therefore sacrosanct. Although both ICRC and CARE had acknowledged similar problems with their own feeding programmes and had taken action to clean out the corruption, the World Food Programme resisted calls to review the beneficiary lists-a cleanup that risked drastically reducing the scale of a programme that was portrayed as a lifeline for Afghans in the city. By the summer of 2000, the issue had become a source of real contention, with WFP finally acknowledging the need for reassessment of beneficiary lists, but arguing that the severity of the drought justified a more liberal attitude to food distribution. In summer 2001, in the face of growing evidence of malpractice, WFP agreed to resurvey on condition that its own female staff would carry out the housetohouse surveys. Pointing out that it was WFP staff who were in fact part of the problem, the Taliban proposed the involvement of surveyors from the Ministry of Public Health, who had undertaken similar joint surveys with, among others, the ICRC. WFP refused, and publicly threatened to close the programme. Despite the likely impact that this might have on legitimate beneficiaries of the urban feeding programme, the Taliban called the UN’s bluff and announced that they would attempt to identify alternative sources of food. With their flagship programme in jeopardy, WFP overnight found the ability to compromise.

An alien way of looking at the world

“So much more do they attend to granting favours than respecting rights.” (Elphinstone 1815)

In the absence of meaningful political dialogue, aid programmes had by the second half of the 1990s become the lens through which the world viewed the country, and their values were the yardstick against which Afghans-and specifically the Taliban-were to be measured. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the ideology of rights that was at the heart of the first major confrontation between the Taliban regime and the international community, and which remained central throughout.

The claim of the human rights movement is that its values are universal. Yet this is a concept of human rights that stems from a peculiarly western, individualist view of the world. A person is seen as an individual agent and his or her rights are conceived in those terms. In Afghanistan, as in many nonwestern countries, a person is embedded in his or her social environment, and rights can be constructed only on this basis. At the most fundamental, these relationships constitute the immediate family and a whole network of close kinship relationships; for some they also constitute the wider network of tribe. Any action by an individual to claim his or her rights has to be judged in relation to its effect on these relationships, a balance struck between what is gained and what is lost. Decisions are structured less by what you want as an individual than by what your family needs or expects of you. We have been struck on more than one occasion by Afghan friends describing how, despite good jobs abroad, they had returned to Afghanistan because of changes in family circumstance. No regret was expressed, or any sense of having done something particularly virtuous; it was just how it was. Duty was followed without question. The issue of responsibilities towards others structures the moral universe more than claims to rights for oneself. Any strategy to increase the rights of individual Afghans needs to acknowledge this, to recognize that moral universes can be structured in different ways that are equally legitimate, though not always compatible.

If we didn’t understand their worldview, they were certainly perplexed by ours. Returning from a first trip to the West, Afghan friends often spoke of their shock at the fact that homeless people are forced on to the streets, or parents committed to institutions in their old age rather than being cared for at home. You do not sleep on the streets here, even in bombedout Kabul; nor do old people die alone. There is puzzlement at westerners’ claims to the higher moral ground on issues of human rights while behaving in their own countries in ways which are perceived to be deeply immoral.

It was not simply that values differed; it was also how concepts such as ‘rights’ and ‘principles’ were presented and negotiated. The Taliban’s refusal to moderate their position over the Logar water project was portrayed by some as a callous disregard for human lives, but the problem lay more in the way in which the differences in belief were handled. Oxfam, like other NGOs, worked within an essentially western framework that believed that the way to get decisions changed was to apply pressure on the party whose behaviour they sought to alter. While politicians and corporations in the West might be susceptible to such tactics, it was to prove completely counterproductive with the Taliban. Not only did they perceive it as an attempt to dictate-rather than negotiate-the terms of engagement of a significant international investment in their country, but the confrontational manner in which the issue was handled made it impossible for the Taliban to change their position without loss of face. In Afghanistan, the successful resolution of problems does not come from confrontation but from negotiation, from a recognition that no one must lose face, from the crafting of a solution designed to appear as if everyone has ‘won’. A change of position is not acknowledged, because that would be to admit fault. Many Taliban edicts were quietly forgotten like this, as with the kites that always fluttered over Kabul despite having been banned. That is how things are resolved, not through the formal revocation of edicts that were too often demanded by agencies that failed to realize that such action was not possible. Seen from this perspective, Oxfam’s demand for formal permission for women to go back to work only ensured that this would never happen.

The aid community’s failure to make progress was also in part due to a pervasive tendency to overestimate its own importance and influence. We often saw ourselves as powerful because of the resources we controlled, and which we believed the Taliban needed in order to build their domestic legitimacy. Yet the amount of money involved was not that great, compared, for example, to the smuggling economy, nor did it speak to those issues that were uppermost on the Taliban agenda. As one study at the time put it: ‘The aid community, from donors to field workers, often seems to have difficulty in seeing beyond its own relatively limited sphere of influence’ (Fielden and AzerbaijaniMoghadam 2001).

Had aid agencies been more able to see themselves as but a small part of a bigger picture, they may have made more progress. They might also have got further had aid workers understood that Afghans saw them as guests in their country; indeed, some aid workers were happier to portray themselves to the outside world as frontline fighters. They were under intense external scrutiny to hold a ‘principled’ position, while at the same time delivering assistance in an environment with as many mixed signals as there were edicts, and where the rules of engagement, on either side, remained far from clear.

The mutual failure of the Taliban and the international community to understand each other, is also vividly illustrated by the contentious issue of the ‘space’ that was claimed for humanitarian action in the country. Previously, in the absence of an assertive central authority, there had been few official limits on the activities of humanitarian groups, which had negotiated with the various factions for access to populations in need. The questionable legitimacy of many ‘counterpart’ commanders was ignored, and their predatory behaviour often perceived simply as the price of working in a warzone. In an effort to reassert Afghan sovereignty in the areas that they controlled, the Taliban were thus faced by aid agencies that believed they had a right to intervene on their own terms, anywhere.

In Afghanistan as elsewhere, aid agencies increasingly used the language of human rights to define their own agenda in other people’s countries. The notion that there might in fact be common ground to be explored between the principled approach of the aid community and the values espoused by the Taliban was inconvenient, given how much was by now invested in the differences. Unwittingly in many cases, there was as much energy spent on widening the gaps between ‘them’ and ‘us’ as on working towards a common cause.

The nature of the human rights discourse itself also contributed to the problem, particularly around the contentious issue of protection. Human rights activists tended to see only the immediate situation, and to define those affected as individual victims in need of protection. But in the context of the widespread abuse of civilians during the Afghan conflict, the situation was usually more complicated than that. There were certainly many victims, but they, or their fathers, husbands or sons, were often also complicit in the fighting, or they were associated with groups that had committed earlier acts of atrocity, and therefore were targets for revenge. This is not to suggest that revenge does not constitute abuse, but to acknowledge the need to understand that layers of conflict, abuse and dispossession often overlap, and to be evenhanded in condemnation.

The second difficulty was that international human rights standards were developed in relation to territorial wars between state armies, where there was a clear distinction between military and civilians. But in Afghanistan, as with other examples of what have been termed ‘new’ wars or ‘network’ wars (Duffield 2001b), the conflict had dissolved boundaries between people, army and government. In the context of loose affiliations that made up the armed groups, the customary distinctions between military/civilian and combatant/noncombatant became blurred.

The final, and perhaps most serious, problem was that rights quickly became another item in the toolbox of those who were party to Afghanistan’s wars. The Afghans were savvy political actors and it didn’t take them long to work out that ‘rights’ was a button they could press to draw attention to their cause-as was exemplified by the accusations of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Shamali. Wellmeaning human international rights workers who knew little of the country and spoke even less of its languages were easy to lead by the nose. Rights thus became corrupted into a tool of war, manipulated with considerable success by some parties to the conflict.

Just as the West’s morality often puzzled the Afghans, so too did their approach to the restoration of law and order. If there was one basic right that those who had lived through the reign of terror exercised by the mujahideen groups between 1992 and 1995 wanted to realize, it was the right to basic security. Public executions in the sports stadium in Kabul, which had frequently been staged to popular acclaim during the mujahideen era, suddenly became a symbol to the outside world of Taliban inhumanity. Many Afghans, however, supported the Taliban’s hardline approach towards law and order. While undeniably often carried out without due process, the summary justice that was meted out seemed to represent the only way to halt the predatory violence of the factions. In the absence of functioning courts and legal systems, due process was clearly a distant prospect. A person has, perhaps, to have lived with real fear to comprehend why the denial of rights to a few people was considered a small price to pay for the restoration of law and order. In a country where the judicial system had largely broken down, the question became the very basic one of: their right to a fair trial, or our right to live in safety in our homes? Yet despite the fact that the Taliban’s uncompromising approach towards law and order rendered much of the country safe, the absence of due legal process was seized upon as an excuse to characterize them as savage. Their adherence to shari’a law was also held up by some as evidence of their barbarity, although when it was the stated policy of the previous administration it had passed without comment.

The attitude of the international community to the justice issue was also at times simply confused. When a UN military observer was assassinated in Kabul in 1998, the day after the US missile attack on Khost, the Taliban were urged to bring the culprits to justice. Indeed, among other issues, this was one of the preconditions for discussions about the return of UN expatriate staff evacuated from the country in response to the incident. When the alleged culprits were identified and the Taliban leadership offered to hand them over to the UN, they were told that they should be dealt with according to Afghan law. When the death sentence (which had been on the statute book for murder well before the Taliban) was passed on the culprits, the UN were faced with the prospect of an execution in their name. The issue was quietly dropped.

Could it have been different?

For those of us who worked in Afghanistan during the Taliban years, the question remains: could we have played it better? If we had started from a greater understanding of how things worked, rather than determinedly trying to bend a proud people to our version of the world, would we have got further? Often we made it more difficult for the more moderate elements within the Taliban to deliver because we insisted on proclaiming victory. We also placed key Afghan staff who were the translators and interlocutors with the Taliban in an impossible position.

What if, for example, instead of confronting the problem of restrictions on healthcare facilities for women headon, we had paid more attention to the potential of exploring the notion of femaleonly spaces? After all, western feminists have clamoured for years for the right to female doctors in their own countries. Similarly, given that western researchers have long argued that females perform better when education is provided in girlsonly classes, could we have better explored opportunities for the negotiation of segregated facilities? Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, credited the strict dress code and segregation of the sexes at university with opening the doors to emancipation, saying that once universities became places where fathers could send their daughters without worrying about ‘moral corruption’, then society began to change (Guardian, 10 November 2003).

In Afghanistan we rushed to defend the right to mixed facilities. The Taliban, it was assumed, were just making a rhetorical commitment to femaleonly provision, with no intention of actually implementing it, and those donors and agencies who considered such options were condemned as ‘accommodationist’. While the Taliban (or at least some of the Taliban, for like any other movement they were rarely all of one voice) may well have just been saying these things, they were hardly unique in this; most people playing a political game have a tendency to massage the truth they present to their constituency. The question remains, could we have achieved more by taking them at face value and trying to establish wellresourced femaleonly services? Certainly there was a problem, in that little existed in the way of femaleonly provision and to deny access to mixed facilities at times meant denying access to anything at all. But there were also indications that by negotiating step by step, facility by facility, by basing arguments in Islamic discourse and choosing words carefully, it was possible to make progress. One example was the nursing college in Jalalabad, where the local health authorities, faced with the prospect of a dwindling number of trained staff, found ways to resume admission of female trainees by ensuring segregation of courses. Despite the opportunity that this represented for Afghan women to receive better care, acknowledged by many Afghan professionals at the time, attempts by WHO to support the courses were greeted at the time with dismay by some expatriates.

Should we also, as Nancy Dupree suggests, have talked more to men?

“If men do not understand what you are doing with the women they are going to come up with some bizarre ideas. I remember a health project among the refugees where the women had six weeks of basic training. At the end of the training each graduate was given a plastic basin and a cake of soap. Immediately, the men were grumbling: ‘What are they doing in there? They are training our women to be prostitutes! Why else would they need a basin and a bar of soap?!’…If the women cannot go to the bazaar to buy soap, you must depend on the men of the household to do it. And if he does not understand the importance of it, he isn’t going to buy the soap. The emphasis must be on the whole family, not on individuals.” (Dupree 1998: 13-14)

The history of reform for women in Afghanistan is as old as the history of the state, and as contentious. Notions of female emancipation have long been associated with foreign interference, and have not only met with fierce resistance from tribal leaders but have not infrequently led to the downfall of the regime sponsoring change. More than a century ago, Amir Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) introduced the first laws to attempt to align customary practice with Islam (Dupree 1984: 306). Using the dictates of the Qur’an, he forbade child marriages, forced marriages, the levirate (marriage of a widow to her deceased husband’s brother), exorbitant brideprices and marriage gifts. He upheld hereditary rights for widows and ruled that women could seek divorce. Despite this, customary practices prevailed. Amanullah, grandson of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, took reform further, advocating monogamy, the removal of the veil, the end of seclusion and compulsory education for girls. He even supported higher education for females; and in October 1928, for the first time in Afghanistan’s history, a number of women went abroad, to Turkey, to study nursing. Both Amanullah’s wife and his sister spoke out publicly on the subject of equality for women. Speaking at the 1927 Independence celebrations, Queen Suraya said:

“Independence has been achieved. It belongs to all of us…Do not think, however, that our nation needs only men to serve it. Women should also take part as women did in the early years of Islam. The valuable services rendered by women are recounted throughout history, from which we learn that women were not created solely for pleasure and comfort. From their examples we learn that we must all contribute toward the development of our nation and that this cannot be done without being equipped with knowledge. So we should all attempt to acquire as much knowledge as possible in order that we may render our services to society in the manner of the women of early Islam.” (quoted in Dupree 1984: 308)

Afghan history is indeed full of accounts of heroic women whose actions and words rallied men at times of national crisis. From writer and political adviser Zaynab, daughter of Mirwais Hotak, standing at the bastion of Qandahar with her brothers when the city was besieged by the Persians, to Malalai holding her banner aloft at the battle of Maiwand in 1880 to prevent the tribal armies from retreating from the British, the poet heroine is an enduring symbol. Conservative leaders were not, however, much impressed with the lessons of history and they revolted against Amanullah. His successor, the Tajik Bacha i Saqao, insisted that women return behind the veil and it was to be thirty years before this imposition was once again removed.

The 1950s saw progress in schools and healthcare for women and the 1964 constitution gave them for the first time the right to vote. Increasing numbers of educated women began working in government and all manner of businesses (though, unlike southern Asia, not in manual labour, as this would dishonour both her and the male relative who let her do such a thing). Nevertheless, most urban women were still secluded even in the 1970s, and the changes had little impact on the countryside. While many women continued to exert influence, most did it indirectly through the men in their family. Many of the moves for reform continued to be spearheaded by progressive men, and there was little in the way of an indigenous women’s movement (Dupree 1984).

Undercurrents of dissent continued to exist. In 1968 conservative members of parliament proposed a law prohibiting females from studying abroad, and in 1970 two conservative mullahs protested at public signs of the emancipation of women by shooting at the legs of women in western dress and splashing them with acid. It was not the last time such things were to happen, for at least one Afghan woman working on women’s education in Peshawar in the 1990s had acid thrown in her face.
Despite the opposition, progress continued until the Saur Revolution of 1978, though much of it remained confined to Kabul. With the PDPA’s takeover of power, women, especially young women, were mobilized to serve ‘the cause’, and in the internal struggles within the Communist Party women’s issues were used by both sides in their claims to ascendancy. But reform ran ahead of society. Even in the urban areas people were shocked at the dress and behaviour of some women, while in the rural areas the campaign to eradicate illiteracy proved to be the spark that lit the fire of jihad: men were not having their women herded into literacy classes, and especially not mixed literacy classes. As the various mujahideen groups battled for power, between themselves and later against the Taliban, women’s honour and their position in society again became mobilized as a rallying call.

Maybe a more careful reading of Afghan history would have taught us that change cannot be forced, from the outside or from within. The description by David Edwards (2002) of how the ultimate failure in Afghanistan of both the communist regime and its enemies was at least in part due to their failure to learn the lessons of the past, applied as much to the international community as to Afghans: ‘There were many such lessons, including one about how Afghans treat outsiders who try to control their homeland and another about how they feel when people in authority interfere in their domestic affairs.’

This does not mean that Afghanistan is a society locked in its past, incapable of change. The same Afghans who fought a jihad against the communists in part because they forced through policies for educating girls, could, twenty years later, when faced with the rules of the Taliban, be heard defending the rights of their granddaughters to education. When asked why, most spoke of the experience of receiving education as refugees in Pakistan or Iran, of how it opened people’s eyes from the narrow confines of their valleys. Change came because people saw for themselves, and made a choice.

The legacy of confrontation

The legacy of this confrontation remains with us to this day. The demonizing of the Taliban, as part of the campaign to justify the overthrow of the regime, has created a caricature of all who stand in the way of the new order. Not only have the battlelines been drawn between the forces of conservatism and those of enlightenment, but dissenters are portrayed as the embodiment of all that is wrong with Afghanistan.

The confrontation led to an oversimplification of complex issues. Nowhere was this more clearly shown than with the controversy surrounding women’s rights. Restrictions came to be seen simply as an imposition of the Taliban, a result of their obscurantist version of Islam. The underlying logic was that once the Taliban had gone, so too would the restrictions. This notion underpinned most outsiders’ thinking on the issue, even though many aid workers would, if challenged, admit that it was not quite this straightforward. Not only were many of the restrictions rooted in practices that had long prevailed within the more conservative elements of Afghan society, but war had made Afghanistan more conservative. Even in urban areas many women could not go back to what they were doing ten years ago, and younger women in particular were likely to face restrictions. For many women, for example, a mahram was necessary if they were to travel; not because of the Taliban restriction but because their family demanded it. Now in postTaliban Afghanistan, the edicts have gone but the restrictions remain, and some of the agencies that in the past shouted loudest about women’s rights have failed to provide the conditions that would enable Afghan women to work. Consideration of where female staff would stay when they went to the field, or if they were asked to relocate to somewhere outside their home area, were simply not addressed by most agencies.

It is, perhaps, telling that the burqa, the compelling signifier of rights denied under the Taliban, remains an enduring symbol of what has not changed in the new Afghanistan. Images of shrouded women flooded the western press during that period, but the ubiquitous blue garments are still inconveniently visible. Even the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice remains, albeit that its methods of enforcement are now more subtle. Many women still wear the burqa out of custom, or say they have just come to feel more comfortable that way, but for many there is no choice, they say simply, ‘We do not feel safe’. Even educated women do not always feel they can choose. Dr Annise Gul, a medical doctor and powerful defender of women’s rights, now in charge of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs in Badakhshan province, sheds her burqa only once within the safety of her clinic or office. When asked if she still has to wear it, she smiles ruefully, and says in a matteroffact way ‘We do’.

The legacy of confrontation also lies in opportunities wasted. The sheer amount of time and effort spent on the catandmouse game of principles with the Taliban was enormous. But time was not the only price. Expressing outrage may be cathartic, but it does not relieve anyone of responsibility to those who suffer. While there is no question that many of the Taliban’s actions and policies constituted a denial of rights and were, both to many Afghans and by international standards, unacceptable, the strategy and tactics that were employed in the cause of change were all too often not those that were likely to benefit Afghans. As the UN’s senior human rights adviser noted: ‘Taliban gender politics had unleashed an aid agency gender war that was characterized by unending battles, skirmishes, and propaganda that further complicated the task of defining-and giving effect to-a workable policy framework’ (Niland 2003: 19).

The value in UNICEF’s denial for five years, in the name of principles, of support to education for Afghans inside the country came to be questioned by Afghan women and men who failed to see the logic of a policy that deprived boys of education in retribution for the Taliban denying this to girls. ‘How’, they asked, ‘will a generation of uneducated Afghan men help in promoting women’s rights?’ ‘Wasn’t the lack of education in the refugee camps one reason so many boys went to the madrasas, the very institutions that helped to form the attitudes of the Taliban?’

Women’s rights was not the only place where there was a price to pay. Western handling of the human rights issues connected with the war took a heavy toll on the West’s claims to impartiality. In trying to link its humanitarian and political work, the UN increasingly jeopardized the humanitarian effort. By the time that the coalition declared war, the ground had been laid for animosity towards an assistance community that was seen as partial.1 Just as the Taliban had become evil to the West, so too had western agencies become the enemy to them. The price for this is being paid today: UN and NGO staff are seen as legitimate targets for attack because they are deemed to be complicit with the US project.

Note

1. That the first international aid worker to be killed was an ICRC staff member sadly does not detract from this argument as, for all ICRC’s cherished and wellmaintained impartiality, neutrality and independence, at the end of the day we are all viewed in the same light.

(Source: Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie, “AFGHANISTAN: The Mirage Of Peace,” Zed Books, London – New York, 2004)

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

Afghanistan is not a wellunderstood country. This is something of a paradox, for a great deal of impressive scholarly work has been devoted to the analysis of its politics, economy and society, and events such as the Soviet invasion of December 1979 and the US overthrow of the Taliban in October-November 2001 earned it a prominent place in the headlines. Yet, all too often, Afghanistan is popularly depicted in terms of crude stereotypes-hirsute warriors, wildeyed religious extremists, women consigned to the margins of social life. The complex realities of this exceptionally diverse territory have somehow not connected with its wider image. The course of events since September 11, 2001 has not greatly improved the situation. Now a different set of misleading images has been injected into the public realm, images which paint Afghanistan as an American success story, a threshold democracy, and a model of what the Bush administration’s approach to ‘nationbuilding’ can achieve. Ordinary people comparing these images have every reason to feel thoroughly confused.

There are, of course, good reasons that help to explain the prevalence of simplistic impressions of Afghanistan. Fathoming the politics of remote countries is always a challenge. Many commentaries have been authored by transient media visitors whose brief has been to capture a little local colour rather than shed light on complexity. And some Afghan political leaders in their own interests have sought to exploit stereotypical images to win support. But perhaps the most important is that the course of events in Afghanistan over the last quarter of a century has given rise to a situation that cannot readily be analysed through the casual deployment of concepts or categories appropriate to less disrupted lands.

The most salient feature of this situation is the breakup of the state. After the communist coup of April 1978, the Afghan authorities lost much of their capacity to raise revenues from domestic sources; and after the Soviet invasion, the Afghan state was substantially dependent on resources supplied by the USSR, amounting to an artificial lifesupport system. With the disintegration of the Soviet state, this aidflow ceased, and the Afghan communist regime collapsed less than four months later. Its successors inherited only the shadow of a state, with compromised legitimacy and limited administrative capacity. Thus, Afghanistan’s challenge has been far greater than that of shaping a government. It is that of rebuilding the state, and establishing its position as the dominant power within Afghanistan’s boundaries. There are few precedents on which one can draw to map out a path that Afghanistan should take, and certainly no magic solutions to its problems.

When the state breaks up, other authority centres typically emerge to discharge some of the functions that the state would normally perform. Some win significant local support; others claim symbolic legitimacy on the basis of the roles they undertake, defending communities and interests from external threats. To posit ‘democracy’ as the only conceivable source of legitimacy in such circumstances is to overlook the intensification of local bonds and the erosion of the willingness to trust strangers, both features of social interaction that one can expect to find when confidence in the state has been severely weakened. But as well as legitimate local authority centres, state breakup also fosters the entrenchment of a range of distinctly unappetising forces: predatory, extractive ‘warlords’; drug traffickers; even terrorists. All have some interest in acting as ‘spoilers’, in blocking the reestablishment of an effective state, and some may flourish with support from state and nonstate actors in neighbouring countries, highlighting the transnational character of the problems with which disrupted states can be confronted.

Afghanistan also runs the risk of being forgotten. The sad tale of its efforts to secure reconstruction assistance highlights the problem. In Tokyo in January 2002, it received substantial pledges of assistance, but as of November 2003, only US$112 million of reconstruction projects had actually been completed. It was in the light of this failure that a further meeting took place in Berlin on 31 March and 1 April 2004. In preparation, the Afghan government provided a detailed programme entitled Securing Afghanistan’s Future which pointed to some key areas of need. The central conclusion of the report was that ‘Afghanistan will require total external assistance in the range of US$27.6 billion over 7 years on commitment basis. A minimum of US$6.3 billion of external financing will be required in the form of direct support to the national budget-preferably more, since budget support helps build the State and its legitimacy.’ At the conclusion of the meeting, a ‘Berlin Declaration’ was published, welcoming the commitments made at the conference. Unfortunately, these amounted to only $8.2 billion for the period March 2004-March 2007, and $4.4 billion for March 2004-March 2005. The Afghan government had little option but to welcome this result, but given the compelling case it had constructed for greater assistance, the outcome was deeply disappointing. In the light of Iraq, Afghanistan is yesterday’s conflict. As I wrote in early 2002, the ‘War on Terrorism and the hunt for Bin Laden put Afghanistan on the front pages. It will soon be off them.’ Yet a powerful lesson of September 11 is that it rarely pays to neglect Afghanistan. If we do, we should not send to know for whom the bell tolls.

These issues are vital to the future of Afghanistan. They are also the central concern of this book.

Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie are superbly placed to reflect on these issues. I first met Jolyon Leslie at Bagram airbase, north of Kabul, in the mid1990s. Khwaja Rawash airport in Kabul was closed for security reasons, and he had driven the then head of the United Nations Special Mission to Afghanistan, Mahmoud Mestiri, to Bagram so that he could leave the country. I managed to hitch a ride back to Kabul with him, and that hour’s conversation established just how effectively he had managed to develop a sense of Afghanistan’s complexities. Subsequent encounters in Afghanistan, and in cities as remote as Amman and Paris, confirmed this original impression. Chris Johnson was working for Oxfam when I first met her, and her experience with numerous aid projects in Afghanistan has made her one of the bestinformed and most informative observers of Afghan reconstruction. The power of their analysis, however, derives from a shared characteristic which social scientists can easily overlook, namely an ability to grasp what one might call the ‘smell and feel’ of a situation. This book is a brilliant example of the illumination that such an ability can offer. Weaving instructive and moving anecdotes together with the fruits of scholarly research, they convey to their readers a sense of daily life in Afghanistan with a vividness that few observers in the past have ever managed to achieve. Some will find their analysis pessimistic, while for others it may appear unduly optimistic. But no one can fail to benefit from reading their thoughtful and moving book.

William Maley
AsiaPacific College of Diplomacy, Australian National University

(Source: Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie, “AFGHANISTAN: The Mirage Of Peace,” Zed Books, London – New York, 2004)

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

The idea for this book first emerged in August 2001 when we realized that between us we had lived in Afghanistan and witnessed the history of international engagement here since 1989-an experience that seemed worth reflecting upon. Events since September 2001 have served to make the subject matter even more important, and of more global relevance.

During the fifteen years that we have known the country, Afghanistan has gone from being an occupied state to one ripped apart by factional fighting, and variously seen by the outside world as ‘fragmented’ or ‘failed’. Then, under the Taliban, it was characterized as a ‘rogue’ state, a country beyond the pale. Finally, it became the state that the outside world wished to recast as the first success of American interventionism and the ‘war on terror’.

The way in which both diplomacy was conducted and assistance given shifted with each stage of these changing characterizations of the country. The lives of Afghans changed dramatically during this period. Those who had always been poor, war pushed them to the edge of survival. Many of the urban middle classes were reduced to poverty, while others went into exile. There were also, of course, those who got rich on the spoils of war. This book tries to track some of these changes and what they have meant to people.

The West has often seen Afghans as a warlike and exotic people, sifting their perceptions through the lens of its own worldview. At times this bears little relation to how Afghans see themselves and their country. Historically this has always been so, but over the last quarter of a century global politics has further shaped the way in which Afghanistan has been seen, and how in turn assistance has been given and people’s rights defended, or not. This book does not, however, set out to provide a detailed social and political history of the country, for others have already done that very ably. Instead, we have sketched enough of the historical outlines for the reader to make sense of the story, and provided references in the text and a select bibliography at the end for those who wish to explore further.

The book is not the result of any research project. Some of the ideas are certainly informed by research one or the other of us has done for other purposes, but mainly these come out of a reflection on our experience of living here as managers of aid projects, sometimes as analysts and policy advisers, but most of all as direct observers of history; of working with and watching the UN, donors and other agencies struggle with issues. Our ideas also come from having many Afghan friends, from endless journeys and of evenings discussing, debating and sharing the experience of war and the struggle for peace. We’ve tried to deepen that understanding by reading; about Afghanistan but also about other parts of the world with experiences different, and yet similar. If the book raises for the reader more questions than answers we will not be unhappy.

This book is the result of a shared process of writing in the course of which it has become impossible in many places to say which of us wrote what. Yet latterly there were periods when we worked together, most of our earlier experiences were separate, in time and place. Most of our firsthand experiences recounted, therefore, are those of one or the other of us, not both. Often it will be obvious to the reader which of us it was; for the rest we decided it didn’t much matter.
The book would never have come into being without the many Afghan friends who have so generously shared their lives and their wisdom with us. Too many of them are no longer alive. We shall not even try to name them, not only because the list would be too long-and even then we would fear missing someone out-but also because the future of the country is still far from certain, and we do not wish to endanger anyone as a result of confidences and opinions that they have shared. For the same reason we have changed some names in the text. We will, however, remain for ever grateful for the way in which they have continues to enrich our lives. The failures of understanding, the omissions and the mistakes are, of course, entirely ours.

Kabul, 2004

(Source: Chris Johnson & Jolyon Leslie, “AFGHANISTAN: The Mirage Of Peace,” Zed Books, London – New York, 2004)

Republished by Kajian Internasional Strategis

Contents

Preface

Foreword

1. The mirage of peace
Illusions of peace
‘Liberation’
Raising the stakes
Bombing in a peace
Losing hearts and minds
New beginnings?
‘Failure is not an option’

2. Identity and society
New values and old
Rooted in Islam
Identity and others
Civil society?
Making decisions, being represented
War and social change
Ethnicity
Closing ranks
Managing the world beyond
Dreaming a past

3. Ideology and difference
Confronting the Taliban
The UN and the Strategic Framework for Afghanistan
An alien way of looking at the world
Could it have been different?
The legacy of confrontation

4. One size fits all-Afghanistan in the new world order
Reasons for war
Early courtship
Changing attitudes
Isolating the Taliban
Aid, rights and the US project
Stitching up a country
Human rights
NGOs-wanting it both ways
Failing the Afghans

5. The makings of a narco state?
Seeding recovery
Or corrupting the state?
Transitional attitudes
Agency responses
Double standards-or caught in a bind?

6. State
State and nation
A short history
The Taliban state
Aid and the state
The UN and the failed state model
The legacy of centralization

7. Bonn and beyond, part I: the political transition
Inauspicious beginnings
Imagining a state
The political transition
Building state failure
Enduring security?

8. Bonn and beyond, part II: the governance transition
The state: who is in control?
International failure
Letting the Afghans down

9. Concluding thoughts
Who’s who
Parties
An Afghan chronology
Further reading
References
Index

Advance praise for this book

“A vivid, intelligent journey through post 9/11 Afghanistan and the wider region. Thoughtful, astute and deeply moving-this account of the postwar crisis in Afghanistan addresses all the major issues of our disturbed world today. The clarity and intellectual forthrightness of this book will help us to understand the violent and confused world we all live in now. This is a deeply sincere book in which the voices of ordinary Afghans describe their past and their future. The most powerful book on post 9/11 Afghanistan that you will be likely to read.” (Ahmed Rashid, author)

“This book provides a devastating critique of US and UN postconflict policies in Afghanistan. Writing out of more than fifteen years’ experience in the country and a deep empathy for the Afghan people, the authors dissect the flawed assumptions, misunderstanding, errors and-in some cases-lack of good faith than have stalled progress in rebuilding this shattered country. It should be required reading for all those interested in why postconflict peace operations can fail-despite good intentions.” (Andrew Mack, The Liu Centre, University of British Columbia in Vancouver)

“Amidst a burgeoning literature on Afghanistan, two seasoned observers treat readers to a trenchant review of decades of international toying with the Afghan people and state. Their outrage is palpable-and contagious.” (Larry Minear, Director, Humanitarianism and War Project, Tufts University)

“This is a refreshing new look at the layers of complexity that characterize assistance to Afghanistan. The style is blessedly free of academic jargon and bureaucratic rhetoric-and enlivened by occasional wry asides. The often blunt analyses of realities on the ground gain credibility from the many years Johnson and Leslie worked within the aid delivery system, heightened by their sustained engagement with Afghans in cities and villages. The difficulties the international community and government have in trying to understand one another are interwoven with unusual insights into the nuances of attitudes rooted in social customs. The recommended operational changes will benefit all who care about the wellbeing of Afghanistan.” (Nancy Hatch Dupree, The ACBAR Resource and Information Centre)

“Johnson and Leslie have brought together a wealth of firsthand understanding of Afghan society and its changing conditions to produce a very rich and moving book. It is informative, thoughtful and unsettling. It makes for very valuable reading.” (Amin Saikal, Professor of Political Science, the Australian National University)

About this book

The West has never understood Afghanistan. It has been portrayed as both an exotic and remote land of turbaned warriors and as a ‘failed’ state requiring our humanitarian assistance. Politically marginal after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Afghanistan’s strategic importance reemerged after 11 September 2001, when the ‘war on terror’ was launched as part of a new generation of international interventions through which those ‘against us’ were to be transformed into those who are ‘for us’. Yet the events of 2001 did not come out of the blue. The turbulent history of the last few decades set processes in motion that not only led to the confrontation, but will also shape the possibilities of transformation in the future.

Drawing on the experience of a decade and a half of living and working in Afghanistan, Chris Johnson and Jolyon Leslie examine what the changes of recent years have meant in terms of Afghans’ sense of their own identity, their social relations and their relationship to the state. It sets their understandings against the often very different perceptions of the West and explores what this has meant in terms of policies towards the country. Finally, the authors critically examine the international engagement in Afghanistan that followed the defeat of the Taliban. They argue that if there is to be a hope of peace and stability, there needs to be a new form of engagement with the country, which respects the rights of Afghans to determine their own political future and recognizes the responsibilities that must follow an intervention in someone else’s land.

About the authors

Chris Johnson lived in Afghanistan from 1996 to April 2004. She worked first for Oxfam, then set up a joint UN/donors/NGO research unit, the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit, where she worked until early 2002. She then undertook a wide range of consultancy work for different organisations concerned with the transition. She is now the Head of Office for UNDP in South Sudan.

Jolyon Leslie is an architect who managed UN rehabilitation programmes in Afghanistan betweeen 1989 and 1995. Between 1997 and 2000, he was the UN regional coordinator in Kabul, and returned to the country in early 2002. He currently manages an urban rehabilitation and conservation programme in the old quarters of Kabul and Herat.

By Michael D. Swaine

Some observers of Asia increasingly emphasize the growing importance of globalization and the forces of political, diplomatic, economic, social, and cultural change as key factors shaping the future of the region. Although such variables are unquestionably significant, the history of Asia, past experience concerning changes in the larger international system, and much of our conceptual understanding of how nations interact to shape their environment clearly indicate that military power remains a critical determinant of the security perceptions and behavior of all nations, and hence of the larger Asian and global systems.

In the case of China, military power has historically been regarded as a pragmatically essential, if not always ethically laudable, requirement for the maintenance of a secure and stable government. One of the primary goals of modern Chinese nationalism has been for the Chinese state to develop a sufficient level of military power to deter future aggression by other states, to support China’s long-standing desire to achieve national wealth and power, and to attain international recognition and respect as a great nation. In addition, many outside observers measure the potential threat generated by China’s rise as a modern nation-state in large part on the basis of the growing size, capabilities, and configuration of its military forces.

Thus, given China’s expanse, its critical geostrategic location astride the Asian landmass, and its overall rapid rate of growth, there is little doubt that its future military posture will exert a decisive impact on the larger security environment and hence on the shape and tenor of those nonmilitary factors mentioned above. This impact will be most keenly felt in Asia. Indeed, China’s current and likely near-to medium-term military posture is essentially limited to the Asian region. The only major exception involves those long-range strategic nuclear weapons systems of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that present a retaliatory, second-strike capability against targets outside Asia, for example, the United States homeland and European parts of the former Soviet Union. The rest of China’s strategic forces, as well as all of its conventional forces, are oriented exclusively toward regional objectives.

In order to fully assess the current and future significance of China’s regional military posture, one must first identify China’s overall defense policy objectives and intended military capabilities relevant to Asia. This is covered in the first section of this chapter. The second section outlines the major features of China’s current and likely future military capabilities and deployments in Asia. The third section assesses the possible implications of the preceding analysis for Asian security, including an evaluation of the impact of China’s current and likely future capabilities and deployments upon key countries. The overall analysis strongly indicates that China’s military posture in Asia is experiencing fairly rapid and significant change, marked most notably by a growing capacity to deploy forces along its maritime periphery. This expanding capability, along with China’s overall growing regional military presence, will increasingly affect the diplomatic and security calculations of key Asian actors, and of the United States.

REGIONAL DEFENSE POLICY OBJECTIVES AND RELATED CAPABILITIES AND FORCE STRUCTURE

China’s military posture in Asia is shaped by several fundamental defense policy objectives. First, and foremost, Chinese forces are deployed to deter or defeat possible threats or attacks directed against China’s heartland, and especially its economically critical eastern coastline. The most likely sources of such threats or attacks include major regional powers such as Japan, India, and Russia, as well as U.S. forces based in Asia, in particular in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.

China’s regional military posture is also designed to deal with a range of possible "local war" conflict scenarios that might occur along China’s periphery, especially in maritime areas. Such conflicts would likely arise in response to Chinese efforts to defend an array of sovereignty and territorial interests, such as claims to the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands near Japan, to Ta iwan, to areas along the border with India, and to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. They could also occur as a result of confrontations over hotspots affecting the broader regional balance, such as the Korean peninsula and the Indo-Pakistani imbroglio.

More broadly, China’s regional military developments and deployments are also intended to support-either directly or indirectly-Beijing’s overall foreign policy and security objectives in Asia. For example, the military supports in various ways (e.g., via senior military officer delegation visits) the development of more cooperative diplomatic and political relations between China and other regional states. The strengthening of the Chinese military also supports the expansion of Chinese diplomatic and military influence and leverage over nearby strategic territories claimed by Beijing, such as the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea; adds to Chinese influence within key regional entities, such as multinational economic, political, and military organizations; and enhances China’s overall global and regional stature, particularly through the display of high-technology weaponry and efforts to establish a presence beyond China’s borders. Over the long term, Chinese military power is presumably also intended to support critical strategic military objectives, such as the maintenance of access to vital oceanic routes in the event of conflict.

The above defense objectives clearly imply a significant transformation in China’s past strategic outlook, from that of a continental power requiring large land forces for defense against threats to its internal borders, to that of a combined continental/maritime power with a diverse range of domestic and external security needs. Overall, in the conventional realm, China is shifting from a continental orientation requiring large land forces for "in-depth" defense of the homeland to a combined continental/maritime orientation requiring a smaller, more mobile, and more sophisticated "active peripheral defense" capability for both inland and especially coastal areas. Such notions are based, in turn, upon several new Chinese strategic principles and combat methods such as "strategic frontiers," "strategic deterrence," and "a greater stress on gaining the initiative by striking first."¹

This shift requires three general types of capabilities for China’s regionally oriented forces:

• The ability to respond rapidly, take the initiative, attain superiority quickly, prevent escalation, and resolve any conflict on favorable terms;
• The ability to conduct preemptive offensive strikes for self-defense as well as use forces for both conventional and nuclear deterrence and coercion;
• The eventual development of limited power projection capabilities in Asia, enabling a prolonged sea presence and limited land and sea area denial; sea area control is probably not a desired capability over the near-to medium-term.

Over the medium to long term, the above defense policy and capabilities objectives translate into a specific set of force structure requirements. In the area of conventional forces, these include:

• A smaller, more flexible, better motivated, highly trained and well-equipped ground force centered on rapid reaction units, with limited yet significant armored fixed-wing and helicopter transport and assault, airborne drop, and amphibious power projection capabilities, as well as a small but well-trained special operations force (SOF);²
• A robust green-to-blue-water naval capability centered on a new generation of surface combatants with improved air defense, anti-submarine warfare (ASW), and antiship capabilities, modern conventional attack submarines with advanced torpedoes and cruise missile capabilities, an improved naval air arm, and greatly improved replen-ishment-at-sea capabilities;³
• A more versatile, modern air force, with longer-range interceptor/strike aircraft, improved early warning (EW) and air defense capabilities, extended and close air support, and longer-range transport, lift, and midair refueling capacities;⁴
• A joint service tactical operations doctrine utilizing more sophisticated command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, and strategic reconnaissance (C4ISR), early warning, and battle management systems, and the use of both airborne and satellite-based assets to improve detection, tracking, targeting, and strike capabilities, and to enhance operational coordination among the armed services.⁵

In the strategic realm, China possesses a small, retaliatory "countervalue" deterrent force, centered on a growing array of mobile short-, medium-, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. A significant portion of these forces is oriented toward targets within Asia, most likely including Japan, India, Asian regions of Russia, and key forward U.S. air and naval bases in the Western Pacific such as Guam. China is currently seeking to improve the survivability and potency of these forces.⁶ It is also likely contemplating the acquisition of a more sophisticated "counterforce" missile capability to defend against America’s technologically superior conventional "in-theater" strike assets. This transition implies, over the medium to long term, the deployment in Asia of:

• A large number (possibly several hundred or more than one thou-sand)⁷ of short-, medium-, and intermediate-range solid-fueled, mobile ballistic missiles (with a range of less than 5,500 kilometers) and short-range cruise missiles, with increased accuracy, and some with both nuclear and conventional capabilities;
• Smaller, more powerful nuclear warheads with potential multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) or multiple reentry vehicle (MRV) capabilities;
• Modern strategic surveillance, early warning (EW), and battle management systems, with advanced land, airborne, and space-based C4ISR assets applicable to Asia and beyond.⁸

CURRENT AND LIKELY FUTURE REGIONAL CAPABILITIES

The Chinese military’s current force structure, training, and deployment patterns suggest that the PLA is currently not fully configured or trained to realize most of the above aspirations and objectives guiding China’s military posture in Asia. At present, the PLA possesses the following broad capabilities relevant to Asian contingencies:

• A highly effective capability to undertake "defense-in-depth" against any conceivable effort to invade and seize Chinese territory, especially by neighboring Asian countries; however, China does not have a very effective defense against precision long-range attacks against Chinese territory from more than 200 kilometers beyond China’s borders;
• Effective ground force-based power projection across land borders against smaller regional powers to within approximately 100 kilometers, to inflict punishment and to deter attacks along China’s periphery;
• Effective power projection to dislodge smaller regional powers from nearby disputed land and maritime territories such as various border areas in Northeast, Central, and Southeast Asia, and the Paracel and Spratly Islands; only a limited capability to hold and seize such territories, especially against combined regional forces;
• An extremely limited ability to project force against the territory or forces of the most militarily capable states near China, especially Russia, India, and Japan; the greatest potential threats to these countries are presented by ballistic and cruise missiles and, in the case of India and especially Russia, perhaps by air and ground forces deployed within contiguous border areas;
• The ability to undertake intensive, short-duration air and naval attacks on Taiwan, as well as more prolonged air, naval, and possibly ground attacks; China’s ability to prevail under either scenario would be highly dependent on Taiwan’s political and military response, and especially on any military actions taken by the United States and Japan;
• An effective second-strike, countervalue-based deterrent against nuclear or other WMD threats or attacks from within the region; China’s confidence in this area has arguably been low in recent years, but is probably increasing as a result of ongoing improvements in missile capabilities.⁹

As these capabilities indicate, China’s current military posture in Asia is primarily oriented toward defending Chinese territory (and in particular Beijing, China’s economically dynamic eastern coastline, and major communications hubs) against a direct attack while deterring any WMD-based threats or pressures.

However, Beijing is also attempting to acquire a range of conventional offensive-oriented capabilities that, if attained, would likely enable the PLA not only to undertake sizable coordinated (i.e., joint) actions against nearby countries and territories such as Taiwan and the Spratly Islands, but also to achieve the more ambitious defense objectives outlined above. These desired capabilities apparently include:

• A multiregimental military air- and sea-lift capacity;
• A multiregimental amphibious attack capability;
• A demonstrated offshore medium-range bomber or strike aircraft capability;
• An operational in-flight refueling capacity for more than one hundred aircraft (approximately four regiments);
• The demonstrated ability to mount sustained naval operations;
• The demonstrated ability to deploy special operations force (SOF) and marine units beyond China’s borders, probably totaling several brigades;
• The capability to undertake true joint operations or coordinated deployments across military regions;
• An airborne early warning and control capability and a strategic warning and real-time surveillance and reconnaissance capability.¹⁰

In order to attain such capabilities, the PLA must first overcome a variety of largely systemic obstacles that plague the entire military modernization effort. These include deficiencies in command and control, air defense, logistics, and communications; inadequate training for critical operators such as fighter pilots and for carrying out sizable offshore operations; persistent problems in the military education system; budget limitations; the lack of critical long-range support systems (e.g., surveillance and targeting); and nagging problems in defense research and development, technology, and the production of indigenous weaponry.¹¹

Assuming that Beijing is able to overcome such problems and sustain or even accelerate somewhat the current tempo of its modernization program, one might expect that China could attain the following overall regional military capabilities by 2007-¹⁰:

• The ability to conduct limited¹² air and sea denial (as opposed to sea control) operations up to 250 miles from China’s continental coastline;
• The ability to strike a wide range of civilian and military targets in East, Southeast, and South Asia¹³ with a large number (perhaps more than one thousand) of nuclear or conventionally armed short-and medium-range ballistic missiles, as well as with several hundred medium-range bombers armed with conventional bombs and cruise missiles;
• The ability to transport and deploy one to two divisions (approximately 15,000-30,000 fully equipped soldiers) within one hundred miles of China’s continental borders via land, sea, and air transport;
• The ability to survive a preemptive strike against China’s nuclear facilities and retaliate within the region (and beyond) with a significant number of improved-accuracy intermediate-and long-range land-and sea-based ballistic and land-attack cruise missiles;
• The ability to overwhelm any likely space-based or air-breathing missile defense system deployed in Asia.

If one projects the above trends for another ten years or so, to the year 2020, one might expect the following general military capabilities:

• The ability to patrol a single non-carrier surface and subsurface battle group within one thousand nautical miles of China’s continental coastline;
• The ability to conduct both sea and air denial operations within five hundred nautical miles of China’s continental coastline;
• The ability to undertake a sizable naval blockade, with air support, of islands within two hundred nautical miles of China’s continental coastline;
• The ability to transport and deploy three to four divisions (approximately 45,000-60,000 fully equipped soldiers) within two hundred miles of China’s continental borders via land, sea, and air transport.

However, these are rough estimates.14 Equally important, the ability to undertake the above military operations does not imply either intent or inevitable success. As indicated above, China’s apparent objective, beyond deterring and defending against a direct attack on Chinese territory, is to protect Chinese territorial interests, to successfully prosecute a variety of possible "local war" scenarios that might emerge along China’s periphery, and to possess sufficient capabilities to augment China’s expanding political, economic, and diplomatic influence in Asia. None of these objectives necessarily implies an aggressive design. Moreover, China’s ability to prevail in any application of military force in Asia will depend significantly on the specific threat perceptions, military doctrines, and capabilities of China’s neighbors.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE ASIAN SECURITY ENVIRONMENT

In the late 1990s, one American PLA expert observed that a concern about China’s growing power and influence was only one, and usually not the primary, factor driving military modernization and deployment patterns in the region.¹⁵ Moreover, PRC power projection capabilities at that time were viewed as quite rudimentary, and concerns about such capabilities were counterbalanced by China’s strong emphasis on political accommodation, its increasing economic integration with the region, and the continued regionwide presence of and regional links with U.S. forces. These factors encouraged lower-cost, nonmilitary approaches to dealing with China’s rise, such as emphases on more practicable, normalized bilateral relations, increasing economic interdependence, and the enmeshment of China in an increasing number of multilateral structures throughout Asia.¹⁶

These general observations remain largely true today for most countries of the region, despite a significant increase in Chinese defense spending and resulting military capabilities since the late 1990s. Looking at the region as a whole, there is little evidence that China’s program of military modernization and its pattern of force deployments have thus far generated a broad-based military reaction from other Asian nations in the form of deliberate force buildups or other types of compensatory or anticipatory moves indicative of an arms race or security dilemma. In general, few Asian nations explicitly refer to China’s expanding military acquisitions as a justification for their own military programs.

On the other hand, one can also perceive what appears to be a diffuse, albeit growing, impact of "the China factor" on regional threat perceptions, defense planning, and military acquisitions in certain areas and among specific nations (discussed below). Many regional strategists are particularly concerned with China’s emerging maritime-oriented security priorities, the steady expansion of the PLA’s operational capabilities-especially those relating to both naval and air power-and its foreign weapons and military technology acquisitions.

A more detailed understanding of the relationship between China’s evolving military posture and regional perceptions and behavior can be gleaned from a closer examination of the most significant subregions and major states, in particular those key areas along China’s maritime periphery, including Northeast Asia, maritime Southeast Asia, and India.¹⁷

Northeast Asia

Japan. In the past, Japanese strategists focused far more attention on the prospects for social and economic instability in China than upon any potential Chinese military threat. In recent years, however, military analysts, some politicians, and even segments of the Japanese public have expressed concern over the possible adverse impact upon Japan’s security of current trends in Chinese military modernization and deployments.

At present, Japan’s air and naval capabilities are greatly superior to those of the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) and PLA Navy (PLAN). Its air force includes a large number of F-15s and a growing number of newer F-2 fighters, as well as several sophisticated airborne early warning (EW) aircraft that are unmatched by the Chinese. Moreover, Japanese pilots train between 50 and 100 percent more than their PLAAF counterparts, and their training system is more technologically sophisticated.¹⁸ The Japanese navy operates several Aegis-equipped destroyers, while China’s naval surface tonnage is reportedly only about three-quarters as large as Japan’s and is far less sophisticated. Japan’s Coast Guard is "almost as large as the entire Chinese surface combat fleet and in several respects better equipped." These Japanese capabilities resulted from significant increases in Tokyo’s defense budget during the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁹

Thus, in general, China does not possess sufficient air and naval power projection capabilities to pose a major threat to Japanese forces or territory at present, nor will it in the foreseeable future. However, one notable exception is in the area of ballistic missiles. The PLA is deploying a growing number of increasingly accurate, mobile short- and medium-range ballistic missiles in South and Southeast China, many of them within range of Japan. Such weapons could be used to threaten or to attack Japanese targets or U.S. military bases located in the Japanese home islands, especially in the event of a serious crisis over Taiwan. This potential threat has added to Japan’s existing incentives-based primarily on the growing security threat posed by North Korean missiles-to expand its program of research on a ballistic missile defense system.²⁰

More broadly, Japanese statements and policies have been more critical of Chinese military behavior since the mid-1990s, in response to Beijing’s nuclear tests, its clashes with the Philippines and Vietnam in the Spratly Islands, Sino-Japanese tensions over rival claims to the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands, and China’s use of coercive force toward Taiwan. As a result, Tokyo’s expanding definition of its security role in the Asia-Pacific-as envisioned by the U.S.-Japan Defense Guidelines Review of the mid-1990s- partly reflects a concern with China’s growing military prowess. In response, China has expressed concern over the "buildup" of Japan’s military and urged Tokyo to move with caution.²¹

In the final analysis, however, most informed observers in Japan believe that China remains at present only a hypothetical future military threat, albeit one that is of increasing concern to a growing number of Japanese citizens. Moreover, many Japanese-as many other Asians-hope that China’s growing military capabilities can be constrained or blunted by successfully integrating Beijing into the multilateral international and regional security systems. Most Japanese appear to believe this effort has a good chance of succeeding, as long as China is not isolated or contained. Thus, the level of potential military threat from China has not been sufficient to dissuade Tokyo from seeking closer bilateral and multilateral cooperation with Beijing. Indeed, the search for such cooperation has arguably increased as Sino-Japanese economic ties have deepened in recent years.²²

South Korea. China’s growing military capabilities have significant potential implications for South Korea, given Beijing’s close proximity to South Korea’s territorial borders, and China’s historically close political, economic, and security ties with North Korea. In past decades, China’s military posture in Northeast Asia was of great concern to Seoul largely because of the fear that the PLA might support Pyongyang in a conflict with the South. As recently as the mid-1990s, South Korean observers cited ongoing military-to-military contacts between China and North Korea as a significant security concern.²³ These security fears have declined greatly in recent years, however, in large part as a result of China’s opening to the outside world, its reduced support for the North Korean regime, and especially the enormous improvement that has occurred in China’s relations with South Korea.²⁴ Seoul fears that growing Chinese military capabilities might threaten the South in a future conflict on the Korean peninsula are also reduced by the fact that the chances of such a conflict are now regarded as very low by many South Korean citizens and politicians.²⁵

Today, little evidence exists to suggest that enhanced Chinese ground, air, naval, or ballistic missile capabilities are either directed at South Korea or would be used against South Korea in the event of a Korean conflict. Even though South Korean defense planners have gradually downgraded their assessment of the urgency of the DPRK threat in recent years and have begun to plan for a "post-DPRK security environment" in which operational capacities beyond the peninsula will matter most, China has apparently not emerged as a major object of concern. In fact, some South Koreans view Japan as a more significant potential security concern than either Pyongyang or Beijing.²⁶

Nonetheless, to some outside analysts, concern about growing Chinese power explains references by various South Korean military officials to the need for a more sophisticated "strategic force"-including AWACS, more indigenous submarines and destroyers, naval-launched attack helicopters, air-refueling aircraft, more sophisticated missiles, antimissile systems, and advanced fighters-to deal with deepening conflicts of interest in the region and threats outside the peninsula.²⁷ Yet even though South Korea is developing the ability to project force into Northeast Asia, "its capabilities are minimal in relation to its neighbors and are likely to remain minimal for some time to come."²⁸

Taiwan. China’s military posture in Asia obviously provokes the greatest response from Taiwan, and for good reason. Since the mid-to late 1990s, China’s military has been heavily oriented toward developing a credible threat of force and a range of coercive measures that could be directed toward the island, both to deter what is viewed as an increasingly separatist-minded Taiwan from achieving de jure independence and, if necessary, to prevail in a military confrontation with Taiwan and possibly the United States.²⁹

In response to this growing PLA capability, Taiwan is attempting-with the assistance of the United States-to carry out a fundamental restructuring and streamlining of its armed forces and to acquire a range of new capabilities and operational procedures. These efforts center on the attempt to create a smaller, more integrated, joint and balanced force, possessing smaller, lighter, more mobile ground units, greatly improved naval and air capabilities, better surveillance and battle management systems, quicker response times, increased survivability against missile and air attack, and enhanced deterrence capabilities. This highly ambitious modernization and reform program confronts many problems, however, and has shown only sporadic success to date, despite extensive and growing levels of U.S. assistance.³⁰

Nonetheless, if Washington continues to press hard for change and the Taiwan government continues to respond positively, albeit incompletely, to such pressure, there is little doubt that advances will continue over the medium term, that is, within the next five to seven years, in areas such as C4ISR, jointness, and training, surface naval combatants, ballistic missile defense systems, long-distance radar, and ASW systems. In addition, the size, configuration, and orientation of the armed forces will continue to adjust to the demands of creating a more credible set of deterrence and defense capabilities. Yet it remains far from certain that such developments will together produce improvements in Taiwan’s deterrent and war- fighting capabilities sufficient and timely enough to influence greatly both Beijing’s overall political, diplomatic, and military strategy toward Taiwan and any specific Chinese decision to apply coercive measures or outright force in a crisis or military conflict. Specifically, the U.S. government worries that Taiwan’s defense reforms and modernization will not take effect early enough to deal with the possible emergence of several major PRC military capabilities by 2007-10 or even earlier.³¹

Overall, the interactive military dynamic between China and Taiwan has produced a type of offensive-defensive arms race that arguably constitutes the most dangerous consequence of China’s regional military posture to date.

Maritime Southeast Asia

Among Southeast Asian nations, China’s developing military posture arguably exerts the greatest effect in the maritime arena. As suggested above, there is growing concern among some defense analysts and political leaders in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines that China will employ its growing naval and air capabilities to influence the security environment in adverse ways. The concern among these observers is not so much that China will apply a highly coercive strategy, but rather that China’s size and aggregate capabilities will fundamentally alter strategic realities and power perceptions in its favor.³² China already possesses the capability to overwhelm any combination of maritime Southeast Asian states in naval force-on-force encounters, assuming no extraregional assistance is forthcoming.

Many ASEAN countries have in recent years acquired some impressive combat aviation and antisurface warfare technologies, but these capabilities exist in relatively small numbers. Moreover, the integration of these technologies into the existing force structure will likely prove difficult (except in the case of Singapore), the combat proficiency of all Southeast Asian operators-barring the Singaporean Air Force-is an open question, and it is unlikely, in any case, that the more sophisticated aircraft and naval platforms of Southeast Asian states would ever face the PLAAF or the PLAN in any unified or coordinated fashion.³³

In most contingencies that can be envisaged (e.g., territorial disputes in the South China Sea, or efforts to control vital maritime lines of communication or commerce), Chinese naval and air forces would have a considerable advantage vis-à-vis the forces of one or even several ASEAN states.³⁴ This will especially hold true once China acquires the ability to conduct routine in-flight refueling of fighter-bombers.

Despite this overall assessment, few Southeast Asian nations have exhibited any clear efforts to acquire new military capabilities in direct response to growing Chinese regional power, or to coordinate their military doctrines to deal collectively with a potential Chinese military threat. The only exception is the Philippines. The Mischief Reef incident of early 1995 provided an incentive to expand the Philippine defense budget to acquire warships and aircraft. Moreover, after the 1995-96 Taiwan Strait crisis, Philippine officials sought low-cost military equipment from the United States, including attack helicopters, air defense radars, multirole fighters, frigates, and coastal defense craft with Harpoon missiles.³⁵ The Mischief Reef incident also seemed to incite interest in Malaysia in acquiring diesel electric submarines. However, no clear military response to China’s increasing regional capabilities or behavior has occurred in Vietnam and Indonesia,³⁶ and Beijing’s relations with Singapore and Thailand remain extremely good. Indeed, the latter country has been a significant recipient of Chinese weaponry for many years. This is also true for Myanmar, which has arguably benefited the most among Southeast Asian nations from China’s increasing military capabilities. Beginning in the early 1990s, Sino-Myanmar military links expanded significantly, and Beijing supplied well over $1 billion in armaments, including fighter aircraft, patrol boats, artillery, tanks, antiaircraft guns, and missiles. Some observers also believe that the Chinese military is involved in a Myanmar naval base at Hianggyik Island and a radar station at Coco Island. Such a PLA presence could be used by China for signals intelligence (SIGINT) purposes and even to deploy forces in the future, thereby greatly influencing traffic through the Strait of Malacca and the strategic environment in the Indian Ocean.³⁷ Overall, most other Southeast Asian states have sought to avoid offending China or suggesting that their military procurement is in any way responsive to a "China threat."³⁸

India

Aside from Taiwan and perhaps the Philippines, China’s expanding regional military posture is arguably of greatest concern to India. Yet this concern is certainly not new. New Delhi has been focused on the direct potential threat posed by Chinese forces since the PLA decisively defeated the Indian military in the Sino-Indian border conflict of 1962. Moreover, since the 1970s, India’s security concerns regarding China have been augmented by its anxiety over the considerable conventional and nuclear assistance that Beijing has provided to Pakistan. India’s subsequent program of military modernization has thus resulted to a significant degree from such concerns. During the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, this program suffered considerably due to major economic and financial restructurings, cutbacks in defense spending, declines in military research and development, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, India’s major supplier of military hardware and technology.³⁹

In more recent years, however, India has managed to devote a growing number of resources to military modernization, partly to increase pressure on Pakistan, partly to deal with China’s recent program of military modernization, and partly in support of an overall strategy designed to raise its strategic profile in Asia. New Delhi is now increasing its level of defense spending by very significant amounts (with the air force receiving the lion’s share of new funding), developing larger numbers of indigenous weaponry, and again acquiring major weapons systems and other forms of defense assistance from Russia, as well as from new niche suppliers such as Israel. This effort reflects a larger, ambitious military modernization program affecting all of India’s armed services.

Today, India’s forces along its lengthy border with China are generally regarded as superior in numbers and quality to Chinese border forces (as shown in incidents with China in 1967 and 1986-87), and there is little sign that this assessment will change in the foreseeable future. In part this is because India continues to improve its most relevant capabilities for countering any potential Chinese thrust across the border by upgrading or acquiring new aircraft, missiles, artillery, command and communications facilities, and radars. Moreover, improvements in the Indian navy, including improvement to destroyers and submarines and even the acquisition of a new aircraft carrier, are being undertaken at least partly in order to counter the expected emergence of a more blue-water-capable Chinese navy.⁴⁰

Because of these ongoing force developments, as well as the significant improvement in Sino-Indian political and diplomatic relations since the 1970s, few Indian defense analysts expect the PLA’s modernization to alter the conventional balance of forces in South Asia or to result in a more assertive Chinese policy in the near to medium term. Moreover, China has for some time been most interested in developing cooperative ties with India, through high-level leadership dialogue, the pursuit of various political-military confidence-building measures (CBMs), and efforts to clarify much of the Line of Actual Control (LOAC) along the border.⁴¹ Overall, from the Indian perspective, China seems far more interested than it once was in furthering good relations with New Delhi, maintaining domestic stability, improving its overall military capabilities, and handling security problems along its eastern and southeastern borders (i.e., regarding Taiwan and the Korean peninsula).

On the other hand, Indian analysts remain concerned about arms transfers from China into South Asia and nearby areas, including Pakistan, Myan-mar, Bangladesh, Iran, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, as well as the development of air and defense ties with all of these Indian Ocean littoral countries.⁴² According to at least one knowledgeable observer, China’s post-1988 strategic ties and military relations with Myanmar in particular have "potential strategic implications almost as serious as Beijing’s ties with Pakistan. It allows China to have two major allies on the two wings of India while it straddles the northern borders."⁴³

However, of even greater concern to India are China’s evolving strategic capabilities, centered on its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. For many Indians, these programs constitute by far the most serious immediate as well as long-term security threat. In response to this threat, India has sought to expand its own nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capabilities. It reaffirmed to the world its nuclear weapons capability by exploding a nuclear weapon in 1998, and it is devoting considerable resources to the development of both medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles that are capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to any major city in China.⁴⁴

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE

From a broad perspective, the acquisition by China of even rough approximations of the kind of military capabilities projected above-and especially the development of the technical and operational capabilities to effectively control some battle spaces out to about 250 miles from China’s frontiers- would have several significant implications for the overall security situation in the Asia Pacific.

First, if sustained over many years, China’s military modernization program could prompt more Asian states to focus their own defense modernization efforts on potential vulnerabilities created by the Chinese buildup. In particular, the defense budgets, force structure plans, acquisition programs, and deployment patterns of key Asian militaries could more clearly reflect the need to counter growing Chinese power, especially air and naval power. Such a disturbing trend would become far more likely if China’s political and economic integration into the region were to falter significantly or confidence in the ability of the United States to effectively counter advances in Chinese military capabilities and deployments were to drop. Without a continued strong U.S. presence, Asian alarm over growing Chinese capabilities could eventually fuel a destabilizing arms buildup in the region as countries such as Japan, the Philippines, Indonesia, India, and Vietnam seek to establish or maintain a military advantage over China in key areas. Such developments could significantly increase Chinese tensions with Japan over the U.S.-Japan security alliance, with ASEAN over the Spratly Islands, and with the United States and Western European states over continued access to Asian resources, technology, and markets. Alternatively, several Asian countries might gradually become more pro-Chinese in their foreign economic and diplomatic policies or less supportive of U.S. policies in the region, especially if Asian countries were unable to develop military forces to effectively counter the sort of increased Chinese capabilities described above.

Closely related to the previous factors, the acquisition by China of the above capabilities could significantly increase the costs and risks involved in deploying U.S. forces in East Asia, especially over the long term. For example, the acquisition by China of significant sea denial or control capabilities, or the continued deployment of both short- and medium-range missiles, possibly possessing both conventional and nuclear warheads, could complicate the U.S. calculus regarding whether, when, and how to deploy U.S. forces in the region to deter or reassure friends and allies, and more generally constrain Washington’s freedom of action in a crisis. For some observers, such a situation would fundamentally weaken, if not destroy, the entire strategy of forward engagement and put major strains on U.S. relations with friends and allies in Asia. Of course, this problem would be made much worse if the United States were to reduce the physical presence or qualitative capabilities of its forward presence in Asia. Either reduction could seriously undermine confidence among regional states.

Obviously, the above developments would have extremely important implications for the future security of Taiwan. As a result of the 1995-96 tensions over Taiwan and former Taiwan president Lee Teng-hui’s enunciation of the so-called "two states" theory of 1999,⁴⁵ China’s weapons programs now place an increased emphasis on acquiring capabilities to strengthen the credibility of Beijing’s military options against the island, and to deter the United States from deploying aircraft carriers and other forces in an effort to counter such options. As soon as 2010, the increased Chinese capabilities described above could lead China’s leaders to attempt a variety of military actions against Taiwan, including another, more intensive round of military intimidation through various exercises and missile "tests," a naval blockade, a limited direct missile or air attack, and even perhaps limited ground incursions, all in an attempt to establish a fait accompli in Beijing’s favor that the United States would find difficult to counter.

It is unlikely, however, that the Chinese leadership would attempt such actions unless they believed that Taiwan were about to achieve permanent independence. Moreover, it should be stressed that the ability of China to prevail in any deployment of military force against Taiwan, even by the year 2020, is by no means certain. As suggested above, China’s relative military capabilities vis-à-vis both Taiwan and the United States will be a far more important indicator of China’s willingness to employ force than the sort of absolute capabilities projected above.

Overall, the above analysis indicates that China is in the process of acquiring new military capabilities and undertaking new force deployments that will fundamentally alter security perceptions in the region and stimulate a more widespread military response among the major powers. Although this dynamic is not fated to produce conflict-even in the case of Taiwan-it will likely increase the chances of regional tension and instability, thus requiring more deliberate and coordinated political, diplomatic, and military efforts. The United States will, by necessity, play the most decisive role in this effort.

NOTES:

1. The Chinese principle of "strategic frontier" is intended to encompass the full range of competitive areas or boundaries implied by the notion of comprehensive national strength, including land, maritime, and outer space frontiers, as well as more abstract strategic realms related to China’s economic and technological development. The principle of "strategic deterrence" was formulated to emphasize the nonviolent use of military power to deter war or achieve political or diplomatic ends, in contrast to the traditional Chinese emphasis on the use of military forces in actual combat. An increased emphasis on gaining the initiative by striking first (rather than waiting for the enemy to strike) reflects the need to act quickly and decisively to pre-empt an attack, restore lost territories, protect economic resources, or resolve a conflict before it escalates. For further details on these and other principles basic to China’s post-Cold War defense doctrine, see David Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), especially chapter 3. Also see Paul H. B. Godwin, "Changing Concepts of Doctrine, Strategy, and Operations in the People’s Liberation Army 1978-87," China Quarterly 112 (December 1987): 573-90.
2. See Dennis Blasko, "PLA Ground Forces after the 16th Party Congress," paper presented at the CAPS-RAND conference, "Whither the PLA after the 16th Party Congress?" Taipei, Taiwan, November 2002. Also see Blasko, "Statement before the U.S.-China Security Review Commission, December 7, 2001," in Compilation of Hearings Held Before the U.S.-China Security Review Commission, Fiscal Years 2001 and 2002 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2002), 897-909, for a detailed discussion of the ground force component of China’s rapid reaction forces.
3. Bernard D. Cole, The Great Wall at Sea: China’s Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001); and Christopher D. Yung, People’s War at Sea: Chinese Naval Power in the Twenty-first Century (Alexandria, VA: Center for Naval Analysis, 1996).
4. Kenneth W. Allen, Glenn Krumel, and Jonathan D. Pollack, China’s Air Force Enters the 21st Century (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1995).
5. Mark Stokes, China’s Strategic Modernization: Implications for the United States (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 1999).
6. China’s long-standing "minimum deterrence" doctrine generally assumes that China would absorb an initial nuclear attack rather than undertake a launch-under-attack (LUA) or a launch-on-warning (LOW). Perhaps most important, the effectiveness of this deterrence hinges on the inability of an adversary to destroy all of China’s WMD capabilities, especially its strategic missile force, in a first strike.
7. The number of Asia-oriented missiles that China deploys over the next ten to fifteen years will undoubtedly depend significantly not only on the state of tensions within the region (and especially regarding Taiwan), but also on whether the United States and key Asian nations such as Japan and India deploy an effective missile defense system in the region.
8. For a detailed assessment of the doctrine and force structure objectives of the PLA, see Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military, especially chapters 3 and 4; and Harold Brown et al., Chinese Military Power, report of the Independent Task Force (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2003), especially 37-62. Also see Michael D. Swaine, "The Modernization of the People’s Liberation Army: Prospects and Implications for Northeast Asia," NBR Analysis 5, no. 3 (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research, 1994); and David Shambaugh and Richard H. Yang, eds., China’s Military in Transition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
9. The preceding estimates are my own, derived from more than a decade of studying the PLA. For a recent assessment of PLA capabilities that tends to reinforce these judgments, see Brown et al., Chinese Military Power, 24-62. Also see Paul Godwin, "From Continent to Periphery: PLA Doctrine, Strategy, and Capabilities Towards 2000," in China’s Military in Transition.
10. Brown et al., Chinese Military Power, 37-62; and Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military.
11. Brown et al., Chinese Military Power, and Shambaugh, Modernizing China’s Military.
12. The word "limited" here denotes the ability to carry out sea denial activities primarily against a small number of surface and subsurface assets in selected, limited areas over short periods of time.
13. Such targets would theoretically include all major metropolitan areas in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and India, and most major U.S. military installations in Asia.
14. Again, these estimates are my own. See Michael D. Swaine and Ashley J. Tel-lis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy: Past, Present, and Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2000), 164-65.
15. According to Bates Gill, regional military buildups and deployments were driven by external security concerns such as piracy, the protection of offshore resources and territorial claims, and the maintenance of open and safe shipping lanes; a growing need among many Asian countries to address the deepening obsolescence of their military forces; and a desire to counter emerging vulnerabilities associated with the enhanced influence of major regional powers or of local rivalries, such as those between North and South Korea, India and Pakistan, Japan and North Korea, and among some Southeast Asian states. These latter concerns were magnified by the fear in some quarters that America’s long-standing role in the region as a security balancer or broker might diminish in response to the collapse of the Soviet security threat. See Bates Gill, "Chinese Military Modernization and Arms Proliferation in the Asia-Pacific," in In China’s Shadow: Regional Perspectives on Chinese Foreign Policy and Military Development, ed. Jonathan D. Pollack and Richard H. Yang (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1998), 10-36.
16. Jonathan D. Pollack, "Asian-Pacific Responses to a Rising China," in In China’s Shadow, 2-3.
17. Russia and Central Asia are not included in this more detailed assessment of regional reactions to China’s military posture because these areas have thus far displayed little in the way of a significant reaction to Beijing’s military modernization effort. Of course, Russia has always been concerned, to varying degrees, with the potential security threat posed by China’s military, given its long border with China, its recent history of armed conflict with Beijing over disputed boundaries, and the much longer history of Sino-Russian tension and distrust. Moreover, an arguably growing number of Russian observers express concern about China’s current military buildup. But such views do not constitute the mainstream in Russian leadership circles. To the contrary, Sino-Russian relations have improved enormously since the late 1980s, and Moscow’s economic problems have resulted in China’s emergence as a major purchaser of Russian weapons and military assistance. In addition, the low level of threat from China sensed by most Russian leaders, combined with the major overall decline of the Russian armed forces, have obviated Russia’s need or ability to strengthen significantly military deployments relevant to China.
18. Eric Heginbotham and Richard J. Samuels, "Japan," in Strategic Asia 2002-03: Asian Aftershocks, ed. Richard J. Ellings and Aaron L. Friedberg with Michael Wills (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2002), 96-97.
19. Ibid., 96.
20. For an assessment of Japan’s ballistic missile defense program and its relation to China, see Michael D. Swaine, Rachel Swanger, and Takashi Kawakami, Japan and Ballistic Missile Defense (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2001).
21. Tsuneo Watanabe, "Changing Japanese Views of China: A New Generation Moves Toward Realism and Nationalism," in The Rise of China in Asia: Security Implications, ed. Carolyn W. Pumphrey (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2002), 176-83; and Gill, "Chinese Military Modernization and Arms Proliferation in the Asia-Pacific," 29-30.
22. Heginbotham and Samuels, "Japan," 112.
23. Taeho Kim, "Korean Perspectives on PLA Modernization and the Future East Asian Security Environment," in In China’s Shadow, 54.
24. In fact, as some analysts have observed, China’s leader and the Chinese military evince little enthusiasm for intervening militarily in a future conflict on the Korean peninsula. See, for example, Eric McVadon, "Chinese Military Strategy for the Korean Peninsula," in China’s Military Faces the Future, ed. James R. Lilley and David Shambaugh (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 283-84.
25. Since at least 2000 South Korea’s defense doctrine has been the subject of serious reconsideration, marked by heated debates over whether or not to drop the "main enemy" designation for DPRK forces. See Nicholas Eberstadt, "Korea," in Strategic Asia 2002-03, 162.
26. Ibid., 163.
27. Gill, "Chinese Military Modernization and Arms Proliferation in the Asia-Pacific," 30-31. As Eberstadt states, at the start of the new century, "ROK defense allocations were being increasingly invested in systems only tangentially related to potential DPRK aggression, but integral to the development of a regional ‘force projection’ capability" ("Korea," 162).
28. Eberstadt, "Korea," 162-63. Also see Kim, "Korean Perspectives on PLA Modernization and the Future East Asian Security Environment," 50-67.
29. Those areas of Chinese weapons development and military deployments of greatest relevance to Taiwan include the increased production and deployment of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles, as well as improvements in missile accuracy and payload packages (including MIRVs and countermeasures); efforts to deploy land-attack cruise missiles on naval and air platforms; efforts to deploy improved antiship cruise missiles; increased deployments of AA-12 or similar air-to-air (AAMRAM)-type missiles; improvements in submunitions capable of severely disrupting air bases and C4ISR facilities; improvements in electronic warfare capabilities, including anti-electronic intelligence (ELINT), anti-satellite (ASAT), and anti-global positioning system (GPS) capabilities; the acquisition of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) to detect and track U.S. carrier battle groups; improvements in data/intelligence fusion and dissemination for battle management and C4ISR; the ability to mount sustained air sorties and to avoid friendly shoot-downs; the deployment of-or intent to deploy-large numbers of fourth-generation and third-generation fighters (Su-30s, Su-27s, J-8IIs, JH-7s, and J-10s); the development of an ability by aviation forces to support ground and naval operations; improvements in combined submarine-and-surface naval operations; efforts to increase the number of more sophisticated diesel- and nuclear-powered submarines, and to produce new types of such submarines (Kilo-class, Types 093, 094); and significant increases in the number of troops (airborne, SOF, and marines) considered deployable and supportable across the Taiwan Strait.
30. For a detailed discussion of the problems and successes of Taiwan’s defense reform and modernization program, see Michael D. Swaine, "Taiwan’s Defense Reforms and Military Modernization Program: Objectives, Achievements, and Obstacles," in No Way Out? New Thoughts on the U.S.-Taiwan-China Crisis, ed. Nancy B. Tu cker (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). The following paragraph on the likely future course of that response was also largely drawn from this study.
31. These could include the ability to strike Taiwan with a significant number of highly accurate, short-range ballistic and cruise missiles, to severely damage Taiwan’s offshore defenses with a larger number of more capable submarines and surface combatants, to severely disrupt Taiwan’s communication capabilities with new space-based and information warfare systems, and perhaps even to seize strategic locations on Taiwan with a significant number of special operation forces.
32. Pollack, "Asian-Pacific Responses to a Rising China," 3.
33. Swaine and Tellis, Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy, 166.
34. Ibid., 166-67. Also see Derek Da Cunha, "Southeast Asian Perceptions of China’s Future Security Role In Its ‘Backyard,’" in In China’s Shadow, 119. Da Cunha states that none of the ASEAN states has the military capability alone to successfully oppose a determined military advance by China into the South China Sea, and that they are unlikely to acquire such a capability in the foreseeable future.
35. Gill, "Chinese Military Modernization and Arms Proliferation in the Asia-Pacific," 29.
36. Although the claim is unconfirmed, some analysts believe that Indonesia concluded a defense cooperation pact with Australia in late 1995 and purchased British Hawk fighter/ground attack aircraft-and possibly advanced combat aircraft from Russia-because of concerns about China. See ibid., 31.
37. Da Cunha, "Southeast Asian Perceptions of China’s Future Security Role In Its ‘Backyard,’" 117-18.
38. Gill, "Chinese Military Modernization and Arms Proliferation in the Asia-Pacific," 31.
39. Sujit Dutta, "China’s Emerging Power and Military Role: Implications for South Asia," in In China’s Shadow, 104-5.
40. Ashley J. Tellis, "Appendix D: The Changing Political-Military Environment: South Asia," in The United States and Asia: Toward a New U.S. Strategy and Force Posture, ed. Zalmay Khalilzad et al. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2001), 206-15.
41. Dutta, "China’s Emerging Power and Military Role," 105.
42. Ibid., 100.
43. Ibid.
44. Michael D. Swaine with Loren H. Runyon, "Ballistic Missiles and Missile Defense in Asia," NBR Analysis 13, no. 3 (Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2002).
45. At that time, Lee Teng-hui stated that Taiwan and China had a special "state-to-state" relationship across the Taiwan Strait. For many Chinese, this amounted to a de facto declaration of Taiwan’s separateness and independence from the mainland and thus, when coupled with the 1995-96 crisis, led to a decision to acquire genuine military capabilities to deter Taiwan.

Source: "Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics“, University Of California Press Berkeley, 2005

The Rise of China and Asia’s New Dynamics

By David Shambaugh

Asia is changing, and China is a principal cause. The structure of power and parameters of interactions that have characterized international relations in the Asian region over the last half century are being fundamentally affected by, among other factors, China’s growing economic and military power, rising political influence, distinctive diplomatic voice, and increasing involvement in regional multilateral institutions. This volume offers an in-depth and careful assessment of China’s new behavior and linkages with the region. The study further examines the impact that China’s rise, in all of its dimensions, is having on the international relations of Asia, and the implications for the United States.

China has always been a significant presence looming over Asia, even before the People’s Republic was established in 1949, but its impact on the dynamics of the region was usually felt much less than that of other major powers, despite its nearer proximity. Beijing’s relative lack of regional influence sometimes caused it to recoil into an autarkic cocoon or necessitated alignment with external powers (the United States and Soviet Union) to augment its security. At other times China exerted a negative influence in the region by attempting to subvert neighboring noncommunist governments or as a result of its own domestic dislocations. When the PRC behaved in these ways, as a non-status quo power, it only became more marginalized from the principal actors and central dynamics of the region. Deng Xiaoping clearly recognized this and, after gaining power in 1978, made it one of his highest priorities to try and reintegrate China into the Asian region. Much was accomplished in ameliorating long-standing tensions and building ties during Deng’s tenure, but even more substantial progress was made during the 1990s. Much credit is due China’s former foreign minister and foreign policy czar Qian Qichen for mapping out and implementing the PRC’s new approach to the region.¹

The contributions to this volume are testimony to the fact that China’s behavior has changed a great deal-and, with it, the dynamics of Asia as well. China is no longer out of the mainstream, but is repositioning itself both as a (and some believe the) central actor in the region and as a responsible power seeking to enhance the stability and security of the area. This new posture is relatively recent. Although China abandoned its subversive regional foreign policy in the early 1980s, until the late 1990s its regional posture remained somewhat aloof and less than fully engaged. Since 1997-98, however, Beijing has demonstrated a new confidence in its external posture, and its ties with neighbors and regional organizations have exhibited a number of new features.

ORGANIZATION OF THE VOLUME

The following chapters elucidate the various aspects and potential consequences of China’s new posture. The volume is organized into six principal sections.

The volume opens with two overarching chapters that lay out the parameters of China’s new engagement with the Asian region. My own introductory chapter sets the scene by elaborating the various manifestations of China’s new regional posture, identifying some of the factors that catalyzed the new posture, discussing some historical parallels for it, and offering some cautionary views. It describes China’s dramatically improved relationships with three former adversaries-Vietnam, South Korea, and India-as well as Beijing’s recent proactive diplomacy and embrace of regional multilateral organizations. I conclude that the centrality of China in Asian regional affairs depends very much on the functional sphere: China is most central in the economic realm, increasingly so in the political/diplomatic realm, and least so in the security realm (although it is growing more so). To be sure, China’s diplomatic influence and its military posture are increasingly being felt throughout the region, but not yet as demonstrably as its economic importance.

I also observe that while China’s hard power is growing quickly, its soft power is increasingly more slowly. Despite a growing convergence between China and ASEAN about security norms and interstate behavior, China seems to have little in the realm of soft power-for example, philosophies or ideologies, popular or high culture, sports, fashion, or role models-to “export” to the rest of the region. Joseph Nye’s classic study of soft power also finds China lacking in many of these elements of soft power attraction, especially when contrasted with Japan or Western nations.²

The next chapter is authored by two of China’s leading experts on the Asian region, Tang Shiping and Zhang Yunling. Their chapter offers a unique and candid description of China’s grand strategy and regional strategy and how the two strategies interact and reinforce each other. Their assessment is a sophisticated and subtle consideration of the economic, political, and security components in China’s strategic thinking and external behavior. They also show how bilateral and multilateral approaches supplement each other in Chinese diplomacy. Finally, they assess the role of the United States in China’s regional strategy, and they offer some scenarios for the future interaction of the two powers.

The second section of the book examines the economic dimension of China’s place in the Asian region. It is in this dimension that China’s regional impact is felt most strongly, and it is in this realm that there is some cause to conclude that China is becoming the principal actor in the region. The two subsequent chapters explore China’s economic impact on Asia, and vice versa. There is a great deal of rich new empirical data and detail contained in these two chapters. Both identify and elaborate the complex and rapidly forming linkages and interdependence among the Chinese and neighboring economies.

The first, by Hideo Ohashi, describes China’s regional trade and investment profile. Although it is not widely known, more than half of China’s total trade volume is now within the East Asian region. Ohashi also observes that China has positioned itself at the center of the economic division of labor in East Asia. He argues that China imports a large number of intermediate goods (parts and components) from neighbors, assembles them into final-demand goods, and has thus positioned itself as the principal export platform of final-demand goods to North American and European markets. By being the main creator of demand for intermediate goods China has become a locomotive of intraregional trade in East Asia. Ohashi thinks that ultimately, as the national economy and domestic consumer demand develop, China itself will become the recipient of final-demand produced goods and services. Fueling much of this phenomenon is the unprecedented amount of foreign direct investment (FDI) flowing into China, the majority of it originating in East Asia. China is also becoming an increasing source of outbound direct investment (ODI) back into the region, thus creating even thicker interdependent linkages. Ohashi also notes that China has also become a major proponent and initiator of regional free trade liberalization initiatives, most notably its stunning proposal to create a Free Trade Area (FTA) with the ten nations of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). By doing so, the PRC has opted for integration and positive-sum benefits over narrow zero-sum mercantilism. Ohashi concludes that all of these phenomena are reorienting the East Asian economic system in an increasingly Sinocentric direction.

The next chapter, by Robert Ash, looks at China’s regional economic linkages even more closely by examining a heretofore unexplored subject: the increased economic interactions of China’s macroregions with neighboring countries and their cross-border linkages. Robert Scalapino once termed this phenomenon “natural economic territories” (NETs), while economists have long written about comparable “growth triangles.” But, until this study by Professor Ash, no economist had attempted such a systematic analysis of the linkages of China’s internal regional economies with their adjacent external regional economies. He finds considerable evidence of such linkages being forged in recent years-particularly between the Yangzi Delta region and Taiwan; the Pearl River Delta region and Hong Kong, but also increasingly Indochina and Southeast Asia; southwest China and South Asia; northwest China and Central Asia; and northeast China and Northeast Asia. This is not necessarily surprising, but Ash provides the hard data to sustain the proposition. He also shows domestic regional linkages further afield, with Europe and North America. In many cases, by showing these broader linkages Ash has elucidated the very way that glob-alization-at least in the investment and manufacturing sectors-works in today’s world.

The third section of the book examines China’s political and diplomatic ties with its neighbors. In some cases (Japan, Korea, Russia, and Taiwan) these are analyzed by contributors bilaterally, while in other cases (Southeast, South, and Central Asia) it is done subregionally. Mike Mochizuki opens the section by examining what is probably China’s most problematic relationship in Asia, that with Japan. He describes the “friendship diplomacy” framework that guided Sino-Japanese relations for more than two decades, institutionalizing the relationship and managing to establish a foundation and set parameters for bilateral ties. But Mochizuki and other observers note that this framework eroded over time and fully broke down during the latter part of the 1990s. While he argues that a new framework for relations has yet to fully fill the void, he presents some alternatives. One is an emerging rivalry for regional leadership. Another is a steady deterioration in ties that would destabilize the region. Mochizuki believes that neither of these models accurately describes the present or future of the Sino-Japanese relationship. Rather, he elaborates the view that the relationship is in a healthy period of readjustment, during which candor is replacing both wishful thinking and excessive pessimism, and both countries are fully realizing the importance of the relationship. However, even with more prudent and pragmatic approaches on both sides, Sino-Japanese relations must still cope with the lingering residue of the past as well as several thorny contemporary problems.

In China, this reevaluation has even resulted in the recent emergence of a school of “new thinking on Japan,” with certain Chinese journalists and scholars, (e.g., Ma Licheng, Shi Yinhong, and Feng Zhaokui) calling for the PRC to “get over” its “Japan problem,” relegate the past to the past, and realize what is at stake for China.³ Further, according to such “new thinking,” Japan is a critically important nation for China (Shi Yinhong even went so far as to argue that Japan may be strategically useful in China’s struggle against American hegemony), and their relationship is critical to regional stability. While such bold thinking is refreshing, it is by no means predominant in China. In fact, after articles on this subject were published in 2003, there was an extreme domestic backlash against the authors, who were accused of all sorts of traitorous intent. Much of the backlash came in the form of what Peter Gries terms China’s new “internet nationalism.”⁴ A series of other unfortunate events in late 2003 and early 2004 continued to sour Sino-Japanese relations.

Professor Mochizuki argues that, despite these strains, a readjusted relationship between Beijing and Tokyo is taking shape, a relationship that is more realistic than the previous framework, and therefore he is “cautiously optimistic” that there is emerging a “new equilibrium” in which there will be frictions, but manageable ones that will be dealt with in mature ways. He believes that the competitive elements in the relationship can be contained. He also sees an increasing number of coinciding interests and policies between the two governments (which his chapter elaborates in some detail) that further auger for stability and expanded cooperation between China and Japan.

In the next chapter, Jae-Ho Chung traces the evolution of China’s approach and policies toward North and South Korea. He reveals the remarkable development in Sino-South Korean ties over the past decade. There is no other bilateral relationship in all of Asia that has developed as quickly and cooperatively over the last decade as that between Beijing and Seoul. This progress has had a major positive impact on the stability and security of Northeast Asia. It has also served as an important buffer against instability or aggression caused by North Korea. Yet it is also evident that the closeness of the Seoul-Beijing relationship has limited the capacity of the United States to pursue a muscular strategy toward North Korea.

Chung also shows how Beijing’s thinking, tactics, and policies toward the North Korean regime have evolved considerably. He offers a careful case study in this regard with respect to the second North Korean nuclear crisis that began in 2002. Finally, he considers the impact of China’s dramatically improved relations with South Korea on its allied relationship with the United States. While the Republic of Korea’s (ROK) ties with China have deepened and grown closer, its alliance with the United States has con-comitantly grown more strained. Seoul’s challenge is to balance its relationship with the two countries, and Chung argues that both serve as a hedge against the ROK’s dependency on the other.

Next, Richard Bush examines the most nettlesome regional relationship for China, its relationship with Taiwan. Bush’s chapter is a refined distillation of an enormously complex relationship, which contains centripetal as well centrifugal forces. He describes the increasing interdependent links across the Taiwan Strait in trade, investment, education, tourism, and other areas. He also notes how the two governments quietly cooperate to combat terrorism, smuggling, organized crime, hijacking, piracy, and other nontra-ditional security challenges. While these exchanges help to stabilize the cross-strait situation, Bush also notes the concerns that some on Taiwan have about their effects, especially the way in which they foster Taiwan’s dependency on the mainland rather than the two areas’ interdependency. But, as Bush succinctly states, “Like it or not, Taiwan has been pulled into the PRC’s economic orbit, and its companies have long since accepted the centrality of the mainland for their future.” He also elaborates the “security dilemma” that has emerged between China and Taiwan, which has triggered something of an arms race between the two sides. The political dimension of cross-strait relations is, of course, inextricably bound up in issues of sovereignty, history, and identity. It is also bound up in the murki-ness of domestic politics on the island, all of which he also spells out with clarity. Finally, he offers a series of potential scenarios for the evolution of China-Taiwan relations, but concludes that Taiwan must undertake a number of actions to “fortify” itself-economically, militarily, politically, legally, and internationally-if it is to avoid having its future determined by an increasingly powerful China.

Moving down to Southeast Asia, Wang Gungwu describes the long and ambivalent history that China has shared with Southeast Asia (and vice versa). This history, he argues, continues to cast a long shadow over the evolving relationship-although it is evident that China and ASEAN (the amalgam organization of states in place since 1967) have established an unprecedented relationship today. Not only is the relationship politically warm and functional (no small achievement given the past), it is also evident that China and ASEAN have discovered complementarities of normative perspectives and economic interests. The Chinese have embraced many aspects of the “ASEAN Way,” a set of normative principles that have been the bedrock of interstate relations within the organization for forty years. To be sure, these principles derive, to no small extent, from the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence first put forward by Premier Zhou Enlai at the 1955 Bandung Summit of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). Thereafter, these principles germinated in the region and bloomed in the context of ASEAN. More recently, China has discovered that its own “new security concept,” first enunciated in Singapore in 1997, dovetails almost identically with ASEAN’s guiding principles.

This intersection of normative perspectives has helped to defuse latent fears and misperceptions between the two sides, has done much to forge a new strategic partnership between them, and has driven Beijing to more fully embrace regional multilateralism. Moreover, in 2003 China acceded to ASEAN’s Treaty of Amity and Cooperation, making the PRC the first foreign nation to do so. The Chinese government also stunned the region with its proposal to create a Free Trade Area with ASEAN over the course of a decade. This has done much to alleviate the angst in Southeast Asia over China’s increasing share of East Asia’s exports to Western markets.

Despite all of this progress in China-Southeast Asian relations in recent years, Wang offers some cautionary perspectives on the limits to further development. First, he notes some of the intrinsic differences within ASEAN, which make it difficult for the member states to act with solidarity of purpose on all issues at all times. Second, he reminds us of the memories and continuing legacies of China’s past behavior in the region-during the pre-modern, modern, and contemporary periods-that leave many Southeast Asians wary of Chinese designs and influence. Nonetheless, despite these cautionary notes, Wang sees a corner being turned in China’s relations with the region, which offers good potential for growth, mutual benefit, and continued regional stability.

Pivoting further around the arc of Asia, John Garver’s chapter addresses China’s relations with the nations of South and Central Asia. Garver’s analysis centers on the instruments of Chinese presence in these vast and distinct regions, and he weighs Chinese influence vis-à-vis that of other intra- and extraregional powers. In a unique approach, he evaluates China’s initiatives to build infrastructural links-primarily a network of roads, rail lines, and pipelines-tying southwest, west, and northwest China to their cross-border neighbors. These linkages are helping to facilitate the growing economic linkages described earlier in Robert Ash’s chapter. In addition to these infrastructure linkages, Garver notes the nascent détente between China and India, the long-standing ties with Pakistan (China’s “all-weather friend”), and the central role the PRC has played in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Despite these developments, Garver is guarded about the prospects for growth in China’s influence in each case. Indeed, he concludes that Beijing possesses relatively little influence in these areas. South Asia very much remains dominated by Indian power and geographic centrality. He notes that in Central Asia Russia and China compete for influence, and Moscow has hardly ceded its interests in the area to Beijing. Moreover, Garver draws our attention to the dramatic increase in American interests and presence in Central and Southwest Asia since 2001. In his view, it is the long shadow of American power and influence-rather than China’s-that defines these regions today.

The final chapter in this section concerns relations between China and Russia. Yu Bin reminds us that this relationship, similar to virtually all other relationships around China’s extensive periphery, also carries with it much historical baggage. Yet, as is the case with Southeast Asia, today China and Russia find themselves in a period of peace and cooperation that is probably unparalleled. Yu Bin elaborates the reasons and the path that brought this strategic partnership into being, but he is quite cautious about its persistence. Yu identifies a number of factors, primarily on the Russian side, that could cause the current concord to unravel. He thus finds something of a disconnect in the relationship, which is characterized by high-level harmony but underlying frictions and suspicions.

Taken together, the chapters in this section evince an ambivalence about China’s relations with its neighbors. On the one hand, the chapters clearly reveal the extent to which Beijing has succeeded in normalizing diplomatic relations and consolidating political ties, settling many nagging border disputes, building up extensive trade links and other exchanges, and projecting the image of being a cooperative neighbor. On the other hand, all the chapters reveal lingering misgivings about China. Many of these arise from historical experiences, but they also reflect concerns about China’s future ambitions. Clearly, Beijing still has much work to do to assure and assuage its neighbors of China’s intentions and the use to which the nation’s growing military and economic capabilities will be put, but it is equally clear that China has made a good effort in recent years, and this has begun to win Beijing a level of trust and a depth of ties not seen before in the modern era.

The fourth section of the volume shifts from politics and diplomacy to examine China’s regional security strategy and military posture. Bates Gill’s chapter argues that China’s regional security strategy has pursued three main goals in recent years: (1) maintain a pacific periphery so as to be able to concentrate on internal reforms and growth (the “peace and development” strategy); (2) manage its growing wealth and power in ways that reassure, rather than threaten, neighbors; and (3) cope with preponderant American power around its periphery without confronting the United States directly. Gill describes various instruments China has used and methods that China has undertaken to achieve these three goals. They include the elaboration of the “new security concept,” the publication of defense white papers and marginally improved military transparency, more proactive policies to diffuse simmering regional problems and “hot spots,” building a series of strategic partnerships with nations near and far, increased involvement in regional cooperative security regimes, deeper involvement in addressing nontraditional security threats, increased willingness to participate in military exercises with foreign nations, and other forms of regional cooperation.

This is an impressive range of new initiatives undertaken by China in recent years, and they have won new respect for Beijing. Yet regional security challenges-Gill identifies those related to North Korea and Taiwan, in particular-remain that will challenge Beijing. He also notes that the nature of the U.S.-China relationship will largely determine Beijing’s approach to regional security problems. He concludes, however, that China’s increased involvement in regional security affairs is not a passing moment, but is going to be a permanent feature of the Asian security landscape and architecture.

Michael Swaine examines the “hard” dimension of China’s regional security stance, its military posture. His analysis is sobering. He concludes that “China is in the process of acquiring new military capabilities and undertaking new force deployments that will fundamentally alter security perceptions in the region and stimulate a more widespread military response among the major powers. Although this dynamic is not fated to produce conflict-even in the case of Taiwan-it will likely increase the chances of regional tension and instability, thus requiring more deliberate and coordinated political, diplomatic, and military efforts to control. The United States will, by necessity, play the most decisive role in this effort.” In his chapter Swaine elaborates the various developments in the modernization program of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) that led to his predictions. To do so he not only inventories the hardware in China’s land, air, and sea arsenals, at present and in the medium-term future (to 2020), but he also takes account of China’s regional defense policy objectives and evolving military doctrine.

Swaine’s analysis and prognosis is a realist one. In his thinking hard power is primary, and it trumps other forces and factors at work. This line of analysis differs from China’s increased integration into the Asian region or the normative efforts of Chinese diplomacy described in several other chapters. Yet hard military power is an important part of the evolving equation in Asia. The PLA’s rapidly improving capabilities will, as Swaine correctly argues, have a major impact on the overall strategic balance in the region. The outstanding question is whether it will create, as he predicts, an increasing “security dilemma” confronted by China and its neighbors, causing the latter to adopt balancing tactics and countervailing actions against the former.

The fifth section of the book examines the potential impact that China’s rise and increased centrality in Asia will have on U.S.-China relations and the role and interests of the United States in the region. Interestingly, the two chapters in this section lead the contributing authors to (1) different assessments of China’s goals in the region vis-à-vis the United States, and (2) different conclusions about the potential influence on American national interests in the region.

Robert Sutter views China’s primary goal in Asia to be regional preeminence in all respects. This overriding aspiration, Sutter argues, is fundamentally at odds with the United States-both American priorities and the existing American preeminence in the region. It is, in essence, both a zero-sum view and a structural assessment. Sutter sees China maneuvering steadily but subtly in the region to counter and undercut the U.S. position and influence.

Yet Sutter also acknowledges that Chinese officials and experts uniformly recognize both that American dominance will likely continue for the foreseeable future, and that it is not in China’s interests to confront the United States directly. This means, in his analysis, that China’s long-term strategy runs counter to U.S. interests, but that the near- and middle-term reality of predominant U.S. power dictates that China’s tactics accommodate American interests. Sutter’s policy prescription, therefore, is for the United States to maintain its confidence and strength in the Asian theater so as “to hold in check long-standing Chinese tendencies to assertively challenge U.S. interests and perceived adverse Asian developments.” He concludes his chapter by raising the specter of a conscious U.S. decision not to maintain regional dominance ad infinitum, thus “set[ting] the stage for a different kind of Sino-American accommodation where the United States pulls back strategically from Asia as China rises to regional leadership.”

Mike Lampton offers a different assessment of China’s aspirations and goals in Asia, which leads him to different conclusions about the impact and policy implications for the United States. While he agrees with Sutter that “constraining the unbridled exercise of American power” is a priority for Beijing, he sees it as one among many goals and not the central motive of Chinese strategic policy. Lampton notes that reassurance of China’s neighbors and peacefully securing China’s economic lifelines and energy resources are additional priorities. He continues in his chapter to disaggregate the different components of the Chinese “power mix” by dividing it into coercive, normative, and remunerative categories (following the typology of sociologist Amitai Etzioni). He argues that China’s remunerative power has grown the most and provides Beijing with considerable regional influence. China’s normative power and influence, as described in earlier chapters, is rising more modestly, but it is also intersecting with the perspectives of a growing number of Asian states, particularly as they become increasingly disenchanted with America’s overreliance on coercive power. Finally, Lampton, in contrast to Swaine, argues that China’s coercive power is growing steadily, but at a measured pace. He observes that the speed of China’s military modernization will in part be governed by developments in U.S. and Japanese military power. Above all, Lampton emphasizes the profound impact that the forces of globalization are having on China, its strategic choices, and therefore its external behavior-all of which leads Beijing toward increased interdependence with its neighbors and more status quo behavior.⁵

The implications for the United States, Lampton concludes, need not be negative. He sees “the principal directions in which Chinese policy has moved . . . to be consistent with fundamental U.S. interests.” China’s rise will necessarily cause the United States to make adjustments along the way, but the basic tendency of increased interdependence and integration is, he argues, very much in American national interests. This does not inevitably mean that China’s rise will ultimately prove to be fully in U.S. interests, but to date, the two powers have managed to coexist and cooperate quite fruitfully.

The final section of this study focuses on the broader implications of China’s rise for the regional order. Jonathan Pollack and Michael Yahuda tackle the impact on regional security and the political/diplomatic order, respectively. Pollack delineates the increasingly complex and multilayered security agenda and architecture that is emerging in the Asian theater. While he detects that “an unmistakable recalibration of power and influence is underway,” owing to China’s ascendance and the “dilution” of American primacy, Pollack observes that a truly integrated regional security system has yet to emerge: “Any characterization of an ‘Asian security order’ (or, even less, a presumptive Sinocentric order) is a major oversimplification.” Notwithstanding some of the nontraditional security challenges of terrorism, HIV and AIDS, nuclear proliferation, human smuggling, and other pan-regional challenges, Pollack notes that regional security is still primarily oriented toward “hard security” issues in four distinct subregions, Northeast, Southeast, South, and Central Asia. He also points out that China has become the only regional actor to have a meaningful security involvement in all four subregions, and his chapter chronicles this growing involvement on China’s part. At the same time that China is increasing its regional security involvement, it is also pursuing strategies to forestall a hostile American posture. As Pollack puts it, “China is attempting to limit its exposure in America’s strategic headlights.” Becoming more involved in sub- and pan-regional security affairs is precisely part of Beijing’s strategy to dilute U.S. influence and “forestall or discourage coordinated regional responses to its enhanced economic power, military capabilities, and political influence,” Pollack argues.

Pollack’s chapter also contains an interesting comparison of the internal strategic discourses in China and the United States about the other. He finds some interesting parallels between these two communities. At the end of the day, Pollack believes that the nature of Sino-American relations will determine the shape of the regional security order, and he describes four alternative strategic futures in this regard:

• A convergent, more diversified security order largely acceptable to the United States and China;
• A mixed security order simultaneously entailing elements of Sino-American competition and collaboration;
• An overt Sino-American political-military competition;
• A Sino-American regional security condominium.

He explores the possibilities for each alternative but does not predict the realization of any single one. Pollack concludes that the evolving and emerging regional security order is very fluid, and that its nature remains to be determined, but that, one way or the other, China and the U.S.-China relationship will be central to the outcome.

The final chapter in the volume, by Michael Yahuda, focuses on the evolving regional political/diplomatic order. Like Pollack, Yahuda describes a multilayered and complex mosaic that comprises the Asian political “system” today. He also finds that, as in the economic and, to a lesser extent, security realms, China’s political integration in the region has been pronounced in recent years. Yahuda also discusses the emergence of regional institutional-ism in Asia and finds that, while it does not have the institutional character of Europe, multilateral institutionalism is nonetheless firmly becoming a part of the regional landscape. He explains how China has not only come to accept such regional institutionalism, but has also grown to become an active and constructive participant in the process. Like Pollack, Yahuda also finds China more proactively engaged in all four subregions of Asia, and he shows how Beijing mixes bilateral and multilateral instruments and involvement in each area. Yet, also like Pollack, Yahuda finds that each subregion continues to have its own intrinsic dynamics-and, hence, a truly regional “order” has yet to emerge.

THE ASIAN SYSTEM: EVOLVING TO WHAT MODEL?

Given the various elements noted in the chapters in this volume, and especially the last two, what might China’s growing power and influence mean for the evolving Asian system? What is the nature of the emerging regional order? In my own contribution to this discussion, let me offer seven possibilities.

A Hegemonic System

A number of observers, particularly in the United States, Japan, and India, remain skeptical about China’s motivations and the sustainability of its new cooperative posture. These skeptics see China’s “new face” as a tactical ploy to lull the region into a false sense of complacency, until China builds up its comprehensive strength in anticipation of the day when it can dominate and dictate to the region. Such a strategy is captured in Deng Xiaoping’s admonition taoguang, yanghui (bide one’s time while building up capability).

A China-dominant system would be a hegemonic system-either coercive (badao) or benign (wangdao). Under such a system, other nations would either be subsumed by a domineering China or would choose, in a looser hegemonic system, to “bandwagon” with Beijing as the best means to protect themselves and their equities. Another variation of this model would be a hierarchical model, with China as the major power at the apex of the regional hierarchical pyramid-reconstituting, in essence, a twenty-first-century version of the ancient “tribute system.”⁶

Such a system not only assumes China’s desire for such dominance, but it would also certainly require the complete diminution of American power and influence and its withdrawal from the region. Neither condition seems likely.⁷ It also presumes, as in balance-of-power systems, that China would be a (singular) pole to which all other regional nations would be attracted, like a magnet. Such poles, such as the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, usually attract others via a combination of an appealing ideology, extensive economic assistance, extended deterrence and military protection, international diplomatic support, and other means. China today, and likely into the future, offers few of these advantages to its neighbors. As a result, the essential requirements for a hegemonic system to take shape in Asia have not been fulfilled: neither does China have significant potential to become a pole, nor do incentives for others to bandwagon exist.

Major Power Rivalry

Other skeptics anticipate an inevitable clash between the existing dominant power (the United States) and the rising power (China), owing to the asymmetric structural properties of the regional system. The classic statement of this view is offered by Aaron Friedberg.⁸ They argue that, historically, rising powers inevitably challenge dominant powers, and that this zero-sum competition for dominance is a virtual law of international relations, at least for the realist school. For this school, the period of “power transition” is particularly unstable and conflict-prone.⁹ A variant of this is the traditional bipolar balance-of-power model (presumably with the United States and China as the two poles), in which two major competitive powers possess roughly equal distribution of power, thus offsetting each other and maintaining the balance.

For this situation to obtain, China’s comprehensive national strength, particularly in the military realm, would have to match that of the United States. Again, this is difficult to envision in the near and medium term. It would also require that the United States and China experience conflicting interests and policies over a wide range of regional and global issues-a dysfunctional relationship quite different from the currently cooperative state of Sino-American relations.¹⁰

The “Hub and Spokes” Model

A third conceptual model is the American-centric “hub and spokes” alliance system that has existed since the dissolution of SEATO in the early 1970s. This is a system of bilateral military allies (the United States with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, and Australia). In such a conceptualization the United States is thought to be the hub of a wheel, with each of the bilateral alliances the spokes of the wheel.

This system has served the allies and the region well for three decades. It has been central to the maintenance of strategic stability and economic development throughout the East Asian region, has deterred a hostile North Korea, was significant in rolling back Vietnamese aggression in Cambodia, has played a role in maintaining peace in the Taiwan Strait, has kept open the sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and has provided for the national security of the allied states. In addition, while not full allies, a number of other East Asian states (e.g., Singapore) have been full security partners in this system. China too has benefited from this system, for all of these reasons.

Although this system has stabilized the region well and has the potential to continue to do so in the future, the structure is not sufficient to constitute a true regional system. A large number of countries-and this includes China-remain unallied or unaffiliated with the system and have no compelling reasons to join. Thus, although the structure goes a long way toward integrating a number of key nations in the region in a common security network, it is highly unlikely that the “hub and spokes” system will enlarge to become a full regional system in the future. Indeed, if the Korean peninsula were to be unified, two key legs of the system, U.S. alliances with South Korea and Japan, would potentially be undermined. Thus by itself, the U.S.-led alliance system is insufficient to constitute a full regional security structure.

A Concert of Powers

A fourth potential model of the evolving Asian system is a concert of powers, in which rivalry is not inherent, but rather the maintenance of stability is shared among several major nations or alliances of nations. The best example of this type of system is, of course, the Concert of Europe, which functioned for almost half a century in the wake of the Congress of Vienna of 1815. It was a system that kept the peace and maintained a balance among the main powers of the era (Britain, Russia, Austria, Prussia, France, Italy, and Turkey). It functioned well because no nation possessed disproportionate power and influence, and because all agreed to regular consultations via a series of diplomatic conferences. It was, in effect, the world’s first de facto regional security regime.

For such a system to evolve in Asia would require a more equal distribution of hard power. It would certainly require that American power decline substantially and relatively, while the individual power distribution of China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia would grow to be roughly equal. It would also require that each member of the concert enjoy generally harmonious and nonconflictual relations among themselves. Although the latter condition may be possible (notwithstanding deep-rooted Sino-Japanese antagonism), and the relative power of the four noted above could generally equalize over time, it remains difficult to envision such a diminution of U.S. power or its presence in the region.

A Condominium of Power

A fifth possibility is a condominium of power by the two dominant powers in the region, the United States and China. Although this possibility seems remote these days, given continuing tensions over Taiwan and latent strategy rivalry, it is not out of the realm of possibility that such a condominium could emerge.

For such a scenario to materialize would require a number of developments, none of which seems likely. First, the dispute over Taiwan would have to be resolved. Second, China would have to fully accommodate itself to the U.S. alliance system in East Asia, budding defense ties with India, and the growing military presence in Central Asia. Third, both countries’ remaining suspicions of the other as a strategic competitor or security threat would have to be resolved. Indeed, condominiums usually require that the two dominant powers be either allied or mutually trusting. Although the United States and China are enjoying their best relationship in many years, including at the strategic level, it is difficult to imagine the two forging a condominium of power in Asia for the foregoing reasons. Not insignificantly, it would also require other major nations in the region to accept and accommodate such a Sino-American condominium-again, a very unlikely prospect. Finally, the emergence of such a condominium would necessitate the substantial and qualitative decline of Japan as a regional and global actor, which is a highly unlikely development.

A Normative Community

A sixth possibility entails the emergence of a region-wide community of nations that shares a series of normative rules and goals and agrees to abide by them for the larger collective interest. Such is the case among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Such a normative regional order could either be heavily codified and institutionalized or could operate more loosely based on shared goals and interactions. Among others, Amitav Acharya and Muthiah Alagappa have been the primary exponents of this model.¹¹

Obviously, for such an order to emerge requires consensual agreement among participants as to the norms, goals, and rules to govern interstate and other behavior. While ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) have been able to achieve this to a certain extent, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to a lesser extent, and China’s “new security concept” dovetails to a large extent with both, the region as a whole remains a very long way from forging such a consensus, much less institutionalizing it. Nonetheless, China’s growing embrace of the ARF and a potential “regional security community” is a positive sign and may move the region gradually in the direction of further institutionalization.¹²

Complex Interdependence

The final potential model for the evolving and future Asian system is oriented not around security affairs, but rather around the dense web of economic, technological, and other ties between nations in the era of accelerating globalization. The core actor in this model is not the nation-state, but a plethora of nonstate actors and processes-many of which are difficult to measure with any precision-that operate at the societal level. These multiple threads bind societies together in complex and interdependent ways. Indeed, they point to another significant way that the Asian region is changing, which is that the traditional geographic subcomponents of the region- Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia-are no longer useful intellectual constructs for dividing or distinguishing the macro-processes occurring throughout the region. In the twenty-first century, these four subregions are all interconnected and interdependent at numerous levels.

There is considerable evidence that complex interdependence has taken hold throughout the Asian region-and it will only accelerate in speed and scope over time. There is no escaping the dynamic, which is a powerful deterrent to conflict and is conducive to peace and stability, as all nations and people become tied together in one large interdependent web.

Yet as profound as this process is, and as deeply rooted as it is becoming in Asia, complex interdependence is by itself insufficient to establish a dominant regional system, precisely because it does not operate at the nation-state level and does not intrinsically entail security arrangements. Any truly regional system must involve both.

A Mosaic of Models

If these seven models for an evolving regional system in Asia individually fail to fully describe the future toward which the region is moving, where does this leave us analytically? Surely, one size does not, and cannot, fit all in a region as diffuse and diverse as Asia.

What is emerging in the Asian region-stretching from Afghanistan in the southwest to Russia in the north to Japan in the northeast to Australia in the southeast-is a multitextured and multilayered hybrid system that shares elements of three of the aforementioned models: “hub and spokes,” normative community, and complex interdependence. There is also an element of the balance-of-power system looming in the background, although it is dormant and would require considerable adjustments among regional states for it to fully emerge. One reason it will likely never emerge is because having to choose between Beijing and Washington as a primary benefactor is the nightmare scenario for the vast majority of Asian states. It is for this same reason that Asian states “bandwagoning” with a rising China will also not likely emerge on a full regional basis (although it might in certain bilateral cases, as some may seek to balance against China). It is not an exaggeration that all Asian states seek to have sound, extensive, and cooperative relations with both the United States and China, and thus will do much to avoid being put into a bipolar dilemma. Some states in fact play a kind of balancing role between the two regional powers-tilting first toward Washington and then toward Beijing-so as to hedge their bets, protect their interests, and keep both engaged.

Clearly, the U.S.-led alliance system remains the predominant regional security architecture. It has been the bedrock of regional stability since the end of the Vietnam War, has served the region well, and is unlikely to be cast aside by the participants in the “hub and spokes” system (including the non-allied partners and beneficiaries of the system). China tried to challenge this system, at least rhetorically, in the 1997-98 period, and it was roundly rebuffed by its neighbors throughout the region. Arguably, only North Korea seeks the dissolution of this system.

This system relies on hard power, and the threat of it. At the same time, we are witnessing the emergence of a “soft power” architecture in the region, based on a series of increasingly shared norms about interstate relations, security, and the emergence of state and nonstate institutions to advance these norms. ASEAN and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), back-stopped by the nongovernmental Committee on Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific (CSCAP), is the cornerstone of this emerging regional community, but the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the South Asia Association for Regional Security (SAARC) are also important components. These organizations are forms of cooperative, rather than collective, security, and they augment the more formal “hub and spokes” alliance-based system.

Finally, the Asian region has been witnessing the growth of intraregional linkages of all varieties-including economic, cultural, technological, educational, and ideational-at a dizzying speed. Asia, long known for its diversity and disconnectedness, is rapidly becoming a seamless web of interconnections and interdependencies.

One key dimension of this interdependence not often considered by analysts is the impact of China’s own internal stability on regional stability. That is, if China’s domestic reforms were to stall, or if there were significant social upheaval internally,¹³ it would have major-and decidedly negative- implications for the region.

Looking ahead over the next two decades it is evident that China has entered a new phase in its development in which the principal challenge will be to provide a range of public goods to the populace in order to improve the nation’s quality of life. Much of China has now become a newly industrialized country (NIC) where public demands are no longer focused on basic consumer durables or disposable income, but increasingly on a range of quality of life issues such as full access to education at all levels, universal and quality health care, environmental protection, workplace and public safety, efficient transportation and communications, high-quality construction, accountability and transparency in government, lack of corruption in government and business, decreasing social stratification and alleviating absolute poverty, effective and fair enforcement of law, and a combination of social welfare financing (including unemployment insurance, retirement annuities, and workplace injury compensation). The public in China is increasingly and appropriately demanding these public goods, just as they have done previously in other NICs throughout East Asia, Latin America, and Europe. Providing and delivering them is a challenge of governance, with the responsibility falling primarily on a combination of central, intermediate, and local governments in China, although private sector nongovernmental organizations and the marketplace can provide for some (such as pension schemes). There is the view that provision of public goods by China’s government has declined dramatically over the course of the last twenty years of economic expansion and reforms, and that the country faces a “governance crisis.”¹⁴ There is a degree of truth in this assessment, as the SARS crisis of 2002-2003 exposed in the public health arena. One finds similar chronic shortcomings in most of the other areas noted above as well. There is no doubt that compared to the prereform era, when China’s socialist government provided many of these public goods, state capacity in this area has declined. Yet this declining capacity should not be overstated either; for example, when compared with Indonesia, North Korea, Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, the Chinese government still provides more of these basic public goods for the majority of its 1.3 billion people.

Thus, improving state capacity to provide these public goods and meet governance responsibilities is the principal challenge for the Chinese government at all levels over the next couple of decades. The current Chinese government, under the leadership of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, seems to be acutely attuned to meeting these challenges and is beginning to devote increased attention and resources accordingly.¹⁵

China’s governance challenges will also increasingly become the responsibility of China’s neighbors, as well as other nations and international organizations. That is, given the interdependence described above, China’s neighbors now have a much increased stake in assisting China to meet these governance challenges and provide the public goods noted above, because if China is not successful in these tasks, then the resulting domestic dislocations inside China will spill over its borders and become destabilizing factors affecting the regional order. In other words, the rest of the region, and even the world beyond, has a greater stake in China’s domestic development and reforms than it ever has before. It is very much in the national interests of other Asian countries for China to succeed in meeting these internal challenges and to strengthen its state capacity in critical areas such as public health, environmental protection, rule of law, civil society, government transparency, poverty alleviation, and nonproliferation. The European Union and Japan have long established such policy priorities and have contributed a great deal of tangible assistance and resources to these ends (China is the largest single recipient of overseas development assistance from each).¹⁶ It can therefore be anticipated (and recommended) that rising levels of aid and development assistance as well as investment in these areas will be increasingly forthcoming from other Asian governments and private sector agencies. It is very much in the interests of the other governments to provide such assistance, as it will be an investment in their own futures and regional stability. Such is the nature of interdependence in Asia today and into the future.

The following chapters elaborate and elucidate the many ways in which the Asian region and system are changing as a result of China’s growing power and influence. While there has been much written about the impact of China’s rise on the global system, there has been considerably less speculation devoted to the regional context. This volume attempts to offer such analysis, in a judicious and balanced manner, by some of the world’s leading scholars in the field of China’s foreign relations.

NOTES:

I am grateful to all of the contributors to this volume, but particularly Mike Lampton and Jonathan Pollack, for their comments and shaping my thinking on specific parts of this chapter. Parts of this and the next chapter previously appeared in David Sham-baugh, “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order,” International Security 29, no. 3 (Winter 2004/2005): 64-99. Reprint permission granted by MIT Press.

1. 1. Qian’s memoirs are a good chronicle of his personal role. See Qian Qichen, Waijiao Shiji [Ten stories of diplomacy] (Beijing: Shijie Zhishi chubanshe, 2003), particularly chapter 5.
2. Joseph S. Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), 88.
3. Ma Licheng, “Dui Ri guanxi xinsiwei: Zhong-Ri minjian zhihou” [New thinking in policies toward Japan: Concerns for the Chinese and Japanese peoples], Zhan-lue yu Guanli [Strategy and management] 6 (December 2002); Shi Yinhong, “Zhong-Ri jiejin yu ‘waijiao geming’” [Closer Sino-Japanese relations and diplomatic revolution], Zhanlue yu Guanli [Strategy and management] 2 (April 2003).
4. Peter Hayes Gries, “China’s ‘New Thinking’ on Japan,” unpublished paper.
5. For this line of argument, also see Alastair I. Johnston, “Is China a Status-Quo Power?” International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 5-56.
6. This model has been put forward by David C. Kang in “Getting Asia Wrong: The Need for New Analytic Frameworks,” International Security 27, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 57-85.
7. For further elaboration of this and other scenarios, see my “Chinese Hegemony over Asia by 2015?” Korean Journal of Defense Analysis 9, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 7-28.
8. Aaron Friedberg, “Ripe for Rivalry: Prospects for Peace in a Multipolar Asia,” International Security 18, no. 3 (Winter 1993/1994): 5-33.
9. See, for example, Ronald L. Tammen et al., Power Transitions: Strategies for the 21st Century (London: Chatham House, 2000).
10. See the discussion in my “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order,” International Security 29, no. 3 (Winter 2004/2005): 89-94.
11. See Muthiah Alagappa, ed., Asian Security Order: Instrumental and Normative Features (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), especially chapter 2 by Ala-gappa and chapter 6 by Amitav Acharya. More recently, see Acharya’s “Will Asia’s Past Be Its Future?” International Security 28, no. 3 (Winter 2003/2004): 149-64.
12. See the excellent and path-breaking study of China and the ARF by Alastair I. Johnston, “Socialization in International Relations: The ASEAN Way and International Relations Theory,” in International Relations Theory and the Asia-Pacific, ed. G. John Ikenberry and Michael Mastanduno (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
13. See David Shambaugh, Is China Unstable? (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); Murray Scot Tanner, “Cracks in the Wall: China’s Eroding Coercive State,” Current History (September 2001): 243-49; and “China Rethinks Unrest,” Washington Quarterly (Spring 2004).
14. Minxin Pei, “China’s Governance Crisis,” Foreign Affairs 81, no. 5 (2002): 96-109.
15. See Wen Jiabao, Premier of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, “Report on the Work of the Government,” delivered to the Second Session of the Tenth National People’s Congress, March 16, 2004, available at http:// neews.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-03/16/content_1368830.htm.
16. See, for example, Marie Söderberg, “Japan’s ODA Policy in Northeast Asia,” in New Northeast Asian Initiatives: Cooperation for Regional Development and Security, ed. Masako Ikegami (Stockholm: Stockholm University Center for Pacific Asia Studies, 2003); European Commission, A Maturing Partnership-Shared Interests and Challenges in EU-China Relations (Brussels: European Commission, 2003).

Source: “Power Shift: China and Asia’s New Dynamics“, University Of California Press Berkeley, 2005

Edited by David Shambaugh
University Of California Press Berkeley, 2005

Contents

Introduction: The Rise of China and Asia’s New Dynamics (David Shambaugh)

Part One: China and The Changing Asian Landscape
1. Return to the Middle Kingdom? China and Asia in the Early Twenty-First Century (David Shambaugh)
2. China’s Regional Strategy (Zhang Yunling and Tang Shiping)

Part Two: The Economic Dimension
3. China’s Regional Trade and Investment Profile (Hideo Ohashi)
4. China’s Regional Economies and the Asian Region: Building Interdependent Linkages (Robert F. Ash)

Part Three: Politics and Diplomacy
5. China-Japan Relations: Downward Spiral or a New Equilibrium? (Mike M. Mochizuki)
6. China’s Ascendancy and the Korean Peninsula: From Interest Reevaluation to Strategic Realignment? (Jae Ho Chung)
7. Taiwan Faces China: Attraction and Repulsion (Richard Bush)
8. China and Southeast Asia: The Context of a New Beginning (Wang Gungwu)
9. China’s Influence in Central and South Asia: Is It Increasing? (John W. Garver)
10. China and Russia: Normalizing Their Strategic Partnership (Yu Bin)

Part Four: Security
11. China’s Evolving Regional Security Strategy (Bates Gill)
12. China’s Regional Military Posture Michael (D. Swaine)

Part Five: Implications for the United States
13. China’s Regional Strategy and Why It May Not Be Good for America (Robert Sutter)
14. China’s Rise in Asia Need Not Be at America’s Expense (David M. Lampton)

Part Six: Implications for the Asian Region
15. The Transformation of the Asian Security Order: Assessing China’s Impact (Jonathan D. Pollack)
16. The Evolving Asian Order: The Accommodation of Rising Chinese Power (Michael Yahuda)

Background

JI is an active jihadist terrorist group with purported historic links to al-Qaeda. The group currently enjoys a concerted presence in Indonesia and, to a lesser extent, the Philippines and is known to have had established cells in Malaysia and Singapore. It has also tried to entrench an operational and logistical foothold in both southern Thailand and Cambodia. The United States designated JI a foreign terrorist organization in October 2002, shortly after the first Bali attacks (discussed later). The group was subsequently added to the United Nations’ (UN’s) list of proscribed entities, a move that requires all member states to freeze its assets, deny it access to funding, and prevent its cadres from entering or traveling through their territories (Manyin et al., 2004, p. 5).¹

JI was established as a dedicated entity in January 1993, having been directly inspired by the militant breakaway wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt of the same name. The group itself formally came into being at Camp Saddah, the mujahidin training camp set up in Afghanistan by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a close confidant of Osama bin Laden. JI’s actual genesis, however, is far more historical in nature, tracing a heritage to DI—a movement driven by theological, ethno-political, and economic imperatives that was established by Sekarmadji Maridjan Kartosuwirjo in the late 1940s. This latter organization was committed to the creation of a full-fedged Islamic state in Indonesia (the Negara Islam Indonesia) and consistently refused to recognize the legitimacy of the secular-oriented Indonesian state following the transfer of sovereignty from the Dutch in December 1949. In pursuit of its objectives, DI launched a series of rebellions across Java, north Sumatra, and south Sulawesi during the 1950s that posed a direct and serious challenge to the ruling authority of the central government in Jakarta (Leifer, 1996, pp. 93–94; Abuza, 2005a, pp. 43 and 57, fn. 9; Schwarz, 1994, p. 169; ICG, 2005a, pp. 2–3).

Although the DI insurgency was efectively broken by 1962, the spirit of the group’s identity was never fully expunged, and its ideas continued to resonate among certain extremist Islamic elements throughout the country. In 1972, two DI adherents, Abdullah Sungkar and Abu Bakar Bashir, set up Pesantren al-Mukmin, a boarding school based in Solo that was dedicated to the propagation of puritanical Islamist teachings. A year later, the facility relocated to the village of Ngruki and became known as Pondok Ngruki. Here, Bashir and Sungkar concentrated on building up small communities—jemaah— by working with even smaller study cells (known as usroh) of 8–15 members, each of whom swore an oath to separate themselves from all kafr institutions and follow a strict Salaf understanding of sharia law (ICG, 2002b, pp. 7–10; Suryhardy, 1982; Australian Government, 2004, pp. 43–44). It is in this context that the ICG observes,

It was a premise of the Darul Islam movement, later adopted by Abu Bakar Ba’aysir and his followers, that setting up a Jemaah Islamiyah was a necessary precursor to the establishment of an Islamic state. The various incarnations of Darul Islam saw the [creation] of small jemaah committed to living under Islamic law as an essential part of [this] overall strategy. (ICG, 2002b, p. 10)

During the mid-1970s, Bashir and Sungkar were drawn into open engagement with other radical Islamist elements through an elaborate sting operation concocted by President Soeharto’s intelligence czar, Ali Murtopo. Duped into believing that their followers were needed to help battle a reemergent communist threat, the two Muslim clerics were linked to an illegal group known as Kommando Jihad and arrested in 1978. Although they were released on appeal several years later, subsequent plans to rearrest them caused both to fee to Malaysia in 1985, where, along with an inner core of Ngruki alums, they acted as a critical “way station” for Indonesians and other Southeast Asian Muslims en route to participate in the anti-Soviet mujahidin campaign in Afghanistan. This experience had a profound impact on Bashir and Sungkar, particularly in terms of directing their ideological orientation toward a more explicit regionwide outlook. During this period, Sungkar and Bashir began to argue for the establishment of a puritanical Islamic state in Indonesia as a stepping-stone toward the institution of a wider, pan-border “super state” for all Muslims. They specifically envisaged a caliphate (Daulah Islamiyah) that would integrate the Muslim-majority states of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, as well the southernmost areas of the Philippines and Thailand (Abuza, 2005a, p. 43; Manyin et al., 2004, p. 5; Singapore Ministry of Home Afairs, 2003, p. 6).

The collapse of the Soeharto regime in 1998 proved to be a signifcant boon to the budding JI network. Formerly restricted Islamic groups from across the political spectrum were suddenly allowed to operate freely. Bashir and Sungkar returned to their country of origin with their Ngruki comrades and openly espoused their pan-regional designs. Just as importantly, the inability of Jakarta to retain control over Indonesia’s outer islands led to the eruption of major Christian-Muslim clashes that, by the end of the 1990s, had plunged Maluku (Ambon) and Sulawesi (Poso) into what amounted to a full-scale sectarian civil war. This outbreak of ethnoreligious violence provided JI with an ideal operational environment to recruit fghters, gain battle-field experience, and consolidate the organization in preparation for its self-defined campaign of jihadist violence that was to literally “explode” across the Southeast Asian geopolitical landscape after 2000 (Manyin et al., 2004, p. 6).

Objectives

As noted, JI’s aims are essentially the same as those of DI but are shaped by a more explicit regional perspective and a stronger sense of jihadist ideology.² The immediate goal is the Islamization of Indonesia, which is enshrined as a fundamental component of a broader ideological vision that views Daulah Islamiyah (an Islamic state) as the necessary catalyst for the restoration of Islamic governance across Southeast Asia (PUPJI, Chapter 5).

According to the group’s manifesto, Pedoman Umum Perjuangan Al-Jama’ah Al-Islamiyyah (general guidelines for the struggle of JI, referred to as PUPJI and written in the 1990s), such an outcome can be achieved only via a two-step process: first, to develop a puritanical organization whose members have a strong sense of religious, social, political, and (most importantly) military identity, and second, to use this group as a platform from which to launch armed jihad (jihad musallah) against “infidels, polytheists, apostates, atheists, and the [morally] corrupt” in order to create a theocratic, pan-regional caliphate (PUPJI, pp. 3, 37–44, and 51–52).³

To expedite this process, PUPJI afirms the need to establish a solid base (qoi’dah sholabah) by creating a cadre of followers who are steadfast in their obedience and totally committed to the movement’s long-term objectives. It is these individuals—possessing the personal strengths of faith (quwwatul aqidah), brotherhood (quwwatul ukuwwah), and fortitude (quwwatul musallaha)—who are intended to act as the “core executor, propagator and guardian of the jama’ah’s mission” (PUPJI, p. 28; see also Gunaratna, Pavlova, and Hanif, 2004, pp. iv–vi).

While acknowledging the importance of education and preaching, PUPJI considers the use of military force as essential to the fulfill-ment of the movement’s strategic objectives. Refecting the teachings of Abdullah Azzam and other prominent militant Salaf ideologues, PUPJI sees preemptive violent action as obligatory for all Muslims under the aegis of an armed mujahidin (Barton, 2008).

This vision has been blurred in recent years by growing disunity among the movement’s ranks that has efectively split JI into two opposing factions: a pro-bombing group, which advocates “fast-tracking” the goal of a pan-regional Islamism by engaging in a sustained campaign of suicide bombings across Southeast Asia, and a more traditionalist bloc (known as the “bureaucrats”), which asserts that indiscriminate attacks are not sanctioned by PUPJI and that JI’s end state can be brought about only by returning to the movement’s DI roots and entrenching a more conservative religious order in Indonesia.⁴

Despite this rift, the general thrust of JI’s ideological approach can still be summed as one that is aimed at Islamizing Indonesia in the expectation that this will positively alter the religious balance in Southeast Asia and ultimately foster the creation of a wider caliphate. The adoption of force is commonly viewed as an integral means of successfully achieving this outcome.⁵ Although diferences of opinion exist over how quickly JI’s end state can be achieved, the long-term goal of instituting a cross-border caliphate, as well as the emphasis on appropriately developing the resources and capabilities of JI cadres to engage in concerted armed violence, is largely shared by the movement’s wider membership.

Structure and Size

JI has been described as al-Qaeda’s operational wing in Southeast Asia.⁶ However, this overstates the formality of the relationship between the two organizations. JI has developed as a distinct entity in its own right and, while it has certainly been prepared to accept al-Qaeda funding and technical expertise in the past, the group’s organizational structure is one that has been specifcally designed to further its own regional Islamist agenda.⁷

Initially, JI adopted a vertically integrated, networked character that was composed of several layers. At the helm of the structure was Sungkar, who acted as the preeminent emir of the movement. After he died in 1999, Bashir assumed exclusive responsibility for JI’s spiritual and ideological development, remaining in this position until he was arrested on charges of treason in October 2002.⁸ It is believed that the post subsequently passed, first, to Abu Rusdan and ustadz Adung and then Yusron Mahmudi Zarkas (aka Zarkasih), who were arrested in 2003, 2004, and 2007, respectively (Barton, 2008; Fitzpatrick, 2007; Jha, 2007).

Beneath the emir was a regional advisory council (majelis qiyadah) that was headed by a central command (qiyadah markaziyah) and chaired, until his arrest in 2003, by Riduan Isamuddin (aka Hambali). Next came three mid-level councils that oversaw matters pertaining to religious and disciplinary afairs. The group was made up of four regional divisions, or mantiqis, that were subdivided into smaller operational companies (khatibah), platoons (qirdas), and squads (fah) and
defned along both geographic and functional lines (Abuza, 2005a, p. 44; Manyin et al., 2004, p. 7; ICG, 2002b, pp. 27–28). The mantiqis were organized as follows:

• Mantiqi I: Singapore, Malaysia (except Sabah), and southern Tailand; responsible for ensuring JI’s economic wherewithal
• Mantiqi II: Indonesia (except Sulawesi and Kalimantan); responsible for leadership and recruitment
• Mantiqi III: Sabah, Sulawesi, Kalimantan, and the southern Philippines; responsible for training and weapon procurement
• Mantiqi IV: Australia and Papua New Guinea; responsible for fund-raising (Singapore Ministry of Home Afairs, 2003, p. 10; Australian Government, 2004, p. 50; Barton, 2008; International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, undated).⁹

In practice, however, it appears that JI worked in a much less centralized fashion than this structure implies. As Manyin et al. (2004, p. 9) observe:

[The organization’s] goal of developing indigenous jihadis [necessarily] meant that JI members often had to work with and/or create local groups outside its control. [As a result], it is often diffcult to sort out the overlap among JI and other radical [entities]. Additionally, regional leaders appear to have had a fair amount of autonomy, and…many of the cells were compartmentalized from one another [for security purposes].

At its height in 1999–2000, JI was thought to have been able to count on a total membership of around 2,000 activists, plus a wider support pool of some 5,000 passive sympathizers who had graduated from the various Islamic boarding schools established under the group’s auspices (ICG, 2007b, p. 13). Tanks to a concerted crackdown on the movement by regional police and intelligence forces over the past seven years, however, possibly as many as 300 individuals have since been arrested or killed (Barton, 2008; Schmitt, 2008). Crucially, these “neutralizations” have extended to some of the movement’s most prominent and adept operational leaders and feld commanders (see Table 5.1).

These losses have had a marked impact on JI’s institutional makeup, with the movement now existing as a far “fatter” and more segmented entity. Mantiqi I and Mantiqi IV have both been fully dismantled, and Mantiqi III appears to have been folded into Mantiqi II and reconfg-ured around a new leadership body, the markaz, which oversees four basic areas: religious training, education, logistics, and military operations. Tese areas are subdivided into region-specifc locales, known as ishobas, on the island of Java). In addition, there now appear to be just three distinct geographical commands for Indonesia—the west area, the east area, and Poso (Abuza, 2007d, pp. 2–3; ICG, 2007b, pp. 1–4; see also Jones, 2007, p. 23).¹⁰

That said, JI can still count on a cadre of at least 15 first-generation leaders who are at large (ICG, 2007b, p. 13; Abuza, 2007c, p. 2; Barton, 2008). It is these latter individuals who are thought to be at the forefront of the group’s pro-bombing faction and its focus on attacks directed against both Western and (perceived) secular enemies in Southeast Asia.¹¹ Six in particular have attracted the attention of local and international law enforcement:

1. Mohammad Noordin Top, a former accountant who allegedly acted as JI’s top recruiter and fnancier and in April 2005 claimed to be overseeing the operations of a hitherto unknown terrorist entity on the Malay archipelago known as the Tandzim Qoedatul Jihad Untuk Gugusan Kepulauan Melayu (al-Qaeda for the Malay Archipelago; see ICG, 2006, p. 14)¹²
2. Joko Pitono (aka Dulmatin), an alleged protégé of Azari Husin and experienced electronics engineer
3. Umar Patek, who is highly profcient in the manufacture of chemical-based explosives and who is wanted for his role in the 2005 Bali bombings
4. Hari Kuncoro, Dulmatin’s brother-in-law
5. Zulkif bin Hir (aka Marwan), who is presently thought to oversee all aspects of military ordnance for regional terrorist attacks
6. Aris Sumarsono (aka Zulkarnaen, aka Daud), who allegedly acts as al-Qaeda’s current point-man in Southeast Asia and is thought to be commander of an “elite” JI squad (known as Laskar Khos) that helped carry out the 2002 Bali attack and the 2003 bombing of the JW Marriott.

Top and Zulkarnaen are believed to be hiding in Indonesia, while Dul-matin, Patek, Kuncoro, and bin Hir are all thought to be in the southern Philippines working with the ASG and, allegedly, renegade fronts of MILF.¹³

Operational Activities

As noted, JI exists as an unambiguously jihadist movement that is constructed along paramilitary lines and upholds the purported necessity (and religious legitimacy) of engaging in preemptive violence whenever tactically and strategically opportune (Barton, 2008). The group has, as a result, emphasized an active operational agenda that has involved political violence and terrorist attacks (planned and perpetrated) both within and beyond Indonesia.

Participation in Communal Violence in Maluku and Sulawesi

Much of JI’s initial operational activity was aimed at fanning anti-Christian violence in Maluku and Sulawesi. The group worked primarily with other non-LJ jihadist organizations created to defend Muslim interests in this part of the Indonesian archipelago—notably Laskar Jundallah, KM, AMIN, and Ring Banten—operating under the collective banner of Laskar Mujahidin (LM; literally, mujahidin militia). By July 1999, there may have been as many as 500 LM members on the ground in the central Maluku islands of Ceram, Saparua, Haruku, and Ambon. The bulk of these members were “deployed” for between six and 12 months and were organized into small groups of up to a dozen fighters who specialized in carrying out either precision or hit-and-run attacks against priests and Christian businessmen, community leaders, and churches. As the ICG notes, the range of weaponry available to these LM forces was considerable, extending from AK-47 assault rifes and antipersonnel mines to mortars, grenades, and Stinger 5s (ICG, 2002d, p. 19).

Many of those who became involved in violence in Maluku or Poso had no prior contact with JI or its partner organizations associated with LM. One of the key tools used to solicit these new members was propaganda video footage produced by Aris Mundandar, a Ngruki teacher and close aide of Abu Bakar Bashir. The exact method of inducting fighters varied according to the organization doing the recruiting and its location, but most inductees were first challenged to think about the sufering of their fellow co-religionists by being shown “documentaries” of the horrors of communal confict in Maluku and Sulawesi. Typically, the person approached would be a student at an Islamic high school; after being exposed to graphic images of Christian violence and cruelty, potential recruits would then be invited to join a halaqah, or study circle, to discuss the plight of Muslims in eastern Indonesia. If these individuals showed sufficient interest, they would then be introduced to the key precepts of Salaf Islamist doctrine before finally being taught the importance of jihad—not merely as a spiritual metaphor but also as an actual and necessarily physical means to confront those oppressing the Muslim faith. In JI/LM circles, this entire process could take up to several months, and even once subsequent physical and military training had commenced, as much as one-third of a recruit’s time was still spent in ongoing religious instruction (ICG, 2002d, pp. 19–20).

Early Terrorist Activity: 2000–2001

Apart from participating in communal fghting, JI also carried out three signifcant terrorist strikes between 2000 and 2001. The first, which was executed in August 2000, involved the bombing and attempted assassination of the Philippine ambassador to Indonesia—allegedly as a “thank-you” for being allowed to access MILF training camps in Mindanao (see Chapter Tree).¹⁴ The second assault attributed to the group occurred on the night of December 24, 2000, when 38 churches were simultaneously targeted in 11 cities across the Indonesian archipela-go.¹⁵ Known as the Christmas Eve bombings, the combined operation involved US$47,000 worth of explosives (procured from the Philippines) and left 19 people dead and over 120 injured.

The final incident in this early spate of activity took place in August 2001, when the Atrium Mall in East Jakarta was bombed. Carried out by Taufik Abdul Halim (aka Dani), the attack was directed against a Christian group that met for church services on rented premises occupying the second foor of the Atrium complex (ICG, 2002d, p. 24).¹⁶ It later transpired that Taufik, who had fought with LM in Maluku, had been persuaded to carry out the attack by Abdul Aziz (aka Imam Samudra)—one of the main architects of the Bali October 2002 suicide strikes, which heralded the onset of JI’s most violent and destructive phase of terrorist violence.

Terrorist Activity: 2002–2005

As noted earlier, the most audacious and lethal strikes attributed to JI date from October 2002 (see Table 5.2). These operations, all of which demonstrated considerable skill in terms of bomb construction,¹⁷ pre-attack planning, and target surveillance, were justifed mostly under the twin umbrella of fghting the “far enemy” (the United States, its allies, and adherents to capitalist-led development) while fostering the supremacy of Islam across Southeast Asia. Although unquestionably spectacular, JI’s post-2002 activities generated considerable controversy within the movement. Not only did the bombings galvanize concerted CT action that led to the arrest of some 300 of the group’s members, many in the movement were highly uncomfortable with the large number of Muslim casualties that resulted from the blasts (something that was particularly true of the Marriott and Australian Embassy attacks in Jakarta). Strategically, the operations were also deemed counterproductive, not least because they directly contributed to increased pressure on Jakarta to crack down on JI’s main territorial base in Indonesia (see Chapter Eight).¹⁸

The net effect of these internal developments has been the fracturing of the organization into the aforementioned pro-bombing and traditionalist blocs, which has signifcantly reduced JI’s operational efectiveness. However, so long as the likes of Dulmatin, Patek, Marwan, Top, Zulkarnaen, and bin Hir remain at large, the possibility of large-scale, indiscriminate attacks and suicide bombings cannot be discounted.

JI Traction in Southeast Asia

As discussed in Chapter Tree, JI has gained a certain degree of traction among militants in the southern Philippines and continues to enjoy a residual presence in the region. According to AFP sources, there are probably around 30 JI members scattered across Mindanao, the bulk of whom are believed to be in areas under the control of ASG or renegade MILF commands. Notably, these include leading pro-bombing elements, such as Patek and Dulmatin.¹⁹ Beyond this, however, there does not seem to be any great afnity for JI even among extremists, and the ties that do exist seem to refect pragmatic self-interest and personal relationships rather than a passionate commitment to the idea of a pan-regional caliphate.

In southern Tailand, JI has little support, despite the increasingly violent and religious nature of the confict. Extant local and rebel outlooks remain parochial and very much focused on defending the region’s uniquely defined Malay Muslim identity.

Of the three critical states discussed in this monograph, Indonesia is undoubtedly the most vulnerable to JI’s message, in part because of the ideological links with DI, which provides JI with a ready-made conduit through which to communicate its Islamist propaganda. This historical connection also finds resonance in the raison d’être of other Indonesia-based Islamist groups, notably Laskar Jundullah, AMIN, KM, and Ring Banten. Although originally set up to fight in defense of co-religionists in Maluku and Sulawesi, all of these organizations systematically came to broaden their operational and political agendas in line with JI’s tripartite doctrine of imam (faith), jemaah (community), and jihad (holy war).²⁰ As noted in Chapter Four, however, it is only Ring Banten that has demonstrated any real readiness to support designs that go beyond the Islamization of Indonesia to champion the idea of a pan-regional caliphate. To this extent, therefore, the true appeal of JI’s ideological message would seem limited, even among entities that advocate hard-line militant sentiments.

On a broader popular level, JI’s resonance is even less apparent. Tis refects attacks that have resulted in Muslim-heavy collateral damage as well as general apathy toward the idea of a wider Southeast Asian caliphate.

That said, one should not be overly sanguine about the complete absence of grassroots support for radical Islamic imperatives that JI could conceivably exploit for its own political purposes. In a 2007 survey conducted by the Center for the Study of Islam and Society (Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat), for instance, a third of respondents (33.3 percent) said that they were active members of a religious organization. Slightly more than half (53.1 percent) agreed with the statement, “People who take liberties when interpreting the Qur’an should be jailed,” while 57.7 and 30 percent, respectively, indicated that they supported stoning to death and amputation as appropriate punishments for adulterers and convicted thieves (both of which are required by literalist interpretations of hudud ordinances as set out in sharia law) (PPIM, 2007, p. 12). When it came to their convictions about what Islam teaches with respect of the legitimate and proper use of violent means, nearly half of the respondents (49 percent) said that they agreed with the proposition that Muslims were obliged to wage war to protect their co-religionists from attacks and aggression perpetrated by non-Muslims. Just under one-third (32.8 percent) supported Islamist violence in Afghanistan and Iraq on this basis, and half of those retroactively justifed the 9/11 suicide strikes in New York on the grounds that the (subsequent) U.S.-led GWOT represented an onslaught against Islamic culture and beliefs. More disturbingly, one in fve (20.5 percent) of the respondents defended the Bali 2002 bombings as the legitimate destruction of a site of Western decadence, with a further 18.1 percent supporting the position that apostates and non-believers must be killed (PPIM, 2007, p. 10). Thus, a signifcant minority of Muslims can be expected to tacitly support the ideology, if not the actions, of groups like JI.

JI’s Future Prospects

Despite the many setbacks that have befallen JI in recent years, it is clear that the group still retains the capacity to articulate a compelling narrative to its support base. Even if the name Jemaah Islamiyah disappears from public view, like that of DI before it, the fundamentalist vision that the organization promotes and embodies is likely to live on in some shape or form and is unlikely to fade away completely. Most JI militants (both at large and in prison) will remain deeply linked to the group’s afliated Islamist networks, working through these embedded social relationships to quietly nurture and foster the jemaah cause

Traditionalists are likely to focus on rebuilding and consolidating rather than seeking to perpetrate large-scale attacks. Moreover, since peace agreements are now in place in both Maluku and Sulawesi (see Chapter Four), communal and political conditions are no longer conducive to promoting local anti-Christian jihad in eastern Indonesia. Given this situation, JI will probably reorient its attention toward promoting local dakwah initiatives. The principal aims will be to build pure Islamic communities as bases from which to prepare mujahidin for future battles and to fend of competition from outside Islamic groups, such as HTI (see, e.g., Jones, 2007, p. 22; Abuza, 2007c).

This consolidation phase is being supported by a new wave of jihadist publications and and sophisticated Web sites that are aimed at both the Jakarta youth market and middle-class audiences. The central message of these publications appears to be the promotion of an Islamic caliphate under strict sharia law.²¹ As a recent ICG report has acknowledged, JI’s current focus on the dissemination of information through a publication network is a direct efort to improve outreach and recruitment as a way of rebuilding the organization (ICG, 2008a, p. 14). It also provides an important source of terrorist fnancing through advertising revenue and the sale of videos and other materials.

The more radical pro-bombers, by contrast, will find it increasingly difcult to operate in any concerted manner—as a result of both unremitting CT action undertaken in the context of the continuing GWOT and popular rejection of indiscriminate tactics that negatively afect wider Muslim interests. However, the ability of these extremist elements to stage ad hoc, random bombings will be retained, especially as long as figures such as Dulmatin, Top, Patek and bin Hir remain at large. Most likely, they will choose attacks that are cheap, are easy to plan and manage, and can be readily executed by small cells (or even individuals) pulled together on short notice. Although largely illusory, such strikes would allow the pro-bombers to project an image of strength and create the impression of a formidable and highly capable organization.

Notes:

1. For more on the UN designation process, see Cronin, 2003.
2. JI leaders have vastly different experiences and training compared to the DI commanders of the 1950s. Their time in Afghanistan and their links with mujahidin across the region and around the world have contributed to their understanding of and appreciation for global struggle. As a result, JI leaders have tended to be much more concerned than the founders of DI with striking out against both the near enemy, the national government (primarily the Indonesian government, but also the Philippine government, and, to the extent that it is possible, the governments of Singapore and Tailand), and the far enemy, Western powers.
3. PUPJI outlines 10 main theological principles, four of which are particularly pertinent to JI’s ideological outlook: 4: return of the caliphate…, 5: faith, migration, and jihad…, 7: allegiance and nonallegiance…, 10: Islam in totality (comments made during the U.S. Pacifc Command Southeast Asia Violent Ideology Strategy Seminar, San Antonio, Tex., October 31-November 1, 2006).
4. Comments made during the U.S. Pacifc Command Southeast Asia Violent Ideology Strategy Seminar, San Antonio, Tex., October 31-November 1, 2006.
5. It should be noted that PUPJI afrms the necessity of giving prior warning to its enemies, who then have a choice to submit or die. The so-called JI bureaucrat mainstream argues that this negates the use of indiscriminate tactics of the sort employed by members of the pro-bombing faction (comments made during the U.S. Pacifc Command Southeast Asia Violent Ideology Strategy Seminar, San Antonio, Tex., October 31-November 1, 2006).
6. For more on the extent of al-Qaeda’s reputed links with JI and other Islamist entities in Southeast Asia, see Abuza, 2003.
7. Comments made during the workshop Al-Qa’ida, the Next Four Years: A Critical Look at the Group’s Status, Targeting, and Evolution, CENTRA Technology, Arlington Va., November 4, 2004.
8. Bashir has never been tried with any ofenses specifcally relating to the actual perpetration of terrorist attacks. At the time of this writing, he had been convicted only of criminal conspiracy, for which he received a sentence of 30 months (subsequently commuted to 20 months as a result of time served). Bashir was released from prison in June 2006 (“Indonesia: Radical Cleric to Be Freed,” 2006).
9. According to Barton (2008), Mantiqi IV was originally set up to recruit troops from Australia; after this failed, the prime purpose of the cell turned to fund-raising.
10. JI also has a Central Sumatra wakala, which is based in the small city of Pakan Baru; however, the overall strength of this subdivision is not known.
11. Author interviews, Singapore, April 2005; see also Jones, 2007, p. 24.
12. Top has also variously referred to his group as as Anshar el-Muslimin and Toifah Muqotilah.
13. Author interviews, Zamboanga, January 2008; see also ICG, 2008b, pp. 3-10; Jones, 2007, p. 25; and Rewards for Justice, undated.
14. Two months later, JI was linked to a second attack, this time on the Jakarta Stock Exchange, which left 15 people dead. The case has never been fully uncovered, however, and the bombing is not now generally considered one of the group’s earlier operations.
15. The targeted cities included Jakarta, Bekasi, Bandung, Sukabumi, Ciamis, and Mojok-erto in Java; Medan, Pematang, and Sinatar in Sumatra; and Mataram in Lombok.
16. Initially, it was thought that the intended target of the bombing was Megawati Sukarnoputri, who had recently been sworn in as the new Indonesian president after the national parliament passed a vote of no confdence against Abdurrahman Wahid.
17. The IEDs used in these attacks were typically in the order of >100 kilos and consisted of a mixture of ammonium nitrate, potassium chlorate, and diesel fuel, combined with a TNT booster charge (author interviews, Manila, January 2008).
18. Author interviews, intelligence ofcials and security analysts, Singapore, 2005; Barton, 2008; ICG, 2007b, p. 1; Fealy, 2008, p. 391.
19. Author interviews, Zamboanga, February 2008.
20. As the ICG remarks, <blockquote>No understanding of jihadism in Indonesia is possible without understanding the Darul Islam (DI) movement and its eforts to establish the Islamic State of Indonesia….Over the last 55 years, that movement has produced splinters and ofshoots that range from Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) to non-violent religious groups….It is what ties JI to every other ofshoot, including…AMIN, Ring Banten, [Laskar Jundullah, and KM]. (ICG, 2005a, pp. i, 31)</blockquote>
21. Author interview, Adelaide, April 2008. Indicative of these publications is Jihadmagz, a magazine that caters to a relatively wealthy middle-class readership; covers conficts in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Chechnya; and espouses radical anti-Western propaganda.

Terrorism is not new to Southeast Asia. Indeed, for much of the Cold War, the activities of a variety of domestic ethnonationalist and religious militant groups posed what was arguably one of the most signifcant challenges to the internal stability of several countries across the region. Tese violent organizations arose in reaction to the unwillingness of many Southeast Asian governments to acknowledge or recognize the right of minority self-determination. Such reticence essentially owed itself to an implicit fear that acceding to even limited ethnonationalist demands would result in an unstoppable secessionist tide, challenging the very basis of statehood that underscored Southeast Asian post-colonial identity (Acharya, 1993, p. 19; see also Christie, 1996; Jeshurun, 1985; Joo-Jock and Vani, 1984; D. Brown, 1994; Findlay, 1996; and Nathan, 1997).

Since the 1990s, however, the residual challenge posed by substate militant extremism has risen, in reaction to both the force of modernization pursued so vigorously by many Southeast Asian governments and the political infuence of Islam-which has, itself, been further amplifed by the contemporary force of South Asian (and, more spe-cifcally, Afghan) radicalism (Christie, 1996, pp. 207-208; D. Brown, 1994; von der Mehden, 1996; Reilly, 2002; Tan, 2004; and Kurlantz-ick, 2001).

In the southern Philippines, an ongoing Moro insurgency continues to disrupt stability, investment, and local development, and, in stark contrast to the character of its original inception, now has an explicitly religious bent. Tree groups remain at the forefront of militant action in this part of the country: the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and the Misuari Breakaway Group (MBG). Complicating matters in the country is an entrenched communist-terrorist insurgency that is seeking the establishment of a Maoist state through protracted people’s war and that continues to ben-eft from popular disillusionment borne out of government corruption and extreme socioeconomic inequities. Te New People’s Army (NPA) stands at the forefront of this challenge and, though weakened, continues to demonstrate an ability to disrupt and operate on a national basis.

In southern Tailand, violence associated with Malay Muslim separatism has been a recurrent problem since the late 1960s. Te overall scale of unrest, however, has risen dramatically since 2004 to the extent that the so-called “deep south” is now in the throes of what amounts to a full-scale ethnoreligious insurgency. Although it lacks clear organizational coherence and strategic direction, the present generation of militants operating in southern Tailand have taken their struggle to a level of violence and brutality not previously witnessed and, over the past four years, have been instrumental in carrying out repeated attacks against local administrators, politicians, police, Buddhist temples, and schools. Moreover, the current manifestation of Malay Muslim militant extremism has been marked by an explicit jihadist undertone that is seriously threatening to unravel the fabric of communal relations in this part of the country.

In Indonesia, Islamic extremism has emerged as an increasingly salient threat since the demise of the Soeharto regime in 1998. In particular, a dramatic reawakening of atavistic Muslim identity has combined with a more fuid domestic environment to dangerously exacerbate and radicalize popular sentiment across the archipelago. Tis has, in turn, helped foster the formation of a newer generation of jihadist movements variously dedicated to the establishment of a fundamentalist order in Indonesia and/or a wider caliphate in Southeast Asia.

Intelligence and government sources in Washington have viewed these developments with considerable consternation, expressing fears that Southeast Asia is now a major springboard for local and wider acts of international terrorism that has direct relevance for Western security, political, and economic interests. Indeed, various manifestations of politically motivated extremism sourced out of the region are presently counted as-if not the number-one security challenge and research priority in the United States-a principal focus of concern.

Problematically, to date, however, most of the attention paid to terrorism in Southeast Asia has tended to emphasize response contingencies and crisis management at the expense of systematic risk vulnerability assessments. As a result, policy has often been shaped by preconceived and, in many cases, unsubstantiated threat scenarios. Absent has been the type of comprehensive, empirically grounded analysis that is critical to prioritizing and marshaling resources across intelligence, informational, law enforcement, frst responder, and community jurisdictions.

Accordingly, this monograph aims to provide a holistic depiction of the overall terrorist environment in Southeast Asia by considering the issue from the “red” (adversary), “blue” (partner-nation), and “green” (partner-nation populace) perspectives. The study had three main objectives:

• first, to provide an informed appreciation of the motivations, aims, modus operandi, and efectiveness of regional terrorist groups, the methods by which they entrench themselves in local civilian populations, and the extent to which they interact across national boundaries
• second, to weigh the efectiveness of partner-nation eforts in Southeast Asia to (1) address underlying political, military, social, economic, and infrastructure conditions that foster extremist violence; (2) mitigate the traction or pull of militant ideology and propaganda; and (3) disrupt terrorist network efects
• third, to audit the relevance and appropriateness of existing U.S. internal security, civil-military, socioeconomic, and governance support to partner-nations in Southeast Asia.

This monograph is divided into three main sections. Chapters Two through Five examine the contemporary threat environment in Southeast Asia, focusing on established confict zones in the Philippines, southern Tailand, and Indonesia and the regional challenge posed by Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). Chapters Six through Eight discuss the principal elements of Philippine, Tai, and Indonesian national security and counterterrorism (CT) strategies analyzing their efective-ness in ameliorating the contemporary terrorist challenge to regional states. Chapters Nine and Ten describe the main parameters of existing U.S. security assistance to Southeast Asia and assess how future programs can be structured to ensure the best possible CT outcomes. Finally, the monograph includes a dedicated appendix that examines emergent or potential operational and logistical hubs in Cambodia.

The Current Terrorist Threat

Overall, the terrorist threat to the countries covered in this monograph remains a serious but largely manageable security problem. In Tailand, while the scale and scope of Islamist-inspired violence in the three southern Malay provinces of Yala, Pattani, and Narathiwat have become more acute since 2004, the confict has (thus far) not spread to the country’s majority non-Muslim population nor has it taken on an anti-Western dimension.¹ Indeed, at the time of this writing, outside demagogues and radicals had singularly failed to gain any concerted logistical or ideological foothold in the region, which suggests that Tailand’s so-called “deep south” is unlikely to become a new hub for furthering the transregional designs of fundamentalist jihadi elements.

In the Philippines, Moro Muslim extremism has declined markedly since its high point in the 1990s and early 2000s. Te Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) and Misuari Breakaway Group (MBG) both remain factionalized with the bulk of their existing cadres mostly confned to isolated pockets across the Sulu archipelago. Te leadership and mainstream membership of the largest and best-equipped Moro rebel group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), appears sincere in its stated desire to reach a comprehensive peace settlement, despite the breakdown of a cease-fre reached in July 2003. Although a perceptible communist threat continues to exist, the New People’s Army (NPA) has witnessed a steady decline in numbers and weapons. Moreover, the NPA’s ability to fully control those areas that it has infltrated, which presently amount to only 5 percent of the country’s total, is declining.

Te situation in Indonesia is somewhat more fuid. On the one hand, the latent threat posed by Islamist radicalism has patently declined since 2000, refecting both more efective CT actions on the part of the police and widespread popular opposition to militant groups whose attacks have disproportionately afected Muslim interests. On the other hand, a signifcant minority of the Indonesian population harbors a desire for some form of fundamentalist Islamic political order, which under certain circumstances could spark a resurgence of support for extremist jihadism if not carefully managed and countered.

Te threat environment in Indonesia also has direct relevance for transnational terrorism in Southeast Asia, not least because the country plays host to JI. Although the network has been substantially weakened by the arrests of several leading midlevel commanders, as well as internal disputes over the utility of large-scale, indiscriminate bombings, it has demonstrated a proven capacity to adapt and will probably never be fully expunged as a movement of radical ideas.

Counterterrorism Responses

A true assessment of the current terrorist environment in Southeast Asia must take into account the nature and appropriateness of state responses. Again, there is reason for guarded optimism here. In Tai-land, the government has gradually come to appreciate the virtues of more nuanced, dialogue-based approaches to confict mitigation in the southern border provinces. Te new emphasis on development and “soft” hearts-and-minds initiatives is likely to continue regardless of the political complexion of future Tai governments.

In the Philippines, the armed forces have made signifcant progress in defense reform and civil-military relations and are now reaping signifcant rewards in the ongoing battle against Islamist and Moro extremists in Mindanao. Te admittedly halting negotiations with MILF have made progress, and, with the notable exception of ancestral domain, most outstanding issues have now been settled. Manila has also made headway against the NPA insurgency through a combination of “hard” and “soft” security policies aimed at normalizing (former) hostile communist areas.

Finally, in Indonesia, the central government has fully committed to professionalizing the police force and ensuring that it is internationally recognized as adept and accountable. In addition, Jakarta is slowly augmenting what hitherto have been very weak coastal surveillance capabilities, and it now recognizes the need for a concerted deradical-ization program. Most signifcantly, the government has established a credible and efective CT unit-Special Detachment [Detasmen Khusus] 88-which reports directly to the military and has been credited with the neutralization of at least 450 militants since 2005.

Policy Recommendations

While U.S. security assistance to Southeast Asia has been important to the development of a more efcacious regional CT strategy and structure, much more could be done to inoculate this part of the world against the possibility of a renewed terrorist threat, from either domestic extremists or an emboldened transborder jihadist network. Accordingly, this monograph ofers the following recommendations.

Better integrate CT, law and order, and development policies to address the issue of corruption in the region. Tis enduring and pervasive problem not only fuels resentment against incumbent governments, it also sustains popular support for extremist groups. It is crucially important that elected ofcials, bureaucrats, and other representatives of the state are able to win the trust and confdence of their own communities and thereby deny terrorists the political infuence they need to grow their support and mount efective operations.

Promote further police reform in the Philippines and Tailand. Tis could certainly be done through the current bilateral suite of assistance that is provided through the U.S. Department of State (DoS) Anti-terrorism Assistance (ATA) program, International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) program, and International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP). However, the United States should additionally consider sponsoring a much broader program of professional training through nascent but proven multilateral arrangements. Entities such as the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC), the Southeast Asia Regional Centre for Counter-Terrorism (SEARCCT), and the International Law Enforcement Academy (ILEA) in Bangkok all ofer the major advantage of bringing practitioners together in a single organizational setting where professional networks can be built and ideas and perspectives on terrorism and CT can be exchanged and debated.

Foster a less benign environment for terrorism in Southeast Asia by increasing support for regional institutions, such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Regional Forum, Asia-Pacifc Economic Cooperation, and the East Asia Summit. Channeling security and CT assistance through these collaborative frameworks will help reduce the perception that terrorism is an exclusively American problem. It will also provide an opportunity to buttress indigenous capabilities in areas where Washington is unable to operate bilaterally for political or logistical reasons.

Press all 10 ASEAN countries to sign and ratify each of the 16 United Nations (UN) conventions dealing with CT. Although political agreement was reached at the Jakarta Sub-Regional Ministerial Meeting in March 2007 on the need to strengthen legal CT tools, the fact remains that many Southeast Asian countries have yet to enact a broad range of conventions and protocols relating to terrorism.

Emphasize the use of soft power to enhance local governance in regions susceptible to fundamentalist propaganda (through INCLE); foster greater military and police awareness of human rights and appropriate rules of engagement (through U.S. Department of Defense-sponsored International Military Education Training program, or IMET, courses); and promote general socioeconomic development (through the U.S. Agency for International Development [USAID] and DoS Economic Support Fund, or ESF). To ensure that these types of endeavors have a long-term, sustainable impact, it is critical that they be carried out in close cooperation with national and local authorities and are executed with due regard for community consultation in civic action planning.

Supplement the use of soft power with “smart” power. Tis can be achieved by (1) spearheading public diplomacy, exchange, and educational eforts to discredit perverted interpretations of Islam; (2) empowering moderate Muslim leaders as voices for greater religious negotiation; (3) investigating possible alternatives for reducing the pull of pan-regional sentiment from the inside out, by ascertaining the extent to which emergent fssures between JI’s mainstream and the pro-bombing faction can be exploited; and (4) promoting prison reform to reduce the potential for jails to be exploited as recruiting or radicalization hubs. Tese dialogue and communication initiatives should focus not only on Southeast Asian states with established militant Islamic entities but also on countries that could foster or otherwise encourage hardline Islamist sentiment. Notable in this regard is Malaysia, where a more radical, “enabling” environment could emerge if divisions within the Malay community widen as a result of domestic political instability.

Give greater attention to identifying and supporting conventional and nonconventional broadcasting and message-delivery systems that can be efectively utilized in a multilayered communication strategy aimed at countering the proselytizing activities of extremist groups. Properly employed, these conduits could be highly efective in prosecuting the “struggle of ideas”-not least by targeting and infuencing those sectors that are most able to bolster the middle ground of political compromise and, through this, foster an environment that is hostile (or at least nonreceptive) to the appeal of violent Islam.

Note:

1. In this monograph, Islamist is used when describing Islam as a religiopolitical phenomenon. Te term is an immediate derivation of Islamism, which has its moorings in signifcant events of the 20th century, such as the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. It is distinguished from Islamic, which is more correctly understood as signifying religion and culture as it has developed over the past millennium of Islam’s history. For more on these terminological nuances, see Denoeux, 2002; Roy, 1994; and 9/11 Commission Report, 2004, p. 562, fn. 3.