From Southeast to Central Asia: Air power and Covert Operations in US Foreign Policy
Public Forum on the War in Afghanistan Ingraham Hall, University of Wisconsin: 15 October 2001
Alfred W. McCoy
I. INTRODUCTION:
1.) In his recent state-of the-nation address, President Bush told us that our current war against terrorism would be like no other that our nation has ever fought.
a.) On this point, Mr. Bush seems ill-advised. There are several precedents for this war in the history of US foreign policy, particularly in Central Asia.
b.) Just as the movement of tectonic plates has shaped the face our planet, so human history draws diverse social forces into geopolitical templates that shape the fates of nations and empires.
c.) Beneath the surface of reported news, our current war in Afghanistan is thus being shaped by a collision of past, present, and future.
II. PAST: First, the PAST.
1.) After two centuries as a hemispheric and maritime power, the United States first became involved on the Asian mainland at the dawn of the Cold War.
2.) General In the late 1940s, the Iron Curtain came crashing down along the Eur-Asian land mass.
a.) To contain Soviet and Chinese expansion, the United States mounted covert operations along communism's soft underbelly-- a highland rim that stretched for 5,000 miles across Asia from Turkey to Thailand.
b.) In the 1950s, as Washington formed a hasty anti-communist coalition to defend this vast frontier, it seemed blissfully unaware that many of its nominal anti-communist allies joined to advantage themselves against traditional rivals in long-running regional conflicts.
c.) Driven by the bipolar logic of the Cold War, the United States played Thailand against Vietnam, Pakistan against Russia--using Bangkok and Islamabad as a regional surrogates in our attempt to contain communism.
d.) Along this mountain arc, shifting templates of geopolitics have produced repeated eruptions at two flash points, two cockpits of conflict--Afghanistan in the west and Laos in the east.
e.) For 30 years, the CIA fought covert wars at these flash points--in Burma during the 1950s, Laos in the 1970s, and Afghanistan in the 1980s.
g.) Although these covert wars were both hard-fought and formative for United States as a world power, they were and are classified--making it difficult for the American public to understand either their character or their consequences.
3.) Laos: During its secret war in Laos from 1964 to 1974, the United States developed an arsenal of new tactics that continues to define US foreign policy in the post-Vietnam era.
a.) Since it had signed a treaty with Moscow to neutralize Laos in 1962, Washington found itself forced to intervene in a country where it couldn't intervene when the Vietnam war started two years later.
b.) Contradiction forced improvisation, leading the US to develop a new military doctrine that combined tribal mercenaries and massive air power.
c.) For more than a decade, the CIA led a secret army of 30,000 Hmong mercenaries in bloody mountain warfare against communist guerrilla forces.
d.) Simultaneously, the US Air Force fought the largest air war in military history over Laos, dropping 2.1 million tons of bombs on this tiny, impoverished nation--the same tonnage that Allied powers dropped on Germany and Japan in all of World War II.
e.) Through this unrestrained application of air power, the US Air Force overturned the old military maxim that only infantry can take and hold ground.
f.) In this air war over Laos, US had discovered a new strategy for force projection without infantry that has since become central to US foreign policy in Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, most recently, Afghanistan
5.) There were, of course, some problems with this new military doctrine.
a.) When the Iron Curtain came crashing down across this southern rim of Asia in 1948-49, it had--through one of history's accidents--landed on Asia's opium zone--a region that had cultivated the opium poppy for over a millennium.
1.) So when the CIA mobilized tribal armies to fight communism, highland warlords used the agency's arms and protection to become major drug lords.
b.) Moreover, mass, indiscriminate bombing was a violation of the Geneva Conventions on warfare--a problem that would increase year-by-year in the post-Vietnam era as the international community moved to tighten the laws of war.
6.) Afghanistan: The CIA's second major war along the Asian rim began in 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to save its client regime in Kabul.
a.) Seeing an opportunity to wound its enemy, Washington worked with Pakistan, a front-line state in the Cold War, in a ten-year war to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
b.) Viewing the world through bipolar lenses, Washington was unaware that it had intervened in long-running regional struggle between Pakistan and the Soviet Union to install their Afghan allies in Kabul.
1.) When Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence, or ISI, proposed its Afghan client Gulbuddin Hekymatyar as resistance leader, Washington--with few alternatives and less intelligence--agreed.
2.) Working through ISI, the CIA supplied some $3 Billion to Afghanistan's Islamic militants over the next 10 years.
3.) Nearly half these funds went to Hekmatyar, an Islamic fundamentalist who murdered rival resistance leaders and fought to control the opium traffic.
c.) Moreover, Washington seemed oblivious to the possibility that CIA operations, through the imperatives of covert warfare, might stimulate opium production in Afghanistan, just as they had in Laos only ten years before.
1.) Although there had no heroin before 1979, in just two years the Afghan-Pakistan border became the world's largest producer--supplying 65% of US illicit demand.
2.) As the mujaheddin forces took control of territory inside Afghanistan, they imposed an opium tax on peasant followers.
3.) Caravans carrying arms for the mujaheddin returned to Pakistan with raw opium for hundreds of heroin labs operating there under the protection of Pakistani intelligence.
4.) The Pakistani army's National Logistics Cell then shipped the refined heroin to Karachi for export.
5.) Under such informal protection, during this decade of war Afghanistan's opium production rose nearly ten-fold--from 250 to 2,000 tons.
7.) By 1989, the Soviet Red Army pulled out of Pakistan, and the US had won one of its greatest victories in the Cold War.
a.) Instead of negotiating a political settlement to stabilize the region, the United States, after fighting a covert war outside the rubric of conventional diplomacy, just walked away.
b.) For Afghanistan, the price of victory was high. After 12 years of warfare, the country had:
--1.5 million dead, --four million refugees, --soil sown with land mines that killed and wounded 800,000 people, --a ruined government, and --a ravaged economy.
b.) After investing $3 Billion in Afghanistan's destruction, Washington spent almost nothing for its reconstruction.
d.) Through this covert war, Pakistan's politics had also been destabilized since:
--narco-politics corrupted already weak democratic forces, --the ISI, through its CIA alliance, had gained unprecedented power inside the military, --and the radical Islamic parties, operating under ISI protection, had won military support by providing fanatical fighters for continuing covert warfare in Afghanistan and Kashmir.
e.) After the US withdrew, Pakistan continued to purse its long-term goal inside Afghanistan of installing a Pushtun-dominated client regime in Kabul.
1.) When the Tajik resistance forces took Kabul in 1992, Pakistan first backed its client Hekmatyar in failed attacks on the capital that killed 25,000 people; and then armed a new force, the Taliban, for a war that captured Kabul in September 1996.
2.) During the Taliban's first three years in power, drugs, by default, became the regime's largest source of tax revenue and opium production doubled to an extraordinary 4,600 tons-raw material for 75% of the world's illicit heroin supply.
III. PRESENT: Next, the collision between past and present.
1.) In the first days after the attack on the World Trade Center, Washington gained a vague sense that it would have three options for punishing Osama Bin Laden:
a.) A combination of air and commando attacks on his camps in Afghanistan--a option that hadn't worked in 1998.
b.) Sustained air and ground operations from nearby bases to topple his Taliban protectors and capture Bin Laden.
c.) Arms and air support for the Northern Alliance of minority Tajik and Uzbek rebels to capture Kabul.
2.) In the first month of war, the region's geopolitical templates began to force an historic re-alignment in US policy in this region.
a.) Almost by reflex, the US had first sought Pakistan's support for a war against the Taliban, apparently unaware of their close alliance.
b.) Stymied by Pakistan's insistence on protecting its client regime in Kabul, Washington is being forced, slowly, painfully, to realign itself in this regional conflict--moving away from its old Pakistan-Pushtun allies and shift north towards Russia and its Uzbek-Tajik clients.
c.) Caught in these shifting geopolitical templates, Washington is momentarily paralyzed.
1.) Pakistan has insisted that nothing weaken the Taliban's hold on Kabul and the US Air Force now flies over Taliban tanks massed north of Kabul to bomb meaningless targets elsewhere.
2.) Washington is reluctant to embrace the Northern Alliance--a rag-tag coalition of minority Tajik and Uzbek commanders who dominate the drug traffic and change sides for hard cash.
d.) Washington's options are all dangerous, difficult, and unworkable:
1.) Option #1-Unworkable: Continue bombing Kabul's dust and wait for the Taliban to surrender bin Laden.
2.) Option #2-Unworkable: Continue to defer to Pakistan and wait patiently on the oft-chance that this fragmented nation might reach a consensus about what to do in Afghanistan.
3.) Option #3-Dangerous: Align ourselves firmly with Russia and the Northern Alliance to install a minority government in Kabul that Pakistan will find unacceptable.
4.) Option #4-Difficult: Work through the UN to negotiate a coalition government for the sort of reconciliation and reconstruction that were needed 10 years ago when the Afghan war ended.
IV. Future: Finally, the journey from present to future.
1.) As recent events have taught us, the United States cannot ignore even this remote and ravaged corner of the globe.
2.) Once problem of terrorism has passed, Central Asia has good reason to command our attention:
a.) As a flash point of geopolitical conflict, Central Asia can destabilize our fragile global order.
b.) As the site of some of the world's largest untapped oil reserves, the Caspian Basin may become as important to the global economy in the 21st Century as the Persian Gulf was in the 20th century.
3.) More broadly, recent events challenge the wisdom of Washington's practice ostracizing "outlaw states" and ignoring regions of the globe deemed unimportant.
a.) In a global system that has shed internal and international restraints to accelerate trade, outlaw states pose a serious threat to stability.
b.) In our fragile, interdependent world, these outcasts can easily take their revenge by exporting refugees, terror, and drugs.
4.) If we cannot hope for altruism from a great power, then at least we expect it will to exercise its power efficiently, rationally, inflicting a minimum of collateral damage in the pursuit of its self-interest.
a.) If that cannot be said about US foreign policy in Asia during the Cold War, then hopefully Washington will navigate these dangerous currents in our contemporary world with greater sense and success.
b.) Finally, as a democracy, the United States cannot hope to negotiate these dangerous times without informed participation and, when necessary, protest, from its citizens.