Ahmad Faruqui reviews 'Descent into Chaos: How the War against Islamic Extremism is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia' by Ahmed Rashid
Ahmad Faruqui reviews
Descent into Chaos: How the War Against Islamic Extremism is Being Lost in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia
By Ahmed Rashid
Allen Lane, 2008
One of Pakistan’s foremost journalists, Ahmed Rashid had traveled widely in Afghanistan and Central Asia long before it became fashionable to venture into that part of the globe.
Over the years, he interviewed in person fearsome warlords that most people did not wish to see even on television. He painstakingly accumulated facts about the ‘jihad’ being waged by terrorist groups and wrote two books about it.
Now Rashid has brought his talents to addressing the central question of the day: how has the US-led global war on terror fared? The book’s title gives away the ending. It could have come straight out of Dante’s Inferno. But while that was a poet’s fantasy, what Rashid has given us is stark reality.
Because of the war, the lives of countless people in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Iraq, a topic covered only indirectly by Rashid) have been lost, impaired or scarred forever. Billions of dollars have been spent on it, with more than seven billion going to the Pakistani military alone, but all we have to show for it is general mayhem six years on.
Rashid regards Iraq as a costly blunder that diverted human and material resources from the war in Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban are resurgent. He attributes that to the general failure of US policies. Warlords who carried out war crimes were never held accountable and still hold sway in their territories. An American puppet, Hamid Karzai, was installed as the president and ruled with such incompetence that his authority is circumscribed by the city limits of Kabul. The Operation in Bora Bora to nab Osama bin Laden was botched up by American troops under the command of General Tommy Franks who later argued that he never knew that bin Laden was in the area.
Rashid argues that the US strategy of investing heavily in General Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan was flawed from the outset. Musharraf, who had seized power illegally in October 1999, had no interest in liberalizing the country. A US administration which had made democracy its hallmark blundered by supporting a military dictator who was the antithesis of the popular will andwho used every arrow in the quiver tostrengthen his hold on power. Musharraf held a referendum in which almost no one except government employees cast a vote but which allowed him to have himself declared President, akin to how Napoleon crowned himself. Musharraf created a King’s Party so that it would get a notorious bill passed in Parliament which would allow him to simultaneously serve as the president and army chief.
After 9/11, Musharraf reinvented himself as a liberal. All it took was a phone call from US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age unless it did as told. Musharraf had correctly anticipated that the US would act like a ‘wounded bear’ and attack Afghanistan and if Pakistan did not comply, it would turn to its nemesis, India. But Musharraf was never fully able to persuade the Pakistani general staff to join the US in the fight against the Taliban. They always saw it as a US war, not their war.
Musharraf directed the intelligence services and the uniformed military to go after Al-Qa’ida and all foreign-born militants but to not go after domestic insurgents. Hundreds of suspects were arrested and turned over to the US. But the insurgents continued to gain strength. Last July, they occupied a high profile mosque in the heart of Islamabad and only yielded when it was stormed by commandos. This June, they came close to taking over the largest city in the Frontier province, Peshawar.
Rashid argues that all along Musharraf has engaged in a high-stakes game of poker with the Americans. Behind the façade, his military continues to support the insurgent groups that it had created to further its anti-Indian
Early in his rule, Musharraf dismissed a man who was beginning to show political independence and replaced him with an international banker, Shaukat Aziz, who had been serving as the finance minister. Aziz, who had friends in high places such as the deputy US Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, had no domestic constituency and better yet, no political ambitions.
Soon after taking the high office, he startled an interviewer on BBC by saying that he had never had any difference of opinion with Musharraf and was unlikely to ever have one. This type of carte blanch fit right in with Musharraf’s ‘unity of command’ management style.
Musharraf was on the record as saying that, while he was not power hungry, he would not share power with anyone else. Aziz kept on expanding the cabinet to build support for his boss. At one point, it exceeded a hundred ministers, the largest by far in history. A special facility had to be found to host cabinet meetings, evoking Lewis Carroll.
No one expected much success from a dictator whose army had systematically consigned the political institutions to a graveyard. But people expected more from a twice-elected American president. Rashid does not discuss why that did not happen. Nor does he discuss whether the war on terror would have fared better had then US taken an approach that put more weight on winning the hearts and minds of the terrorists and less weight on bombing and jailing large numbers of suspects outside of a judicial process.
In other words, Rashid does not engage in revisionist history. Nor does he speculate about the future. He simply sticks to the facts. That is both the strength and weakness of his book.
Even then, it is a must-read for specialists and the general reader. The contrast between the events chronicled by Rashid and the narration laid out in US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs is striking. According to her, everything good that has taken place in Pakistan since the terrorist attacks of 11 September has been due to the prodemocracy policies of the Bush administration in the greater Middle East.
Rashid has penned the ultimate indictment of the Bush-Musharraf-Karzai alliance, which emerges in his compelling narrative as nothing but an axis of incompetence.
Ahmad Faruqui
Associate with the University of Bradford’s Pakistan Security Research Unit
This book review was first published in the RUSI Journal (Vol. 153, No. 4, August 2008).