'Pashtunistan,' the quagmire

WHEN IT comes to Afghanistan, President Obama may be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't: Who would he rather be damned by and what are the risks each gauntlet of damnation entails?

If he changes course and removes U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the militarist right will attack him as endangering America, and if there's another terrorist attack, he'll be blamed.

If he doesn't change course, and, as some signs have indicated, escalates the counter-insurgency war there, he'll eventually have his base on the left out in the street comparing him to LBJ.

The problem is not really Afghanistan as much as it is "Pashtunistan," the rugged home of the ethnic Pashtun people. Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Pakistan are divided by the Durand Line, the border created in 1893 by Sir Henry Mortimer Durand, a colonial British official.

The Pashtuns are known for three things: They're very determined and tough, they use Islam as a discipline for their difficult lives, and they ferociously oppose foreign intervention. They threw the Brits out twice and the Russians once.

The Taliban are Pashtuns. "In practice, the foreigners are fighting Pashtun nationalism," says respected military writer Gwynne Dyer.

PRESIDENT Obama concedes we're not "winning" in Afghanistan.

Still, he's sending 17,000 more troops, and his generals are talking about an escalated counter-insurgency war expanding into Pakistan, a war already noted for violent commando assaults and rocket-equipped drones piloted by people in air-conditioned cubicles in places like Arizona.

"We've got to sustain the disruption of the safe havens," a senior administration official recently said, referring to the Pashtun areas in Pakistan across the Durand Line, the border that even many Pashtuns don't recognize.

This escalation comes at a time when Pakistan is in crisis and leaders in both Afghanistan and Pakistan have been highly critical of the United States for the significant civilian casualties from airplane and drone bombings and commando raids.

Gen. David Petraeus and his staff of "warrior intellectuals" advocate improved counter-insurgency tactics that they say will engage the Pashtun people on a village-by-village basis.

They are based on "securing the population" and identifying and neutralizing "terrorist" elements. But, when distilled down, these tactics sound too much like the "strategic hamlet" and Phoenix programs used in Vietnam.

Counter-insurgency tactics always involve a foreign or dominant military power and an insurgent force "rising in opposition to [that] authority."

But there's only so much tinkering you can do with the basic tactics.

They didn't work in Vietnam, and it's unlikely they can work in the highly foreigner-

unfriendly areas of Pashtun-

istan - unless, of course, the goal is an extended stalemate - or more likely, a state of permanent tension and bloodshed.

Some say we're in Afghanistan to assure control of key transit routes for Caspian Sea oil and gas. If so, that can only lead to ever greater bloodshed. Pursuing alternative energy here at home makes much more sense.

TARIQ ALI is a Pakistani journalist who feels the United States is throwing gasoline on the region's already enflamed problems.

"The West prefers to view Pakistan through a single optic," he writes in "The Duel: Pakistan on the flight path of American power." He says we're threatened by "the power of the bearded fanatics . . . on the verge of taking over the country."

Of course, the attacks by al Qaeda operatives on Sept. 11 seared this single view deeply into our minds. For Ali, Pakistan's greater problem is one of overwhelming corruption, a dynamic that big-money U.S. military interference will only worsen, as it did in Saigon in the 1960s and '70s.

"In fact, the threat of a jihadi takeover of Pakistan is remote," Ali says. "The lack of a basic social infrastructure encourages hopelessness and despair, but only a tiny minority turns to armed jihad."

Still, the "single optic" rules here in the United States, as the urge for 9/11 revenge still seems to drive our Afghan/Pakistan policy. The well-documented fact that al Qaeda benefits from our military interventions for recruitment and that virtually no one predicts "victory" in Afghanistan anywhere down the road doesn't seem to matter.

Twenty-nine years ago, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security chief, delighted in the prospect that we could help Afghanistan become the Soviet Union's "Vietnam."

In this moment of national pragmatism, we need to ignore the fear-mongers and study these tragic lessons, especially the one in which Lyndon Johnson tried to have both a Great Society and a doomed counter-insurgency war.

It would be tragic to make the same mistake once again. *

John Grant, a Vietnam vet and member of Veterans for Peace, is a writer/photographer living in Plymouth Meeting.