:: Farrukh Dhondy

War or peace? A Nobel for the answer

Farrukh Dhondy

"That love never dies

Is the biggest of lies.

Never, never, never

Trust the word ‘forever’…"

From Bachh ke Raho by Bachchoo

Oct.24 : I won a lot of money on the election of US President Barack Obama. Weeks before he got nominated, I was at a dinner party of British chatterers and the conversation turned, as it does in a demonstration of British concerns and seriousness, to the American elections. My British friends were uniformly convinced that America, being the most "racist" country in the world, would never nominate leave aside elect, a black man to the race for the presidency. Black man in White House? No way Jose!

I said it would come to pass even now. I hadn’t consulted my astrologers. I had lived for years with the ideas of the emergence of the black population and had a good sense of the truth that America has never been one nation. The other nation, the emergent one, was ready to elect Obama. I stated my belief and was challenged by a friend to put my money where my mouth was. I gambled a modest two-figure sum and was challenged to double and treble it by other punters who boasted that this was like taking candy off a baby.

I usually lose on the horses, always preferring to bet on the ones with 20 to 1 odds and worse, but my dark horse won (will I be sued for racism? I am writing this from California!). I collected, commuting the losers’ sentences to paying for cases of wine and to charities of my choice rather than taking the money and squandering it on silly clothes for Best Beloved (my youngest daughter) or other indulgences.

Apart from being a good calculation, the bet on Obama was a preference and a faith. Last week he was given the Nobel Peace Prize by the Swedish Academy. This week I happen to be in Los Angeles and every American I meet, Obama supporters all, seem to think that this peace prize was at best premature.

The reason is that Obama is faced at the moment with a crucial decision. He and his team are considering whether to send in 50,000 more American troops into Afghanistan. The US’ allies have not put their money where their treaty-signing fingers are. Britain has pledged 500 more troops and that too only to train Afghans if their Army will raise 10,000 more men.

General Stanley McChrystal, Obama’s Army Chief in Afghanistan, has asked for what he considers the bare minimum number of ground troops in order to hold the line in Helmand and the rest of the country. Most of the 50,000 he wants will be deployed in offensives against the Taliban and a pacification programme which calculates that an Army not only clears the territory of enemy combatants, but can hold it for a favoured native administration.

Both McChrystal and Gordon Brown are aware that the problem of holding Helmand the Pashtun south of the country is made more difficult by the fact that the Afghan Army is made up of Tajiks, their traditional hostile co-citizens.

As such, even with 10,000 more Tajiks, the Army is not going to be able to win the "hearts and minds" of the Helmandi population and be welcomed as their protectors from the evil Taliban. Neither is the reputation of the Karzai government, dominantly Pushtun though it is, very bright with the population which tells every questioner that the corruption of their administration is unbearable and supported only by American arms.

Obama has an alternative. He can ask his legislators to deploy more "drones", the unmanned bomber planes which, like radio-controlled toys, are the American Army’s equivalent of the suicide bomber. That way only the enemy gets hurt — but the problem is that the hand-off method inevitably causes civilian deaths. Hitting caves with drones in Tora Bora may be necessary, but hitting villages in the mountainous regions from which the Taliban and other insurgents operate is bound to bring collateral damage and lose hearts and minds as fast as the people who bet against Obama’s election lost their cash.

Obama has to consider that committing 50,000 troops to Afghanistan would be doing more than President George Bush did when he gambled on the pacificatory "surge" in Iraq. It would remind America and the world of the Iraq gamble and even revive memories of Vietnam. Can Obama, Nobel peace laureate, politically afford comparisons to President Nixon and Henry Kissinger?

The rock hardens and the hard place begins to wedge the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) effort in Helmand in an unenviable grip. The world now knows that Afghanistan is a strategic disaster. More men, more trucks, weapons and helicopters, leave aside more Tajik troops, together with the certain knowledge that the presidential elections which seem calculated to put Karzai back in the chair are nothing if they are not fixed, will only strengthen the Helmand population’s perception that Nato is there to reinforce the repression they have faced.

The alternative to surges and drones is retreat in one form or another. Afghani insurgents are encouraged by their recent history of defeating the Soviet Union’s troops, deployed in their country to support an ungodly and un-Islamic, if necessary and progressive, government. So far only the fringe of Afghan society is determined, for its own material survival, to fight the Taliban.

The natural allies of Obama in his election to the presidency were the 11 per cent population of Hispanics, a considerable proportion of Afro-Americans and an immeasurable number of anti-war, pro-hope youth.

The sections of the population in Afghanistan — such as women — which should on all material and socio-political criteria be against the Taliban, have in no sense been mobilised or worked out strategies of manifesting some influence or power. Yes, there are brave feminist voices and one candidate in the presidential elections specifically targeted the women vote, but no programme of emancipation from the darkness of dogma has emerged in the population at large.

Across the border in Pakistan the insurgents are in a contest to the death with the Pakistani Army and with civil society itself. Any interference by foreign forces could tip the balance of allegiance of the population. In other words, Pakistan is best left to the Pakistanis and any assistance should be by way of material and a very hidden presence to see that this assistance doesn’t, as it has a habit of doing, find its way to Switzerland or real estate agents in Europe.