When it comes to the war in Afghanistan, I suppose I’m one of those impatient Americans that the Pakistani ambassador spoke about during his visit to Denver this week. “One thing Americans don’t do very well is patience,” Husain Haqqani told the Denver Post editorial board. “And this is not a war that is going to be won in five weeks. Or five months. It might need a five-year or a 15-year window.”
Since the United States has already been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years, I assume he meant five to 15 years more. And he’s quite right that many Americans would be impatient with that prospect. Maybe even horrified.
To give the ambassador his due, Haqqani hardly fits the stereotype of the slippery official that many Americans have come to associate with his country: someone who one moment will be winking at extremism in his own neighborhood and the next moment be lecturing Westerners on the need to stand up to al-Qaeda.
To the contrary. Haqqani is a scholar who has taught at Johns Hopkins and Boston University, written serious studies on political Islam and advised the late Benazir Bhutto until her assassination two years ago (her husband is the current Pakistani president). Indeed, Haqqani’s disdain for the former military government of Pervez Musharraf, who resigned last year, stems in part from its habit of “calibrating militancy rather than eliminating it. And we are now seriously focused on eliminating it.”
What Americans don’t realize, he maintains, is how the mood in Pakistan has shifted in important ways. Yes, anti-Americanism is still rampant. But sympathy for jihadist Islam has actually cratered. “In July 2008, public opinion polling in Pakistan showed that only 33 percent of Pakistanis thought that the Taliban were a threat to Pakistan,” he said. “Today it has gone up to 83 percent.” Opposition to al-Qaeda is very high as well, he adds.
Haqqani even holds out at least faint hope that Osama bin Laden, on the run these many years, might finally be cornered. “Musharraf wasn’t playing ball fully” with the U.S. in the hunt for bin Laden,” he says, but insists that his government will — although “it will take awhile for us to work that out.”
This is all good news, of course, but his advice on Afghanistan is harder to digest. Haqqani contends the Taliban is vulnerable because of its tenuous composition. “There are the hard-core Taliban that are connected to al-Qaeda ideologically. Then there are people with local grievances. . . . They don’t have an ideological agenda. They’re looking for a deal. And then the third category is ordinary people who’ve just been swept up in all of this.”
America can defeat the first category with force, Haqqani argues, and peel off the last two by changing the “economic, social and political environment” in which the Taliban is able to recruit.
“There is no reason you can’t have a Marshall Plan for places like Pakistan and Afghanistan,” he says. “Transform them and then unleash our own potential as nations to really find our own place in history.”
But does the analogy hold? The Marshall Plan was a reconstruction project for countries whose once thriving economies had been crippled. By contrast, as Haqqani himself acknowledges, “in the eastern provinces of Afghanistan and western parts of Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan, there is no economy. I mean, what do they grow? What do they produce? So I would rather that these people had the option of making boxer shorts for Wal-Mart than make IEDs for the Taliban.”
Who wouldn’t? Well, other than the Taliban, and the opium lords, and the foreign interests who help bankroll the extremists, and all of the other forces promoting division and reaction in that hapless, dysfunctional land. Haqqani’s eloquence and conviction are impressive, but they may not be enough to restore Americans’ flagging faith in a mission nearly eight years old.
Sometimes patience is indeed a virtue. And sometimes, as a cynic said, it is a tragic waste of time.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com.
