Page 21 - The Cormorant Issue 14

Unfortunately, the political fallout of the Libyan crisis may nega- tively affect the “Ghent Initiative” for enhanced capability devel- opment that is now being discussed. The emphasis is on pooling and sharing and task specialisation, in order to enhance cost- effectiveness and operational output, and to create budgetary margin to address the strategic shortfalls. While pooling can be organized in such a way that all participants retain maximal flex- ibility to engage in separate operations, there is a big risk that Member States will now not be willing to engage in pooling with those seen as unlikely to join in when it comes to real opera- tions. That impression can only be undone by those so accused, including by signalling their willingness to pool capabilities in sub- stantive capability areas, to a substantive degree. That in turn will create the political energy necessary to ensure that the “Ghent initiative” becomes a long-term process, a forum for effective strategic-level dialogue between national defence planning. Only through CSDP can such military convergence be achieved, as the only way to produce more deployable capabilities by all Member States, which will thus also benefit the two military most powerful Member States, France and the UK.
One specific capability in which the EU is lacking is planning and conduct. The EU does not have a permanent operational head- quarters. As a result, it cannot do permanent planning so that whenever a contingency arises specific plans can be produced quickly. And it cannot but outsource the conduct (command and control) of an operation, either to a Member State or to NATO. The Libyan crisis demonstrates though that the availability of
NATO is not guaranteed. Even though in the end Turkish objec- tions were overcome (though in future crises they will undoubt- edly re-emerge in view of Turkey’s new foreign policy stance), arguably conducting the operation under the NATO-flag, with all the connotations that carries in the region, has negative politi- cal consequences. The only EU Member States able to conduct such complex operations are France and the UK, and then only with difficulty. The inevitable conclusion is that if Europeans want to be sure they are able to act in every future contingency, the EU needs its own operational HQ. Now is the opportunity to set up an integrated civilian-military OHQ within the European External Action Service.
Today, the picture is mixed. European countries are in the lead, but Europe is not. Eventually, the EU will come back into the pic- ture, for it is beyond the capacity of those individual EU Member States to set and implement long-term strategy for Libya and the Mediterranean, grateful though one must be for them assuming leadership of the current crisis management. If the three strategic lessons listed above are learned and absorbed, the next time hopefully the EU will be in the picture from the very start, to the benefit of all concerned.
Prof. Dr Sven Biscop is Director of the Europe in the World Programme at Egmont – Royal Institute for International Rela- tions in Brussels, and Visiting Professor at Ghent University and at the College of Europe in Bruges.
Pashtunwali and the Pashtuns
Sir Hilary Synnott
“I have been a Pashtun for six thousand years, a Muslim for thir- teen hundred years, and a Pakistani for twenty five,” said Khan Abdul Wali Khan, the leader of the Pashtun separatist movement in response to a journalist’s question in 1972 about where his allegiance lay.
It is a popular generalisation that “All Taliban are Pashtuns, but not all Pashtuns are Taliban”. Like many popular generalisations, it has the merit of being broadly true while also risking being misleading. And it begs many questions. Who are Pashtuns, also known as Pushtuns, or Pakhtuns, or Pathans? Who are the Tali- ban? What, if anything, do they stand for and what drives them? To what extent can a man (and it is men rather than women who are relevant in this male-dominated context) be both at the same time? Why do some Pashtuns claim to be Taliban and some not? For some journalistic purposes the various characteristics and drivers are all too often conflated into one label: ‘the enemy’ or, often less accurately, ‘the bad guys’.
Since British forces in Afghanistan encounter Taliban and Pash- tuns in adversarial settings, as well as having to deal with une- quivocally ‘bad guys’, it is as well to have a sound idea of what one is up against. But, while Montgomery famously had a photo of Rommel in his tent in order better to ‘know the enemy’, as Sun Tzu had advised, the task in Afghanistan is more difficult because ‘the enemy’ and their motivations are more diverse than was the Afrika Corps. Some elaboration may be useful.
Taliban, the plural of the Arabic word Talib, or student, is literally a group of people who claim to be students of Islam; study being a never-ending task and duty for a true devotee, a concept which existed in the days of the Greek philosopher Socrates and which,
one hopes, has its reflection today in the notion of open-minded- ness . In the context of Afghanistan, however, it was the name adopted in about 1994 by followers of the one-eyed 35 year-old former Mujahideen Mullah Mohammed Omar. It was they who, with the help of the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, drove out the anarchic warlords who had filled the political and govern- mental vacuum which followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989. In the ensuing civil war, Mullah Omar’s Taliban, composed mainly of Pashtuns from the south and east of the country and supported by the ISI, opposed the Northern Alliance, an umbrella organisation comprising Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen and other Pashtuns. The Northern Alliance were backed by the US after 9/11 and were heavily represented at the Bonn Conference the following December which determined Afghanistan’s future constitutional process. The Taliban were not present in Bonn and hence the southern and eastern Pashtuns felt, to use a Western concept, disenfranchised from the decision making process.
The geographical distribution of Pashtuns reinforces the conten- tion that ‘not all Pashtuns are Taliban’. The absence of census allows no certainty about numbers. Best estimates suggest that Afghanistan is home to some 12 million Pashtuns, about 42 per cent of the population. But many more, about 27 million, live in Pakistan. Of these, some 3.5 million live in the sparsely popu- lated and turbulent Federally Administered Tribal Areas, FATA, which have a special constitutional status in Pakistan and which neither the modern Pakistan state nor the British before them have ever been able to ‘tame’. Of the rest, most inhabit the ‘Set- tled Areas’ in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa (formerly Northwest Frontier Province) and Northern Baluchistan, adjoining the 1500 mile long Durand Line which runs between the two countries, although Afghanistan has never recognised it as an international border.
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