Central Asian Expert: U.S. Needs to Allow Iran, Others into the Afghan Question

President Barack Obama needs to give Iran assurances that the U.S. will not use Afghanistan to undermine the Iranian government, in exchange for assistance in the region, according to noted author Ahmed Rashid.

“You need Iran on every front, whatever you are talking about. Whether it is military, Taliban, terrorism or economics,” Rashid told a noon-time gathering at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco today. “I think Iran is looking for that kind of minimum security for itself and Afghanistan. I think this is a big issue. It will obviously be opposed by the conservatives in the United States, but it needs to be done.”

Rashid, the author of the best-selling book, Taliban, which became the leading publication on the subject after 9/11, is promoting his current work, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, which chronicles the missteps and possible ramifications of further instability in the region.

One way the U.S. can begin to soothe the region, according to Rashid, is by reaching out diplomatically to the Iranians. "Obama needs to make private or public assurances to the Iranians that they will not use Afghan soil to undermine Iran like the Bush administration did or to seek regime change in Tehran through Afghanistan," said Rashid, adding that the U.S. must also assure all players in the region that it is not seeking permanent military bases in the future. “I don’t believe the Americans want to stay in Afghanistan just as much as they want to stay in Iraq and that is precisely why Obama was voted in to get out of Iraq,” he said.

Rashid also said the other regional powers, Russia and China, must be allowed to join the conversation because of interests in their border security, economic issues and the presence of Islamic extremism in both countries.

The issue of how President Obama will be able to sell the re-introduction of war in Afghanistan to the American people will be a complicated endeavor, yet Rashid believes it to be paramount to the success of any involvement in Central Asia.

“It’s going to be very difficult to sell a commitment to Afghanistan, but I think it is absolutely critical," he said, "It’s critical for your own homeland security. It’s critical for Europe -- for the fact that al Qaeda has spread there. It’s critical also because of the nuclear factor: Pakistan is a nuclear power and no one can afford for Pakistan to meltdown. And, finally, it’s really critical to stop the expansion of al Qaeda before these local jihadi groups become more organized and more of a part of this global jihad."

Rashid found little to argue with in the president's announcement last month of the addition of 17,000 troops into Afghanistan while looking at it in a practical sense. “You cannot talk to the Taliban from a position of weakness, and right now the U.S. is losing the war in Afghanistan," he said. "You have the president, who himself said the U.S. is not winning, which is a polite way of saying that the U.S. is losing.”

Inside the Pakistani Handling of the Swat Valley

The irascible Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate this week, believes the Pakistani truce with the Taliban in the Northwestern region of Swat is just one part of the eventual unraveling of the state.

Instead of purchasing peace, the Pakistani government has surrendered part of its heartland without a fight to those who can and will convert it into a base for further and more exorbitant demands. This is not even a postponement of the coming nightmare, which is the utter disintegration of Pakistan as a state. It is a stage in that disintegration.

Though his stark assessment of a failed state in its infancy is quite candid, the notion that the Pakistani government ceded a modernized former tourist outpost to a Taliban faction that never had any roots in the region has been problematic to many in the Obama administration. They worry that fundamentalist sanctuary was created in one sweep of the pen following the truce.

The seeds of the rise of the Taliban in the Swat Valley did not materialize overnight, but had been brewing since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan after 9/11 and in part a sidebar to decades-long conflict between Pakistan and India.

Author Ahmed Rashid, whose book on the Taliban stood as the sole text on the then-obscure fundamentalist Muslim sect after 9/11, told Democracy Now! in June that the conflicts between tribal groups and Pakistanis on the border became a religious and family affair fused with an institutional fear by the Pakistanis of Indian dominance.

The tribes are divided by an artificial border created by the British. And the Pashtuns are the main recruiting base for the Taliban, and they’re also the main recruiting base for these paramilitary forces. So you had cousin fighting cousin, cousin on the Taliban side, another cousin on the Pakistan army side.

And their failure to deal with this, largely because of their refusal to retrain and rearm as a counterinsurgency force, because they go in as this army used to fighting on the plains of Punjab against Indian tanks rather than, you know, re-equipping and retraining as counterinsurgency forces, these heavy casualties they’ve taken have led to then these very dubious kinds of peace deals, which are essentially a surrender document by the Pakistan army to say, “Well, as long as you Taliban don’t attack us, the Pakistan army, we’ll let you stay where you are.”

This is what ultimately occurred last month. In addition, Rashid said earlier in the interview, the Pakistani government portrays the specter of India as a "bogey man" to the people. He says, for example, that the government continues to offer up a scenario of a huge Indian presence up north in Afghanistan seemingly ready to pounce on Pakistan. In essence, it illustrates that Pakistan has its eye primarily on India, with which it has fought three wars and still disputes the region of Kashmir.

How does the new American president handle Central Asia? President Obama has already vowed to escalate the war in Afghanistan at the expense of withdrawing troops from Iraq. Rashid believes Obama must look at the region as one giant geopolitical puzzle. "The first thing I would recommend very much for the new president is that you have to look at this region as a whole," said Rashid, "You cannot resolve the crisis in Afghanistan without ending the sanctuaries in Pakistan. You cannot persuade the Pakistan army to end those sanctuaries, unless you persuade the Indians to do something about Kashmir."

Lately, the President has showed a willingness to heed Rashid's advice. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has recently said that the U.S. is open to interacting with the Iranians and their role in the region, and one of President Obama's first executive decisions was to send drones to bomb the tribal regions of Pakistan along with making talks with the Pakistanis a prime campaign talking point.

With special envoy Richard Holbrooke now in the region and the work of Clinton already in the works the days of "either you're with us or against us" have now led to a return of complex diplomatic maneuvering that is hopefully in good hands

Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos, will discuss the multi-faceted problems the United States faces in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India at The Commonwealth Club of California Wednesday at noon. Click here for more information.