For the United States to be successful in the campaign against
Afghanistan’s Taliban regime, it must do a better job understanding
the motivations of the players involved and must stop “outsourcing”
diplomatic and humanitarian duties, said Thomas Gouttierre, the
director of the Afghan Studies Center, at the University of Nebraska.
The bombing campaign by the United States so far has yielded “marginal
gains,” said Gouttierre in an interview. “We need to
stop bombing the urban centers. … We killed Afghans who are
innocent in this whole thing and have nothing to do with the Taliban.”
The Taliban rulers and their troops, he added, “are in this
war to the bitter end, and we have got to take them out.
“We have to be seen as being committed to this effort. We
have not a good record in that part of the world as being consistent
and committed over the long term.” After the Soviets left
in 1989, the United States was accused of abandoning Afghanistan
and Pakistan, and neglecting to help in the reconstruction that
was needed in both countries after the war against the Soviets.
“We essentially outsourced our foreign policy to the United
Nations and to Pakistan during that time, and we outsourced our
humanitarian efforts. We gave more money to humanitarian efforts
in Afghanistan than any country, and no Afghan knows that we gave
anything. … We are in that kind of war in which people need
to know what we are doing for them. We cannot do it through multilateral
organizations.”
Gouttierre served on a United Nations peacekeeping mission to Afghanistan
from 1996 to 1997. He had lived there for 10 years, before the Soviet
invasion in 1979. “Afghans are not always fighting against
each other,” he said. “We think they are, because we’ve
seen them in the last 20-30 years fighting the Russians and now
fighting each other.” Gouttierre said that most Afghans want
to return to the pre-war political system, which allowed “some
type of proportional representation.”
Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance is a “reliable ally,”
he said. However, he added, it’s unclear how effective the
alliance will be in fighting this war.
“They have managed to survive against very heavy odds up
to this point, but they are nowhere near as numerous as the Taliban
movement, they have nowhere near the amount of weaponry that the
Taliban has,” said Gouttierre. “They are not as trained
as the Taliban.” Among the Northern Alliance’s “liabilities,”
he explained, are that some of its members are “not people
of stature, who have a lot of baggage with them.”
For example, the president of the Northern Alliance, Ustad Rabani,
carries “baggage from the politics of the past,” Gouttierre
said. “We need to disassociate ourselves from those folks.”
However, Gouttierre said, one person could bring the Afghan people
together—the exiled 88-year-old leader Mohammed Zahir Shah.
He has “more credibility than any other single Afghan person
at this moment,” Gouttierre said. Zahir would be someone who
could “guide [the creation of] a grand national assembly,
in the traditional elements of Afghan society, to seek a better
alternative to the present.”
“We have to make sure that we are not playing the Taliban
game,” Gouttierre warned. “We don’t want to put
our troops in any position where they would be standing targets
at any time.” He said hit-and-run guerrilla tactics are the
most appropriate for this type of war. “We are in a better
position to run than even they [the Taliban] are, because we have
the technology to make it possible,” he said. “Guerrilla-style
tactics are putting the Afghans in the position that they themselves
had put the Soviets in [before 1989], and we are going at them in
the position they had in attacking the Soviets.”
The United States, additionally, needs to do a much better public
relations job in the Muslim world. “We did it in the beginning.
We are not doing enough of it now,” he said. “We need
to keep getting the proper kinds of information and intelligence
about who it is we are fighting against and who we fight with, and
we need to be really doing much more in the humanitarian area.”