Gwynne Dyer: US slow to learn from mistakes

There is always a high turnover of generals in wartime. Some get replaced because they turn out to be no good at the job, but many others are changed because they have failed at a task that was beyond anybody's ability to accomplish.

They are fired, in other words, because the alternative would be to blame the person who gave them that impossible task. That certainly seems to be the case with General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan, who was appointed by Defence Secretary Robert Gates less than a year ago, when President Bush was in power.

The specific event that caused McKiernan's dismissal may have been his recent admission that there is a "stalemate" in Afghanistan. But it was probably inevitable anyway, because Gates, who was retained from the Bush Administration by President Obama, needed somebody to blame for the fact that the military situation in Afghanistan is worse than ever.

What's needed is "fresh thinking, fresh eyes on the problem," said Secretary Gates, explaining why he was appointing General Stanley McChrystal to the job instead. So what should General McChrystal's fresh eyes see? He could start by understanding that the United States is not fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan. It is fighting the entire Pashtun nation, about 30 million people, two-thirds of whom live across the border in Pakistan.

That border has never really existed for the Pashtuns, who move freely across it in peace and in war. The Taleban are entirely Pashtun in membership, and always were.

When they ruled southern and central Afghanistan in 1996-2001, they were hated by the other ethnic groups, and even by many Pashtuns.

But the US invasion effectively drove not just the Taleban but the Pashtuns in general from power, in a country that Pashtuns have dominated for several centuries. To minimise US casualties, the United States made an alliance with all the non-Pashtun ethnic groups of Afghanistan (the "Northern Alliance") in 2001. There really was no US land invasion; it was the Northern Alliance that defeated the Taleban, with considerable assistance from B-52 bombers.

It was a clever strategy, but it perpetuated what was effectively an Afghan civil war between the Pashtuns (40 per cent of the population) and all the other ethnic groups, Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek.

It is warlords from those other groups who have controlled the Afghan Government ever since. Except, of course, President Hamid Karzai, the token Pashtun, who is mockingly known as "the mayor of Kabul".

This is not a war about ideology. The Pashtuns are fighting to regain at least a major share of power in Afghanistan, while the US and other foreign troops are for all practical purposes allied to the other ethnic groups. That is why ALL the fighting is in the Pashtun-majority provinces.

There is no point in trying to win over Pashtun "hearts and minds". The war will only end when the Pashtuns regain a big share of the power. And no matter how fresh General McChrystal's eyes are, it's unlikely that he can deliver that.

Hamid Karzai has ensured his re-election as president in the elections in August by bribing or bullying his most serious challenger into withdrawing from the race, and choosing "Marshal Fahim" (Mohammed Qasim Fahim), a powerful and notoriously bloody Tajik warlord, as his first vice-president. The other vice-president, Karim Khalili, is, predictably, a Hazara.

Karzai's second term will be a reprise of his first: the same ethnic imbalance, the same corruption and warlordism, the same combination of toadying to the foreigners who provide the cash-flow and occasional outbursts of nationalist resentment when US air-strikes kill too many innocent civilians.

And McChrystal should ignore the Air Force's promises to do better: in counter-insurgency wars, air-strikes ALWAYS kill more civilians than combatants.

On top of everything else, the US still insists on eradicating the poppy-growing that provides over half of the country's income.

Opium use is obviously a problem but burning farmers' fields leaves them no alternative source of cash except fighting for the Taleban, who pay US$200 ($337) a month.

Finally, McChrystal should understand is that "winning" or "losing" in Afghanistan makes almost no difference to US security. The Taleban are not "outriders for al Qaeda," in the lazy formula used by State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke.

The Taleban are an Afghan phenomenon with almost exclusively Afghan goals, and even if they should win absolute power after the US leaves (which is unlikely), there is no reason to believe that they would send terrorists to attack the United States. Indeed, Osama bin Laden probably didn't even let them know in advance about the 9/11 attacks.

This war is not only unwinnable but unnecessary, and if David McChrystal understood all these things he wouldn't have taken the job. But he did take it, so he doesn't understand. Afghanistan is Vietnam for slow learners.

* Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist based in London. His articles appear in 45 countries.