Social Science Research Council

Comments by Barnett Rubin Center on International Cooperation, New York University

Transcript by: ACE Transcription Washington D.C.

Barnett Rubin: Thanks. Thanks a lot Tom. I'm going to abuse my privilege as a speaker first to talk about something other than my talk. First, I just want to go back briefly to that point. We are talking about international law, but I noticed throughout the discussion, there is a tendency that just resurfaced again to confuse the legal issues with the factual issues. That is, a lot of these discussions are not about legal principles; they're about fact-finding. Now, that is a legal question, who is responsible for doing the fact-finding? And you can tow in-this is a problem, by the way, when people start using the passive voice, as in, "it is believed that." That is a way of avoiding the issue. So try not to use it.

Now, second point about al-Qaeda's motivation. I believe that we are seriously misunderstanding and underestimating al-Qaeda if we say that they're not interested in attracting political support and they're just an apocalyptic religious group that wants to bring about some religious apocalyptic coup. They are not. They are a political group. They are interested in getting support. Not only are they interested in getting support, they are getting support. Their strategy is succeeding.

Osama is the most popular boy's name in the Muslim world. The reason for this is not because Muslims want to bring out some apocalyptic end of history and destroy and kill all Americans and Israelis and convert Christians and Jews to Islam. No, it's for political issues that Osama articulates without compromise in a way that no political leader in the Arab and Muslim world does, except maybe the leaders of Iran, about Palestine, about Iraq, about other issues of concern to Muslims. And while his mode of action and the activities that al-Qaeda undertakes are participated in by only a miniscule, tiny minority, and only a miniscule, tiny minority really support that actions, the political grievances that he articulates are actually kind of mainstream beliefs among Muslims around the world.

And if we continue to talk about terrorism just in this de-politicized kind of technical, organizational way, and reinforce that by saying that they're just this apocalyptic religious group that has nothing to do with politics. And we should have ads on TV about how Muslims live happily in America and so on, meanwhile having intelligence operations that have no effect on our policies, then we are deluding ourselves about what we are dealing with.

It is a political conflict. There are political issues at stake. That doesn't mean you can explain terrorism as simply the outcome of grievances because the vast majority of people with those grievances do not engage in terrorism. That's where Afghanistan comes in. And so because they also need to have the means and ability to organize in a certain way.

Now, the other point is al-Qaeda is very different from these other groups that have been classified as terrorist organizations. Not in that it's apolitical and just religious. But in that it doesn't have a national basis in a national struggle or a national, political system, like Hezbollah or Hamas, and does not try to organize above-ground political support groups that can participate in elections or public information campaigns.

No. It's much more postmodern than that. It's a transnational network that operates through the Internet, international airlines, money smuggling, commodity smuggling, and that communicates with its support base through the electronic media. Which it has learned to do very successfully. So it is quite a new phenomenon, which we should not underestimate.

I should also say in terms of their goals, the goal of al-Qaeda is not genocidal, in the sense, in the totalistic sense. They're not trying to kill all Americans when they attack Americans. But they believe, actually, you see, that by inflicting costs on the Soviet Union and in Afghanistan, they caused the Soviet Union to break up. They actually believe that. They think that that's why it happened. And they believe that by hitting the centers of American capitalism, which is the source of our power, they can have a similar effect on the American empire. So they actually do have political goals, sort of motivated by certain motivation. And precisely when they see that our policy doesn't budge and so on, that's why people start thinking maybe these terrorists who have the solution, because the other methods of trying to change American policy apparently have not worked.

Now, that still is not enough to turn them into terrorists, of course. That requires a lot of other things. And maybe deviant psychology and so on, because they are such a small group. But they still do represent something political.

As far as Afghanistan is concerned, first the role of Afghanistan is not as a source of terrorism. Afghanistan does not export terrorism; Afghanistan re-exports terrorism. That is, first terrorism is imported into Afghanistan, and there it is processed in the atmosphere of a failed state so that it can become more powerful. And thereafter, it is re-exported. It's kind of a duty-free export platform for terrorism. And I won't go back into the history, which everyone is familiar with about how this goes back to the U.S. supported and organized operation against the Soviet Union and so on.

However, going forward to September 11 and the use of force after that, which I think is what I should talk about, the first decision point in a way was the one we were just talking about-whether this was an act of war or a criminal act. And therefore, whether we would respond to it as warfare or through some kind of transnational law enforcement. Personally, I was trapped in Lower Manhattan on September 11 watching the World Trade Towers burn, and my immediate reaction was that it was an act of war, although I did not have a legal argument to make exactly.

And I had lunch the next day with the chairman of the joint chiefs, the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff with whom I was supposed to be on a program with Kofi Annan, about conflict prevention at the Council on Foreign Relations on September 11. And I mentioned to him that it seems like Pearl Harbor. And he said it was much worse than Pearl Harbor. And he fought in World War II.

Certainly the decision that was made that it was an act of war and we would respond to it through war was not particularly controversial. I don't know what the legal status of that is. The only question I have about it really is if it is an act of war, how can se say that the people, and we're waging war, why is it that nobody we capture is a prisoner of war, but are criminals? It seems to me if you're undertaking law enforcement, then you arrest criminals. If you're acting in war, then you capture prisoners of war. I'm sure there are more-at least some of them would qualify as prisoners of war. That is, people who are fighting in the Taliban army, for instance. I'm not that familiar with the details of a legal argument, so there's possibly an inconsistency there.

But once a decision to go to war was made, then there were a lot of decision points about how to do it and what the war goals would be. I think the first goal, the first question was whether the official position of the administration was that the Taliban had to hand over the top leadership of al-Qaeda or we would destroy the Taliban administration of Afghanistan. So the first question that they had to face in a way was . . . well, a set of questions. How far to go in negotiating with the Taliban? What would constitute Taliban compliance with that? They never had to face that because the Taliban never complied in any respect whatsoever. And then what would be the goal of the military operations?

The first question regarding Taliban compliance is there were-and I should say I wasn't in the government at that time, and what I'm telling you now is based on post facto conversation, or even for that matter, post facto conversations I've had with some people in the government, constant conversations I was having with different Afghan groups, including the leadership of the Northern Alliance during this period, and post facto conversations with a coterie of retired intelligence agents, former guerillas, and UN officials, and other shady characters. So I have no way of verifying almost anything that I'm going to tell you.

But this is what, I have the impression-and everybody is trying to spin things for me, so I'm trying to put this together as best as I can. It also includes people who told me one thing and then got on TV the same day and said exactly the opposite, so I'm not sure.

So the first question was there were a number of . . . Pakistan was saying hold off, hold off, we're going to change the regime in Afghanistan. We'll get some good Taliban, moderate Taliban in there, they'll hand over bin Laden, and you won't have to go in and have a war. So that certainly didn't happen by October 7, which was the date that the bombing started.

Now, previous to that, as the U.S. was preparing for that, they flew a mission into Dushanbe, a military mission, and met with the leadership of the United Front, commonly known as the Northern Alliance, and the commander of the Panjshiri is General Mohammed Fahim Khan. And the account I have of that comes from General Fahim, not from the U.S. side. But they discussed possible terms of cooperation. And as they say, they made a-the Panjshiris say the Afghans who were involved, they made a difficult decision that they would cooperate with the United States, they would have a military supply relationship. But the exact dimensions of what they would do were not clear at that time. And the U.S. was independently contacting other commanders because of course they did not have a unified command over the whole of Afghanistan, to say the least.

The bombing started on October 7. At the time, I wondered why did it start on October 7, and some military people I talked to said that that was because the weather was closing in. Later some other people said it was because of the anthrax attacks in the United States. And that they were actually worried that there would be more chemical and biological weapons attacks coming soon, if they did not wipe out what they thought were chemical and biological weapons factories in al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.

I don't know this; they just [inaudible] told me, not bother arguing about whether the missiles should start on the basis of policy in Afghanistan because it has nothing to do with policy on Afghanistan. It had to do with the anthrax. That's still a question. I don't consider that a settled question, but it's one of the stories that I have heard.

The bombing first targeted the al-Qaeda bases. And then Stage One. Stage Two was targeting the Taliban military infrastructure, in particular. That is, bases, not frontlines and troop concentrations. Meanwhile, as the Taliban regime was crumbling, negotiations were continuing to go on, and in fact Pakistan claimed, the ISI claimed at that time, that is the Inter-Services Intelligence director of Pakistan, I believe claimed at that time-everything I say is qualifie, so I don't have to qualify every sentence, okay? -claimed at that time that there was going to be a coup d'etat in Kabul by one group of Taliban against another.

Actually, now that I go back to it, if I am correct about this, that was actually-they claim, I'm not endorsing this- queered by the start of the bombing, because it was supposed to happen like October 8 or something like that. So unverifiable. But there was a report coming out of Tehran, supposedly an intelligence leak from a non-Iranian, from a Western source, into Tehran in the Financial Times on October 6, claiming that such a coup was imminent and naming in fact the people who would be leading it. Meanwhile, there was a lot of traffic going back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan of some of these leaders.

Now, the next question was, what is the relationship between the political change and the military campaign? Now here, let's backtrack. There were kind of two big options that the Bush administration faced. One big option was have a much huger version of August 1998, which involved, really, targeting all-well, I believe the Clinton administration had already told the Taliban in I think January 1999 that the next time-

That the next time there was a major-I don't know if the word major was used-anyway, an attack on U.S. assets clearly traceable to al-Qaeda, the U.S. would not only attack al-Qaeda bases as in August 1998 but would also attack the Taliban. I think the magnitude of the attack was left unspecified. So this could have been simply carrying out that policy of the Clinton administration in a big way. In such a way that you would really disrupt the Taliban. And that would have been very consistent with Bush's campaign position against so-called nation building.

However, after a debate within the administration, which was quite a bitter debate, which in fact, as far as I can see, is still not fully settled. The administration articulated the policy of also supporting the policy transition and the reconstruction of Afghanistan through a framework elaborated by the United Nations. The argument that won the day on that, I believe, based on what I was able to see from my intermittent interaction with some parts of the government, was that the reason we are facing this problem now was that the United States did not remain engaged after the Soviet withdrawal and allowed Afghanistan to disintegrate into a failed state where terrorists could build bases. And that we were not going to make that mistake again. And that that required state building, anyway, which is probably the better term for it than nation building, but required continued engagement. Or what Richard Haass referred to as nation building light, at least.

And of course, we would have the United Nations do it because we don't want to do it. I mean, that's appropriate also, I'm not criticizing that. That was extremely appropriate. That is one of the things that the United Nations does. But of course, it does it well only when it is strongly supported by the United States and other major countries. Well, maybe it doesn't do it well even then. But it does it better when it is strongly supported by the United States and other countries. So that policy was articulated.

Second, how do you go about that political transition and reconstruction? Political transition comes first. And that was very closely linked to the military tactics because we did not have an alternative national Afghan army, or national Afghan insurrection through which to oppose the Taliban because of the ethnic and other divisions within the country, which I will not discuss now.

And of course-oh, I left out-of course, the other aspect of this was Pakistan, of course, which Pakistan basically was told, would you like to be our partner or would you like to be our target? And they opted for the former because they're not going to have an al-Qaeda ally with nuclear weapons. That's not on . . . So they cut off direct government-supported aid to the Taliban, although quite a bit of it continued for some time. And they had to fire a bunch of their top military officials who were doing it covertly for several weeks after they had said they wouldn't do it.

Now, the question then had to do with the role of the Northern Alliance and the role of the U.S. military. Because the Northern Alliance was not simply the anti-Taliban force; it was an ethnically based force, regional force, it was a force that had largely destroyed Kabul city and were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people there. Of course, they're very highly admired by the French because of Ahmad Shah Masood. And, you know, they had certain virtues, but they did not have a national base of support or legitimacy in the country. However, they were the only armed force on the ground that was fighting against the Taliban.

So politically, one argument was first go for a political solution that shows there is an alternative to the Taliban that is nationally acceptable. That is, do something like the Bonn process, but before there is a military victory. Then-this was my argument at the time, not that I'm' sure that it would have worked. So I'm not saying I knew it was right all along because all of this is uncertain-but then large parts of the Taliban regime will defect to it.

People were saying, why aren't the Taliban defecting? The answer was there is nothing for them to defect to. But if you create something-and in fact, it did happen that Hamad Karzai, a Kandahari, was made the chairman of the [inaudible] administration on December 5. And Kandahar was handed over to him on December 6. And the political dynamic that that started could have happened earlier-could have, not would have-but could have, and it might have had a different effect.

That would have required also a different military deployment, however, and that's, I think, probably the decisive reason not to do it because even if you had that UN-sponsored political alternative in place, it did not have military force at its disposal. It would have required a much larger U.S. military presence, at least in the major urban centers, and certainly in the city of Kabul.

And it was not the UN that started the light footprint policy in Afghanistan; it was actually the U.S. military, which wanted to have a light footprint. And there are very valid reasons for that, given experience of past invading armies in Afghanistan. I don't think it would have been received the same way the Soviets were, at least not initially, not at all. But still, actually logistically, it's practically impossible for the U.S. military to do something like that at this point. It would have to rebuild the road network. For that reason, it might have been a good idea because it would have forced them to do that. But they didn't want to do that.

So the alternative was to give a lot of supplies to the Northern Alliance and also to relatively autonomous commanders in southern Afghanistan who did not belong to the Northern Alliance. That is, bring back warlordism. The abolition of which was the single most popular thing that the Taliban did. And so that way of fighting the way-for which there were very compelling reasons at the time, and I don't belittle those or I'm not even in a position to say it was wrong because I'm not sure anything else would have worked-but that way of fighting the war generated precisely the problems that we are now experiencing.

The next decision point, which possibly, which is quite murky to me still but which maybe could have been handled differently, had to do with specifically what to do about Kabul. Kabul is the capital, and it doesn't belong to any ethnic group. It doesn't belong to any faction. And if in a situation where there are no civilian institutions of governance, military control is rulership. So if Kabul is taken over by the forces not of the Northern Alliance but actually of the Panjshiris-that is of the Supervisory Council of the North, Masood's forces specifically who are not just Tajiks, as most Kabulis are, but are people from a very specific region-then it will belong to that faction and it will not be seen, people won't feel comfortable or secure there from other parts of the country. It won't function as a national capital, and the victory will be seen as a factional victory by this small group.

So many people were saying the capital should be secured by some kind of international force and no forces of the Northern Alliance or anybody should enter it. Well, what's very curious is that the Northern Alliance was also saying the same thing. And this is what I don't understand because at the time, I was constantly getting phone calls from the Northern Alliance spokesman and higher officials saying we don't want to enter Kabul and make this mistake that we did last time, and look like it's not a national victory. Will you please get in touch with someone in the Pentagon and tell them that? Of course, now they were dealing with . . . and then everyone criticized them for then rushing into Kabul as soon as the U.S. made the decision to bomb the frontlines. And they took it over, people said they broke their promises.

And now I'm hearing that they were told to do that by Donald Rumsfield because he didn't want to have to send U.S. troops to take Kabul. So again, I don't know exactly what happened, but that meant that you did have what was perceived as factional control and it is still perceived as factional control over the capital. Although that has been significantly diluted by the deployment there of the international security assistance force, which was originally British commanded. It is now Turkish commanded, and will be handed over to joint German and Dutch command with, I believe, assistance from NATO planning structures for the first time, which is a positive development.

Now my time is more than up, so let me just summarize. What has happened since then is that the reconstruction effort is very much stalled. A lot of money has been delivered contrary to what people have said, but it has almost all gone for humanitarian assistance. The government has no control outside the capital. It has legitimacy outside the capital and popularity, to some extent, although that is going down. But it doesn't have control of the apparatus because the warlords that are not natural phenomena but that were recreated through the way that we pursued the war, are in control of many areas-or all areas, actually, including the customs revenue and other things.

Now, what is the relationship of that to U.S. interest? And I think that that is what the debate is about now. There is one school of thought that says well, of course Afghanistan has never been a Jeffersonian democracy. And as long as it's controlled by people who are not-that was what we said about al-Qaeda, by the way, in the 1980s too-but leaving that aside, as long as it's controlled by people who are basically not supporting terrorists who are against us, that's okay. We'll continue to do some reconstruction under their aegis and then history will take its course while we move on. Or we stay engaged, not that we move on, we stay engaged, but we stay engaged to this kind of nation building light.

The other alternative is to say, actually, this is not a sustainable situation in Afghanistan or between Afghanistan and its neighbors for reasons we might want to discuss later. And that only a government which has at least more effective, internal policing powers that is able to deliver more goods to the population so as to increase its legitimacy and control of territory will be able to keep that country stably free of use by terrorist for a significant period in the future. And also will help stabilize the surrounding region, which is actually were most of the al-Qaeda people are, particularly in Pakistan right now, and not in Afghanistan.

Now, that argument is one reason that the U.S. is now changing its military force posture in Afghanistan and starting, January 1, I believe, will go into what is called Phase Four, although I'm not sure what all the other phases are. And we'll reduce the number of mobile troops because they think the search and destroy operations are not finding much to search and destroy, and have more of a security-oriented deployment and a reconstruction-oriented deployment, which will in effect replace the possible expansion of ISAF. There are a number of problems with that.

But basically the lesson is, I think, we did a remarkable job of destroying the Taliban regime. There was no indiscriminate bombing. The bigger problem with U.S. bombing was not that it was indiscriminate, but that sometimes it very accurately destroyed the wrong targets because of mistakes in intelligence. That is not really a big issue in Afghanistan right now, though compensation to the victims is. The bigger issue is really the ongoing operations in eastern Afghanistan, which I think are going to be phased down.

Of course, we may still have killed more people than were killed on September 11. But, you know, we can kill more people by accident than other people do on purpose because that is the nature of our power. But that is not relevant, really, to the issue of the legitimacy of the act, although it is relevant to how people perceive legitimacy of the act in certain parts of the world.

But we have done not well at all in the follow-up, in the political change, although the government that is now in power, if it actually had power, would be not quite a, not a bad government at all, actually. But it's not able to carry out many of the things that its ministers would like to do, and in particular in reconstruction. And that is, of course, a multilateral, that's not the sole fault of the United States. It's a multilateral problem, problems in the UN, problems with other donors. But basically the reason for this difference, in a way, is there is no collective action problem in the U.S. military action and Afghanistan.

But there is a collective action problem in reconstruction because I have this experience a lot. You give a talk and say well, reconstruction, there's not enough money, it's going the wrong way. And then the representatives of the donors come up and say look at everything we're doing. And they give you a list of everything they're doing and how generous they are.

And that' fine, but it doesn't add up to the result. But nobody is responsible for adding that result up. Everybody feels generous for what they're doing because they're not legally obligated to do that. So nobody is actually in charge of the reconstruction of Afghanistan.