As one of my heroes, Horatio Nelson, once put it, with characteristic succinctness: “Never break the neutrality of a port or place, but never consider as neutral any place from whence an attack is allowed to be made.”
This is a point long lost on the “liberal” intellectual, who, even after he has admitted the need for war in some material form (such as the incursion into Afghanistan after the events of 9/11), turns his mind to limiting the action. Mere words will easily persuade him that the battle stops at some artificial line, corresponding to a national border. The notion of “hot pursuit” is held under suspicion, or rather, denied. Any power that has not explicitly declared war against us, even if he is harbouring our enemy, must be taken as “neutral” if he gives his word. (Or, in the case of Saddam’s Iraq, or Syria, or Iran, even if he doesn’t give it.)
And so, every day, our troops fight and die against something in Afghanistan misleadingly called the “Taliban,” or “al-Qaeda”—the local face of international Islamism—while this enemy enjoys sanctuary across the Pakistan frontier, and is supplied not only from there but from Iran, and with weapons that often came all the way from China.
Nominally, Pakistan is not a neutral at all, but an ally. Looking at the government of ex-General Musharraf (“ex” as of yesterday, by a constitutional lark, just as Vladimir Putin will soon be the “ex” President of Russia, in a paper charade), we might wish for better allies, but it is the nature of warfare and of life that you take what you can get.
The “neutrals” in this case are the growing number of districts in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier, and stretching across Baluchistan, where Pakistan’s army has concluded some sort of armistice, formal or informal, after being routed in the field by the Islamists. This, at least, is clear enough from information leaching out of a part of the world that has never exported very crisp information.
It would also seem clear enough that our Canadian and allied forces in Afghanistan are circumscribed, by the political pressure back home, to avoid a wider war. They are thus left fighting a purely defensive action, on behalf of otherwise defenceless Afghan civilians, in which “taking the battle to the enemy” can only mean finding and destroying his encampments within Afghanistan itself.
Yet as we surely discovered in Vietnam, a purely defensive war cannot be won. Especially when the prize is not the one we are defending—the strategic equivalent of Quang Tri, or Khe Sanh—but rather, Saigon. The “Saigon” of my analogy is Pakistan itself, and we have been slow to realize that the conquest of Pakistan is the enemy’s principal objective. Afghanistan is a sideshow, and the enemy’s efforts there are like those of the Viet Cong in the remoter Vietnamese countryside—essentially, hit and run.
That Pakistan is the prize should be self-evident. It is a ready-made nuclear power. While the country lacks Iran’s huge oil and gas reserves, it has not been under the rule of crazy ayatollahs for the last 28 years, and is thus in fairly serviceable order to be used in the larger Islamist enterprise.
North and South Waziristan, Bajour, and Swat, are the districts that have been ceded to the Islamists by known accords, and from where Pakistan’s army has withdrawn in poor order; but the trend is much broader, and the degree to which that army has proved inept is legitimate cause for alarm. Worse, there are questions about many officers’ loyalties.
Meanwhile, a huge Islamist propaganda offensive is being directed against the Musharraf government—that is portrayed, fairly plausibly, as an American puppet regime—and daily terror strikes throughout urban and lowland Pakistan are reinforcing the message that the Islamists are irresistible, and must necessarily prevail. The opposition to them within Pakistan is deeply divided against itself, with the parties of Pervez Musharraf, Benazir Bhutto, Nawaz Sharif, and others, playing political games that no country can afford under mortal threat. (There are some indications that at least Musharraf and Bhutto are considering an alliance, for which we can only hope and pray.)
Far from winding down our presence in Afghanistan, there is an acute need for us to gear it up. For it must sooner or later fall on the West to do what Pakistan’s army can’t: annihilate the Islamists in their bases across the Pakistan frontier.
The only conceivable alternative is to leave this job finally to India, another nuclear power. And whether the Pakistanis themselves understand that these are their ultimate alternatives—that the Islamists must be routed by them, or by the West, or by India, in descending order of attraction—is moot. For none of us can ultimately afford a nuclear Pakistan in the hands of the international jihad.
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