Srinath Raghavan - Fierce Enigmas: A history of the United States in South Asia

A T AROUND SEVEN OCLOCK on the morning of May 21, 2016, a middle-aged Pashtun man crossed the border from Iran to Pakistan. Although he was carrying a Pakistani passport bearing the name Muhammad Wali, he was detained at the border crossing for nearly two hours. When allowed through, he got into a white sedan and proceeded on the eight-hour drive to Quetta, capital of the Pakistani province of Balochistan. As the car approached the small town of Ahmad Wal, about two-thirds of the way to Quetta, Hellfire missiles from an American drone tore into it, incinerating the driver and passenger. The US Joint Special Operations Command had assassinated Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansur, the leader of the Taliban.

Two days later, President Barack Obama announced the killing in a press conference in Hanoi. The strike, he said, removed the leader of an

The Obama administration hailed the assassination of Mansur for two reasons, primarily. First, it was part of a strategy to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, a strategy that now seemed likely to succeed. Mansur himself had taken over as leader of the Taliban less than a year priorafter revelation that he had muzzled news of the April 2013 death of Taliban supreme commander Mullah Mohammad Omar. Mansurs killing, it was assumed, would throw the organization into disarray and embolden the moderates within the Taliban to enter into talks with the Afghan government.

Second, the strike would send a strong signal to Pakistan that it could no longer harbor Taliban leaders while pocketing American financial aid. Pakistans policy of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds was well known to American policymakers. In Obamas first intelligence briefing in 2009, the director of central intelligence had wearily told him that the Pakistanis were a living lie. American officials believed that Pakistans mendacious stance stemmed not just from its desire to prop up the Taliban and ensure that Afghanistan remained its strategic backyard but also from its long-running rivalry with India over Kashmir and its fear of Indian influence in Afghanistan. Over the years Obama realized there were limits to how much Washington could cajole India into engaging with Pakistan even as the latter supported anti-Indian terrorist outfits. Instead, he came to rely heavily on a covert action programhuman and technical intelligence,

The assassination of Mansur did not, however, deliver the desired outcomes. Days after the strike, the Taliban leadership council in Quetta chose Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, a religious scholar, as his successor. And they soon escalated attacks inside Afghanistan. By the time Obama left the White House in

As for the impact on Pakistan, it turned out that the United States might have grossly misjudged the dynamic between the Pakistanis and Mansur. Former associates of Mansur as well as knowledgeable Afghan officials subsequently disclosed that in the month prior to his assassination, the Taliban leader had been at loggerheads with the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the intelligence agency known for its far-reaching power and influence over the very top layers of the Pakistani government. Mansur had apparently resisted ISI orders to target infrastructure in Afghanistan, to promote a hardline Pakistani protg, Sirajuddin Haqqani, as his deputy, and to advance Pakistans particular interests in future negotiations with the Afghan government. During this period Mansur had conveyed to Taliban commanders under him that he was prepared to negotiate for peace. In a bid to loosen the ISIs grip on the Taliban, he was reportedly prepared to accord greater autonomy to his commanders in the field and was exploring the possibility of securing assistance from Iran to avoid relying so heavily on Pakistan. The ISI, in fact, may well have created the trail that led the Americans to Mansur.

These details emerged over fourteen months after Mansurs assassination. By then, the war in Afghanistan had garnered the dubious distinction of being the longest war in American history: twice as long already as the Vietnam War. Despite a heavy commitment of troops and money, drones and Special Forces, the United States still found it difficult to distinguish who was on which side of this tangled conflict.

Barack Obama was not, of course, the first American president to grapple with the complexities of South Asia. Nor were George W. Bush or his immediate predecessors. In fact, the story of US covert action in the region goes all the way back to 1827, when Josiah Harlan raised the Stars and Stripes at the outskirts of the town of Ludhiana in the Punjab and recruited a ragtag militia to foment a rebellion in Afghanistan against its ruler, Dost Mohammed Khan.

Born in 1799 to a family of Philadelphia Quakers, Harlan had come to Calcutta in 1822 as supercargothe agent responsible for overseeing cargo and its saleon a merchant vessel. A year later, he signed up to serve as a doctor in the British East India Companys army for the war on Burma. During a period of convalescence after being wounded in the field, Harlan chanced upon a recently published book on Afghanistan by the British official Mounstuart Elphinstone. Although the British nominated Elphinstone as their envoy to the court in Kabul, a regime change in which Dost Mohammed had deposed Afghan ruler Shah Shuja prevented him from taking up his appointment or living in the city. That did not prevent Elphinstone from concocting stories of Oriental splendor and strife, bejeweled princes and wild tribesmen.

The adventurer in Harlan was hooked and decided to redeem Shuja. He set off on a covert expedition into Afghanistan aimed at restoring Shuja to the throne of Kabul and securing for himself a little kingdom to rule. It did not quite work out as he had planned. After much intrigue and travail, Harlan actually ended up training an Afghan force for Dost Mohammed Khan. In the summer of 1838, Harlan himself led this force in a campaign against the khan of Kunduz. Thereafter, he claimed to have struck a bargain with a Hazara chieftain to become the ruler of that province as a reward for securing it from its traditional enemies. By this time, the first Anglo-Afghan war was underway, and a bitter Harlan had to depart Afghanistan. Back in the United States, he embarked on several failed business ventures, including one to import camels from Afghanistan.