Backfire: Iraq, Afghanistan and the war on terror
Over the next few years members of the Bush administration continued to claim that developments in Iraq were heading in the right direction. Their main argument rested on the belief that after liberation the country was steadily moving towards adopting a democratic system of government.
This focus on democracy was important not only because it chimed with American values, but also because it was discovered soon after the invasion that the main justification for the war,Ba'th (Arabic: Renaissance)
The name given to the pan-Arab socialist party founded by Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar in 1947. Its first congress was held in Damascus. It subsequently spread to Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq and eventually resulted in the establishment of two rival Ba'thist regimes, one in Syria since 1963 and one in Iraq 1968-2003.
Shi'a Islam
Muslim sect which emerged out of the struggle over the succession following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Derived from Shi'a Ali (the Party of Ali) or those who supported the Prophet's sonin-law Ali's accession to the Caliphate. An estimated 15 per cent of Muslims are Shi'a. They are concentrated in the areas of Iran, Iraq and southern Lebanon, with smaller communities scattered throughout the Muslim world.
Sunni Islam
The main body of Muslims, who follow the path (sunna) of the Prophet Mohammed and the Quran and the hadith.
the idea that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD, was wholly unsubstantiated. As no WMD could be found, it was necessary to find another reason for justifying the war, and the Bush administration, with the UN now sidelined, therefore put increasing stress on the idea that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein had created the conditions for establishing a democratic Iraq that could in turn act as a model for the greater Middle East region.
Initially, it did appear as though some progress was being made in this area.
After about a year of rule by the so-called Coalition Occupation Authority, Iraq returned to being an independent state in June 2004. Following another transitional phase, a new Iraqi constitution was approved and this was then followed by the December 2005 parliamentary elections. People who had once been forced to engage in phoney exercises in representation manufactured by Saddam Hussein's Ba’th Party were now able to select candidates in real elections. An impressive 76.9 per cent of eligible Iraqis cast their vote and no fewer than twelve parties came to be represented in the new House of Representatives. All this was significant, but it took place against the background of an ever-worsening wave of violence that threatened to snuff out the stumbling efforts to create democracy and risked provoking the partition of the country.The roots of violence were many, but two factors stand out. First, the United States was seen as attempting to impose its own political system on Iraq and its excessive influence was naturally resented. Second, there was the simple fact that if Iraq did become democratic then power would most likely be exercised by the Shi’a majority, leaving the Sunni minority, which had traditionally dominated the government, on the periphery. Not surprisingly Sunni militants, who included a number of Saddam loyalists, had no intention of being consigned to such a position and tried to derail the democratic process by taking up arms against both the Americans and the Shi'a. Unfortunately poor American decision-making only fanned the flames, for shortly after the occupation began the Iraqi army was disbanded and the Ba'th Party banned, thus providing a huge reservoir of disgruntled, unemployed men with military and political training for the growing insurrection. Worse still was that the existence of American targets and the chance to create hostility between Sunni and Shi'a proved an irresistible lure to al-Qaeda- linked operatives who began to engage in a series of high-profile and extremely bloody terrorist acts.
With too few American troops stationed in Iraq to maintain order, by 2006 virtual civil war conditions existed as relentless terrorist attacks and fighting between Sunnis and Shi'as, fuelled by eager elements entering Iraq from the outside, threatened to tear the country apart.In order to try to bring this situation under control, in 2007 the Bush administration increased troop levels by 20,000, thus bringing the overall size of the American force in Iraq to 150,000. Critics of this so-called ‘surge' recalled similar episodes during the Vietnam War in the 1960s, when the addition of extra troops was supposed to turn the tide of the war. By the autumn of 2007 it did appear that the surge had led to a diminution of violent attacks. However, whether this would continue into the long term was most uncertain as the desire for revenge, sectarian hatred and the wish to obstruct any attempt at nation-building continued to motivate a variety of different insurgent groups. All that was clear by October 2007 was that almost 4,000 US military personnel had died in Iraq, the great majority of them after major combat operations were supposedly finished.
For the Iraqis themselves accurate casualty figures were difficult to come by. Some surveys put the number as high as 1.2 million since March 2003; other estimates range from 20—30,000 to 600,000. The other measure that stood as a testimony to the horror of the civil war was the displacement of millions of Iraqis. By 2007 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported that 2 million Iraqis had fled to neighbouring countries, while an almost equal number had been internally displaced. This amounted to 16 per cent of the Iraqi population, which meant that Iraq proportionally had more refugees than any other country in the world. In 2006 about 100,000 Iraqis fled to neighbouring Syria and Jordan each month, causing further political destabilization in an already fragile region. Most obviously from the perspective of the ‘war on terror', such dislocation did little to persuade anyone that American policies were somehow making the world a safer place.
Only one region of Iraq saw relatively little violence and this was the area inhabited predominantly by the Kurdish minority. However, even here there was growing evidence in 2007 that the Kurds were facing problems ahead, for their success was earning them the hostility of Turkey, which feared the possible effect on its own Kurdish minority. Iraq by the end of 2007 thus still faced a troubled future with little prospect of a return to peace.In Afghanistan the situation was only slightly better. To be sure, a national government was in place, headed since 2002 by the seemingly popular Hamid Kharzai, and by 2007 ‘only' 445 Americans had been killed, in addition to a number of Britons, Canadians and other nationalities. Afghan casualties, while again difficult to calculate, were estimated to be somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 since 2001. Afghanistan had produced the largest number of refugees of any single country before 2001; in 2002 1.8 million returned. Despite this, 3 million Afghans were still living outside the country in late 2007. While most of these had not been driven out of their homeland as a result of post-9/11 developments, their unwillingness to return was hardly a vote of confidence in the so-called ‘Operation Enduring Freedom'.
The explanation for this lack of interest in returning to Afghanistan was twofold: escalating violence and limited economic opportunity. By 2003, less than two years after being ousted from power, the Taliban began a new insurgency. Sporadic attacks on coalition targets soon became endemic, causing an immense strain between the Afghan government on the one hand and the United States and its allies on the other. In 2007 President Kharzai publicly admitted that he had been seeking peace terms with the Taliban, a quest that proved unsuccessful. Meanwhile a number of NATO countries were making moves to reduce their presence in the country.
The resurgence of the Taliban was complemented by the resurgence of opium as the major cash crop in Afghanistan.
Ironically, the Taliban had banned and effectively curtailed the Afghan drug trade when they were in power, but production dramatically increased soon after the US-led invasion began. By 2007 it amounted to more than 50 per cent of the country's gross domestic product. The coalition forces' efforts to attack production were either unsuccessful or even counter-productive, causing further violence over control of the crop. In the end, far from being a success, Afghanistan, which had been the first major front line in the war on terrorism, was suffering from an abundance of insurgents and warlords, both undermining the Kharzai government's fragile hold on power.In sum, by 2007 the ‘war on terror' was hardly going according to plan. Iraq had been described as a central front in this war, but many came to believe, by 2007, that America's presence there was having the exact opposite effect from what had been intended. Instead of becoming a ‘poster child for democracy', Iraq had turned into a breeding and training ground for terrorists. In Afghanistan, which had too often been relegated to Iraq's shadow, the old protectors of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were far from finished. And, while the United States itself had not been hit by terrorist strikes since 2001, many other cities suffered severe blows, most notably London and Madrid. Even in the United States, where support for the invasion of Iraq and other policies had earlier been high, public opinion had turned sour. Fewer than 30 per cent of Americans polled in 2007 thought that the United States and its allies were winning the ‘war on terror'. The problems, however, did not end there, for the United States had also to contend with the other members of the ‘axis of evil'. And ironically, Iran and North Korea, the two countries that had shared this dubious honour with Iraq, actually did have something that the Iraqis, perhaps because an assiduous sanctions and inspection regime had made it impossible, did not: a realistic possibility of obtaining nuclear weapons.