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115 CHAPTER 7 Afghanistan: A Third Way Edward N. Luttwak Introduction: The Regional Context What follows is based on the presumption that the attempt to transform Afghanistan into a pluralist democracy (peaceful at home yet strong enough to keep the agents of Pakistan’s institutionalized extremism at bay) has been a quixotic venture of very great cost in blood, treasure, and reputation, sustained against daily evidence of its impossibility by the ignorant arrogance of “counterinsurgency” theorists in and out of uniform. It is true that the Taliban would find few supporters in an Afghanistan developed to Swedish standards of education and affluence, but it was always a fallacy to believe that victory could be won by the insignificant ameliorations possible in less than a century or more of very costly endeavors—and without killing a great number of recalcitrant Afghans. What is offered instead is an organic solution that accepts the heterogeneity of Afghanistan and recognizes that China, the Russian Federation, and India have more pressing reasons than the United States has to prevent a Taliban victory. The former offers the ready possibility of reconstructing a product-improved “Northern Alliance” that with steady external aid can keep the Taliban from Kabul. The latter indicates where the aid comes from, and it is not the United States, which is so greatly separated by distance and constrained by the need to practice its own fiscal frugality. This is not a formula for perpetual civil war, but rather a reversion to the formula that ensured Afghanistan’s tranquility in the past, and which allowed a young traveler to go from end to end of the country without encountering any form of war: a central government, discreetly helped by foreign powers, that tolerates local diversities under the patronage of duly respectful local potentates. The patient traveler who follows China’s interminable highway 314 from Urumqi through Kashgar to the Pakistan border crossing passes within hiking distance of Afghanistan, at the roadless tip of the Wakhan corridor. The Uyghur dissidents who 116 Edward N. Luttwak were encountered and captured during the 2001 US invasion would scarcely have inconvenienced themselves to reach Afghanistan that way, given that Tajikistan offers a much easier route to Kabul, while transit from China via Pakistan offers cheaper bus rides by way of the most scenic highways. But even if it is only cartographic, the adjacence of Afghanistan to Xinjiang, where some nine million perpetually restless Uyghurs live, reminds us that it is China that should be paying the costs of the war against the Taliban, given that it is ten thousand miles closer to the danger. Only the deeply provincial could view this suggestion as outlandish, given the present financial circumstances of the United States and those of China, and the respective Afghan perils faced by each: one is in the al-Qaeda past, the other is China’s unsecured political future. A debate has been under way in the United States between people who fear that Taliban rule would provide a safe haven for global jihadists, and others who insist that the Taliban are an essentially Afghan phenomenon whose leaders paid a very heavy price the last time they harbored foreign terrorists, and who would not do so again. But there can be no debate about what Taliban rule would mean for China: The certainty of sanctuary for Uyghur fugitives (in the first place within the small Uyghur communities in Afghan cities), and the lively possibility of at least discreet bases for dissidents. Sanctuary just across the border from the Uyghurstan of their dreams has a different meaning than sanctuary in Munich, home of the hereditary leader Erkin Alptekin, or Washington, DC, where Rebiya Kadeer, a prominent Uyghur businesswoman and political activist, lives. Distance matters. Moreover, Taliban rule could shelter a far greater level of dissidence than that of the Uyghur, because China’s Hui Muslim minority is many times larger, and when it revolted in the nineteenth century under the influence of a now indeterminate “new teaching” that may well have been Wahhabism, the rebels ravaged a great part of northwest China centered on Shaanxi for years on end, causing the deaths of millions.1 More recent outbreaks of Hui violence have been quite small, but there is a militant reassertion of Hui identity: Veiled hair is now the norm in Hui quarters and has become a common sight, even among the tourist throngs in Beijing. With educational progress the possibility of renewed ideological contagions has only increased...

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