Afghanistan--and Beyond

IN CENTRAL ASIA and Afghanistan, the vital interests of four nuclear powers--Russia, China, Pakistan, and India--collide. That critical fact should suffice to dispel any thought that the United States has the option of vanquishing bin Laden, overthrowing the Taliban, and abandoning the region to its own devices. The dangers are obvious and unacceptable. The implications--for the military campaign that has begun in Afghanistan and for our long-term involvement in the region--need to be thought through.

The airstrikes launched last week against military targets in Afghanistan were the first step in a campaign whose complexity should not be underestimated. Ultimately, we will most likely have to deploy ground forces in significant numbers to take and hold ground, and we will probably have to keep them there over a lengthy period.

As the administration seems to recognize, we cannot hope to form a stable government in Afghanistan on the basis of the Northern Alliance alone. The forces in the alliance took power briefly in the early 1990s, but were unable to establish their legitimacy. Their failure led to a half-decade civil war, which the Taliban won. It is far from clear that, bereft of its most effective military commander (assassinated by bin Laden's agents on September 9), the Northern Alliance would do better today.

Regardless of who commands it, moreover, its ethnic make-up militates against a Northern Alliance government. The alliance represents a Tajik-Uzbek coalition that is far from stable; Tajik-Uzbek conflict kept civil war simmering across the border in Tajikistan throughout the 1990s, and continues to threaten stability there and in neighboring Uzbekistan. But even if the alliance holds together, Tajiks and Uzbeks are ethnic minorities in Pashtun-dominated Afghanistan. It is difficult to imagine any stable government in Kabul without the participation of a considerable Pashtun bloc.

The real challenge we face in Afghanistan, therefore, is to bring into being a Pashtun leadership group that can participate in a coalition government with the Northern Alliance. Somehow, we must persuade or compel the Northern Alliance to accept such a compromise, and this we can do only if we are not dependent on the Northern Alliance for ground power.

To put a stable government in power in Afghanistan, then, we will have to make a significant deployment (in the tens of thousands) of American ground forces to the country. Only such a deployment will give us the respect and leverage we will need to force compromise upon disparate and hostile ethnic groups. There is considerable reason to believe that we can succeed in this. The two decades of nearly continuous war Afghanistan has endured have clearly begun to generate the desire for a settlement, even a compromise settlement. This is vital if stability is to be restored. It is unlikely, however, that the Afghans will come to such a compromise if theirs are the only forces on the ground.

There are indications that the administration has come to realize the importance of introducing ground forces soon. In any event, the president must begin to warn the American people of the likelihood of an extended and extensive deployment of American ground forces in Central Asia. At least as urgently, he must ask Congress for a substantial increase in the defense budget, for our armed forces will not be able to maintain the necessary deployment in Central Asia over the long term without seriously eroding our ability to meet challenges elsewhere in the world.

Military operations, however, require consideration of the delicate international situation in South Asia. All of our plans and actions must take into account that going after bin Laden and deposing the Taliban regime is not enough. For there will be no lack of people willing to pick up the banner of the anti-Western jihad, and an unstable Central Asia will continue to offer them a perfect base from which to operate. The proximity of four nuclear powers raises the stakes.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan have been struggling for supremacy in Central Asia. The Uzbeks have the largest and best organized military in the region, the Kazakhs real and potential economic strength and strong ties to Russia. The Kazakh-Russian tie is a natural one, not only because they share a long border, but also because a very considerable portion of the Kazakh population is ethnically Russian and Ukrainian. The Uzbeks, for their part, have been eager to bring the United States into the region as a counterbalance to Russian influence and support for Kazakhstan. The deployment of American ground forces into Uzbekistan is likely to make it seem that we have chosen sides--which could polarize the area and alienate the other Central Asian states, as well as the Russians.