Afghanistan: Our Second Vietnam? NATO diplomat Jack Segal offers a view from the “graveyard of empires” By Anne Stanton Last week Jack Segal was trying to figure out how to pump a shallow pool of gray water out of the basement of the Traverse City house he and his family had recently moved into. It was a reality check for the NATO diplomat, who recently returned from his 40th and last trip to Afghanistan. During the course of the last decade, Segal has visited 50 NATO installations and tiny, temporary military bases in this troubled country. A top NATO diplomat, he has been the target of gunfire, rocket fire and mortars, yet he is quick to add that 60% of the country, surprisingly, is not at war. People are simply going about their daily lives. In the beginning, Segal didn’t wear body armor as he visited the markets of Mazar-e-Sharif, Kunduz, and Kandahar. But not so on recent trips. He now wears a bullet-proof vest everywhere. Segal’s official title was principal foreign policy and political advisor to General Egon Ramms, a German four-star general and the Joint Force Commander for NATO. His job involved helping sort out policy and political crises, often getting worked out in what seemed like endless meetings. Some were held in the presidential palace, others in a Mercedes Jeep, where the air conditioning miserably failed to compete with the multitude of laptop computers and cell phones. It was not uncommon, he said, for at least one person to faint from the blistering heat. Conference calls often included General Stan McChrystal who reports to General David Patraeus, and Ramms. Occasionally President Obama was on the phone, he said.
WORLD ASSIGNMENTS Segal moved a year ago to Traverse City, although it’s more accurate to say that Segal is just now re-joining his wife, Karen Puschel, herself a former U.S. diplomat and their 13-year-old daughter. Segal was mostly living in Holland and Afghanistan, with short trips home. The multi-lingual couple previously worked together for the State Department in exciting careers that took them to remote corners of the world. Segal recalled a dinner party in Tel Aviv in 1991, when Saddam Hussein was bombing the city. They set gas masks by their place settings. A year later, they were assigned to Moscow to implement the new terms of the START agreement, which included the destruction of chemical weapons (necessitating the pay-off of organized criminals). Their favorite assignment? Opening a new American consulate in the Ural mountains, making them the first diplomats to an area long closed to the West. He remembers stepping off trains in minus 40-degree weather in Siberia. “It was an adventure, and we were into adventure,” he said. Segal’s retirement comes at a time when the military brass of Afghanistan is backpedaling on promises made at the start of the troop build-up in February of 2009. Two weeks ago, General Stan McChrystal said that achieving success in Afghanistan would take a lot longer than he hoped. And Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last week said not to expect significant progress by the end of the year. This comes after pouring billions into military bases far out in the deserts of the south and near the border of Pakistan. McChrystal, at the time, called for a new “soft power” approach. He wanted troops to get out of the bases, take off their body armor and sunglasses, and build relationships with villagers—easier said than done in villages dominated by the Taliban.
TALIBAN TROUBLES McChrystal’s most prominent demonstration case was the village of Marjah, a Taliban stronghold and the center of the thriving opium trade. NATO forces intended to oust the Taliban and install a “government in a box”—trained civilian administrators and policemen from other villages. Yet the military effort hasn’t delivered yet—the Taliban are as strong as they ever were—and the government also isn’t working, largely because there weren’t enough Afghans either courageous or trained enough to take the job. Yet despite the seeming hopelessness, Segal does not favor immediate withdrawal. “We are too far down the road. What if Osama bin Laden comes out of his cave and announces, ‘We defeated the Soviet Union and now we’ve stopped the world’s largest superpower’? We’d have suicide bombers attacking every institution they hate. But neither should we sink into an endless pursuit of distant dreams.” Segal said he agrees with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, when he praised America’s commitment to begin withdrawal by the summer of 2011. “I am happy. American troops also have families like our troops. They need to go home as well,” Karzai said. Segal speaks like a diplomat, eager to hear what you have to say, and calmly explaining his point of view. And he has many views. Northern Express asked him to talk about his life and what we should do next in Afghanistan. Here’s the interview, which was edited for brevity:
NE: You were drafted to fight in Vietnam, back in 1968 at a time of a massive troop build-up. How does that influence your thoughts on Afghanistan? Segal: I was there for a year, and there came a time during my Vietnam experience that I could not explain why we were there or what we were trying to do. My dad wrote to me, and asked, “Do you think you are making headway?” I couldn’t answer that question. Making headway toward what? So it is with Afghanistan; I constantly remind myself, how do we answer that question.
NE: Is this a second Vietnam? Segal: It could be. Each morning when men go out of the gate (at their base camp), and expose themselves, not knowing if they’ll come back, I want to know, are they adding value? Are their trips making a difference? The lesson for me from Vietnam comes from a series of interviews with Robert McNamara (Secretary of Defense for presidents Kennedy and Johnson). He was asked, “When did you know we were going to lose the war?” He said, “After the Tet offensive in January of 1968, I went to the president and told him, ‘We cannot win the war.’” I threw a book at the TV, I was so angry! I was there during Tet in the Third Brigade of the Fourth Infantry. It was a huge battle and a lot of guys got killed, and here’s this guy, saying he already knew it was over. At that point, 20,000 Americans were dead. After that battle, 37,000 more died, boys mostly, some girls. We can’t let that happen to us in the War on Terror.
NE: How should we understand the Taliban? Is our fight with them? Segal: There is a lot of confusion with the Taliban. We were attacked on 9/11 by al Qaeda. After 9/11, we sent a message to the government of Afghanistan, which was run by the Taliban, and told it to turn over Osama bin Laden and his key men. They refused, and we invaded. The issue morphed from getting Al Qaeda into something about the Taliban. But if you talk to an Afghani, if you go to the villages in the south of Afghanistan where the Pashtuns have lived for centuries, and you say, “Are you a Taliban?” most men would say, “Of course! I’m a student of Islam.” That’s what Talib means: a student. It concerns me that people haven’t realized we are not competing against the Taliban, but insurgents. We will never defeat the Taliban because they are the fabric of the country. There is no stigma attached to being a Taliban. That’s what you are supposed to be. Yet as recently as last week, Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, said on TV, we must defeat the Taliban. I threw another book at the TV. No, no, no. We are going against their core beliefs.
NE: The Taliban actually brought stability to the country after it had been taken over by warlords. Segal: Yes, people were fed up with the disorder of all these power brokers. They didn’t want them. So the Taliban did what they are doing today. They came in and set up a parallel government. The big problem then, and it still is: there is no system of justice, except for the Taliban. If there are disputes over land or animals or water, and I want someone to judge that, there is no one in government to do that. What the Taliban did was to hire circuit riders—just like circuit judges in Michigan in the 1860s. They ride in on a motorcycle and base their decisions on the Koran—the only law a Muslim respects. The Koran is not subject to interpretation. Every word is unambiguous. Any law passed in the Parliament is superfluous; anything you need to know about human rights is in the Koran. Afghans are not the only ones who believe this. We need to understand that one very important fact.
NE: People say peace is impossible in Afghanistan because it’s a loose collection of tribes as opposed to being an organized central government. How do we achieve peace among all these different factions? Segal: In any Muslim society, there are four stages of peace, and it begins with forgiveness. Under Islam, the only person who can give amnesty is the person who’s been violated. So if a neighbor has killed your son, you must forgive him. And if it’s entire communities that have been killed, there must be gigantic support for everyone to agree to forgive. The first stage begins with simply agreeing to appear in the same place, not even talking to each other. By the fourth stage, the senior leaders meet publicly and come to an agreement that’s already been pounded out secretly by their underlings. It’s all about saving face for males in Islam. Loss of face is the worst thing that can happen. Therein lies one of the solutions. We need strategic patience and allow the Afghans to negotiate with each other; we can’t do the negotiating for them. NATO officials should not be saying what the “red lines” are, the non-negotiable terms of agreement. Recently, a senior U.S. official (Hillary Clinton) said, we will not permit any taking back of the rights of women. I wish we could say that, but the problem is, that’s not our call. What if Afghans say that’s not acceptable?
NE: But what about the brutal treatment of women? How can we do nothing? Segal: You know, they’re still being treated that way. Did you read about the 14-year-old girl who was publicly flogged for running away from an arranged marriage with a much older man? That’s not specific to Afghanistan and the Taliban. We flogged people in the 17th century. We burned them at the stake in Salem, I’m sorry. In Gohr, where this girl was from, there wasn’t one thing I saw that was different from the 17th century. In Saudi Arabia, women can’t drive. In Amish country in Pennsylvania, girls wear buns and long dresses. Do we tell them to wear short shorts and bikinis? Of course not. It’s their culture. I presume they vote. Do they drive? I doubt it. You see where I’m going. When one culture imposes values on another, there are conflicts. In Afghanistan, a solution would require us to be flexible. The hard part is that the highly educated, Westernized Afghanis wrote out the rights of women in the new Afghan Constitution in 2002 at the conference in Bonn, Germany. To replace what? I guess, the Koran. It was very unacceptable to the Taliban. The Constitution dictates that women would hold 25% of the seats. If you tried to get that bill through our own Congress, good luck!
NE: Is it working? Do they have 25%? Segal: Almost, but it’s hard. Some are afraid to run for office. Some dropped out—a lot were under death threats. Some can’t go home to their districts. Too dangerous. And some are making too much money in Kabul and don’t want to go back home.
NE: What can we do about the constitution now? Segal: Fair play is never made from a clean slate of paper, ever. Is there a deal that we can swallow hard and accept? That we can urge the government of Afghanistan, as the negotiators, to support? There is so much resistance in the (Taliban-controlled) south and parts of the east. The government should insist on schooling for boys and girls as a right. We can say, we would really like that to be codified and accepted by the insurgents.
NE: Does it say anything in the Koran about girls not going to school? Segal: It’s kind of negative on schooling. It’s pretty certain Mohammed could not read or write, but his wife, who was 14 years older than him, could. Mohammed’s words in the Koran cannot be changed or interpreted. “This is the word of God, and it’s all you really need. I’m his messenger.” They need to understand the Koran and that’s why they need to go to the mosque five times a day. I know it’s hard for people to understand this, but not so long ago, women were still not allowed to be pastors in some Christian faiths, and one religion still doesn’t allow them to be priests.
NE: So where are we now in terms of casualties? Segal: We’ve now had eight years of fighting: 1,750 NATO soldiers have been killed, 1,100 of them Americans; an estimated 20,000 Afghan soldiers have been killed, and 200,000 Afghan civilians have died.
NE: Not to mention that we’ve disillusioned the civilians with the corruption. A high school exchange student from Afghanistan told me they see crooks build these grand homes with money meant for the common people. He said it has caused the Afghans to lose all respect for us. Segal: When Karzai says that most of the corruption is the fault of the Americans, I agree. Where did all the money come from? It came from us. We handed all the money to crooks, and we’ve been handing it out as fast as we can – no bidding – because we’re in a hurry. Six months ago we were spending a $1 billion a day, 60/40 Afghanistan and Iraq. We need to get control.
NE: In the bigger picture, what should our goal be? Segal: We are there to contain al Qaeda. We are not there to turn a 17th century country into a modem democracy. Our president has said very little about the Taliban. His words are to disrupt, dismantle and destroy al Qaeda. Karazai is convinced we are going to leave and is trying to create an environment to make a deal with everybody. The Afghans like him, but not his government. He’s part of the royal family. They don’t blame him; they just want him to get rid of the corrupt politicians. And that’s a good thing. I’m going to go back to the subject of Vietnam. The little town of Marja didn’t work. Kandahar is under the control of the Taliban. The only trajectory we have left is we all sit down with real Afghans at the table, listen to them, and ask them, “What do you think will work and what can we afford to do?” If they say, build all the roads and fix everything, we might say, “We can’t afford to do that.” When I came back here to Michigan, I couldn’t believe our roads. The road from the airport in Kabul is in better shape than anything in Traverse City. As a U.S. taxpayer, we do not have unlimited funds, and the unemployed people in this town need a job too.
NE: And what about the troops going out of the gate? Segal: We need to get them out of the front lines now. The IEDs and ambushes---and there are casualties on all sides, civilians too—add no value. Send them by helicopter to train the Afghans to patrol their own streets.
NE: What do you think of Greg Mortensen’s work, building schools in Afghanistan? Segal: His idea is you can’t build a school until you build a relationship, and this works. If you can just get literacy here, they could run the government, but that would take 30 years. The feeling has been, we don’t have time. But why are we in such a hurry?
NE: Last question. Why did your family move to Traverse City? Segal: For one, Karen’s mother lives here. Also for the beauty, the culture, the recreation. There are flights to two major cities. The Traverse City downtown looks like Europe. People ride bikes here, and they don’t get killed doing it.
Jack Segal will offer an extended education class at Northwestern Michigan College this fall. He’ll also speak at the International Affairs Forum in November.
Segal’s peace STRATegy
As presented in a speech at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly in Riga, Latvia .
• Help the Afghans build their own system of security, with an emphasis on police training. • The U.S. must gain control over its billions of spending in Afghanistan, such as setting up a bidding system and adding strict oversight, to stave off corruption. • Let the Afghans sort out the political arrangements with their opponents. It may result in a tricky coalition of Islamists, progressive civil society advocates, terrorists, warlords, technocrats, and tribal elders. We need to accept that civil war might be a possibility—again. • Take Obama at his word: “It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.”
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