Are we still fighting the Cold War?

Hello dear readers!  I am posting Kathryn Lindquist's opinion piece titled "Fighting Old Wars".  She presents a view of the war in Afghanistan and our struggles in Pakistan through the visor of Cold War military history.

You don’t have to be a blogger for Time to know that the War on Terror isn’t over, and that the United States has gotten itself and the world into a complicated battle wherein, behind democratic rhetoric, political expedience and ideology are engaged in a ferocious zero-sum trade off.

What may be a little bit more surprising is that the Cold War isn’t over, either, and though the rhetoric has changed, the battles facing many of the world’s toughest hot-spots are inextricably tied with that pre-War on Terror boogieman, Communism.  I may have been pre-ambulatory when Reagan uttered his famous directive to Mr. Gorbachev regarding where to put his German wall, but I have learned to walk, talk, read, and listen in a world that is so accustomed to the polarizing conflicts of the past that it decided to rename them.

Case in point: Klein, in the post linked above, observes that Pakistan’s role in the US-led coalition war in Afghanistan has been contradictory and ambiguous.  Pakistan’s interest in affairs on its border is not particularly hard to understand in any kind of international relations paradigm.  But the lack of consistency in objectives from Pakistan, and US rhetoric’s unwavering protection of Pakistan’s so-called security interests is a little bit more difficult to explain.  It is also so much, much more than reminiscent of SOP for Afghanistan, and Pakistan, policy in the 1980’s that it makes one wonder whether the US has altered its policy in the last 30 years at all.  The fact that Afghan mujahedin received vast numbers of weapons and huge sums of financial support from the US government during the Soviet occupation is not secret, and many go so far as to point out that the world is reaping what it sowed in Afghanistan: rampant guerrilla warfare using resources that the Cold War superpowers poured into one of dozens of proxy battlefields.

Unfortunately, the analysis tends to stop at this finger-waggling insight.  The connection between past battles and their present manifestations is, in Afghanistan, fairly clear; the same Stinger missiles that were first launched against Soviets in 1986 have been bombarding US troops since the current insurgency got its legs underneath it.  Then as now, Pakistan was involved with the distribution of arms and provided shelter to the mujahedin groups then known to some as Afghan Freedom Fighters.  And the US was just as incoherent about its own definition of victory and just as seemingly content to defend a Pakistani policy that served a Pakistan with very particular, and not necessarily shared, regional interests.

But what is to be done, apart from appreciate the irony and make scholarly conclusions?  The question is not whether the world is continuing to suffer the effects of the global ideological between Democracy and Communism.  That much seems clear, and despite that, the goal of a human rights-respecting, stable, and with any luck, vaguely democratic regime in Afghanistan is an intrinsically valuable goal, worth pursuing.  The fact that coalition forces must deal with an unresolved super-power war that began no more recently than 1979 is merely a fact of history; no one can change what’s past.  The more interesting and less-often asked question is why the forms of Cold War diplomacy, international action, and interstate policy are continuing unexamined even though the world is, ostensibly, facing new and different challenges from non-state actors and rogue regimes.  Why the Washington focus on the fate of Pakistan?  Why the use of conventional forces against guerrillas when we know exactly how well those guerrillas are armed?  If the world is truly a different place since the cataclysmic events of the late 1980’s, then maybe the tools, tactics, and institutional practices that we use on the world stage should reflect a different kind of battle.  From government form to policy function to rhetorical style, it still looks like the Cold War to me, and she doesn’t even have a new haircut.