On China by Henry Kissinger: Book review – latimes.com

The former secretary of State skillfully analyzes the history of U.S.-China relations but offers only general advice on the future.

Zhou Enlai, left, and Henry Kissinger in Beijing in 1971. (Library of Congress / The Penguin Press /May 29, 2011)

By Linda MathewsSpecial to the Los Angeles Times

May 29, 2011

Henry Kissinger was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 for negotiating the Paris peace accords that established a ceasefire in the Vietnam War and let the United States extricate itself from that quagmire. But his most enduring achievement, this massive book suggests, was in laying the groundwork for President Richard M. Nixon‘s historic 1972 trip to Beijing, shaping the communiqués that ultimately led to formal diplomatic relations with China and then acting as a go-between for the world’s most powerful nation and its most populous for the next four decades.

Kissinger’s formal government career lasted just eight years, from 1969 to 1977, when he served first as Nixon’s national security advisor and then as secretary of State to Nixon and to his successor, Gerald R. Ford. His informal service to the United States, particularly in U.S.-China relations, has never stopped.

Kissinger reports making 50 trips to China, sometimes to deliver messages from presidents, sometimes to feel out the new chiefs of the Chinese Communist Party, occasionally just to show his family the sights. To four generations of Chinese leaders, he was laopengyou — an old friend — and thus was entrusted with confidences that he dutifully reported to whomever was in power in Washington, whether Republican or Democrat.

“On China,” Kissinger’s 13th book, blends an incisive strategic analysis of the moves and countermoves of China, the United States and the former Soviet Union with telling vignettes about his meetings with Chinese Communist Party leaders.

Lovers of diplomatic history may delight, as Kissinger obviously does, in his review of the misconceptions, mistakes and missed opportunities that plagued China’s relations with the United States before Nixon’s trip. In the mid-1960s, for example, the legendary Mao Tse-tung explicitly told American journalist Edgar Snow that China would never go to war against the United States or intervene in Vietnam, but U.S. officials missed the signal, Kissinger writes. The administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson continued to regard China as a bigger threat in Indochina than the Soviet Union.

Ordinary readers, however, may be more drawn to Kissinger’s entertaining and sometimes gossipy accounts of his meetings with China’s most august leaders. He describes, for example, Mao’s “bantering and elliptical style of conversation … Mao advocated his ideas in a Socratic manner. He would begin with a question or an observation and invite comment. He would then follow with another observation. Out of this web of sarcastic remarks, observations and queries would emerge a direction, though rarely a binding commitment.”

Initially, Kissinger acknowledges, he was less drawn to Deng Xiaoping, who was politically rehabilitated after Mao died and guided China’s economic modernization during a crucial decade. Kissinger describes Deng’s “acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional sarcastic interjections and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of the eminently practical … Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries, nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables” as Mao did. Eventually, Kissinger says, he developed “enormous regard for this doughty little man with the melancholy eyes.” China today is “a testimonial to Deng’s vision, tenacity and common sense,” he concludes.

Kissinger credits Nixon, his own patron, for showing a “unique grasp of international trends” and for recognizing in 1969 that China might be amenable to overtures from the United States. Practically speaking, it was the threat of a war along China’s border with the Soviet Union that set in motion the diplomacy that led to Nixon’s first trip to Beijing. The Soviets massed 1 million troops there and hinted at possible attacks on Chinese nuclear installations. Nixon, sworn into office just months earlier, “put forward the then-shocking thesis … that the Soviet Union was the more dangerous party and that it would be against American interests” if China were invaded, Kissinger writes. His office then issued a directive that in any Soviet-Chinese conflict, the U.S. would stay neutral but “tilt to the greatest extent possible toward China.”

The Chinese, so shaken by the Soviet buildup that they had prepared for the evacuation of most top leaders from Beijing, got the message. An explicit invitation from second-in-command Zhou Enlai to Kissinger soon followed, and together they laid the groundwork for the February 1972 session between Mao and Nixon.

During those first meetings in Beijing, there was little comment from Mao or his underlings about the United States’ continuing diplomatic relationship with Taiwan — no threats, no demands, no deadlines. That willingness to live with ambiguity over the island that Beijing officially regarded as a breakaway province was enshrined in the Shanghai Communiqué, the document issued as Nixon’s visit ended. The communiqué, unlike most official documents, has served its purposes over the ensuing decades and prevented Taiwan from ever becoming a flashpoint, Kissinger notes. Today, Taiwan is a major trading partner and investor in the mainland.

The U.S.-China relationship obviously has been strained at times, particularly after troops of the People’s Liberation Army brutally broke up student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. Deng, who had dispatched the troops to the square, was denounced throughout the world. U.S. politicians demanded economic sanctions and suspension of military sales. President George H.W. Bush did impose limited sanctions. Two emissaries sent by Bush to Beijing three weeks after Tiananmen met a defiant Deng, who said, “We don’t care about the sanctions. We are not scared by them.” The Chinese summoned Kissinger himself months later. Unapologetic, Deng still insisted that if the government had not intervened, the demonstrations would have sparked a civil war. And Deng and other leaders made it clear to Kissinger that they would not tolerate bullying even from the United States on China’s domestic issues.

Kissinger’s view on Tiananmen, as on other points of contention between the United States and China, is that nothing should be allowed to undercut the strategic relationship between the countries. Those ties, he argues, kept the Soviets at bay, contributed to the decline of the Soviet empire and put China on the road to becoming a global economic powerhouse. But the old Kissinger formula has less application now that China and the United States no longer share a common enemy.

Today, frictions revolve around economic issues: The United States argues the yuan, the Chinese currency, is seriously undervalued. China ignores such pleas as well as suggestions that its people should consume more and export less. Members of Congress fret that China has emerged as the largest international holder of U.S. debt. China and its entrepreneurs disdain environmental concerns.

Kissinger offers only a general prescription for such ills: The countries must remain engaged, must keep talking, even if their interests diverge. Both are “too large to be dominated, too special to be transformed and too necessary to each other to be able to afford isolation,” he concludes.

This book can be pre-ordered from Liberty Books

On China by Henry Kissinger – review | Books | The Guardian

The former US foreign policy supremo’s take on diplomacy with Beijing evades the key question

Henry Kissinger in China with Zhou Enlai and Pat Nixon. Photograph: John Dominis/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Henry Kissinger in China was always a gratingly and irritatingly smug presence, but Henry Kissinger “on China” is madly baffling. After nearly 600 pages, Kissinger fails to address the key question: why and how did President Richard Nixon decide that it was in America’s interests to protect communist China?

1. On China
2. by Henry Kissinger
3. 

Kissinger tells us that this de facto alliance was personally decided by Nixon in August 1969 just as the Soviet Union was preparing to launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on China. Nixon had decided the Soviets were the more dangerous party and that it was against American interests for China to be “smashed” in a Chinese-Soviet war. “It was a revolutionary moment in US foreign policy,” Kissinger explains. “An American president declared we had a strategic interest in the survival of a major communist country.”

In October 1969, Mao Zedong was so convinced war was nigh, he ordered all Chinese leaders to disperse around the country, except for the indispensable Zhou Enlai. Kissinger says that it was only Moscow’s uncertainty about America’s response that led the Soviets to postpone the project. Soon after, Kissinger, as Nixon’s national security adviser, engaged in the secret negotiations that led to the American president’s meeting with Mao in 1972, an event that astonished America’s enemies and its friends.

Nixon’s policy has guided eight American presidents and four generations of Chinese leaders. It continued after the Soviet Union, and the military threat it posed to China, had disappeared. It continued even after the outrage that followed the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Three weeks after 4 June, the White House sent secret envoys to reassure the communist leadership that the Sino-American alliance would continue no matter what.

Kissinger can truly claim to be the chief architect of what was and remains one of the pillars of the international order. He advised and directed White House China policy for four decades, and on 50-odd visits to China has consulted with every one of its leaders. That, not the large fees he pockets for appearing at one of those regular business conferences boosting economic ties, is why he always looks so pleased with himself in China.

The alliance is as crucial to understanding world history as Britain and America’s decision to make an ally of Stalin in order to defeat Hitler, rather than the other way round, the result of which was the establishment of a Soviet empire in Europe rather than a German one.

Kissinger says that at the time it seemed the Soviet Union was more dangerous because, unlike China, it was an expansionary, aggressive power. Is this true? China had sent troops to Korea and Vietnam (not 100,000 as Kissinger claims, but closer to 500,000), as well as to Burma and Cambodia, and had financed and trained insurgencies in a dozen countries – which would cost millions of lives. There wasn’t much to choose between them.

Kissinger says he wrote the book to “explain the conceptual way the Chinese think about problems of peace and war and international order”. But what we really want is a justification for this policy. Even at the time it was a bizarre move, but with the advantage of hindsight it is even more peculiar. What exactly did America ever gain from it? It certainly enabled China’s rulers to stay in power despite Mao’s catastrophic rule, but no evidence has emerged that the alliance directly contributed to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

On the contrary, if Beijing and Moscow had gone to war, surely it would have been to America’s great advantage. America might have emerged victorious from the Vietnam war and saved Cambodia from the horrors of Khmer Rouge rule. The long-standing threat to South Korea and Taiwan might have disappeared and the Soviet gains of the 1970s, such as in Angola or Afghanistan, might not have been made.

One supposes that Nixon feared a swift Soviet victory in China, but Kissinger does not say that. Instead, he constantly invites us to share his pleasure at the brilliance and subtlety of Chinese leaders, no matter who they are: Zhou, Hua Guofeng, Deng Xiaoping. Even when he meets Mao – senile and dribbling – Kissinger can’t help being blown away by his supposed brilliance.

Yet Mao was by then recognised even by his followers as a mad monster. He had managed to make enemies of practically everyone in China, starved up to 50 million people to death, repeatedly purged the army and party, imprisoned or exiled millions, and ruined the economy. He led the country into ruinous and costly wars with every one of China’s neighbours and was now willing to sacrifice tens of millions more in a nuclear war with the Chinese Communist party’s great benefactor, the Soviet Union.

Kissinger explains that actually this was all yet another dazzling example of Mao’s skilful diplomacy, learned from studying the ancient Chinese arts of statesmanship, specifically an instance of Zhuge Liang’s “empty city stratagem”. Mao would supposedly lure the Soviets deep into the countryside and then destroy them. In fact, Kissinger should have practised the Taoist concept of wu wei and done nothing. It was evident even then that Mao and Zhou would be dead within a few years and had prepared no succession. Kissinger recounts how the famous ping-pong diplomacy only started when Mao, slumped over the table in a drug-induced haze, suddenly woke and gave the orders to his nurse.

Whoever followed Mao would have to rescue China from its total isolation and restore the economy. They would have to go cap in hand to America for help, and Washington could dictate its own terms. Instead, Nixon turned up in Beijing as a supplicant, waiting anxiously to be summoned to the emperor’s side, listening to tutorials in strategy. In return for this blessing, the Chinese persuaded the Americans to withdraw from Taiwan, and then to support China’s murderous protégés, the Khmer Rouge, in Cambodia, forced them to lose the war in Vietnam, to sacrifice Tibet, and of course to sacrifice America’s moral principles.

As Kissinger remarks of another occasion: “At a moment of great national danger – which its own analysis demonstrated – China nevertheless acted as an instructor on strategy.”

In truth, the Chinese couldn’t believe their luck in finding such a naive and biddable partner as Kissinger. He gratefully accepts whatever the Chinese leaders tell him at face value, especially their nonsensical self-serving version of Chinese history. For instance, he starts the book with Mao explaining that Tamurlaine was really a Chinese general – Tamurlaine wanted to invade China.

Kissinger implies that only a clever diplomat such as himself can catch the sophistication of the Chinese people and their “subtle sense of the intangible”. So in this book Chinese leaders never sound unreasonable, but always sensible and pragmatic, unlike the Americans, who make unreasonable demands and have confused ideas about democracy and human rights.

Kissinger has no curiosity at all: he never looks behind the curtain, let alone listens to spokesmen of the Chinese opposition. Even after Tiananmen, when the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi was holed up for 18 months in the US embassy and the subject of high-level bargaining, Kissinger didn’t bother to meet him. It’s a pity that Kissinger was never distracted from his mission to achieve “a rebalancing of the global equilibrium”. The world might have been quite a different place.

The Friday Times:Follow the falcon by Rakhshanda Jaill

literary debut at the age of 78 is unusual, to say the least. But when that maiden foray into the world of literature carries the promise of greatness, you know you are witnessing the birth of a very special writer. It is for this reason that I read ‘The Wandering Falcon’ with a sense of wonder and growing delight. Seldom does one get to read such spare but exquisite prose and rarer still is the writer who has such a sure grasp of his story. Jamil Ahmad, born in Jalandhar in 1933, acquired degrees in Law and History from the University of the Punjab, joined the Civil Service of Pakistan in 1954, and served mainly in the Frontier Province and in Baluchistan. He was posted as Minister in Pakistan’s Embassy in Kabul at a critical time before and during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. At the time of his posting in the Frontier Province, he acquired a working knowledge of Pushto and his fluency continued to improve with increased usage. This facility allowed him to interact more freely with the local people. At one point, with the help of some friends from the Afridi tribe, he walked into the Tirah Valley, the heartland of the Afridis. This initiative created quite a stir, as it was the first-ever venture into this territory by a government representative. Now he lives in Islamabad with his wife Helga Ahmad, a nationally recognized environmentalist and social worker who was awarded the Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal in 2007. My prediction is that Jamil Ahmad will be the Next Big Thing to hit Pakistani literature. Quite apart from its glimpse into life in the “forbidden” and remote areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan, ‘The Wandering Falcon’ has been conceived in a most unusual way: as a series of inter-linked stories, each self-contained as chapters yet connected by something that runs through all of them. In an interview conducted from my home in New Delhi with Mr Ahmad via email, I wondered if this was by happy serendipity or devised for a particular reason. Mr Ahmad tells me that he was posted in Swat as Commissioner in 1971 after it was merged into Pakistan. By then he had spent over a decade as political officer in the tribal areas of Pakistan — in Quetta-Pishin and Chagai in Baluchistan, Khyber and Malakand (covering Dir, Swat and Chitral), the Frontier and Dera Ismail Khan (covering North and South Waziristan). With some free time on his hands he thought initially of writing poetry. His wife, however, was dismissive about the quality of the few pieces he produced and suggested that he focus instead on the tribal areas, as much of his life had been spent in those parts. Mr Ahmad took this advice and started scribbling bits and pieces, which Helga immediately transcribed on her typewriter with a German keyboard. Friends suggested that the writings be converted into fiction with a central character around which a book could be structured. Mr Ahmad, however, demurred, believing that a perpetually strong central character is unnatural. “I feel a human being is like a twig carried by a strong current. It is only for brief moments and infrequently that he bobs to the surface, but is then rapidly swept into the depth of the stream of life,” he says, explaining the sequential nature of his narrative. One story from the book – The Sins of the Mother, about an eloping Baluch couple who risk everything by fleeing from their tribe – has been showcased in the Pakistan issue of Granta and generated a fair amount of interest in this most unusual author. The book’s history is just as remarkable as the events it reflects. By 1974 the manuscript was completed in its raw form; it hibernated for over three decades. About three years ago, Mr Ahmad’s brother, younger by fifteen years, heard of a short story competition. Since he vaguely remembered some ‘pieces’ Mr Ahmad had written, he asked Helga Ahmad to make a copy and send them across. From that point onwards, events moved swiftly. Mr Ahmad’s brother felt that the manuscript merited being treated as a whole – not merely as a short story. He also strongly urged Mr Ahmad to refine it. Once suitably re-worked, it caught the attention of Faiza Sultan Khan, editor of the Life’s Too Short Literary Review. Ms Khan then passed it on to Penguin India’s Meru Gokhale, who acted as its Fairy Godmother. Reading this slim book at a galloping pace, I felt like I was being taken by the hand and guided deep into a folded land of hills and valleys. Occupied by a tribal people united under the banner of Islam but governed by a more ancient code of conduct, this is a dark world of abject poverty, deprivation and want, but also one that is lit from within. Translucent beams of Life irradiate it. The will to live, the zeal to carry on with dignity and grace, and the inherent desire in human beings – no matter how devastated by fate and circumstance – to rise above their condition permeates this seemingly dark domain. It could have been a wretched place, you feel, but is inexplicably not in the least. A deeply ingrained sense of honour, justice and loyalty permeates this world, which is as harsh and unforgiving as it is inscrutable to the outsider. Jamil Ahmad brings a rare insight and compassion to a subject and a people that have invariably invited fear and mistrust. Asked what is the greatest bane of the life of these peoples, Mr Ahmad says: “The problem faced by the tribal people living in a harsh terrain are, by and large, no different from the more affluent people living in the fertile and productive areas. In my opinion, a feeling of envy, lust exists in equal measure in all societies. However, tribal societies have generally evolved a better system to manage ‘conflict resolutions’ than other forms of collectivities. The one negative factor which one comes across frequently — especially in Pakhtun areas – is the absence of equal rights to those who do not belong to the dominant tribe of the area.” And the greatest blessing? His answer is equally unequivocal: “Their greatest blessing is that their system is simple and stable. The line between right and wrong is drawn clearly. In the two years I spent in the Baluch area of Chagai, there was not a single theft; the Mengal tribe who used to migrate southwards during winter used to leave their houses unlocked and their stores of grain unprotected. Nobody ever touched the grain or the possessions they left behind.” The tribal areas are commonly perceived as remote and impenetrable and their people as inscrutable and incorrigible. Did he find it so? Again, one is struck by the empathy with which Mr Ahmed views his former charges when he says: “I had and still retain a great respect for their code of life. I think the Baluch, particularly, can hold their heads high in any assembly of men. A one-line prescription in the British Government hand-book suggests: “Honor the Baluch”. As for “inscrutable”, I was amazed at the candor, openness and loyalty I was offered. Despite belonging to the plains of Punjab and speaking the local language imperfectly, I never felt an alien during my two decades with the tribes. Tribesmen tend to judge the qualities of the political officer by his code of conduct. He is offered respect if his quality of integrity, work ethics and fair play pass their test. If he fails to qualify, then disaster follows.” Set in the decades preceding Talibanisation, The Wandering Falcon allows us to wander, like the falcon that soars high over hill and dale but takes in the minutest detail of life on the ground with its razor-sharp gaze. Appropriately enough, it has a boy protagonist called Tor Baz or the hunting falcon, the outsider looking in who connects the series of stories. While each chapter can be read as a self-contained short story, together they narrate the rite of passage of a boy — whose lineage is unknown, whose parents were a runaway couple killed in cold blood to avenge the family honour, who belongs to neither this tribe nor that – as he learns to survive in a world that is both cruel and gentle, harsh and loving, fragile and unrelenting, timeless yet changing. The notion of honour and its concomitant principles of loyalty, fidelity and truthfulness string the stories together as much as the coming of age of Tor Baz from infancy to adulthood. Underlying everything is a complicated and carefully maintained sense of hierarchy. For instance: ‘Those who possessed buffaloes and migrated every year looked down on those who owned only goats. Those with a few patches of land hewn into the high mountainsides would not marry into those who did not have any.’ Winters of misery and desperation followed by the short-lived spring of hope and the summer months of wandering are leavened by a highly codified set of principles that govern every moment from birth till death. While the story of Tor Baz is fascinating for its glimpse into a world less travelled, Jamil Ahmad’s prose makes it compelling and real. For a writer who has debuted at an age when most are putting down their pens, he writes with a surprising ease and confidence. Simple, spare and stark, his words are unembellished by rhetorical flourishes, his sentences shorn of even a trace of artifice or artfulness. There are no fancy turns of phrase, no verbal acoustics, no play upon words, nothing in fact to draw away from the stories he wants to tell in as straightforward a manner as possible. Here is writing – the finest one has read in a very long time in English by a South Asian writer – that ebbs and flows with such effortless ease and conveys the essence of the story in such few words that it catches you unawares with its freshness. Rakhshanda Jalil lives in New Delhi and writes on issues of literature, culture and society

‘The Wandering Falcon’ is restless as ever

Famous people, it can be said, come in two distinct types. There are those who would consciously, even diligently, scheme their way to stand, and preen, on the proscenium, baking their ego in the spotlight’s warm glow. Then there are a few who serve faithfully a relentless passion that urges them to labour in anonymity, even to serve a long apprenticeship, not in the hope of reward or recognition, but in the service of beauty and truth.

One such person is Jamil Ahmad, the former Pakistani civil servant who has written his first novel at the ripe age of 78, when most people believe the meaning of their existence can only be distilled from the deeds of children and grandchildren. His debut in fiction has been a veritable sensation, sending a frisson in literary circles worldwide, winning him rave reviews and accolades for the richly imagined and profoundly insightful ‘The Wandering Falcon’.

All this had woken sleepy Islamabad to the literary phenomenon called Jamil Ahmad, even though the book is to arrive in bookshops here only next week. No wonder, to all those who want to interview him, Ahmad has only this to say: “Please read the book first”.

And to think the novel had been nearly consigned to that heap of unpublished manuscripts. This isn’t to say Ahmad had received rejection slips from publishers; he completed writing ‘The Wandering Falcon’ in 1973-74 and kept it in a cupboard drawer where it mouldered for nearly 34 years, through his many postings and shifting of residences. Last year, Ahmad’s younger brother, Javed Masud, chanced upon it and realised it was worth a literary appraisal. Says the bureaucrat, who retired as chief secretary of Balochistan, “Javed gave it to Faiza S Khan, the daughter of former foreign secretary Shahryar Khan. She carried the manuscript to London and gave it to Penguin, who decided to acquire global rights for it”.

Then began a new bout of hard work on Ahmad’s three-decade-old manuscript – the editing and the meticulous detailing. “I am very lazy,” says Ahmad, flashing a smile as he, his German wife Helga, and I sit chatting in the drawing room of his Islamabad apartment. Considering the hype around the book, he sure must be planning on spending the lavish royalty his book is expected to earn. “Well, I don’t need much. I have enough to buy my cigarettes,” says Ahmad, before stepping out to the balcony for a smoke, proscribed as he is by Helga to light cigarettes inside.

As the late afternoon light fades away and the muezzin’s call to prayer resonates in the air, Ahmad, tall, lean and dressed in casual trousers and a Lacoste T-shirt, switches on a table lamp, illuminating the paintings on the walls. I am particularly captivated by the one depicting a young tribal whose haunting eyes and prideful expression are so typical of those hailing from the tribal areas. Ahmad observes: “Actually, I had wanted this painting to adorn the cover of ‘The Wandering Falcon’, but in the end the publishers chose the one with the barefoot little boy. You can see that on the other wall. Your cousin Gen Nasirullah Babar wanted to add this painting to his collection but I could not part with it”. The familial link perhaps explains why Ahmad didn’t turn down my request for a meeting, as he has most others, declaring, as he did to me: “I am an extremely private person”.

His narration, like his novel, is bare, often requiring Helga’s interpolation to make it vivid. As I scribble in my notebook, the new author says he belongs to Lahore, but served his entire career in the tribal areas and Balochistan, traversing its inhospitable, desolate terrain. Unlike the families of most bureaucrats serving here, Helga and the children accompanied Ahmad wherever they set up their temporary abode – in Swat, Malakand, Parachinar, Dir, Khyber, Dera Ismail Khan, etc.

“The changes as I wrote the different chapters came so naturally, as the boy in the desert took me along the narrative. Many of the people I had met were full of narratives themselves as they had fought in both the World Wars,” says Jamil.

Since work was light and social life negligible, Ahmad would return home early evening and began, in 1971, keeping a diary, noting down all he saw and heard and felt. “I’d write between 4 and 8 pm, and Helga would then type it out on her typewriter.” It’s the same typewriter that sits on the dining table, which I now walk up to for a closer look: a German Triumph. “It’s she who encouraged me to write. I tried my hand at poetry but she dismissed it,” says Ahmad. “His writing was not always very clear, and after taking to scribbling in his diary, he began writing on plain sheets of paper,” says Helga. It was the contents of these that Helga typed, turning out the manuscript that has taken 34 years for the world to read.

Even the German typewriter has a back-story. Ahmad met Helga – she says she hails from the tribal area of Germany! – at the British Council in London and the two married in 1956. Since she had made her choice of living in a country about which friends and family knew very little, she brought the typewriter along. “I thought I’d write letters back home,” she recalls. It’s now Ahmad’s turn to interject, to supplement the story of their love and times together in the rugged terrain of Balochistan. “My wife was very brave and travelled with me to all those remote areas. She never asked for fancy clothes and jewellery during our life together in that harsh terrain.”

What terrain, and what desolation! In Kachao, Balochistan, theirs was the only house on the crest of a mountain facing Iran, making it very difficult for the couple to communicate with each other during the day when Ahmad was away on work. “One day, Helga sent me an urgent message about one of the children. But what I was told was that the tap was leaking! Actually, someone had read the other side of the paper on which Helga had scribbled the message,” recalls Ahmad. Did Helga wear the veil in the land of orthodoxy? She didn’t have to, as she either stayed at home or travelled around in a vehicle. “In fact in 1965 our driver in Malakand wondered why my husband was so strict about observing purdah since I was a foreigner,” says Helga.

Ahmad, who retired in 1980, hasn’t revisited the areas where he had once served. But he says the turmoil in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Balochistan – the reign of terror, the drone attacks, the relentless blood-letting deeply saddens him. “The anger in Balochistan has been building up for 60 years.” He isn’t willing to indulge in a blame game, confining himself to saying the mayhem there is the handiwork of ‘actors’. “Traditionally, there was a mullah uprising in every generation. Remember the Fakir of Ipi (who fought a guerrilla war in the NWFP against the British)? The tribes have always handled everything themselves, according to their culture and tradition,” Ahmad explains. Perhaps there’s a novel there? To a man as intensely private as Ahmad, you don’t ask such questions.

What next in Afghanistan? | Books | The Guardian

‘The proposed new US approach pays very little attention to the reasons why many Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan support the Taliban.’ Photograph: AFP Photo/Getty Images

The most important result of Osama bin Laden’s death is likely to be a new US approach to Afghanistan. President Obama is now essentially in a position to “declare victory and get out”, without risking too much in terms of US public and military opinion. Unfortunately, everything I know of the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, as described in my book, Pakistan: A Hard Country, suggests to me that the strategy towards which the Obama administration is tending could have disastrous consequences for Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US.

This is above all because the proposed new US approach is structured around the needs of US domestic politics and a crude approach to killing terrorists, with very little attention to the realities of Afghanistan or the reasons why many Pashtuns in both Afghanistan and Pakistan support the Taliban.

As things stand, the likely Obama strategy will be the following: the US will build up the Afghan National Army to the point where it can hold the main towns in the Pashtun areas without the help of US ground forces. Most US troops will withdraw, but the US will keep bases in Afghanistan from which its planes will smash any concentrations of the Taliban aiming at capturing the cities. US aircraft and special forces will continue to target any identified groups of al-Qaida in the country.

This is basically the Soviet strategy between their withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, albeit with the crucially important difference that the USSR did not keep bases in Afghanistan – it did not need to since it had them just over the border in Soviet Central Asia. And it must be said that up to a point, the Soviet strategy worked: the Afghan regime of Najibullah Khan which they left behind outlasted the Soviet Union itself. I was a British journalist with the mujahideen at the siege of Jalalabad in March 1989, when they were indeed decimated by the government’s airpower when they concentrated to attack the city.

For Washington, this strategy appears to meet several objectives: It would greatly reduce US numbers and US casualties in Afghanistan; it would be in accordance with Obama’s declared approach of reorienting US strategy towards targeted operations against terrorists; it would prevent Taliban victory and scenes of US defeat like Saigon in 1975, and at the same time avoid the perceived humiliation of having to negotiate with the Taliban leadership whom the US has spent years denouncing; and it would keep US bases in Afghanistan, which sections of the US security establishment see as useful to threaten Iran, raid Pakistan and maintain US influence in the region.

What is wrong with this strategy? Firstly, it means that the Taliban will continue their war. Their leadership have declared categorically that they will fight on as long as any US forces remain in Afghanistan. In the absence of any peace settlement giving them a share of power, the Taliban will also go on fighting against the Kabul regime.

US air and ground raids will go on infuriating the Pashtun rural population and encouraging them to support the Taliban. Because the war will continue, so will the Taliban’s reliance on al-Qaida as a source of expertise, and on heroin as a source of revenue. And while the Afghan army may be able to hold the cities, it is obvious that it and the rotten Afghan state will never be able to extend real authority into the countryside.

Secondly, will the Afghan army even be able to hold the cities? The Soviet-backed regime after 1989 did, but it was in many ways a much more cohesive regime than the one that the US has created, with an army based on the old Afghan Royal Army, and led by a Pashtun with real authority among Pashtuns. The present Afghan civilian state is terribly weak, while the army, though large and heavily armed, is demoralised and deeply divided between Pashtuns and Tajiks.

A horribly plausible scenario for the future looks like this: the Afghan civilian regime disintegrates after Karzai steps down in 2014, leading to a coup by the Tajik commanders of the army. This is followed by a counter-coup by Pashtun troops, and civil war in the government-controlled areas. The US is faced with the choice either of pulling out, and allowing Taliban victory in the Pashtun areas, or of sending US troops back in to take over again.

Faced with this scenario, far better would be an attempt at a peace settlement with the Afghan Taliban, starting with the creation of a Taliban office with diplomatic immunity in some other Muslim country, and peace-building measures such as local truces. The broad outlines of a possible settlement have emerged from conversations with former leading Taliban officials such as Mullah Zaeef and Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil.

They involve the phased withdrawal of all non-Afghan armed groups from the country: on the one hand al-Qaida and all terrorist groups (including those targeting Russia, India, China, Iran and Pakistan), and on the other, US and Nato forces; de facto Taliban control of most of the Pashtun areas, with some form of power-sharing in a weak government in Kabul; and a Taliban commitment to stop heroin production in their areas in return for international aid to those areas.

This last is a question usually neglected by the US but is of crucial importance to the UK, Russia, Iran and increasingly China. Heroin has done more damage to our societies than terrorism; and we need to remember therefore that for more than 30 years, only the Taliban (in 1999-2000) has been able to prevent heroin production, because only the Taliban has exercised effective control over the Pashtun countryside. The idea that our allies in the Kabul regime and the Afghan army will be willing or able to do so is ludicrous given their record.

Would such a settlement hold? The Afghan Taliban must realise – and their allies in the Pakistani military certainly do – that whatever happens it will not be possible for them to conquer the non-Pashtun areas of Afghanistan in the face of US, Russian and Indian help to their local enemies. After all, they had a real fight to do so in the late 1990s when only Iran and a weak Russia were ranged against them. US carrier-based aircraft would still give the US great ability to coerce the Taliban and back their enemies if the Taliban broke the treaty.

On the other hand, everything I know about Afghanistan, and everything we see in the news about the Kabul regime and its armed forces, tells me that what is certain is that the US strategy sketched above will not work. As to whether the Taliban would agree to such a deal – well, we won’t know that until we’ve asked them.