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The Way Forward in Afghanistan
Fred Kaplan tries to read the tea leaves in Afghanistan today. Why is President Obama taking so long to decide on a strategy, and what is that strategy likely to be?
Counterinsurgency involves protecting the local population from insurgency groups, so that the national government is better able to provide basic services, thus winning popular support and undermining the insurgents' appeal. If the government is particularly corrupt or incompetent, it won't be able to build on the security wrought by a good counterinsurgency campaign, thus nullifying our success and sacrifice.
....Some advocates of the strategy have cautioned that counterinsurgency campaigns take years, even decades, to bear fruit....
In the meantime, Obama told [Jake] Tapper that he and his advisers "are identifying not just a national government in Kabul but provincial government actors that have legitimacy in the right now."
This suggests that Obama is seeking ways to go around the central government — striking separate deals with provincial leaders or providing more or less intensive levels of support — if Karzai proves to be a feeble partner in our counterinsurgency campaign. Or it might suggest one way to exert leverage over Karzai — to make clear that we will empower regional players, and thus weaken his own standing, if he doesn't clean up his act, thus making his regime more legitimate in the eyes of his people and therefore better able to beat the Taliban in the competition for hearts and minds.
That's....plausible. Obama likes the counterinsurgency approach, but without a credible government to back it up, it won't work. Solution: find another government to work with. Make deals with tribal and provincial leaders instead of Hamid Karzai. So he's asking his team to figure out if there's any chance of making that work.
It's an interesting thought. Especially for a president trying to convince the country that his policy in Afghanistan is still reality based.
choices
I believe he's still looking because he knows that there are actually no longer any good choices. They disappeared several years ago. To imagine there are always ways to win this game is the same as imagining that we can defeat death, a game played in the minds of children. Unfortunately, the voters are children, and the president is going to have to break the bad news about the Easter Bunny.
"protecting the local population"
The greatest threat to the various local populations in Afghanistan comes from the foreign invaders. The local populations were under no threat until the foreign troops arrived. Counter-counterinsurgency would involve protecting the local population from the occupying foreign troops. The only way the US military can protect anyone in Afghanistan is by leaving.
wait a minute
"The local populations were under no threat until the foreign troops arrived."
This simply isn't so. Under sharia law imposed by the Taliban, those accused of theft had hands cut off; those accused of rape, murder, & adultery -- *adultery* -- were put to death in public executions held in soccer stadiums. Men were required to wear beards & head coverings. Women were required to wear burqas, and they were prevented from working, going to school, and participating in any kind of athletics. I'm certainly not suggesting that this obligates us to insert ourselves & magically right everything that's wrong. And there's no question that indiscriminate bombing from 30,000 feet is even worse. But let's not whitewash Afghan life under the Taliban.
even worse
Like you wrote, everything America does in Afghanistan is even worse than what the Taliban did. Rape of children is much more common in Afghanistan now than before Americans and NATO troops arrived.
A Question
I deleted my comment. It was too STUPID!
For all the Taliban's faults, they are still better than...
...the Afghan government that came before them: the group of corrupt warlords that held the country in the wake of the Soviet withdrawal and that now enjoy the support of the US military. Indeed, the Taliban was the best government Afghanistan had had in decades, and that includes the current puppet regime. With all the astronomical volume of blood-stained corruption that powers our own government, we are in no place to lecture other governments on their shortcomings, and certainly not to forcibly replace them with substitutes of our own device.
I wonder...
The reason I deleted my comment was that the gist of it was similar to yours. Then I decided to check out whether what I had said was accurate. I found a BBC poll that claimed a large majority of Afghanis supported the invasion to oust the Taliban, something like 93%. Today that support number for NATO and US troops is lower but still a clear majority, in the 80% range. So did I just swallow a bunch of propaganda in the form of a poll? Or is it just a matter of choosing the lesser of two evils - which is pretty much what Crissa contends, apparently the Taliban being the greater evil?
Correction
not what Crissa contends, what Junebug contends
Junebug,
I think we know one thing for sure. No matter how bad the Taliban was, the US motive for the invasion had nothing to do with the well-being of the Afghan people. The 'rescue' of the poor Afghans, particularly the women, was just another excuse, similar to the many reasons for invading Iraq after the initial WMD lie was exposed. Just another ploy to win the support of the American people for staying in Afghanistan after bin Laden escaped. As I've said in comments before, I think the powers that be in the US want to secure Afghanistan for another round of the Great Game.
America cares nothing for
America cares nothing for the Afghans. The best government Afghanistan ever had was the Soviet backed one the US created the Mujaheddin to destroy.
Polls are unreliable for determining popular public opinion in a country as diverse ethnically and geographically as Afghanistan. W. Bush was quite unpopular in the US by 2005, but no Americans wanted military occupation to end his administration.
The Taliban were harsh rulers, but their rule was informed by the harsh culture Afghans share, making it endurable for the provincial population that dominates Afghan society. Americans cannot understand that Mullah Omar had more legitimacy than Mullah Hagee or Mullah Parsely, but he had actually fought in a war of liberation and a civil war in order to bring about some semblance of stability and authority to Afghan society, something eight years of American occupation cannot claim.
Thanks for your comment,
Thanks for your comment, tpx. I was surprised to find the BBC poll that showed a large majority of Afghans supported the US invasion. Still, what you say is true about the ethnic diversity in Afghanistan and the difficulty in doing a good poll. But in any case, my latter point and your agreement stands, the US cared not an iota about Afghan women or society in general.
The problem is...
That the Pashtun tribes have historically rejected central government control. For them, Kabul is as much an invader as the U.S. is.
Giving power to local players -- whether they be warlords, tribes, or provincial governors -- is smart, not just because it gives leverage against Karzai, but also because these players are far more likely to win the allegiance of the locals than the central government.
Of course, it's a subtle game to play... building up the Pashtuns might tick off the Hararas and Tajiks, it might lead to internecine fighting... it's a 3-dimensional chess game. But I don't think there's any other path to achieving our objectives.
Afghan pawns
I find the concept of the 3-D chess game to be problematic and repulsively condescending. Afghanistan has been treated as the object of just such games for more than two hundred years. The British have messed with them, then came the Russians with the Americans in opposition, then the Pakistanis and the Indians with the Saudis and Iranians creating the Taliban, and now we have the Americans - again. All have failed, partly because none of these nations cared at all for the well being of the Afghan people. The disaster there is not a political one, it's economic, and until we begin to approach Afghanistan with an eye toward improving the livelihood of its citizens, we'll fail. The political problem is to figure out how to remove Afghanistan from the death grip of Pakistan and India. The majority of the Afghanis don't give a shit about the Taliban or al Qaeda, and I believe that if we concentrate on economic development as the primary tool of intervention, the problem of terrorism in Afghanistan will diminish over time. If we continue to push security as the dominant component of "foreign aid", we'll not only fail, we'll make things there and elsewhere worse.
Leverage against Karzai?
Our powerless puppet is in need of discipline? Is that what's wrong with the Afghan regime, they are insufficiently obedient to Washington? Kabul, the Pashtun capital of Afghanistan from which the Pashtun-dominated Taliban ruled is a foreign occupier to the Pashtuns? Giving power to warlords of the various other ethnic groups is going to get the Pashtuns on our side? Aren't these warlords the same group of thugs that so sullied their own reputation that their defeat at the hands of the Afghan people led by the Taliban was inevitable without US intervention? Do you know anything about Afghanistan aside from the name of the largest city and ethnic group?
Re: The Way Forward in Afghanistan
The United States and Pakistan built the freedom fighters to resist the Soviets.
Pakistan has a standing military that works to establish the writ of its government.
Afghanistan has yet to build a legitimate government or a military that answers to that government.
I can't see a difference between going to the provincial leaders to build their militias to resist foreign fighters and the tactic used in the '80s to build the freedom fighters to resist the Soviets.
The Same
"I can't see a difference between going to the provincial leaders to build their militias to resist foreign fighters and the tactic used in the '80s to build the freedom fighters to resist the Soviets."
The effort to support "freedom fighters" led to the creation of a remarkably corrupt and oppressive oligarchy which the Afghan people unsurprisingly rejected in favor of the Taliban. "Freedom fighters" is what we used to call Al Qaida. Yes, it is all too familiar.
Obama announced a new Afghan
Obama announced a new Afghan strategy back in March (smart and adult, no doubt), but hasn't really implemented it, or even explained it.
Why the dithering?
Did you see the article in
Did you see the article in the Boston Globe yesterday? It says that one typical advisor from the US to Afghanistan costs $500,000 (much of this is for security) and it turns out that many of them seem more concerned about getting contracts into US hands as opposed to helping Afghanistan.
I have a feeling that a lot of people think the US is worse than Afghanistan in terms of corruption/favoritism which means that Karzai isn't necessarily the main problem.
Utterly clueless comment
The problem with the Afghan government is and alway has been that they are a US-installed puppet regime. Now, clueless commentators are speculating that the predictable hatred of Afghan patriots for Afghan collaborators can be defused by hand picking a different set of collaborators. Counterinsurgency in a foreign land where a nation has no legitimate business waging war is evidence of a crime against international law. The problem is not that the counterinsurgency is ineffective; the problem is the existence of counterinsurgency. The problem is not the tactics employed in the prosecution of a huge war crime; the problem is the war crime. Unfortunately, MJ is now far too mainstream to give thoughtful commentary on an issue so dear to the hearts of neoconservative propagandists. Honestly, if you don't have sufficient independence to significantly criticize government policy, why do you post at all?
I know, I know....
...it seems facile to keep comparing Afghanistan to Vietnam, but geez, in many many ways they're just SO comparable.
The Way Forward in Afghanistan
tagged as:- result
How ironic. Bush fought the "wrong" war and now Obama is refusing to fight the "right" war, the war that everyone has long known was the real war that needed to be fought to defeat the Talaban and al Qaeda. How did the U.S. ever become so profoundly ignorant and complacent? We haven't even learned the lessons of Vietnam, the lesson that everyone for all political persuasions DO AGREE on, namely, either get into the war "all the way" with a determination to win, or get the hell out IMMEDIATELY. In Vietnam and Afghanistan the U.S. would not do either. All agree it causes an unnecessary, pointless loss of life to half-heartedly maintain a middle position of neither fighting to win nor hastening to pull out. The U.S. absolutely must either send many more troops in an all-out effort or it must pull out immediately!
The lesson of the Vietnam War is also the lesson of WWII:
Don't invade somebody else's country for no goddamn good reason. After WWII, we made such invasions illegal. We then bent the rules very severely in Vietnam and Afghanistan and then threw them gratuitously in the trash in Iraq. The ignorance of people of precisely what is wrong with the Afghan occupation and what was wrong with the Vietnamese occupation is amazing. Guess what? People don't like it when you invade their country and make their government your bitch. When you tell them that you are holding their government in thrall by military force in order to give them freedom, they don't believe you. They fight back, and you cannot crush them without committing war crimes galore. Paradoxically, your commission of war crimes in order to crush them also has the effect of strengthening their numbers and resolve. Often, they win, and even when they don't, you suffer a massive hemmorraging of funds for military operations, predictable stifling of the forms of representative government domestically, permanent stains on the reputation and honor of your own nation, and a dismantling of the frameworks of international law that keep the community of nations from behaving like cave men with clubs. No, the problem isn't excessive restraint on our part, doofus.
Afghanistan
It's a catch 22.
If the US withdraw and leave Afghanistan, it will be retaken by the brutal Taliban. If they stay, they are dying needlessly and the Taliban and other groups fighting them will use it as a justification for their fighting.
Ugh, what a mess!
The US should ally itself
The US should ally itself with the Taliban. The Taliban are no worse than any other faction in Afghanistan except they are less sympathetic to international corporations and less susceptible to US bribes. What makes the Taliban so unacceptable to the US is their determination to do what is best for Afghans instead of international oil companies.