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Anthony Cordesman’s distress signal that the war in/against Afghanistan "is being lost" because we haven’t provided nearly enough resources to do the job has provoked worried reactions all around.
But I don’t agree the problem is Cordesman’s failure to define "success" so that we can evaluate whether his proposals would work. Cordesman’s WaPo op-ed does define what he thinks "success" is and what "failure" would be.
He defines success partly in arguing to give the US commanders and ambassador whatever they want:
They must be given both the time to act and the resources and authority they feel they need. No other path offers a chance of a secure and stable Afghanistan free of terrorist and jihadist control and sanctuaries.
And what are these statements if not definitions of success:
Similarly, a significant number of such U.S. reinforcements will have to assist in providing a mix of capabilities in security, governance, rule of law and aid. U.S. forces need to "hold" and keep the Afghan population secure, and "build" enough secure local governance and economic activity to give Afghans reason to trust their government and allied forces. They must build the provincial, district and local government capabilities that the Kabul government cannot and will not build for them.
There’s no ambiguity here; Cordesman is clearly describing nation building, including the creation of local, regional and federal governments that "give Afghans reason to trust government and allied forces."
Think about how absurd that statement is. When a determined, and still mostly non-violent right wing insurrection in the US can easily undermine trust in the US government, it’s ludicrous to think we can counter even more violent right wing extremists in Afghanistan from making Afghans distrust their own pathetic regime.
And exactly how can a US military get Afghans to trust "allied forces," when they’ve repeatedly shown far less respect for Afghan lives and property than the US police are required to show in America to American citizens?
So the problem is not a failure to define success. It’s embracing definitions that are so ambitious they’re not even remotely possible and so interventionist and paternalistic that they lack moral legitimacy. And Cordesman isn’t alone; he’s probably saying what most of the Washington establishment would say.
The prevailing US notion seems to assume that there is some level of military and economic intervention by unwelcome foreign powers that can tranform a resistant Afghan society and armed and hostile population into something they have never been and probably don’t want to become. But the only plausible model for doing that is total war, crushing defeat, unconditional surrender, and a total take-over of the civilian authority enforced by prolonged military occupation — and that may only get you Iraq.
If there is some realistic scenario that somehow skips these steps, I haven’t seen it.
Only a nation used to functioning as a rogue, international outlaw in the guise of fighting communists (then) or terrorists (now), would fail to see itself in such terms. But I don’t think even the misguided and mostly distracted US public is quite prepared to support this. But that probably won’t stop our government from trying.
Some smart people want more definitions:
Spencer Ackerman
Matthew Yglesias
Ezra Klein
More from Matt:
On metrics to measure success!
47 Comments
As a Vietnam Era vet all I can say is the rhetoric sounds very familiar when it comes to Afghanistan.
Generals and Majors.
XTC rocks!
This blog needs a bit of tidying. Take and deep breath and make it better. Thanks.
I’m coming to the conclusion that there’s nothing more we can do in Afghanistan. There was a time when we might have made things better, but that time has passed. We appear to be getting sucked deeper into this thing, with no workable plan. Ubetchaiam’s point about Vietnam is taken – while it may not be the same, Afghanistan is starting to sound the same.
In his column today, George Will also called on the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan.
How ’bout them apples?
I’m kind of surprised it’s taken this long for the GOP to go anti-Afghanistan. It’s a smart position.
“…something they have never been and probably don’t want to become.” That sums it up completely. Why can’t Americans understand that not every country wants to be like us? The Iraqis may wanted “freedom” but to them that still means that their religion is at the heart of their lives – and they want it that way.
Democracy means different things to different people and we can’t go storming into countries and destroying what they have.
George Will occasionally remembers that he has a brain and a spine, if not a fully-functioning conscience. While all the other Villagers, alleged liberals and conservatives alike, were putting words in Hillary’s mouth in reference to her interview in the September 1999 issue of Talk Magazine, he was one of the few to publicly discuss the OTHER cover story of Talk mag’s maiden issue — namely, Tucker Carlson’s profile of George W. Bush. Carlson’s barely-veiled horror at the prospect of Bush winning the GOP nomination was picked up on by Will — but not because he thought that Bush was amoral or anything like that; it was because Will feared that Bush couldn’t win the presidency — and if we’d actually had a real press corps at the time, Will would have had good reason to fear this.
Afghanistan, where Empires go to fail.
Again we fail to learn lesson from history.
The sad irony is the most recent failure was the Russians whose opposition we armed and trained.
Bin Laden ,anyone?
The only purpose of the ______ (fill in the blank) War is to rake in $$$ for the arms merchants.
Dickless Cheney and Twitchy Bush, The Hague ‘10
They’ve always been objectively anti-Afghanistan. Bush couldn’t be bothered to do more than a perfunctory chase after OBL, especially after he let the guy escape at Tora Bora; he soon got bored and then returned to ramping up plans to go after Saddam.
“When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jes’ roll to your rifle and blow out your brains,
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier…”
Ah, this was about Ahmed Chalabi pulling off one of the biggest cons in history. He got the PNACers to back removing Saddam under the idea that they could replace him with an Israel-friendly régime. Wrong.
Sounds like the neocons who own the soul of the WaPo are trying to rope Obama in to expanding this war that broke the back of the USSR…
My thoughts exactly. Thanks JC
In high school I made four dates with four different girls all on the same night…to this day I can’t tell if any were a success. Success is just what you want it to be..just around the corner.
I agree, and the worst problem is the Karzai govt, as it was with Diem in RV. From The report commisioned by the British HS office, and being discussed there all weekend, “the government that is losing the insurgency is not being out fought its being outgoverned.” outside of a couple of small areas, Karzais corrupt govt has no control, those areas are under the control of the insurgent forces except for brief violent, tense interludes when American troops patrol through,also sound familliar??
I say this without meaning any offense, but I’d like to see your defense of all the suppositions you’ve made in this paragraph, with documentation, numbers, and facts.
Document unwelcome (please find more than just a RAWA video), document “resistant Afghan society”, document “armed and hostile population”, document “probably don’t want to become”, document the comparison with Iraq, or, for some of your commenters, with Vietnam. Neither are good comparisons, and if you read enough RAWA, you’ll find them pretty pissed off at the “armed and hostile population”, too. Please mention the total lack of mention of Pakistan’s hegemonic use of the Taliban from their own soil, please mention the 11 fold burgeoning of the heroin trade to finance a group of armed insurgents who were created by a foreign power, and have infinite money to wage war whether or not the Afghan citizenry wants them around or not. Please mention that after the Americans left Vietnam, there was peace, which would not be the case in Afghanistan. Please mention the fact that the Americans mounted a full scale invasion and occupation of Iraq without provocation, neither of which they did in Afghanistan.
The situation in Afghanistan is complex, daunting, and you and I and everyone else is free to believe what they want about the solution there, but that one paragraph had more inaccurate propaganda, and quite frankly, bullshit in it than a network TV broadcast, which is saying something.
the neocons were in his campaign, it is what he ran on, it is what his supporters voted for – more war waged on the people of Afghanistan, withdraw soldiers from Iraq and send them over there, expand into Pakistan just as Nixon struck at Laos and Cambodia.
$4 billion a month, for what? nation building, when California is bankrupt and burning, and Democratic politicians have the gall to nickel-and-dime healthcare reform proposals, and propose cuts of $35 billion from Medicare?
Cutting vital support for the old and frail = 9 months of Obama’s doomed, missionless project in Afghanistan.
If Republicans were doing this at least the (D)’s would pretend to fight it a little.
Doubt if we are going to have much success with “nation building” in Afghanistan- we should settle for zero tolerance for terrorist activities against us. I agree with Will that it’s Pakistan that matters- putting the nukes and delivery equipment in the hands of an even less stable government could be a catastrophe- those guys ALREADY distributed nuke blueprints throughout the world.
I don’t know how the two issues are connected- if leaving Afghanistan makes a difference with the future of Pakistan- that needs to be thought through VERY carefully.
Cordesman is a shill and an idiot. He is saying we should give the Pentagon whatever it wants for as long as it wants. I am only surprised that there wasn’t a pony in there somewhere.
As I have said many, many times we have no Afghanistan policy. A policy needs to answer the following 3 questions.
1. What do we want?
2. What can we do?
3. What can we live with?
The reason that Cordesman and so many others in our foreign “policy” elites are such idiots is that they only answer the first question and attempt to pass that off as policy. It isn’t. If Cordesman bothered to look at question 2, he would realize that the American and world economies are incredibly shaky right now and that we do not have the resources to support him and his playing soldier in Afghanistan for what looks like decades. If he looked at question 3, he would know that Afghanistan is of virtually no importance to us, that we have lived for years with al Qaeda in the tribal territories in Pakistan and that any control or pursuit of al Qaeda in Afghanistan can be managed on a limited basis and in coordination with other countries in the region, most notably the Pakistanis, the Iranians, and the Russians. But Cordesman is too caught up in the current situation to really see past it. Like I said, an idiot.
No Sense & No Sensibility: Many of us who supported Obama’s election believed he had enough sense to not re-engage in a war that was lost eight years ago when the Bush administration diverted troops for its Iraq misadventure.
Now, to Obama’s multi-trillion dollar bail-out of the financial industry, Obama’s carbon credit give-aways to polluters, Obama’s virtually non-existant and mostly-for-show ‘assistance’ to home owners/credit card holders/workers, Obama’s clubby federal subsidies for the rescued too-big-to-fail banks to purchase smaller ‘failed’ banks, Obama’s tepid approach to financial industry regulation, and Obama’s waffling ‘MIA’ health care leadership, can be added Obama’s mis-guided efforts to ‘win’ in Afghanistan.
That Obama doesn’t have enough sense to listen to the people who supported and voted for him is startling. I guess his days as a community organizer soured him on listening to the average tax payer, citizen and voter. America is worse for it. While I fear the Republican alternatives are worse still, Obama’s time is limited and a wonderful opportunity will soon be squandered, unless he comes to his senses and supports the American people who once supported him.
the situations arent exactly the same, but where propping up a weak, corrupt “freindly” govt,that controls only the area around the capital, that has the confidence of NO ONE especially afghans its very similar to Vietnam. The problem of pakistan seems identical to the problem of laos and cambodia, providing basically safe staging areas for guerilla fighters, is frustratingly simillar. The people of Vietnam only wanted peace. They hade been at war for decades, and ceturies before and were probably the most militarized people on earth, is that not also very familiar? afgahnistan is not vietnam, its in a different part of asia but people are the same in all places and through all times. Not much is that different.
here’s a little something the British Ambassador to Afghanistan believed:
“
The two-page cable — which was sent to the Élysée Palace and the French Foreign Ministry on Sept. 2, and was leaked to the investigative and satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaîné, which printed excerpts in its Wednesday issue — said that the NATO-led military presence was making it harder to stabilize the country.
“The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution,” Sir Sherard was quoted as saying. “Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis.”
the lack of links does not make something bullshit, m’dear.
who needs a link to establish that the Afghan population is ‘armed and hostile’? Mr. Rogers?
how about a link showing how friendly the Pashtuns are to foreign invaders? take your time.
As there being no reason to fight in Vietnam and no reason to fight in Iraq, except for misplaced notions of self importance, there seem to be many reasons to fight Islamic fundamentalism and “jihad” if that is what NATO is doing in Afghanistan (sp?)
Re Pakistan and nukes, it always needs to be borne in mind that both of these are a major concern of the Indians and that they are much more likely to react to any dangers posed by them long before we would entertain taking any action.
“how about a link showing how friendly the Pashtuns are to foreign invaders? take your time.”
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/
Someone described the press today as a lonely outpost of self righteous pride that spends it’s time completely out of the loop of what is truly happening. I paraphrase radically. This kind of tortured reasoning, or lack thereof, has to come after an explanation of why anyone would want to be in Afghanistan.
The reasons are strained, and rarely, if ever, discussed. It seems to be about Pakistan, but that isn’t discussed either. The people we are killing or protecting do not like us. They do not want us there, as is the case with all the wars since Korea.
So, exactly what is to gain? Keep the nukes out of the hands of the nuts? Is Pakistan so afraid of India that they will protect their ownership of the nukes right up until they have to destroy them, or use them?
There is no rational that is convincing for us to be there. Except making the defense industry a lot of money.
That would seem a poor reason for a war. But we keep on using these vapid excuses for invading those for whom we hold in contempt, and have something we can steal no other way. What is it in Afghanistan? Is it mining rights? Is it opium? To keep others out? To keep our soldiers from coming home?
the reason to fight in iraq is the same as to fight in VN or afghanistan, to expand the capitalist empire. if those folks arent making garbage in American owned factories to sell the borgeuois in europe and NA, they simply arent “FREE”.
I do see it as returning to their roots, especially re: Clinton and Bosnia.
Apparently Obama is not the leaping kind, he is one that needs to be shoved..the sooner the better. This is a failing of the Dem Party and will reflect on the next election. We Progressives put Obama in office and if we drop our support he will fail big time. We get revenge and America gets screwed. This is why the GOP is so overjoyed and is worked up about. Obama’s plans before the election were all progressive and he did a 180 after. The GOP easily smells blood because of Dem weakness.
Yes, although the relations between the two countries are hardly warm and friendly- there is certainly an important role for the US to play in preventing a nuke disaster in Pakistan.
No. Vietnam had both a well organized government on the other side of the DMZ, and a well organized insurgency capable of governing on the South Vietnam side. Consequently, withdrawal of the enemy produced a takeover and then peace. There isn’t such a thing in Afghanistan, which has been at war with itself, with a lot of hegemonic interference from its neighbors, for many years and had destroyed a large part of its own society before we ever got there.
No, the Taliban operating out of Pakistan is not equivalent to Vietnamese forces (NVA or Vietcong) operating from staging areas in surrounding countries. The Pakistani Army and the Pakistani ISI created the Taliban, they were put together from people in the refugee camps who knew little or nothing about the country of their parents, and had been trained in madrassas run by the Saudis to be fighters from a young age. In more ways than one they are not an indigenous Afghan fighting force, and are not merely staging in Pakistan, they were harbored there with money and resources by the Pakistani government after 2001, on the reasoning that the U.S. and NATO would lose interest in Afghanistan and withdraw, at which time they could retake the country. Those who want us out, like RAWA has said, also want the Taliban gone (and get very specific about it tribe by tribe). They are funded by drug money to the tune (according to Ahmed Rashid and Gretchen Peters and others) of around $3 billion per year, and will be there and be buying sophisticated weaponry in the Emirates whether anyone living in Afghanistan wants them around or not.
That’s extremely different from Ho Chi Minh’s group, which was fiercely independent of foreign control, and had been so for 50 years, even if they had foreign aid and alliances.
No, Afghanistan is not Vietnam, Afghanistan’s major cultural antecedents are the Steppe Cultures, the Mongols, their own imperial history (the Kushan and the Ghandhari empires and to some extent the Moghals), and most important of all, Iran and India, their Silk Road trading and cultural partners. Vietnam has a mixed cultural history, the south is pronounced Southeast Asian, the north frequently a tributary of imperial China, and had a religious battle fomented in divide and conquer style by the French as a side antecedent to the war. Not much in common at all.
“People are the same in all places and through all times,” is not a very astute comment, perhaps you have a better phrasing for it? I don’t know what it means, having studied several different cultures, and having found them to be, well, different.
It simply is not that simple. The element which is manufacturing and selling heroin and suppressing women and education and remains functionally illiterate, is an element which must be resisted. Does not have much to do with capitalism except for the drug trade.
You do.
Afghanistan is not where empires go to die. It, and places like it, is where dying empires go. Empires grow and maintain themselves by concentrating their efforts on rich, economically and strategically important areas. Any empire that ends up in a place like Afghanistan is advertising that it is inept and poorly run.
“People are the same in all places and through all times,” is not a very astute comment, perhaps you have a better phrasing for it? I don’t know what it means, having studied several different cultures, and having found them to be, well, different”
then you havent lived long enough, or read well enough to understand what it means. so the vienamnese were a special case then. BTW the “withdrawl of the enemy”brought peace? really? which enemy? not the japanese, not the french, not the americans, the chinese? well, no not really then either. there was war with cambodia after that and internal fighting over which direction the government would take. chinese or russian patronage. all of the difference you point out are superficial to the American mission. all of the similarities to the war in VN, or any other war of colonial expansion the US has fought are there. you will fight yourself to rationalize how afghanistan could be different. the only thing that we have a chance to make different is how long we are deployed there, fighting a war the afghan people dont want us to fight. You are already personally invested in the outcome, or you are one of those people who cant stand to be wrong. if you just cant stand to be wrong you are picking a hell of an argument to make.
How can we have success in A’stan when we back/support/prop up a govt that is not only totally corrupt but appears to be activly involved in the drug trade. The Taliban are fighting a civil war-phase 2,3, or 4-that started when the USSR invaded. They almost managed to take total control of the country until we intervened on the side of one of those fighting against the Taliban(their war on Heroin production perhaps?. So where are we now almost 8 years later? We are backing the current govt which is so vastly corrupt that people are actually looking back at the Taliban govt as “the good old days”. After serving in Vietnam-my generations bad war-I spent about 20 years reading about the causes and the whys and wherefores of that war. I concluded that it was the wrong war fought for the wrong reasons against the wrong enemy. We were proping up a totally corrupt govt-so corrupt that after we had Diem killed they had many coups-to many to count-exchanging one bunch of thieves for the next. While we were fighting against communist agression, the other side was fighting a civil war and a war against invaders. Part one was the French, then the Japanese, then the French again(with american assistance) then after they finally defeated the french, the americans came-after we tried our damndest to sabotage the 1954 agreement-and after another very long war, first the americans were defeated, then the corrupt southern govt was. We had a very basic misunderstanding about this war. We did not understand, in a very basic way, what the NVA/VC were fighting for. It was a war for independence against a foreign occupying power. Sound familar? Currently we are fighting a very long war against a people who, at the bottom line, do not want the US backing the govt or attempting to establish democracy. We are, very basically, repeating the same mistake that got and kept us in Vietnam. That is the failure to understand what the people want and the failure to understand the motives of the Taliban.
As for the rest of the world, I totally blame the British and the empire that they had. Lets look at the scorecard. Sri Lanka. India/Pakistan, Iraq. Sudan, Israel/Palestine, Somalia and Nigeria. Quite a list, no? The other wars of the 20th century after WWII I also blame on colonialism. The French in Indochina and the Japanese in Korea. And the lack of foresight by ourselves because we aided and abetted the French in their attempt to regain control of Indochina. Empire building, Hubris, Racism. They all played a part
Okay, I haven’t lived long enough or haven’t read well enough. Vietnam was not a failed state, there was a government in place within a short amount of time. The U.S. withdrew there in 73-75. Is it still at war? Afghanistan went unstable in 78, and it is.
I will fight myself to rationalize how Afghanistan could be different? The burden of proof is on those who claim it is not different, since it shares precious little cultural heritage, geography, language, great power politics, or any of the other factors with Vietnam, only actually sharing the fact that U.S. troops are there and were in Vietnam.
I am personally invested in the outcome? Only emotionally. I don’t believe in condemning little brown or black people to endless war on the justification that all non-intervention is good because the U.S. is an evil empire. I can’t stand to be wrong? That may be, fair enough criticism to make about a lot of people, I could be one of them. But you have scarcely proven me wrong, so that event has not come to pass.
Picking an argument? I’m sorry if that is what happens, but I’m tired of there only being two points of view on all U.S. policy. I’m in favor of demilitarizing U.S. foreign policy, including in Afghanistan, but not in withdrawing to our borders and letting those living in hell elsewhere go fuck themselves and die horrible deaths after their horrible lives. I’d express the same point of view if we were talking about Democratic Republic of Congo or Sri Lanka where there aren’t Americans involved. And I believe that sooner or later, the U.S. and other powers will have to learn how to stop state failure, and develop foreign aid and diplomatic arms that are bigger than their to-be-reduced military arms. I believe that because the swath of failed states exactly follows the path of those countries that have so far lost their sustainability to climate change, with few exceptions. This is the only kind of problem that the future will present, the world needs to learn how to solve it. You’re free to think they should do that without American help, a lot of people do. But don’t try to force it into a cookie cutter of British imperialism (Rudyard Kipling), or Cold War proxy (Vietnam), or neocon aggression (Iraq). Tell me where I should express that, if it is off limits here?
we are in afghanistan by mistake. we went there to “get bin laden”.. either we dont really want to get him, or he is un-gettable. what would we do with him anyway? kill him? that wouldnt do any good for us.Not with an enemey that mmkes religious martyrs daily. put him on trial? i think not. we were in Iraq for the empire. for capitalism. afghanistan dosent offer anything to capitlaism. so now we are there for what? not for any of the ostensible reasons, to “make afganistan free” or to bring rights to women, or build a prosperous free afghan nation. WE dont fight wars for those reasons.Not at all.The U.S. government is not officially concered with the well being of the afghan people. so what are we doing there. we arent putting ourselves in a stronger position strategically. Afghanistan is not strategically important to anyone, except afghans.The longer we are there the more risk we take of exposing how weak we are becoming. they are just trying to figure what “victory” looks like on TV, so they can leave.
I understand what you are saying but my view is somewhat different. Let’s take Iraq. Saddam was a harsh dictator and I’m sure that his citizens wished him gone. It seems, from what I have read, that the AVERAGE citizens were not beaten, killed or otherwise tortured. Iraq was actually a fairly progressive country in that women would not required to cover themselves, they were allowed to go to college and to have jobs. The population had electricity, air conditioning, clean water and other amenities. Now those things would not be enough for Americans (at least, not yet) but perhaps they were enough for Iraqis and certainly preferable to being bombed, killed, raped, their homes destroyed, almost no electricity, no clean water, very few schools. Terror day and night from outsiders whom they had not harmed. I think they would choose to go back to the time during Saddam. Afghanistan very likely is the same.
“Vietnam was not a failed state”
vietnam was a colonial state. as soon as they elected their own govt we overthrew it.
“I will fight myself to rationalize how Afghanistan could be different? The burden of proof is on those who claim it is not different,”
im not trying to prove anything that isnt obvious to anyone watching. you are.
“I am personally invested in the outcome? Only emotionally. I don’t believe in condemning little brown or black people to endless war on the justification that all non-intervention is good because the U.S. is an evil empire. I can’t stand to be wrong? That may be, fair enough criticism to make about a lot of people, I could be one of them. But you have scarcely proven me wrong, so that event has not come to pass“
right. to free the “little brown people” we have to kill them. to save the village we have to destroy it. afgahnistans problem isnt colonialism, its not enough of the right kind of colonialism. you bet.they dont know any better so we have to teach them our ways at gun point, and the best way to do that is to install a corrupt govt and then rig the elections, so they will know what democracy looks like. i dont have to prove anything that is self eveidnet
Unfortunately, Twain, no, Afghanistan wasn’t like Iraq under Saddam Hussein before the Taliban were toppled. cf., e.g., Steve Coll, Ghost War, Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos, etc. I agree wholeheartedly with what you say about Iraq. Unfortunately, it doesn’t transfer to Afghanistan.
Nothing you are saying is self-evident from facts acquired on the history or the current or recent sociopolitical or economic, or military history of Afghanistan. That was my original point about Scarecrow’s paragraph.
well i hope your right. The “history,or the current or recent sociopolitical or economic, or millitary history of Afghanistan” shows that the whatever the American occupation of Afghanistan is trying to accomplish, dosent have much of a chance of helping the Afghan people. Can you clear one thing up for me, what IS the American occupation trying to accomplish, in “historical” or “economic” “sociopolitical” or “millitary”
terms?
The problem is that the US chooses to help with guns and not butter. If our foreign policy was all humatarian we would all be in a better place.
We have militarized the world along with other industrialized nations whose CORPORATIONS have infected the world with weaponry.
We simply fail to learn how destructive the proliferation of weapons and militarism is. Of course the nation with all the fire power get to call the shots and that is an idea which doesn’t seem to want to die.
When the main opponent to the big guy on the planet game collapsed the US embarked not on a program to demilitarize the planet but to effectively conquer it with their military. This was the mission statement offered by PNAC.
But what do “we” do when there is tyranny and oppression and murder and torture of people by their government? That is a rough. We certainly need to cut off their access to weapons, the tools of oppression. And we certainly need to bring international pressure on behalf of the people for humanitarian reasons. This means boycotts, blockades and cutting off all but humanitarian needs. If we are aware of a genocide underway the INTERNATIONAL community must then act to stop it with military force under international control and command.
Now that conservatives understand Afghanistan, when is Obama going to wake up and realize that Obama’s war is not the good war?
First off, it isn’t really an occupation, just like it wasn’t actually an invasion. When the Bonn Agreement was signed ending the Afghan Civil War, there had been participation by 350 Americans in the tail end of the war, the toppling of the Taliban wasn’t by Americans, it was by the Northern Alliance, having been given an advantage by American bombing at sites specified by Iranian intelligence.
The agreement specified nation building as the priority. That was the mission the ISAF/NATO forces, plus UNAMA, UNDP, and all the other UN and other organizations, 40+ nations, and 60+ donor nations signed on to doing. The other mission, which goes as rationale in the U.S., was called “Operation Enduring Freedom” and was specified by the September 18, 2001 AUMF, to hunt down those Taliban and al Qaeda who had been involved in the September 11th attacks. By the time the ink was dry, those people were largely in Pakistan, so that mission never really had a purpose, save one: It kept the Bush Administration from having to argue for nation building to the American people, and it provided a rationale (not accepted by the ICRC and human rights lawyers and organizations) for detaining people for the “duration of conflict”, even though the Bush people were simultaneously arguing that those detained deserved no rights under Geneva.
The role of the military in that agreement is limited to providing security for the nation building operation, about which hundreds of pages are expended on detailing roads, schools, disarming warlords, ending the drug trade in the south, building economic infrastructure, etc.
That mission, partly because it was nation building, and partly because Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld wanted to move on into Iraq, was openly subverted by Rumsfeld and Tenet from the beginning, but met with considerable success for a couple of years, before Karzai began making too many compromises to keep his government out of the corruption trap, and the arming of the warlords (by CIA and the U.S. special forces at the same time that ISAF was trying to disarm them) started tearing the central government to pieces, and the Europeans started reneging on half of the stuff they had agreed to do (like train a totally civilian local police structure, interdict heroin, build ring roads, etc.), and doing things like deploying relief teams instead of development teams because it was easier to sell at home. The European parliaments, unlike the American Congress, explicitly signed on with votes to all this, but also promised their people there would be few or no casualties.
Meanwhile, Pakistan deployed a large number of ISI on what in the U.S. would be called NOC status to incubate the Taliban until NATO gave up so they could reassert their hegemony in Afghanistan, which they use as a bulwark against the Indians, and as a training ground for insurgents for various causes, principally sending “homegrown” insurgents into Kashmir. When it began to look like NATO would not leave without finishing, the Taliban launched an offensive in the south in 2006, which has also had the advantage of garnering them a lot of lucrative drug money from control over trafficking out of Helmand.
It is so frightening now to watch someone I greatly respect, like Bill Moyers, get on TV and talk about how suddenly the mission has changed to nation building. That was the only legitimate mission in Afghanistan since early 2002, all these countries signed on to it. The real bogus mission there is the hunt for bin Laden, with it’s (consistently) 11,000 soldiers and its excuses for tens of thousands of uncharged, untried prisoners. But none of that seems to be allowed by either the left or the right as a construct in the U.S. The right has some kind of war for our freedoms from Islamofascism meme going, and the left has some kind of imperial boot on the neck of the restless natives meme going. Neither are even close, and Afghanistan will never, ever, ever be a part of the Middle East or the Far East, or have much in common with Iraq or Vietnam. No matter how many people on the only both sides allowed want to think so.
The security problems could be solved in large part with some principled diplomacy with Pakistan combined with a regional alliance which means the U.S. and Iran having very direct, very strong cooperation, so that Pakistan realizes it must call off it’s pipedreams, while keeping India in hands off mode so that Pakistan has no legitimate gripe about security. Now you tell me: What do you think the biggest obstacle to that scenario, the one that kills the least civilians or NATO troops, is? That is where the focus of attention should be. What would it take for Iran and the U.S. to bury their differences long enough to stop the killing in Afghanistan? How difficult would it be to honestly talk to Pakistan about sanctions? That’s why you don’t hear more accurate descriptions of what’s really needed.