A Better Option
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA
Twenty years ago, a humbled Soviet empire pulled out its troops from Afghanistan, long considered the graveyard of empires. Just as that solemn anniversary was being observed in Russia, President Obama announced the deployment of an additional 17,000 US troops to that country.
US General David McKiernan, who commands the NATO garrison in Afghanistan, is hoping that the president will authorize a second supplement of 13,000 US troops. Will the near-doubling of the US troop strength yield a US victory, reversing the pattern that has set in during the past seven years? No.
Russia ’s ambassador to NATO, Dmitri O. Rogozin, has rightly pointed out that since they entered Afghanistan, the Americans “have repeated all our mistakes and made a mountain of their own.” At the peak of the conflict, the Soviets had some 110,000 troops in Afghanistan.
Despite a decade of occupation, in which they controlled the towns and cities and the insurgents controlled the countryside, they failed to subdue the Afghans. Some analysts opined that the results would have been different had the Soviets deployed half a million troops. No surprise here. Those who lose always blame their defeat on an insufficiency of force.
Indeed, when the US was mired in Vietnam, a joke that gained currency was that one of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s star analysts fed data on the comparative strength of the US and enemy forces into the computer and asked, “When are we going to win?” Pat came the answer, “You won in 1962.”
Noting that the American public supports the troop build-up in Afghanistan, Brookings’ Michael O’Hanlon says that the day may well come when Americans will ask: “Why is it we have to win this war? Why is it so vital to our interests?”
The unclear objectives of the troop build-up in Afghanistan hearken back to Vietnam where, at the peak of its involvement, the US fielded an army of half a million. In 1965, under President Lyndon Johnson, US troop strength grew from just 23,000 to 180,000.
In his classic treatise on the Vietnamese war, “On Strategy,” Colonel Harry Summers says that says that seven out of ten US general officers who served in Vietnam never knew why they had been there.
Writing from Hanoi in the New York Times, Tom Miller notes that by sending in more troops, Obama is going down a slippery slope not unlike the one that Charles de Gaulle warned John F. Kennedy about in the early 1960s. This is not the time to be listening to revisionist historians who contend that had the US deployed two million troops in Vietnam, it would have won the war.
Some people see victory in every defeat. Indeed, General William Westmoreland, who commanded the US forces in Vietnam, continued to believe to his last breath that the US never lost the war. He professed to be providing economic and social assistance to the Vietnamese. In reality, he focused on military operations.
A common refrain, cited by historian Stanley Karnow, was, “Grab ‘em by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” When nothing was working, President Nixon in 1971 expressed his determination to “bomb the bastards off the earth.”
Miller agues that the US, as in Vietnam , has ended up with an assortment of bad allies. This time, the bad allies are drug dealers, warlords and corrupt and ineffectual civil officials. Violence is on the rise and the US is on the verge of losing the war, not just in the countryside but also in the towns and cities.
Rather than blindly going down a path aimed at destroying the Taliban, who enjoy little popular support but whose ranks continue to swell daily as they put on the mantle of the resistance to foreign occupation, he argues that the US should seek out a regional political solution.
Support for such an approach has come from an unlikely quarter, NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. In his view, that is the only way to put out the fires that have been lit by the Afghan insurgency. Scheffer envisions that partners in the regional solution would need to include not only Pakistan but also Iran .
Even US Defense Secretary Robert Gates has acknowledged that “political reconciliation” has to be part of the long-term solution. But in the meantime the US troop build-up continues. It is unclear whether that is intended to put the insurgents out of business through intimidation or whether it is meant to engage them in combat and to physically exterminate them.
US Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, has questioned the wisdom of the troop surge. “Is there a danger that a heavier military footprint will further alienate the population, and, if so, what are the alternatives? We must target Al Qaeda aggressively, and we cannot allow Afghanistan to be used again as a launching pad for attacks on America.” But, he noted, that “it was far from clear that a larger US military presence would advance that goal.”
Going back to the days of Alexander of Macedon, Afghanistan has swallowed up conquerors time and time again. Genghis of the Mongols failed to prevail over them. Nor did the British (their retreat immortalized in verse by Rudyard Kipling) or the Soviets. The march of history will not make an exception for the Americans.
President Obama will no doubt recall a speech in which Abraham Lincoln said, “What has once happened, will invariably happen again, when the same circumstances which combined to produce it, shall again combine in the same way.”
Like all prior conquerors, the US is not going to win the Afghan war. So what should it do?
The worst option is to keep on pouring more troops into the cauldron. That will further flame the insurgency and cause even bigger trouble in Pakistan.
A better option is to dramatically draw down the US troop strength and use special operations forces from the Bagram Air Base to go after Al Qaeda in conjunction with the Afghan army.
The best option is to pull out US ground troops completely, train the Afghan and Pakistani ground forces and let them join in the hunt for Al Qaeda. The US role would be limited to air support.
( The author is an associate with the Pakistan Security Research Unit at the University of Bradford. Faruqui@pacbell.net )
