October 16 , 2009
Obama Confronts Failure in Afghanistan
While Obama is trying hard to wind down the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is taking a sharp turn for the worse. What for many years was an afterthought or a forgotten war, has now become a very intense and deadly conflict. Last week a brazen assault by Taliban on a US outpost killed 8 American soldiers. War costs have escalated to 4 billion dollars per month, and Obama has already upped the US troop commitment to 68,000 soldiers, while additional NATO forces take the total foreign troop presence up to 100,000. Despite that, the situation has markedly deteriorated. What went wrong?
In 2001, the US won a cheap and easy victory using mostly Northern Alliance proxies combined with US Special Forces and airpower to demolish the Taliban. But at that point the Taliban were actually trying to hold cities and territory and were willing to stand and fight a conventional war, which resulted in them being pulverized. After that quick victory the Taliban movement was scattered and demoralized, and a level of peace that Afghanistan had not known since the early 1970’s took hold. Two million Afghan refugees, many living in camps in Pakistan and Iran, returned home. Mass immunization programs were initiated, and an impressive expansion of primary schooling took place, including schools for girls. Afghanistan got a free press, and was able to establish some basic national institutions, including banks, television stations, and a few universities.
The landlocked and mountainous nation is totally dependent on its road network, and the major ring highway underwent badly needed reconstruction.
But despite these real signs of progress, the Bush administration made a huge error in their basic policy. Bush needed the army for Iraq, and so Afghanistan was shortchanged, both in terms of soldiers, which were kept to about 10,000, and in terms of reconstruction and development. What money was spent in Afghanistan was spent on military uses, and the amount assigned to development was trivial. There was little attention paid to the fact that a real functioning Afghan state was not being created in the years after 9/11. President Karzai was really just the mayor of Kabul. There was no concerted and dedicated attempt to create a real Afghan army that could secure the country. The average Afghan, especially outside of Kabul, saw little in the way of meaningful improvement of their lives. Into this vacuum, the Taliban were able to regroup and reform. Pakistan, under Musharraf, saw lack of commitment on the part of the US and hedged their bets by allowing the Taliban to reform and regroup in Pakistan as a potential counterweight to an India-allied Northern Alliance-dominated Afghanistan.
These failures laid the ground for the Taliban to come back. Obama has had to play catch up. The US presence in Afghanistan has been ramped up starting last year and now even more so by Obama. But General McChrystal, who is the commander in Afghanistan, is asking for even more soldiers, and has said that he cannot win without them. On the other hand, there are strong voices in the Democratic Party who are against more soldiers. The army would only get those soldiers by sending forces currently in Iraq. And the costs would be in the billions every month. Meanwhile, the Afghan election for President has been a disaster, and is widely seen as having been blatantly rigged to give Karzai an undeserved first round victory.
The real question for Obama is: what would a massive allocation of US soldiers accomplish at this point? Would anything less than 200,000 troops really allow the US to stamp out the Taliban? And to what extent can critical US goals be accomplished with a much smaller force?
The time to do Afghanistan right was 8 years ago, when there was overwhelming support from the American people and international credibility. But back then, the US only put in 8000 soldiers, opium was allowed to flourish, and Karzai was never more than the mayor of Kabul. Years of neglect allowed a Taliban insurgency to regroup and reform. To stamp it out now would require another 100k soldiers, which the US doesn’t have and the American people don’t want to send anyway. There is no way to “win” that does not involve creating a functioning Afghan state, but Afghanistan is so backward and decentralized that to create a real state would be awfully difficult, even if the Taliban didn’t exist.
If the US wants to deny Al Qaeda a base of operations, they can downsize to a few mobile regiments and use them to destroy any large concentrations of Taliban and hunt Al-Qaeda with helicopter assaults and Predators. This would be enough to keep them off balance and prevent the Taliban from being able to capture cities. But with barely functioning and very corrupt state, and an army made up of illiterate conscripts, the raw material of victory just isn’t there. In Iraq, victory was basically allowing the Shias to take over and forcing the Sunnis to accept the loss of control of Iraq that they fought against for so long. The Shias also now control the massive resources of an oil state to buy off and co-opt enemies. No such ethnic strategy is available in Afghanistan because the Taliban are based in the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns. All the other ethnic minorities are much smaller in size and cannot act as a counterweight.
Ultimately, it will only be the slow buildup of education and economic activity that will bring a functioning state to Afghanistan, but that will literally take 25 years. What to do in the meantime? The US should stay in Afghanistan but make do with a light long-term presence dedicated to preventing a Taliban takeover of the cities.
Comments can reach me at Nali@socal.rr.com.
