What Are We Doing In Afghanistan?
Alex Massie reads a downbeat assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and muses:
At the very least one might hope it will cause some people to ask some questions. We like to think of Afghanistan as the “good” war. But what does that mean? Allied troops have been in Afghanistan for six years now and a military victory remains elusive. Is this merely a matter of resources? If it’s not, then how useful are promises to pour more troops into Afghanistan? And what does victory look like anyway? How sustainable are current operations? In fact, are we more concerned with “winning” the “war on drugs” than with pacifying the Hindu Kush and Helmand province? To what extent is the drug war compromising our ability to achieve our other objectives? Furthermore, what sort of threat does the Taliban (and a rump al-Qaeda) in Afghanistan pose to the non-Afghan world? Is it containable absent a military occupation? How long should our current occupation last? Dare we tell the public? Can we win? What are the adverse consequences, if any, of winning?
I think what we need to do is step back and think a little bit more clearly about what it is we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. As of sometime in 2002, the Bush administration seemed to have decided that victory had already been achieved in Afghanistan, and it was time to start pulling resources out of there and throwing them into Iraq as Afghanistan moved into a consolidation phase. That was a terrible error. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to say that six or seven years later, we can just roll up our sleeves and rededicating ourselves to achieving the goals we were told we achieved years ago. The situation has changed, windows of opportunity open and close, and our mission has gotten very murky. Oftentimes when this kind of operation goes on long enough the goal becomes “succeeding” — or, rather, doing something or other that whoever’s in charge of the operation could plausibly label success. But we need to think, instead, more concretely about what it is we’re hoping to achieve in Afghanistan — specifically, does preventing portions of Afghanistan from serving as a base for terrorist operation directed at the United States really require us to establish an effective central state in Afghanistan?
26 Responses to “What Are We Doing In Afghanistan?”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
October 1st, 2008 at 12:58 pm
should we really, i mean really, consider an attempt at nation building. put the nation to work on highways and sewage and a new electrical grid. get provences working together and try and bring together a feeling of nationalism between the tribes through this effort. from new schools all the way to a national soccer/cricket stadium. just pull back to a major base and sit, ready to act as a QRF to aid the army and use contractors from around the world to help, not profit from, the country. i know, i know very idealistic and probably not too do-able but that is a future that would be kinda cool to watch grow.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:02 pm
While reading Charlie Wilson’s War, I came across this sentence - Special Forces doctrine held that if a guerrilla insurgency survives and grows, then it is by definition winning. Now the question of it being lost is probably an open but NATO is not winning.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:04 pm
Having just read the Dexter Filkins piece on Pakistan and the Taliban, it seems pretty clear to me that a large part of the problem is that we’ve been funneling gazillions to the Taliban’s chief sponsors — the government of Pakistan, which conducts show-raids on its tribal territories but otherwise maintains them and their Al Qaeda buds through a swiss cheese network of Army and intelligence back channels. Basically, Bush not only took his eye off the ball, he got punk’d by his buddy Mushy, who was funding and protecting the bad dudes we were paying him to fight all along. Filkins portrays it as pretty much one big racket. Pakistan has many motives for maintaining the Taliban — wahabbist wingnuttery in the ranks of the Army and intelligence, wanting to maintain territorial integrity by having a shadow force of black turbaned hillbillies keeping Afghanistan in chaos and occasionally making forays into Kashmir, etc. But the main reason, he posits, is that Pakistan is entirely economically dependent on the money we give them to keep the Taliban under control.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:17 pm
From Wikipedia: “Due to the interminable and inconclusive nature of the war, the conflict in Afghanistan has often been referred to as the Soviet equivalent of the United States’ Vietnam War.”
AKA, just another fruitless Land War in Asia. Is it really conceivable that we want to war against fundimentalist Islam? For how long?
October 1st, 2008 at 1:24 pm
I will repeat.
The ONLY good of the Iraq invasion was to distract the world
from failure in Afghanistan.
No western invader has succeeded there since Alexander.
If they want to succeed there, eliminate the money in opium
by legalizing it. The alternative is applying the tactics against it which the Taliban used — incredible savagery
that are not palatable (to put it mildly) to the west.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Yes, it is a good question of how we got from “Let’s get Al-Qaeda” to “Let’s Install a Democratic State in Afghanistan and Prevent the Return of the Taliban.” I always had the impression that somehow we didn’t think the former was a sufficiently noble cause, i.e., if we’re going to invade another country, then we should leave it better than when we found it. That notion seems, like the Geneva Conventions, quaint now.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Well, thinking more constructively, seems like, at a minimum, you need to:
-Either somehow get the Pakistani government to really kick the Taliban out, which may be impossible since they now govern those tribal provinces and are infiltrating the cities too, or cut off aid to Pakistan, which would create massive instability and potentially hand a nuclear-armed country to the Taliban
-Pump tons of money into Afghanistan trying to build a sustainable economy off a product other than opium, or just paying people to fight the Taliban, as we’ve kinda done in Iraq. Would this be sustainable? Probably not. Would much of the money end up in the pockets of the Taliban or evil warlords? You betcha!
-As in Pakistan’s tribal provinces, basically build from the ground up a government to replace the feudal warlords that the Taliban has largely offed. Do we have the expertise to do this? I doubt it. Does the Mayor of Kabul have the ability to do this, even with substantial military support?
The most important thing is probably not so much depriving backasswards would-be terrorists of a place to fester so much as keeping their fingers off Pakistan’s button.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I like to offer a victory argument to conservatives. We won in Iraq. We won when we got rid of Saddam Hussein. (Whether it was worth it is another question.) Since we won years ago, why do we still need to stay?
In Afghanistan, where we have never won, the same logic applies. When we’ve gotten rid of Osama bin Laden, we will have won. At that point, our interest in Afghanistan is simply that it not become a completely failed state and a haven for terrorists. I don’t suggest that we declare victory and go home, but I do think that if we could get rid of the face of al-Quaeda our presence could be scaled back. Scaled back, I hope, to the point where we could provide assistance to the Afghan government without being seen as an army of occupation.
This may be a simplistic personalization of foreign policy, but personalization is politically effective, and the fight with al-Quaeda is partly a political struggle. The material damage done to them would be amplified by the blow to their public relations.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:48 pm
More good news at Newshoggers
We lost the small window of opportunity we had to do anything in Afghanistan. We should get out.
October 1st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Isn’t the whole idea behind democracy that the masses do not suffer for ONE man? Why have we been bombing the daylights out of this country for seven years over one man for whom we do not have enough evidence to indict for 9/11?
Same question for Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
It seems that millions of people are suffering over a pissing contest between megalomaniacs.
October 1st, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Excuse me, but even the most casual survey of events pertaining to the so-called “bailout” suggest that we are experiencing major difficulties establishing an effective central state in Washington, D.C..
So it’s rather silly to debate establishing one in Kabul until we have our own ducks lined up, don’t you think?
October 1st, 2008 at 3:20 pm
Rory Stewart made a similar point to Massie’s in his interview with Chris Lydon. He’s extremely critical of the ‘good war’ / ‘bad war’ division in American politics, and is pretty scathing about Obama’s plans to use an increased US force in Afghanistan.
October 1st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Matthew - Not to be a dick, but I’ve been periodically haranguing you on this very point for a couple of years now. All your questions - very good ones - about nebulous “victory” ALSO apply to that good war that all “reasonable liberals” support.
In any event, welcome to the club I guess.
October 1st, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Wiley (10) said: Isn’t the whole idea behind democracy that the masses do not suffer for ONE man? Why have we been bombing the daylights out of this country for seven years over one man for whom we do not have enough evidence to indict for 9/11?
I didn’t realize we had any readers from the UK. The first sentence is a non sequitur. The second ignores the very strong evidence that OBL has admitted his role in 9/11. A lot of people UK and the euro zone think Bin Laden is a scapegoat at worst, but that’s life.
Assuming that we nail him at some point, what then? If we leave, the Taliban will probably take back southern Afghanistan in a year or two, and then we’re back to a civil war. Can we suck the life out of Pushtun support for them by buying the farmers off? If we do, and it works, how long are we going to keep that up?
On the other hand, lets say we work a deal with the Talibs where they can do as they will with the country, as long as they don’t fuck up our shit. That was the pre-9/11 situation, or so we thought.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:33 pm
The big question is: Who are we actually fighting in Afghanistan?
1. Al-Qaeda — That seems a perfectly reasonable target as long as it’s narrowly defined as non-indigenous extremists actively plotting attacks on United States territory, but how many are left? A few hundred?
2. The Taliban — They tolerated Al-Qaeda plotting on their territory, so we punished them for it, hard. We get along fine now with the Communist Party of Vietnam and we aren’t actively at war with the Communist Party of North Korea, so perhaps its time for bygones to be bygones. (A settlement might involve the Taliban taking a new name.)
3. The Pashtun tribe? Uh-oh. That’s The Forever War. There are 20 million or more of them and they like to fight the way other guys like to play golf. To the extent that Taliban is the political expression of Pashtun tribalism combined with Pashtun religious settlement, then it’s not going away. All we can do is try to channel it into non-anti-American directions. And the most obvious way to do that is to start pulling out.
October 1st, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Glad to see Matt is starting to wonder what is going on in Afghanistan. Probably that’s a good initial step to getting Tom Friedman to wonder what’s going on there and then maybe Barack Obama.
does preventing portions of Afghanistan from serving as a base for terrorist operation directed at the United States really require us to establish an effective central state in Afghanistan?
Are either of these objectives possible? I’d argue maybe not. Are either of those objectives legitimate for the U.S. government to pursue? Probably not, especially given the way we’ve been pursuing them–randomly blowing up civilians to “save” them. At least Matt seems to acknowledge we’re in Afghanistan for reasons of pure national self-interest, not to put Afghans on the glorious path to democracy or whatever manure the administration is selling these days.
But that’s not a very liberal position to take, is it? Did anyone think to ask the Afghans what they want? Have American liberals figured out yet that the world is not their Risk board?
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:08 am
Isn’t this what was being said about Iraq in 2006?
December 12th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
Television has always been there for us, whether for simple after-school entertainment or as an electronic babysitter. Of course, TV’s also been there to watch and play our beloved video games, so it isn’t far-fetched to believe it’s a good
January 18th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
laptop battery
laptop batteries
March 2nd, 2009 at 12:51 am
cialis
Great site. Good info
March 8th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
I am very tired of the big controversary of should we stay in Afghanistan? In the first place we should have never been there! Why should we be concerned about other countries cultural issues. We have a hugh problem here in the United States called RACISM. This problem needs to be addressed before we go to other countries. There has been a long history in this country with children not having the proper education. Why are we concerned about other countries when our country is having a lot of difficulty socially and financially.
March 22nd, 2009 at 8:09 am
tramadol
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
April 3rd, 2009 at 6:49 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 8th, 2009 at 6:57 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Afghanistan is setting a stage for future wars with India, Pakistan, Russia and China. It is the perfect military base for the USA, to launch a pre-emptive attacks against the real powerful enemies. Smart cookies, these Americans.
April 16th, 2009 at 8:03 pm
I want to say - thank you for this!
viagra