America Needs More Realistic Aspirations in Afghanistan
Benjamin Friedman says we don’t need more troops in Afghanistan, we need a different set of goals:
Pundits tend to assume that counterinsurgency and state-building are identical — foreigners enforce the state’s claim to a monopoly on violence to gain it support and crowd out alternative authority structures. But there is another counterinsurgency strategy out there, which is to allow the insurgency local power, to appease it as part of a bargain. The key tactic that brought lowered violence in the Sunni part of Iraq – bribing insurgent militia leaders to cooperate with us — undermines the Iraqi state, sacrificing our stated goal for a simpler one.
I think that’s right, though I also think this is largely irrelevant to the issue of how many soldiers it’s worth putting into play in Afghanistan in order to execute such a strategy. But the more I think about it, the more the real strategic genius of “the surge” looks like an extremely clever way to basically rebrand a dramatic de-escalation of U.S. war aims as “victory.” Unfortunately, exactly as surge skeptics predicted at the time, dallying two extra years in Iraq has wound up dramatically undermining our position in Afghanistan. Consequently, we’re in a position where we really do need to try to take the formula that “worked” in Iraq and bring it to Afghanistan—lowering our horizons.
43 Responses to “America Needs More Realistic Aspirations in Afghanistan”
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February 18th, 2009 at 12:30 pm
When American troops leave, the Taliban will retake Afghanistan.
Doesn’t matter if it’s this year or 50 years from now.
As long as we’re there, they won’t.
Pretty simple.
Why do we need any “goals?”
February 18th, 2009 at 12:33 pm
The only feasible goal in Afghanistan is the neocon desire to harass Iran.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
How about we first try building roads and power/communications lines connecting the major cities? Is that out of reach at this point?
February 18th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
My “different set of goals”: Leave. Now.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
How about we just get the hell out right now. The last time we “accomplished” something in Afghanistan it was the creation o al Qaeda by the CIA. The only thing we’re “accomplishing” now is destabilizing Pakistan- a nuclear power. Great idea, that.
The demented illusions of American imperialism die hard. But die they inevitably will. The only question is how much blood and treasure will be wasted in the meantime.
February 18th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Lower our horizons to where? I asked this in your last Afghanistan thread, and I’ll ask it again: what, exactly, are we trying to accomplish in Afghanistan? What do you think we can accomplish in Afghanistan? What does any of this have to do with fighting terror? Four years ago, when faced with similar questions about Iraq, you advocated withdrawal. Why isn’t withdrawal an option in Afghanistan?
Incidentally, it looks like Obama’s goals for Afghanistan will include more poppy-eradication projects. I can’t begin to fathom where the U.S.’s security interest lies in alienating Afghan farmers by destroying their crops in a drug war fool’s errand – and neither could you, once upon a time.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
If the only thing we can do in Afghanistan is to pay the Taliban not to kill us, then there’s very little reason to stay.
That said, if our leaving allows the Taliban to set up shop as they did before, what assurances will we have that we aren’t going to have to fly back over there and do this all again on some dark day in the future?
February 18th, 2009 at 1:08 pm
This is completely false.
Oddly, Al is right. Of course that makes him wrong. Al has presented us with a beautiful Koan. Make the most of it.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
southpaw, what difference does it make whether terrorists train in Afghanistan, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, or somewhere else altogether? You (and Obama) are making an unwarranted extrapolation from the fact that bin Laden happened to be operating in Afghanistan at the time of 9/11. But there’s nothing magical, or critical to US security interests, about Afghanistan; it’s just another chaotic hellhole. (And massive government bungling was in any case required in order for the 9/11 hijackers to succeed.)
February 18th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
That said, if our leaving allows the Taliban to set up shop as they did before, what assurances will we have that we aren’t going to have to fly back over there and do this all again on some dark day in the future?
The Taliban are not al Qaeda. The Taliban didn’t fly planes into the World Trade Center. There were no Afghans on board those planes.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
When American troops leave, the Taliban will retake Afghanistan.
Yes.
This becomes more obvious when we can recall that whenever the press or bloggers like Matt say “Taliban”, they ought to be saying “Pushtun”.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
That’s ridiculous. The Taliban didn’t always rule Afghanistan. That they took power after the Soviet withdrawl was a lucky break (for them). Any one of a number of militia groups might have seized power. The reason the Taliban was able to blow up the giant Buddha statues was because there wasn’t any government before them crazy enough to have blown them all up already.
It is possible for Afghanistan to be ruled by any number of different governments. I doubt federal democracy will be one of them any time soon, but it doesn’t have to be a totalitarian ultra-fundamentalist Islamic state.
Lowering our goals to a stable situation that doesn’t include the Taliban in any position of meaningful power might be the answer. It’s hard to do that now. So far we haven’t been able to make Karzai into the head of a strong central government. We have made him powerful enough to make acheiving any goal he doesn’t like difficult, though.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Njori, you’re only part way to sanity. You’ll get all the way there when you realize that NO outside power has EVER been able to produce a “stable situation” to its liking in Afghanistan, not for long anyway. There’s no reason to think there’s a magical exception for the almighty US.
February 18th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
The rightwingers grade on a very tolerant curve. Thus, Bush got an A plus in security, because they just decided 3,000 people dying on his watch when the WTC fell was a rounding error. I coulda happened to anyone! And then he was always tough. The rhetoric. How could it not give you a woody. Especially when your favorite conservative movie is Red Dawn.
But, in actuality, he was a chump, the rhetoric was garbage, and he left Osama bin Laden in a very good position, at the crossroads of two hostile nuclear powers and with an excellent contract for training the Taliban that has outlasted Blackwater’s business plan. Of course, the Bush administration took neither Osama nor the Taliban seriously; rather, they were ploys for the global war on terrorizing the voter into voting in kleptocrats. But al qaeda and the Taliban, for some reason, don’t see themselves as bit players.
When the Bushies greenlighted the airlift at Kunduz that took the core of the Taliban’s command into Pakistan, they signaled that this war was not a priority, and that the U.S. was gonna take the side of the armies of ignorance. Since then, we have only been marking time – with body counts – for the negotiation. It is time to do it. In fact, maybe with a sufficient bribe, the Taliban will whack Al Qaeda for us. Though I doubt it.
We lost in Iraq – now an Islamic republic firmly allied to Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah – and we lost in Afghanistan. So tell the yahoos we won a VICTORY – they love that word. And get out.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:17 pm
I didn’t say it needs to be to our liking.
Previous powers tried to make money out of Afghanistan. The USSR wanted a doormat to the middle east. Bush wanted to make a strong centrallized state with a democratically elected government there. If we aim lower, we might succeed.
As far as previous colonial powers are concerned, they all successfully made Afghanistan into something that did not harbor terrorists who killed 3000 of their citizens. That should be our minimal goal.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Stop with the terrorist read herring already. As has been said earlier in the thread, the Taliban didn’t fly those planes.(Nor by the way is there any guarantee they’d even win in a warlord free-for-all.) If that’s the best you can do by way of justification for “aiming at” something you can’t even define (with further waste of blood and treasure along the way to final failure), it’s nothing short of pitiful.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Sigh, yes I do know that the expression is “RED herring.” A preview function would be nice…
February 18th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
I don’t think anyone here (or anywhere, probably) has claimed that the Taliban themselves flew the planes on 9/11, so who’s using a red herring?
The claim (which, of course, you’re free to agree with or not) is that the territorial sanctuary that the Taliban provided to al Qaeda allowed al Qaeda to mount operations of the scale and ambition of 9/11.
One could credibly argue that al Qaeda actually requires no territorial base or, alternatively, that we need to deny al Qaeda freedom of action in Northwestern Pakistan as well if we want to truly cripple them.
But let’s not pretend that everyone who doesn’t favor immediate withdrawal can’t tell the difference between bin Laden and Mullah Omar.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
That pipeline ain’t gonna happen. Give up. Afghanistan was not about “democracy”, “freedom”, or “terrorists.” It was about oil and the last great reserves in the Caspian Sea.
February 18th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
Your argument also depends on the proposition that you CAN permanently deny al Qaeda freedom of action in BOTH Afghanistan AND NW Pakistan. To which I say, good luck with that. Try considering whether maybe you haven’t seized the wrong end of the stick in thinking about how to deal with al Qaeda. A purely imaginary ability to deny them any base anywhere is not a solution to anything, precisely because it’s purely imaginary. It ain’t gonna happen. Better have a plan B. Mine is to reduce the provocations to the Muslim world that are such effective recruiting tools for al Qaeda- beginning with getting out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Together with improving the focus and efficiency of our security agencies and their cooperation with their foreign counterparts- because once again, 9/11 could not have happened without massive US government bungling.
What’s your plan B after you finally realize that your project is not actually achievable?
February 18th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Deposing the Taliban, with a combination of air power, special forces, and local proxies, was a good move. The problem is that Bush raised the bar ridiculously high with his goal of democratizing a perennial 4th world backwater. The smarter thing to do would have been to let the Northern Alliance take over the country, and continue giving them arms and air support so they could grind down the Taliban on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
The Taliban was very unpopular in Afghanistan. They relied upon the presence of a large foreign fighting force, Al Qaeda, to keep power. Al Qaeda’s payment for services rendered was free reign to conduct terrorist activities based from Afghanistan. The Taliban is responsible to a large degree for what Al Qaeda did.
There is an significant chance that they will.
The difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is that there is a legitimate case that fighting in Afghanistan could conceivably prevent deaths here. In Iraq, we stayed to help one pro-Iranian group rather than another. That was foolish. In Afghanistan, there are meaningful differences in the various organizations that could take power.
Even achieving a victory of “anybody but the Taliban” would probably result in fewer Afghan deaths, and possibly fewer American deaths, in the long run.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
“The difference between Iraq and Afghanistan is that there is a legitimate case that fighting in Afghanistan could conceivably prevent deaths here. In Iraq, we stayed to help one pro-Iranian group rather than another.”
We weren’t fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq? Even Al-Qaeda called Iraq its key battleground in its war against us, and Al-Qaeda lost there (thanks to our “dallying” in Iraq over the last two years, as Matt puts it). Iraq would have been a much more attractive base of operations for Al-Qaeda than Afghanistan. When the CIA captured Al-Qaeda communications in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, a lot of it included mockery of Afghanistan’s backwardness and remoteness.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
http://www.freezerbox.com/archive/article.php?id=183
Enron, Halliburton, Unocal. Bush. Cheney.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Wouldn’t it be nice if they still had a communist government there like they did back in the 70s? By now they would’ve been making stuff for Walmart and Target and exchanging it for US Treasury bonds.
February 18th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
The Northern Alliance stayed together because of the commom enemy of the Taliban. After their overthrow, they stayed together because opposing the US was a waste of resources. Absent the US and the Taliban, they would likely have begun fighting eachother. That doesn’t mean we needed to stay as long as we did, though. We should have gone about doing what we set out to do.
February 18th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Al Qaeda in Iraq could not have existed without Americans to attack. As for what Al Qaeda says, it is generally not a good idea to take your enemies at their word. I imagine Al Qaeda has said more than a few things you disagree with.
February 18th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Again, you’re assuming too much. Al Qaeda is essentially a loose group of different terrorist organizations. I don’t propose that we’ll wipe out terrorism, nor that we’ll stop terrorist organizations from working together. In that sense, Al Qaeda can always claim to continue existing.
What we can deny them is a state with a government that is dependent upon them. Where they are, the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan may consider them less trouble to tolerate than eliminate, but neither government depends on them for survival. This restricts their potential activities.
Even Saudi Arabia will go after its most extreme militants when it suits them. There is a reason that Al Qaeda is not based in Saudi Arabia, despite the many Saudis involved in the 9/11 attack. The Saudi government could turn on them if it chose to.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban relied on Al Qaeda for military support. If the Taliban retakes Afghanistan, they might be even more dependent on foreign fighters. This would allow Al Qaeda significantly more freedom.
February 18th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
Njorl: “What we can deny them is a state with a government that is dependent upon them. ”
This sets the terms too high. Al qaeda as an international entity is a loose coalition; al qaeda in Pakistan is not. On the other hand, the government of, say, the United States is a stable and identifiable organization – the government of Pakistan is not. It is not now and has never been clear that the Pakistan government, even under Mussharef, controls the Pakistan secret service or the army. And of course breakaway regional governments make the mix even more muddy. Al Qaeda could easily catalyze a crisis – say, the assassination of India’s Prime Minister – that would have the effect of increasing the power of its people in the diffuse network of Pakistan’s government. The evidence so far is that AQ in Pakistan has been an excellent political player. For instance, after 9/11, the leadership of AQ evidently made a decision not to attack again on American soil, strengthening the position of the person they wanted in power, Bush, who in turn left them alone, basically fighting al qaeda proxies in Iraq. I imagine nobody misses Bush at the moment like Osama bin Laden.
So, whether the U.S. withdraws from Afghanistan or not, al q is still going to be a problem. Perhaps we should simply pay them tribute. This worked for the Romans.
February 18th, 2009 at 6:00 pm
More stupid shit from Matt.
He wants us to expend billions more dollars and more US lives to…exchange the Taliban for a narco-state run by the Northern Alliance.
Real smart, Matt.
Karzai’s fucking BROTHER is a drug smuggler. Half the guys in his government are drug smugglers and warlords.
Matt’s utter fucking IGNORANCE of the situation in Afghanistan is just jaw-dropping. But he blithely babbles on like he has any fucking clue at all.
Afghanistan never meant anything to anybody. The Taliban were irrelevant to Al Qaeda’s threat. And Al Qaeda could have been dealt with by conventional law enforcement and counterintelligence methods. There was NEVER a need to overthrow the Taliban to get AL Qaeda.
It was just another stupid BUSH move and now Matt SUPPORTS it!
February 19th, 2009 at 3:49 am
Why don’t we just go home?
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