With amazing rapidity, an extremely serious debate has erupted in Washington over whether the war in distant Afghanistan can be won, and therefore whether it is worth continuing to try to fight it. The apparent skulduggery that surrounded the recent elections certainly contributed to that, by making it suddenly seem even more improbable that a ‘nation-building’ program could be successfully completed any time in the foreseeable future.
Yesterday, the weighty paleo-conservative commentator George Will weighed in, arguing in the WaPo that it’s “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan”
Yesterday, too, the NYT editorial board hosted an entire discussion on the topic of “Is It Time to Negotiate With the Taliban?” The answer, from just about all their eight expert contributors, was “Yes”.
This, while the commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan Gen. Stanley McChrystal is on his way to Washington where he is widely expected to argue for an increased commitment of US troops to the the theater, and pursuit of an accelerated campaign of counter-insurgency/nation-building there.
Today, the WaPo’s David Ignatius waded into the debate, arguing for a “Middle Way” between shooting and talking in Afghanistan.
Also today, the WaPo hosted a forum of six outside contributors to reply to George Will. All except Andrew Bacevich were arguing for continued, and if necessary increased, US military engagement.
Just about everywhere else in the US public discourse, this issue is now being just as hotly debated… But nearly all these discussions fail to mention one factor that is vital both to the hope of Afghanistan’s people ever regaining some amount of internal stability and to the hope of the US forces avoiding a complete catastrophe there: That is, the fact that there are numerous other, significant but non-western, states that have strong interests in Afghanistan and a significant ability to intervene helpfully there in a number of ways.
The way most of the discussion here in the US is being conducted you’d think the whole “story” about Afghanistan consists of an outsize US super-hero trying to deal with a large number of very complicated (and generally rather ungrateful and un-cooperative) Afghan actors, with some bit parts being played by NATO allies and the still-troublesome government of Pakistan.
But if we admit– as I think we must– that the US is ways over-stretched in Afghanistan and needs to find a way to radically reduce its presence, a question immediately arises as to how to do that. Thinking about that challenge only in the context of “talking to the Taliban” or not talking to them misses a large part of the point.
Three additional questions that immediately arise are:
- (1) How can the US talk to them; that is, in what context?
(2) If the US/NATO footprint in the country– political along with military– is radically reduced, then how can the remaining huge governance problems in the country be addressed thereafter? and
(3) How, actually, can the US and NATO organize a withdrawal from Afghanistan– substantial or total– that is not a catastrophic rout?
In addressing all these questions the international– that is, beyond-NATO and beyond-Pakistan international– context of the whole situation in the country becomes key.
Afghanistan sits in a central Asian arena in which China, Russia, and Iran all have strong interests. Ways stronger and more compelling, indeed, than the interests the US claims to be pursuing in the country!
But thus far, Washington has worked to sideline the degree of influence that any of these actors can have on political-strategic decisionmaking in and regarding Afghanistan. That prerogative has been reserved for– of all bodies!– the explicitly western, and anti-Russian military alliance, NATO.
This, even though over recent months NATO has become a lot more reliant on Russian transit rights for the very survival of its troop presence in Afghanistan. (As I’ve written quite a lot about here over the past couple of years.)
Over years past as I wrote a lot about what was needed for the US to be able to undertake a withdrawal from Iraq that was speedy, total, and generous, I always– like the 2006 Iraq Study Group– stressed the advantage of the US drawing all of Iraq’s neighbors into a serious negotiation of the post-withdrawal “rules of the game”; and I argued, too, that the UN had a special ability to convene and lead such a negotiation.
As it happened, in Iraq, as the Bush administration came last year to accept the need for a full US withdrawal it managed to do so with only minimal coordination from those of Iraq’s neighbors that it still hoped to marginalize and oppose (mainly Iran.) But of course, the failure to have an effective all-neighbors forum for Iraq continues to hamper Iraq– though not so much so, the US, as it withdraws.
In Afghanistan, the geostrategic situation that US forces face if and when they contemplate a withdrawal is significantly different. In Afghanistan, the significant neighbors include two of the world’s veto-wielding “big powers”. Also, in Afghanistan, the sheer logistics of a withdrawal are very much more complex than in Iraq. There’s no handy and compliant neighboring staging post such as those provided near Iraq by Kuwait, Jordan, and Turkey… And in case anyone hadn’t noticed this, the terrain within and around Afghanistan is mighty hard to traverse or operate within!
So even just in organizing the logistics of any significant US/NATO drawdown from Afghanistan– let alone the politics and diplomacy of how to do that– the US will be forced to coordinate closely with the country’s “neighbors” (broadly defined). And those will include Russia, China, and Iran.
How will that go? Who knows? What seems clear to me is that, for now, many in the headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and in Putin’s inner circles in Moscow must be relatively happy to see NATO bashing its had against a brick wall inside Afghanistan– degrading its capabilities by the day as it does so, while also acting as an ever-increasing drag on the US national budget.
So they might not be in any big hurry to help Washington out… On the other hand, since the main effect of US actions thus far inside Afghanistan has been to allow the Talibs to reconstitute, and since the Talibs pose a much more present threat to China and Russia (and also to Iran) than they do to the US, at some point I imagine these powers may well become happy to step in and help the US exit from the quagmire.
For a price.
Anyway, in all of this, the UN will play an increasingly important role. It is still, after all, the main place where inter-big-power business gets done in the world.
WHY ARE WE IN AFGHANISTAN?
U.S. troops have been in Afghanistan since October 2001 when they were supposedly sent in response to 9-11, although no Afghans were involved in the terror attacks. The stated aim of the Anglo-American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was to find Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaida members and put them on trial. The U.S., however, said it had given up its pursuit of Osama Bin Laden years ago. So why did the U.S. and Britain really invade Afghanistan — and why are we still there? Why has President Obama increased troop levels in Afghanistan? The short answer is the TAPI gas pipeline, which will carry gas from Israeli-owned and managed gas fields in Turkmenistan to Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and China.
The TAPI pipeline needs to cross Helmand province in the south of Afghanistan.
Turkmenistan and Afghanistan are both very rich in gas reserves. The Turkmen mineral assets are managed by the former Mossad agent Yosef Maiman. Building the TAPI pipeline is a Zionist pipe dream that will use the mineral wealth of Turkmenistan to benefit Maiman and his partners. This is the main development project that U.S. policy is trying to accomplish. Transit fees from the gas pipeline are intended to support the government in Kabul.
Yosef Maiman, Israeli Mossad agent, owns much of the gas of Turkmenistan and controls all of it.
Are we to believe that the U.S. is fighting an 8-year war in Afghanistan in order to make sure the Afghans can get “goods and services consistently from their government?” Have we spent hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan so we can build post offices, train stations, and power plants? What are the “economic underpinnings” that need to “start to move?” Why would the U.S. government care more about providing “goods and services” to the people of Afghanistan than, say, the people of California?
Ms. Cobban. Your reaction or critique of the above would be appreciated. thanks in advance.
Logistics of departure aside, there is no good justification for staying there. Al Qaeda is gone, and 9/11 type plots can be hatched in a motel room, you do not need a country and training camps to prepare one. The anti0imperialist chorus is particularly silent on this one, at least since Obama is in power. Bush faced protests every time there were casualties and Hussien Obama is somehow immune to body bags returning to the US. Talk about double standards. Just get on big transport airplanes and fly out of there. If the Russians want in, be my guest, from what I see Taliban and Russia can be each other’s deserved punishment.
I’d be dubious about George Will or Titus turning against the war in Afghanistan. The conservatives want to turn Afghanistan into “Obama’s War”. So these objections have the motivation of hurting the administration rather than any moral sentiment about the war.
All these years the war in Afghanistan had been neglected by the Bush admininstration. They didn’t care all that much about the people who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks; they had their Iraq plans to work on. I see Obama’s recent efforts as an attempt to correct that neglect. To actually have the manpower and commitment needed to minimize the Taliban’s military power for a change. To have people actually keeping Taliban troops out rather than to use drones to hopefully kill Taliban fighters but wind up killing a lot of civilians instead. I want to see Obama’s effort tried out for the next year, with a special focus on capturing Bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and other al-Qaeda leadership.
I understand that the Afghan government had been already in negotiations with Taliban elements, the Taliban being very fractured. I think we should entrust negotiations to the Afghan government; they’d know how to conduct negotiations better than we ever could. The goal of negotiations would be reconciliation with fighters willing to disavow Mullah Omar and the regime of his era. A political solution of Taliban fighters without the 1990’s leadership would work.
Omop, I very strongly disagree with your conjecture that the TAPI pipeline project is the main “reason” the US forces are in Afghanistan (and, as you indicate, a strongly Zionist reason, to boot.)
A case can be made that invading Iraq was to a significant degree a decision that was strongly pushed by pro-Israeli elements in the US elite. The invasion of Afghanistan was a much more strongly ‘national’ US project from the beginning. Only a few dissenters like us Quakers stood aside from it and argued that concerted international police action would be a better approach.
The interesting thing, looking at the evolution of US policy in Afghanistan is how much, actually, it didn’t evolve… at least, not through conscious decisionmaking. From around Jan 2002, when Cheney & Co. started pulling all the attention towards Iraq, until the arrival of Obama, the US conducted the war in Afghanistan on auto-pilot, or perhaps through studied inattention…
Inkan, I think I disagree with you, too. I know you’ve been following the discussions over at registan fairly closely. As I argued there (against A. Exum) and elsewhere, if we have uncertainty about the effectiveness of military action in Afghanistan then the most moral and practical thing to do is NOT to “try it”, which seems to be what you’re urging, in part.
I also stand aside from your attribution of base motives to Titus on this point…
But anyway, it’s excellent to have you back contributing here.
Helena,
It wasn’t just a failure of the US during 2002, it was the whole international system that failed to meet the expectations of either the Afghans or the promises our countries made to them.
I spent 15 months there from November ’01 and the lack of commitment to a real reconstruction effort was astounding. If the rhetoric had been matched by the dollars, Afghanistan would soon have been a place of full employment and the sense of betrayal (blind hope notwithstanding) would probably not have led to resistance on the scale that we now see.
An interesting comparison to make is between the budget’s approved for helping Afghanistan develop with those for conducting self-defeating military operations.
We cannot turn back the clock and, in my opinion, there is no real desire on the part of the international community to do so.
That leaves the strategy question as little more than how we escape from being prisoners of our own dishonesty and incompetence? We’re painted into a corner and the brains behind it all (and we can’t just blame W and Tricky II for this) haven’t a clue how to get out whilst maintaining an illusion of power.
The last chance was for President Obama to announce a new course in Western strategy. This was possibly his Gorbachev moment – all other considerations aside – but he looks to be going down the same old militaristic road. Why is that? Because the goal is not success in Afghanistan – whatever that may mean – it’s allaying the judgment that we’ve failed militarily to subdue the country and bend it to our will.
I’ll stretch things a bit here: if this administration can’t deliver a workable, humane, first-world healthcare policy at home then they haven’t a cat-in-hells chance of dealing with Afghanistan’s myriad and often inscrutable challenges.
BTW: very interesting piece by Hillary Leverett on Marshall Fahim
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/31/the_warlord_winner_of_afghanistans_election?showcomments=yes
with a special focus on capturing Bin Laden, Dr. Zawahiri, and other al-Qaeda leadership.
Inkan1969, Well let us dream the day they capture these monsters.
But make no mistake here last week Saudi authorities arrested 44 terrorists inside and they reported that some met al-Qaeda leadership Bin Laden!!!
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090819/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_saudi_arrests
So if CIA with 50mil bounty for his head can track where he is for the last 8 years , but normal individuals went some where and met him telling a where is the focus?
What change Obama brings?
I’m afraid that this article and thread is just a variant of the disastrous liberal interventionism that is the problem and that cannot be the solution.
Ad hoc utilitarian geo-political verbal engineering is not an “international dimension”, but is an obscuring of the international dimension. The kind of regionalisation of Imperialist globalism that you propose is only permitted as a downward franchising, where the regional “peer pressure” is used for the purposes of enforcing the wishes of the Imperial hegemon.
This is the only condition when “regional blocs” are permitted to appear and to exercise any power. It is idle to propose such a thing in relation to Afghanistan where the strategic rivals of the USA would be involved. Your argument falsifies the entire situation, Helena. Of course the USA (NATO) is only there to mess up those very powers. Now you think the USA will hand the whole box of tricks back to them to use against it, the USA?
I must say that I think this is a poor kind of writing. Indeed there are many “missing ingredients” in the discourse of national and international politics. But this kind of writing does not assist. In fact it locks discussion in to the narrow and incomplete set of empirical considerations that has prevented it from advancing. Instead of being a step forward it is a blundering backward.
I agree, Titus (whether or not Inkan1969 is on to something about your motivation, I’ll set aside). It really frustrates me the extent to which liberals and progressives have fallen silent over our other pointless, imperialist “war”. The occupation of Afghanistan is arguably just as fool-hardy as Iraq’s was/is. There are no clear, discernible goals besides fighting a war of attrition against the inclinations, disposition of the majority Pashtun, and they’ll likely get what they want in the end after however-much-more pointless, tragic bloodshed.
The Taliban didn’t commit 9/11 (as horrible a government as they were, they were and are frankly no real threat to us). It’s just stupid, and whether for politics or by conviction, Obama bought the farm on that one (I think it was largely politics, initially, and now he’s stuck with his own rhetoric, declared policy, etc.)