When election results are strongly disputed from within the community they were held in, this represents–obviously– a deep crisis of power and legitimacy within that community.
That’s the case in Iran today, more than three months after their disputed election. It was also the case in the US in November-December 2004, lest anyone forget…
That post-election dispute was brought to an end by a fiat from the US Supreme Court; and the Supremes’ notably undemocratic ruling then met with surprisingly rapid acceptance from the vast majority of voters, even Democrats. (How different would the history of our country and the world be if Al Gore had been inaugurated in 2001? Who can know?)
But whether you liked what the Supremes did in December 2000 or not, at least in our country there are mature institutions of national governance that were able to withstand, contain, and end the deep internal division over who won the November 2000 election.
And then, there’s Afghanistan.
Mature institutions of national governance? Um, no.
That’s why I think Brian Katulis and Hardin Lang have things rather wrong in the post they have on the Af-Pak blog today, in which they seem to be assuming that somehow (they don’t say how), a new and somewhat capable president will emerge there in the relatively near future, and will be able to get on relatively easily with the tasks of ending the country’s very, very serious insurgency and its urgent tasks of governance reform.
Not so fast, guys! Why are you assuming that, from that very flawed and now deeply contested election anyone can easily emerge as a winner and start to get on with such tasks?
(I guess Katulis and Hardin have some personal/professional investment in the August 20 elections being generally seen as having been “successful”, since they went to the country as part of one of the internatinal election-monitoring teams? On the other hand, if you think that the real mission of an international election-monitoring team is to monitor and uphold the idea that elections must be, and be seen to be, free and fair, then maybe they should not be so quick in assuming that this one was well-run enough to generate a legitimate winner.)
Those most at risk, if the dispute over the election results turns into all-out fighting between Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, are of course Afghanistan’s long war-battered people, who would have to put up with that new conflict tearing up that society along with all the other conflicts that are already wracking it.
But the US-NATO position in Afghanistan is also at risk if the US doesn’t have an Afghan ruling “partner” who has at least some semblance of internal and international legitimacy.
And right now, NATO itself is coming under huge strains from the Afghan war.
Who was it who first said “NATO must go out-of-area or go out of business?” (F. Stephen Larrabee, 1993.)
“Out of business” is now a much more live possibility than it was back then.
Category: Afghanistan (vintage)
American power has limits? Who knew?
Steve Clemons tells us today that
- Afghanistan, like Iraq, is sending the impression to the rest of the world that America is at a “limit” point in its military and power capabilities.
Well, duh.
He goes on to say,
- Limits are very, very, very bad in the great power game — and Afghanistan is yet again, an exposer of monumental limits on American power.
Now, Steve is usually an intelligent and reasonable person. So I’m mystified why he is giving the impression here that the US had no significant “limits” on its great-power capabilities until the Iraq war; and that the relatively sudden “revelation” that there are such limits is both surprising and “very, very bad.”
C’meon, Steve. Yeah, maybe you grew up more in the era of post-Cold War US uberpowerdom than I did. But even then, there were always limits on US power.
And you know what, for any kind of a realist, knowing there are limits and figuring out how to work effectively within them is a good thing, not a bad thing.
It was GWB and his crowd who thought there were no limits, and that they could make their own history regardless of other powers or other interests.
… Steve’s piece was basically about Afghanistan. Neither he nor anyone else has yet been able to explain to me why the US (which is located halfway round the world from Afghanistan) and NATO– in which the allies are also very geographically and culturally distant from Afghanistan– could ever be conceived to be the ideal tools for “pacifying” Afghanistan.
Let’s have a whole lot more realism in this discussion. Including by recognizing there are limits to US power.
Lessons from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan
Someone called Artemy Kalinovsky has just published a thoughtful essay at the AfPak Channel arguing that, for precedents for many of the dilemmas the US military faces in Afghanistan, we should look no further afield than to the Red Army’s experiences in Afghanistan a quarter-century ago.
I have a lot more to say on this topic. But I’m tired.
Pat Lang on the dangerous, continued rise of ‘COIN’-mania
Lang makes some important points here about the distortion of what should be a rational, nationwide discussion about the US military’s massive and troubled engagement in Afghanistan.
He writes,
- The interests of the reigning generals, the neocons and the Brothers of the Order of Counterinsurgency at CNAS are coming together now. The mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN as a vehicle for the program of the AEI crowd are widespread. Among them are internal blockage of access to blogs like this one by the armed forces, exclusion from the main stream media of dissenting voices and the editorial page of the Washington Post.
CNAS— the Center for New American Security– is a relatively young but currently very influential think-tank that’s been a hot incubator for “liberal” hawkishness. Michele Flournoy, one of its founders and its first president, is now Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and may well replace Bob Gates as Secretary.
All the “mechanisms for propagation of the faith in COIN” that Lang mentions are important. But let’s hope that wise heads and the continuing military and financial realities of the situation in Afghanistan can speedily turn the debate in Washington in the direction it needs to go.
Oh yes, and some serious, pro-withdrawal popular pressure is really necessary, too.
Afghanistan debate: The missing international ingredient
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.
Does Afghanistan’s election matter? How, exactly?
The only thing that really matters about the presidential election held in Afghanistan yesterday was whether it will generate a nationwide government that has enough political credibility with the country’s 33 million people that it is able to govern.
This seems to be in severe question. And the question may not be answered for many weeks, or even months, yet.
From this point of view, the statement Obama made yesterday lauding the election as a success was both (a) beside the point and (b) inappropriate. Oh, and also distinctly (c) premature.
It is not for him, the president of the foreign country occupying Afghanistan, to declare the election a success. It is for the Afghans. That is, if we are all to believe the official US narrative about Afghanistan now being a “sovereign nation” in which the US and other NATO forces are deployed just to help the Afghan government…
There are two major ways (and a host of lesser ways) in which the election could fail to generate a “credible enough” government.
Firstly, the whole process of voting may be judged by Afghans to be non-credible, as evidenced either by very low turnout or by widesread and credible reports of voter fraud.
It may well be possible that the recorded turnout among the 15-16 million registered voters was so low– due to the intimidation of the anti-government insurgents, disillusion with the governing system, or other factors– that the whole voting exercise is inherently non-credible.
We should know that when we gain an idea of raw turnout numbers, apparently tomorrow.
Or, the turnout figures may be sufficiently high to allow for credibility– but the reports of fraud could be so widespread and credible that even (or perhaps especially) those high raw turnout numbers don’t look credible.
Secondly, even if the voting process has some initial credibility, the reported results of either yesterday’s first round or the runoff that mandated in the event of no clear winner could come under serious contest from one or more of the losers…
We are seeing before our very eyes, in Iran, the debilitating effect that such a contest to electoral legitimacy can have on a governance system.
I imagine, though, that the US military will not allow a prolonged-deadlock situation to go on very long in the event of a contest arising in Afghanistan… And they will intervene in some way… But of course, that would only undermine the legitimacy of the resulting president even more!
But anyway, let’s say that Hamid Karzai or Abdullah Abdullah manages to emerge as the winner after a first or second round, and this victory meets with no immediate serious contestation from other candidates. Then, the lucky winner goes and forms a government…. that does what?
Well, one thing I’m assuming it can almost immediately do is sit astride a rather bloated stream of foreign (US-mobilized) funding. Which it then gets to deploy. Yoohoo! (Why do you think most of these guys are runnng in these elections, anyway?)
But will it be able to provide enough basic services– including that most vital government service of all, pubic security– to enough Afghans to be able to keep and expand its legitimacy?
Who know? The odds look rather grim..
Bottom line, though: It is far too early to call yesterday’s election a “success”– for any of the candidates, or for the process itself.
… By the way, I’ve been pretty disappointed so far in the AfPak Channel of news and commentary that Foreign Policy mag and the New America Foundation got up and running a couple of weeks ago.
Maybe it’s still early days for the people there. But if you want a good, up-to-date source on the election that aggregates news and reports from a wide range of sources, then Wikipedia’s page “Afghan presidential election, 2009” looks far, far better to me.
It provides an amazing range of excellent links. Including one to this great August 19 piece by my fellow IPS contributor Gareth Porter.
Gareth quoted former US ambassador to Afghanistan Ron Neumann as saying that the odds of the election tending up as “good enough” in the eyes of the Afghans was “50-50”.
He also quoted Australian COIN specialist David Kilcullen as saying, “The biggest fear is Karzai ends up as an incredibly illegitimate figure, and we end up owning Afghanistan and propping up an illegitimate government.”
Chapeau, Gareth!
‘Afghanistan worse than Vietnam’
Fascinating post at FP’s AfPak channel today, comparing Afghanistan with Vietnam, elections and all.
Not favorably for Obama’s policy in Afghanistan, it has to be said. The headline said it all: “Saigon 2009.”
The authors are:
- Thomas H. Johnson [who] is a research professor of the Department of National Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, [and] M. Chris Mason [who] is a retired Foreign Service officer who served in 2005 as political officer for the PRT in Paktika and presently is a senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, D.C.
So they appear to know what they’re talking about.
Here’s their bottom line:
- For those who say that comparing the current war in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War is taking things too far, here’s a reality check: It’s not taking things far enough. From the origins of these North-South conflicts to the role of insurgents and the pointlessness of this week’s Afghan presidential elections, it’s impossible to ignore the similarities between these wars. The places and faces may have changed but the enemy is old and familiar. The sooner the United States recognizes this, the sooner it can stop making the same mistakes in Afghanistan.
… It doesn’t matter who wins the August elections for president in Afghanistan: he will be illegitimate because he is elected. We have apparently learned nothing from Vietnam.
Obama, Afghanistan– and St. Augustine
Pres. Obama gave a speech to the veterans of Foreign Wars annual convention on Monday in which he spelled out his view of the US’s now-declining strategic stakes in Iraq and its continuing strategic stake in Afghanistan.
His words were considered and important.
On Iraq, he said,
- In Iraq, after more than six years of war, we took an important step forward in June. We transferred control of all cities and towns to Iraq’s security services. The transition to full Iraqi responsibility for their own security is now underway…
But as we move forward, the Iraqi people must know that the United States will keep its commitments. And the American people must know that we will move forward with our strategy. We will begin removing our combat brigades from Iraq later this year. We will remove all our combat brigades by the end of next August. And we will remove all our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011. And for America, the Iraq war will end.
By moving forward in Iraq, we’re able to refocus on the war against al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan….
From one viewpoint, of course, what the US military has been doing in Iraq has been moving back, not forward, despite all of Obama’s uses of the term “forward”.
It’s forward, I suppose, if you understand that he means that the US has been proceeding with its commitments under the November 2008 Withdrawal Agreement. And his mention of the end-of-2011 deadline buttresses that interpretation.
Also, if he wants to describe– for this presumably very nationalistic US audience– this very necessary move out of Iraq as a move “forward”, let him do so, I say.
And then, remembering what he has just said about Iraq, let’s see what he said about Afghanistan. He described his administration’s “new, comprehensive strategy” in Afghanistan in the following terms:
- This strategy acknowledges that military power alone will not win this war—that we also need diplomacy and development and good governance. And our new strategy has a clear mission and defined goals—to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda and its extremist allies.
… These new efforts have not been without a price. The fighting has been fierce. More Americans have given their lives. And as always, the thoughts and prayers of every American are with those who make the ultimate sacrifice in our defense.
As I said when I announced this strategy, there will be more difficult days ahead…
But we must never forget. This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people.
Steve Walt had an excellent critique of Obama’s “war of necessity/ al-Qaeda safe haven” claim on his FP blog yesterday.
I want to take a slightly different tack. I want, first, simply to point out a few important things; and then I want to get more deeply into launching a “Just War theory” critique of the whole US military venture in Afghanistan.
So, the prefatory points I want to make:
Registan, Bloggingheads (redux), etc
I’ve gotten into a little argument with Joshua Foust over at Registan, over the chronic problem of the gross under-representation of women at ‘Bloggingheads TV’.
This is not a new problem.
First of all, I understand that that under-representation is not Foust’s fault. But all the guys who participate in those forums without also raising their concern about gender issues are, imho, compounding the problem. Women and other under-represented groups need allies.
Foust claimed that there are “lots” of women at BHTV. I just went, randomly, to the ‘M’ page on their list of contributors and counted six women out of 36 names. That is definitely under-representation!
… Anyway, I feel a bit bad about singling Foust out on this… for two reasons. Firstly, I don’t know him personally at all– unlike some of the other guys who do things there, who is who I should really persist in talking to.
Secondly, and most importantly, the substance of the work that Foust does on Registan is truly first-class. Today he has two other excellent posts up– this one, about the “Meta-war in Georgia one year on,” and this one that asks the really important question about why anyone thinks this week’s election in Afghanistan is important.
Afghanistan: “Armed nation building”??
The generally sane and realistic military analyst Tony Cordesman published a 28-page paper (PDF) yesterday on the US war in Afghanistan, which to me merely underlined how deeply un-winnable this US war has become.
Here’s his lead sentence:
- There are no certainties in war, and the tasks that NATO/ISAF and the US must perform in Afghanistan go far beyond the normal limits of counterinsurgency. They are the equivalent of armed nation building at a time when Afghanistan faces major challenges from both its own insurgents and international movements like Al Qa’ida, and must restructure its government and economy after 30 years of nearly continuous conflict.
Armed nation building?
Pack up your guns and come home, guys. Do whatever deals you need to do, to get out of there fast. Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans.
I’m not even sure where this notion of “nation building” came from, within US/western strategic and policy discourse. The current Wikipedia entry on it is suggestive and helpful. For starters, it denotes a clear distinction between the process of nation-building and that of state-building– most notably, by sending you to a different page for the latter.
To me, nation-building implies a process that can only be effectively and sustainably undertaken by the constituent members of the nation itself. It certainly can’t be carried out in any meaningful way by a horde of very heavily armed robo-troops parachuted in from a distant land. It just might be that a group of armed men from outside could do something to help with the process of state-building. (Not that that would make the resulting state recognizably a democratic one, however.) But nation-building, in the sense of building up the ties among a group of people so they feel they all belong to one “nation” and are bound by the obligations of that commitment?
Nah, I’m still not seeing it as a possibility.
I don’t think NATO can succeed at state-building in Afghanistan, either.
… This evening I was on a Press TV show with Larry Korb and Gareth Porter, about Afghanistan and Iraq, both. Larry, who’s a sensible, realist person, seemed fairly supportive of Obama’s decision to increase the numbers of US troops in southern Afghanistan. At one point I asked him what the best outcome was that he could reasonably foresee in Afghanistan. He said something like,
- Well, that in 18 months we would have stabilized things enough there that the process of nation building could be taking root. But if that hasn’t happened by then, we’d have to look at other options.
This is not exactly a gung-ho outlook. But I think that even this outlook is very short-sighted and irresponsible.
Why wait another 18 months, when it is almost certain that the kind of “stability” Larry was looking for won’t be there then… and along the way, how many more Afghan citizens and how many more Americans will have died?
Pres. Obama should start acting now– to reach out to the whole of the rest of the world community, but especially Afghanistan’s neighbors, to ask their help in formulating a plan for a speedy withdrawal of the western troops from the country. Pakistan and Afghanistan both need a lot of help in re-establishing effective governance at all levels. But military troops who are western are just about the worst imaginable tools to help bring this about.
And guess what. There are plenty of other ways for these two countries’ peoples to get what they need.
Sure, many Americans still have a lot of concern about future Al-Qaeda attacks, or about Afghanistan once again turning into the kind of place where Al-Qaeda can find a safe haven for organizing its heinous plots. But once again, the insertion, use, and maintenance of a large western military force in the Afghan-Pakistani border region seems like just about the worst, and most counter-productive way to respond to these concerns.