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Why Do We Do Everything Half-Assed? |
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Today the Pentagon confirmed the deployment of 3,200 additional US marines to Afghanistan. This “mini-surge,” however, offers little hope of changing the war from a quagmire into a success. Simply put, NATO forces have not accomplished enough nation-building in Afghanistan:
Failure to bring other meaningful development means that tactical victories, such as the symbolically important capture of the town of Musa Qala in northern Helmand, have little value in the overall counter-insurgency campaign. It is hard to win the hearts and minds of people whose fields and homes are constantly fought over.
The Taleban found it hard to recruit three years ago. Now they have significant influence across the countryside, although not the main roads and towns, in most of Afghanistan. Given the frail reach of the national police and justice system, the Taleban have increasingly been called on to settle local disputes.
NATO has not addressed the root causes of the Taliban’s appeal, and as a result the militia is hanging on, even growing. Providing security and acting as a sort of local government fueled the Taliban’s rise in the 1990s, and if people turn again to the Taliban for protection and stability, their power will increase further. Without an effort to really hear and address the problems of ordinary people, we will be fighting the Taliban in vain.
We are not necessarily “losing” in Afghanistan, but neither are we “winning”: in reality, we have no clear goals and no clear strategies. We are doing everything half-assed, even imperialism and aggression. Pumping in a relatively small number of troops, and making no real changes on our approach to poppy cultivation, local violence, and government corruption means that the underlying situation will remain the same.
The lack of creativity and clear thinking on the part of the administration and the Pentagon is particularly worrying in light of regional developments. The New York Times reports that Islamic militants in Pakistan have slipped out of the government’s control.
Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.
Islamic militants surrendered in July after Pakistani authorities stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad. Government officials reported more than 100 deaths; militants insisted that thousands had been killed.
As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.
The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.
Injecting American military forces into Pakistan, as I have said before, would be phenomenally stupid. Rather than provoke further destabilization in Afghanistan’s neighbor, we should push for greater regional cooperation, and keep our eyes on the goal of an orderly withdrawal. Escalation will only produce more chaos and bloodshed, not progress.
Unfortunately, our disorganized and feckless strategies mean that like the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan threatens to drag out for years longer than it already has. We need some new thinking, and quickly; otherwise we are simply sending more brave young men and women to lose their lives, to lose the hearts and minds of Afghans, and to lose our fragile grip on a situation that is sliding into unpredictable chaos.
This has been the problem from the beginning, and it doesn’t show signs of ending anytime soon. Why do Americans love existential, unending wars? Why do we get so enamored with the Cold War or the War on Terror that we stick with these undefined conflicts through great loss and debt?
It’s such a strange drive that we Americans seem to have.
Completely agreed. I guess I’m of similar mind to Alex, in that I feel we, at this point, have some obligation to Afghanistan. We went in there and dismantled their government. It wasn’t a government we liked, but it was a government.
So, at this point, I do feel we owe them something and I’m not sure it is totally hopeless. However, we need to focus on nation building and not military operations. We need to turn over the entire process of protecting and governing to Afghanis, and we need to foot the bill for roads, schools, money not to grow poppies, etc…
It may fail, but I haven’t lost all hope in that quite yet.
I agree with your final statements that we should withdraw from Afghanistan, completely.
I’m curious though, are you saying the root cause of the Taliban’s appeal is their ability to provide protection and stability? If so, exactly what are we attacking them for? They were a strict ideological rule and killed many people, I understand this. The problem is that anything we setup in our efforts to “nation build” will ultimately fail because it is not an organic Afghan government, and the people know this. If we really did allow the people to choose their leader democratically, I doubt they would choose anybody that Washington approved of and Washington won’t allow that. So whatever nation we build there will be immediately torn down. Just bring the troops home and let Afghanistan and the rest of the Middle East make their own decisions. (Don’t give them anybody subsidies either.)
NATO’s mandate is to protect Europe from Communism. So. Why are we still in NATO? Why are we still going into NATO wars while when we entered NATO it was explicitly stated that it would not interfere with our Congress’s sole authority to declare war? I’m confused. If our military’s presence in these countries IS the root cause for Al Qaeda’s appeal, and we attacked the Taliban because they harbored Al Qaeda, wouldn’t a withdrawal of our military from the Middle East cripple Al Qaeda’s recruitment and enable the Taliban to give Al Qaeda the boot which they surely would do?
This must be so because nobody likes foreigners calling the shots in their country, especially the Afghans.
I believe that NATO is in Afghanistan because of us, and not the other way around. NATO is in part a treaty wherein members agree to protect any other member that gets attacked. So they came to help us after September 11th.
As far as the Taliban goes, my perspective is that the Taliban were the most organized mafia/militia/movement to crop up in the chaos of mid-1990s Afghanistan. They were brutal, but they also had support from local people who were tired of death, misery, and insecurity. Afghanistan is full of guns, for example, and one thing the Taliban did when they took control of towns in the 90s was to give people a choice: join us or give us your guns. What that meant, on one level, was that things got safer for many people. I am not apologizing for the Taliban or saying they weren’t oppressive and vicious. I am only trying to understand why many Afghans supported them.
If we left, we might not like who came to power. But if we can’t do any good there, we may have to leave. I guess I’d like to see NATO take a real stab at nation-building; not sham elections and puppet governments, but roads, hospitals, etc. And the key thing is to put Afghans to work building their own nation. We need to get some money flowing through the ordinary population.
I’m sure you’re right about NATO following us.
I don’t like NATO because it is yet another avenue where the President will enter wars (like Kosovo) without Congressional approval. That and it is obsolete. I guess this is another topic though.
As far as the Taliban are concerned. I’m right there with you. The Taliban also ran schools and organized other civic programs. They were a local government (with their deadly faults, granted).
I think it’s a philosophical difference, but I just don’t think we should make any attempt to nation build. We (the US population) should help with that via Engieneers Without Borders, the Red Cross, etc. Washington should stay in Washington and our military should stay in North America and not tear a nation apart in the first place. With a sound economy, which we would have if we didn’t have endless war, we could help many more countries, I believe, through NGO charaties.
I don’t think we should have gone into Afghanistan into the first place - though maybe, in the climate after 9/11, it was simply inevitable. We should have treated the attacks as crimes, not acts of war - then we could have poured resources into catching Al Qaeda and Osama, not fighting Afghans.
But now that we’re there, what should we do? It’s an extremely difficult question, and I haven’t completely made up my mind yet. Are we prepared for the Taliban to retake power? I say, let’s set a date for withdrawal (say, at most 18 months from now), and then do as much good as we can before we go. That way we can at least try to make some more friends and fewer enemies. But maybe you’re right, maybe we should just leave.
Well, I tend to believe you’re getting your wish. Though the media coverage is relentlessly on the kinetics, there is a considerable amount of NATO-sponsored work going on in the area of nation-building - not nearly as much as I would like (and not with so much of a de-emphasis on the kinetics as I want to see), but it is picking up. A big part of the challenge is that one can only push so fast when the local technical, economic and cultural infrastructure can take only so much. The capacity to take on development, against all those cross-cuts, is fortunately increasing and we’re starting to see more stuff happening on the ground. That said, Barnett Rubin has some very pertinent commentary of late on the Informed Comment Global Affairs blog (or whatever it’s called) regarding the methodology (and cultural footprint for lack of a better term) of our intervention - as a general rule of thumb, everything that Rubin says about Afghanistan is worthy of careful consideration; he’s smart and a good guy to boot.
I agree with the general thrust of your comments - if “big Army” is part of the problem, so too is “big NGO” - we’ve got to get better at how we do these things. All that said, in my view the notion of ceasing intervention in Afghanistan is non-viable - quite apart from the fact that the Afghanis deserved better than to have western powers support/fight a proxy war against the Sovs, rend their cultural fabric utterly and then walk away leaving them to the tender mercies of the ISI as they did, nothing less than the NATO alliance which you give little credence to is at stake. You may not understand why America allows itself to be so “encumbered” by this alliance, but let me tell you - from the other side of that alliance, it’s the ultimate underwriter of the security arrangements of all us funny-looking non-US folk. Further, that whole “unilateralism = maximum freedom of action” notion isn’t working out so hot. The rest of us think you guys need to spend some time with your options a bit constrained by international consensus. Pretty much all of us told you to focus on the ’stan and not mess with Iraq - you guys walk away from Afghanistan because the zeitgeist has shifted and leave us twisting in the wind, we’ll be pretty pissed, let me tell you. Wouldn’t be the smartest move in a century that appears to have opened with US influence in freefall. Stay in, get smarter about how you prosecute the fight (i.e., tell the SF that their core competency isn’t driving around in Humvees shooting up the countryside - specific cultural knowledge and living in the dirt, that’s the ticket).
On the topic of Taliban support, or lack thereof - a critical datapoint that seems to be overlooked in much of the commentary - if they’ve got so much popular support, why is it when CF int operators [Canadian Forces intelligence personnel] dig into the background of the average foot soldier they take out or capture, they increasingly find these guys are/were not from the Afghani side of the line? Pretty hard for me to accept without qualification the notion that these guys have high levels of popular support among Afghani Pashtun when they’re drawn from Pakistan and overwhelmingly derive logistical and int support from that side of the line. Don’t confuse the fact that these guys know their cultural terrain well and are extremely effective at intimidating the population (as well as IO) for popular support. Nor, on the other hand should we think we’re loved, being the ugly “other” right in their face, but the future the Afghani people want is stability not necessarily the Taliban - those guys were not well loved, not at all - the question is how to give that stability when our style of fighting undermines our popular support due to collateral and Taliban proficiency at IO.
The difference is that when these operations are run by a foreign government (”big Army”) and they fail, the resentment is directed at the population who elects this government. “big Army” also tries to build a government, this should not be done. The extent of the government building should be enabling elections and them being totally hands off, and that is even in the current non-ideal position of needing to do that because we tore down what was present, which we should not have done.
“big NGO”, when operated in a free-market, will not bring the resentment because locals will have influence over their actions. Perhaps they will not be effective in their jobs, but this will not reflect poorly on the public of any country, which is a dramatic improvement to our current state.
I heard this talk when the US sent troops into Kosovo also. NATO’s credibility is diminishing. I do believe the US should leave this organization. Its credibility may even improve at that point.
Great, keep it. I just don’t want the US to be in it when we have to borrow money to pay for these military actions. We don’t have any money. Your economy is doing much better then ours, and this is really my issue. Everything boils down, in the end, to the economy. International military actions cost us too much in inflation, loss of resources, and loss of goodwill. We cannot afford it. This is not a light statement either. We, very literally, have no money and it is beyond irresponsible for our King and his court to galavant around the world while we are tearing down a railroad to total economic collapse.
As far as the Taliban goes, I think local acceptance is more culturally related then related to the imaginary lines we call borders so it doesn’t bother me if the people accept their neighbors as their local mafia rulers. At their root governments are mafia anyway, demanding payment for protection.
oh yeah,
No doubt. My understanding of international consensus is that most people think Washington should not try to run everybody else’s countries, and with that I completely agree. We shouldn’t have gone in to Iraq either. Bring the troops back from everywhere, not just Afghanistan. Bring them home from Germany, Korea, Japan (we still pay for Japan’s defense and they’re killing us economically! I wonder why.) I want the US to be a member of the world community through diplomacy and free-market exchange, not military action and unfair trade organizations. Our unilateralism works just great as long as we keep it within our borders where it belongs.
“big Army” in this context refers to conventional, logistics heavy forces - “big NGO” would be the NGO equivalent (folks driving around in a western bubble, pulling down salaries that dwarf the proportion of aid actually going to the end recipient). By definition “big NGO” causes resentment and runs counter to the mission, free-market or not. You may not like nation building with military forces, but frankly America has precious little else in the way of assets that can begin to address such missions - the Department of State has a heck of a lot less ability to handle Phase IV a lot. Warfare changed - your forces can either change with it or they can be highly expensive and largely irrelevant.
America can decide to take its ball and go home (i.e., drop from NATO) but that strikes me as quite unwise. The country has burned through a pretty significant proportion of what latent good will there was out there for it - deciding to withdraw from the world, further destabilizing the global alliance structure would pretty much put a stake in it. Given that American economic influence ain’t what it used to be, compounding the problem by taking the best card the country still has off the table because war didn’t turn out how some quite dim people thought it would seems unwise. Additionally, NATO seems less relevant to some segments of *America* - the relevance for many of the rest of us has actually increased. Take measures to undercut it and it’ll be viewed by many of us as a sign of how unreliable America is as an ally - if there’s anything you guys need to absorb as a take away from this little set of adventures, it’s that you still need allies.
Yes. I think. I mean, Iraq’s terrorism population has skyrocket since the invasion. It was actually an expressed goal of Bin Laden to get the US entangled in a war in the Middle East for recruiting purposes. There is no question that occupations breed resistance, just like the mujahideen before them.
As for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, I don’t know what’s really going on. Does the Taliban work with Al Qaeda? Do these labels really mean anything? It’s really hard to tell, honestly. One thing I’m pretty sure of, as you said, let the Afghans determine their own government, do real nation building if you want (ie. monetary support, not neocolonialism), but mostly make a plan for a quick exit and stick by it.