Colombia and Afghanistan: Where the “Wars” on Terror and Drugs Overlap

by Lance Steagall :: Filed Under Middle East / South Asia :: April 6th, 2009 @ 7:40 pm EST

This post is part of Get Afghanistan Right’s Break the Silence campaign

Latin American and Middle Eastern politics rarely intersect; Chavez’ dalliances with Ahmadinejad, protests of Israeli aggression in Palestine, and the list (off the top of my head) concludes here. In conversation among policy wonks, however, another connection is frequently overheard: Colombia and Afghanistan. Last Sunday, journalist Scott Wilson addressed the similarities between the two from his Washington Post soapbox:

The Taliban have caves and Colombian guerrillas their triple-canopy jungle and mountain hideouts…Afghanistan’s opium poppies fund the Taliban, just as coca fuels Colombia’s guerrillas. As Pakistan does for the Taliban, Venezuela and Ecuador provide sanctuary to Colombia’s insurgents.

Perhaps the most important parallel, though, is the lack of a strong central government. Colombia’s government has rarely held sway beyond Bogota’s nearly two-mile high plateau, and the frail Karzai administration in Kabul has a similarly short reach. As a result, Colombia has relied on brutal paramilitary forces to support a weak army, alienating much of the population in the process. In Afghanistan, that role is played by U.S. forces, which, although by no means as savage as the Colombian irregulars, have cost Afghanistan’s government support among a people famously hostile to foreign invaders.

Extrapolating the lessons learned in Colombia (still a class in session — no matter how improved Colombia may be from a decade ago, it has much more improving to do), Wilson reaches some conclusions that are explicitly contrary to the escalation policy:

First, a surge of U.S. combat forces to Afghanistan may be less useful than further increasing the number of military trainers being deployed to help build a viable Afghan army. Second, the administration should focus less on stopping the heroin trade and more on establishing functioning state institutions — from schools to health clinics. Third, efforts to seal off border sanctuaries do not work and divert military resources from the central job of protecting civilians.

Although he balks at rejecting escalation in so many words, reading between the lines we can extract the following; more troops will have a negligible impact; building up state institutions, not killing insurgents, is one of, if not the, most important task; and protection of civilians is paramount.

Many will no doubt argue that drawing lessons from Colombia is deceptive a priori; though the similarities between the situations are many, the differences are more. Two distinctions stand out; Plan Colombia does not call for brigades of combat troops, while Afghanistan has an ever-increasing appetite for them; our underlying motives and projected aims in the respective regions are distinct. At least ostensibly, Plan Colombia is part of the War on Drugs. Afghanistan is part of our War on Terror.

Nevertheless, we should not disregard the wisdom Wilson gleans from our Colombian experience, the most valuable piece of which I’ve saved for last; “it will take time.” In Colombia, with a competent and tremendously popular government in place, it’s taken over a decade to reach the very much relative success it’s enjoying today. In Afghanistan, as we all know, the government is far from approaching any adequate level of competence and coherence. Throwing more soldiers into the mix won’t change that.