It really comes down to that blood test: What will men die for? The answer, were we willing to open our eyes, is that more Afghans will volunteer to die for the Taliban than for our dream of a “better” Afghanistan. Nor could the Taliban have survived without support among the population. This is Mao 101.
The entire column is in that vein. It sounds very similar to Halberstam’s diagnosis of the Vietnam tragedy.
Frederick W. Kagan makes the case for staying in Afghanistan. An excerpt:
to prevent al Qaeda and ISIS from regaining the base from which al Qaeda launched the 9/11 attacks and from which both would plan and conduct major attacks against the US and its allies in the future. He [President Trump] also described the minimum required outcome: an Afghan state able to secure its own territory with very limited support from the US and other partners. This outcome is essential to American security and it is achievable.
My guess is that the call that the President has to make concerning Afghanistan is a close one, but I am more inclined to agree with Peters. I have no military experience or any other basis for expertise, but for what it’s worth, here are a couple of my thoughts:
1. I am leery of blaming the problems of the Afghan government on corruption. In a limited-access order (borrowing the terminology of North, Weingast, and Wallis), what we call corruption is the only way for a government to remain in power. More generally, if victory depends on our capabilities for nation-building, then I have doubts about the mission.
2. If the Taliban took over, we might be able to convince them not to allow Al Qaeda a safe haven there. If deterrence works, then that would be cheaper than war.
The advocates of doubling down on Afghanistan, such as Kagan, do not explain what it is that makes Afghanistan uniquely “essential to American security” right now, in 2017. There are numerous disordered countries in the Islamic world that could provide a base for terrorist groups, whatever name they happen to be using; are we going to make sure each one of those countries has a government “able to secure its territory” that will prevent this? I doubt that even Kagan would call for that. I get the feeling that our national security establishment simply does not want to admit that the goal we foolishly set for ourselves in Afghanistan – creating a stable state, with control over its whole territory, that can be relied upon never again to host terrorists – is just not attainable.
The planes used in the 9/11 attacks all took off from airfields in the US. And the hijackers entered the country legally. This suggests to me that there are available means of protecting ourselves from terrorism more rational, more effective and less costly than ham-handedly attempting to stage-manage the political development of a hostile tribal society in a mountainous backwater on the other side of the world.
I tend to agree with Arnold. I hope that decision-makers have access to intelligence or planning that we do not. IIRC, the US Army was something like 99% of the economy while it was there in force, the other 1% being poppies, which are now 99% of the economy. The place is hardly a country at all. The cheapest bomb we have is a thousand times more expensive than the tents it is dropped on, and if our plan is to deny the enemy every cave in Afghanistan then we have no means of winning.
Not only that, we just pissed off the Pakistanis, by taking sides in their border conflict with India.
There probably was a chance to win, early on, years ago. But now everybody has learned that these ramp-ups are temporary, and anybody who helps us is a dead man walking when we leave.
The fading twilight of the influence, relevance, and quality of Neoconservative thinking really is a sad spectacle, and no where is that more obvious than in their stopped-clock, mushy-headed commentary on foreign policy and most especially on the situation in Afghanistan.
Fundamentally, the “using Afghanistan as a refuge / safe-haven / base” narrative is incoherent. That story would actually apply better to the FATA of Northwest Pakistan, where Taliban and other Isalmic militants can regroup, rearm, train, and conspire in relative safety and permissive support of the Pakistani government, before launching attacks across the border. Which has been the case for 16 years – remember where they found Bin Laden – and US efforts in this regard including countless drone strikes and who knows how many billions of dollars have come to very little, else we wouldn’t be worrying about the real threat of Taliban resurgence. But the importance of Al Qaeda being physically based in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan in particular was hardly some sine qua non for 9/11. Afghanistan was where the original outline of the terrorist conspiracy was hatched, but the hijakers spent very little time there, some became jihadists while living iin the West, and obviously they launched their attacks from US soil after receiving training in America. Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s beyond obvious that Islamic terrorist conspiracies can be hatched, coordinated, and launched in the West from pretty much anywhere these days, as we unfortunately observe several times a year, e.g., recently in Barcelona.
The bottom line is as simple to articulate as it is ugly. The United States has no national interest in the fate of Afghanistan even close to proportionate to the blood and tresure we are expending there,, except pride and the PR issue of damage control after the fall of Kabul creates a wave of human misery and a scramble of major local powers in the Great Game for Central Asia. We aren’t willing to do what it would take to annihilate the Taliban, especialyl across the border in Pakistan, and we aren’t willing to do the only other thing that might work – to stay and fight there forever – though that insane position apparently still has plenty of implicit support among the Neoconservatives.
I think Kagan is an extreme case of an unreconstructed crusade-for-“democracy”-everywhere neoconservative. They’re not all that deluded.
Although some are:https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/were-all-interventionists-now-donald-trump/
That may be true, but I can only judge by their public output, and so far, I haven’t seen any of them break away from the herd and come out against continuing the intervention in Afghanistan, or even articulate a coherent, evidenced argument for why we shouldn’t expect it to go on for another decade at least. Max Boot’s article in the NYT was particularly depressing, demonstrating that Centcom strategy is still running on bad autopilot code, with no new thinking in a decade, and so with no end in sight. And of course he applauds it. Sad.
Yes, Boot is hopeless.
Indeed, the US should specialize in (a) detecting and destroying from a distance any non-state threat on the US, (b) destroying from a distance any state military and apparatus willfully hosting the non-state threat, and (c) a foreign policy strategy that combines the two to make it a very bad choice for a state to host non-state threats on western nations. No general invasion or nation building is required, as the threat of losing power should be enough motivation to remain among the civilized nations that do not sponsor international terrorism. This course would be much less expensive and far less destructive than that taken by the US this century.
The errors the US has made in the Middle East all stem from the choice of the Bush Administration not to set up the war on terror as one of civilization versus barbarism, but as one of being with us or being against us. Destroying Al Qaeda in Afghanistan: fine. Destroying the Taliban military: optional. Trying to build a state in Afghanistan: idiotic. Making war on Iraq, a state that had zero interest in hosting or exporting terrorism: insane.
There’s no good answer but I, too, think we should leave. Yes, bad for people who want progress. But it’s already bad for people there.
It will probably be a case where the northern tribes fight the taliban, just like before. Iran and Russia arming the north and Pakistan/Saudi Arabia arming the south.
Our overpriced killing machines are not required there.
We’re going to get their rare earth as payment? Dream on. The whole place is mud bricks and straw. You have to be on serious drugs if you think you can profitably mine the mountains.
We’ll wait and see what the troops will be used for, etc. But if you buy that geopolitics is a good way to understand the world this move is basically installing a giant “keep out” sign in Chinese characters. It may be more about OBOR and rare-earths than new neoconservative nation-building (probably a warning to the Russians too, as there are stories that “private” Russian firms are selling arms to the Taliban).
If all the troops do is kill foreign jihadis, and help keep Kabul from throwing in with Beijing (who is seriously courting Pakistan) then OK; not ideal, but OK.
One thing we see little referenced:
We are engaged in military hostilities with different groupings in that territory.
Those groups, or portions of their members form temporary (or longer) coalitions to advance or protect what they perceive as their interests.
What seems missing is a consolidated effort to LEARN and UNDERSTAND the objectives of each of the “hostile” groupings, the factors which lead to their forming effective (combative & terrorist) coalitions in seeking means to seek those objectives.
It would seem primary to KNOW the “enemies.” That effort does not seem to be getting enough (if any) attention.