09.28.09
Afghanistan
Afghanistan has returned to the headlines. General McChrystal has come forward and told the president with little ambiguity that without additional resources, our armies will be unable to hold onto that country. Almost immediately analysts on both sides started coming down for either withdrawal, or for a major revision of strategy and tactics - neither of which would involve stabilizing Afghanistan. Of course, missing from these debates are serious considerations of either the future of American foreign policy or the future of the Afghan people. For the sake of all parties, we cannot simply return home. Like it or not, our short attention span and proclivity for war fever have indeed tied our fate to that of unhappy Afghanistan. What is needed in a dramatic shift in our perception of the conflict to one that fits the conditions of the country and our relationship to it.
However, there are a couple of claims that needs to be dealt with to understand why we are misreading the nature of this conflict. The first that deserves some attention is the idea that Afghanistan will somehow turn out just like Vietnam. The Vietnamese, so it goes, also unconquerable, withstood the might of American military force and fought us to a virtual standstill while driving public opinion over the precipice and against any further involvement. Afghanistan, it is popularly believed, has a great deal in common with Vietnam. Of course - Vietnam is not Afghanistan. Vietnam, a country with a long and proud tradition of ethnic and national identity was a nation accustomed to centralized government. They possessed cultural traditions that made easy room for a system of organized rule that could be translated into a nation state.
The problem in Vietnam was never that the “borders were too porous” or “the people to tribal to be ruled.” If that were the case, the communists never would have commanded such broad support. The Vietminh were a nationalist movement attempting to to secure an independent future for their country. The Vietnam War was never a question of how much force, or how best to secure public support; it was a question of how to disassociate ourselves from the legacy of colonialism while fighting an anti-colonial movement; an effectively impossible task. The war was initiated under false pretenses against an enemy that we shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place - we misread the nature of the Vietnamese communist movement. The war in Vietnam turned into a campaign to reassert western dominance in a region trying to break free from such things. We should not have been supporting the French in the first place, and would have done better to foster a more peaceful transition to independence. Hindsight, of course, is 20-20.
Afghanistan is a wholly different sort of war. There is not now, nor has there ever really been, an Afghan state to speak of. The tribal coalitions function in a swirling mass of shifting alignments and temporary unions while different factions fight for control of opium money. The Taliban never really controlled Afghanistan - they lived in Kabul, collected revenue from local farmers, which they kept in a box, and used to buy old soviet weaponry. They ruled only through the approval of local warlords who controlled most of the country, which limited any real power they might have possessed. More like an anarchistic feudalism.
If fact, I have very real doubts as to whether or not the group we are fighting today in Afghanistan can rightly be called the Taliban, or if they are simply a collection of semi-organized, neo-feudal and islamic interests that will go back to killing each other as soon as we leave. Needless to say, pretending that we are working against an enemy with much of a centralized command structure or even a set of rational unifying principals is probably unhelpful (though I will grant that there is increasing evidence that they may be developing both of these as the conflict continues).
Regardelss, lumping all concerned under the name “Taliban” is useful only in newspapers, and doesn’t make it true. Even assuming that they are the same group who once claimed to rule, those who advocate withdrawal or draw down want to suggest that the Taliban has learned its lesson; that they would never allow a group like al Qaeda to re-establish itself in Afghanistan. However, even if the Taliban was able to stabilize the country, and even if they didn’t share al Qaeda’s political and social agenda, would certainly be unable to keep them out or under control. However, we cannot pretend that 8 years of exile to the wild borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan have helped the remnants of the Taliban learn to respect the power of the Americans and the importance of good government. Moreover, one cannot simply hand the reigns of leadership over to anyone, and expect everything to be suddenly fine. Afghanistan is better understood as a sea of anarchy with islands of enforced calm.
No, we should be looking at other examples of conquest to understand how best to deal with Afghanistan. I use the word conquest deliberately of course. Nation states are created - typically through conflict or at least in that context. Any monopoly on law, order, and the use of force is earned, not granted by US or UN fiat. Our objective in Afghanistan must be to establish a monopoly on political power so that it can be relinquished to the Afghan people in a timely and orderly fashion. This means co-opting local leaders, eliminating resistance, and setting up the institutions of centralized government. The example to be examined is the one set by the British in India when they successfully established a centralized government over a number of minor kingdoms and unified the territory under a small and lightweight colonial administration.
The catch of course, is that he process will likely take decades, and America will have to be willing to cede power once the Afghans are ready to take it. At least one generation of Afghan children will need to grow up under relative stability before any sort of democratic civil society can be created, and the international community will need to pour in billions of aid and assistance. The US, as the leader of this coalition and de-facto leader of the UN, needs to take charge and stop trying to pass the buck if the Afghans are to have a future.
Nation building is not a quick and easy processes. The institutions that make for stable government evolve over many years, and cannot simply be imposed. No person is born with an innate love or desire for democracy, but they can learn to have one, once they see the benefits. Democracy must be actively desired. It is not a passive creed. For the Americans, we must decide if our great nation, with all of its power and wealth, can actually make the world a better place, help others to gain the benefits of freedom as we know them, and stand for something other that the simple glorification of our own names. It is up to our leaders to act responsibly and help the public understand that.