Afghanistan (59 page)

In Afghanistan’s least secure districts, in the heart of the insurgency in the south, the situation is nowhere past redemption. What the insurgents have rapidly gained there, they may just as rapidly lose again in the future. The insurgents’ approach to Islamic practice, their lack of regard for the welfare of much of the population, and their continued attacks that bring death and destruction rather than the longed-for security have prevented them from seizing the high ground of Afghan nationalism and Islamic faith, even among most Pushtuns. There are still many legitimate nationalist and religious leaders who can be brought into the process of building stability in Afghanistan. In the first four months of 2009, some 80 percent of insurgent attacks were concentrated in 13 percent of Afghanistan’s districts;
⁶⁵⁴
the remaining territory provides a potential foundation for improving security.

If Afghanistan is to have a peaceful, viable future, it will be achieved through building on those peaceful cities, competent government ministries, and other Afghan successes that benefit the population, such as the creation of a cell phone network and the emergence of new, independent media. This future is, to many, no more apparent in today’s conflict-defined Afghanistan than today’s prosperous Republic of Korea was necessarily visible in the poor, devastated land that many saw in 1953. The outside world tends to see Afghanistan through a Kabul-centric view, as that is where the diplomats and reporters are based. This view served Afghanistan poorly after the fall of the Taliban, as the focus was taken away from the gathering storm of a renewed insurgency reentering Afghanistan from Pakistan. More recently, with Kabul afflicted by decreasing security due to a more widespread threat from an expanded insurgency and increasing corruption inside, this view has shifted to one of impending collapse and dysfunctional Afghans both in and out of government. But Afghanistan is much more than Kabul, and neglecting this wider view is misleading. Afghanistan will have to draw on the strengths that are found elsewhere that have aided it throughout its history, its qawms and its faith, the determination and commitment of its people that prevailed against the Soviet invader, if it is ever again to be a peaceful nation, not requiring a large-scale foreign military presence just to see it through from one day to the next. Afghanistan will never be like the West or even other countries. It may never contain its insurgencies or interethnic rivalries even to the extent that India does, or limit corruption in its government and legal system as well as that which still afflicts Brazil, or, certainly, have the gender relations of Norway. But Afghanistan can be what it once was, governed the way most Afghans wished it to be.

What Afghanistan needs to achieve this, more than anything else, is time. This includes time to train and equip security forces. Even more time will be required to create a constituency for effective non-corrupt governance and to train those that will take part in it. It will be years before the last of the current warlords pass from the scene. A new generation of Pushtun leaders that are neither fanatics, radicals, nor tools of foreigners needs to emerge. Time is needed for Pakistan to change too, so that it no longer sees its current strategy of tolerating Afghan insurgency
and aiming for control in Kabul as necessary for national security. In Afghanistan, outsiders need to temper ambition with realism, including an understanding of the counterproductive nature of imposing top-down reform without first securing local ownership and an awareness of the limitations of anyone, including Kabul governments, to create change in Afghanistan. Afghans remain wary of reforms that are in reality heavy-handed attempts to impose control; such actions are often resented as attacks on national and Islamic legitimacy, and outsiders need to avoid having their involvement associated with them.

But only the outsiders can give Afghanistan time. The outsiders need to provide the security and required aid so that the Afghans can identify and put in place Afghan-led solutions. Even with the best intentions, outsiders’ solutions create Afghan problems; the differing “small footprint” approaches to both the foreign troop presence and the UN role did not yield reduced resentment of outsiders and increased Afghan governmental responsibility, as had been planned, but rather failed to prevent insurgency and corruption. Outsiders can help enable Afghans to work together and remove negative incentives that encourage corruption. The problem is that there are competing outsiders: Washington, Islamabad, not to mention the terrorists, insurgents, and narcotics traffickers. All have competing visions for the future of Afghanistan.

Amongst the US and its coalition allies, there is widespread frustration over the situation in Afghanistan, be it regarding costs, casualties, or political unpopularity. The fact that there is no end in sight only heightens the frustration. Understanding Afghanistan’s realities and what is needed to succeed on both the international and Afghan levels remains elusive. Even at its best, progress in Afghanistan involves one step back for every two forward, and in recent years things have been far from the best. The temptation to mitigate costs, limit liabilities, scrap the entire commitment, and consider Afghanistan outside the sphere of interest of lands that need to be defended (as the Republic of Korea was, briefly, in the years between the withdrawal of US occupation forces in 1948 and the invasion in 1950) has an appeal across the political spectrum in many countries including the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Canada, and other coalition partners. A Pew Global Attitudes survey of June 2007 reported
majorities of NATO countries except the US and UK said troops should be withdrawn as soon as possible.
⁶⁵⁵
Since, commitments to Afghanistan have become even less popular while casualties have increased and the security situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated.

Afghanistan is not the only country that needs time, always a difficult commodity to provide, and outside support. By 2009, in Pakistan, the civilian government survived many of the crises it inherited from Musharraf’s era. The military was taking action against Pakistan’s insurgents in Swat and South Waziristan and throughout the borderlands, in a change from its previous policies. Pakistan continued to provide targeting intelligence for US UAV attacks against the terrorist and Pakistani insurgent leadership and is reportedly cooperating in on-the-ground activity by US intelligence in Pakistan,
⁶⁵⁶
even if the Afghan insurgents retain the benefits of sanctuary. But despite this progress within Pakistan’s own borders, the political system remains in crisis. The threat of state failure remains, if not imminent, very real. It is of vital geopolitical interest that Pakistan remains viable. US security and aid policies alike need to try and help assure this.

Afghanistan’s Conflicts

The five conflicts taking place in Afghanistan today are not primarily military. In combating insurgency, military forces must play an important role. Against other threats, military force is of a lower order of importance than many other factors, such as intelligence or effective politics. The first conflict is against international terrorism, primarily at the hands of Al Qaeda. These were the people that masterminded the 2006 plot to destroy transatlantic airliners and the 2009 attack on Mumbai, but it also has a wide range of targets throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan that do not necessarily register on international consciousness. The second conflict is the conjoined insurgencies in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taliban forces in both countries, a unitary conflict divided only by the international border and Pakistan’s policies which offered sanctuary to Afghan insurgents and urged its own insurgents to target their offensive against Kabul rather than Islamabad. The third conflict is narcotics and, therefore, counter-narcotics. Opium needs instability
and an absence of state authority and, so far, Afghanistan is still chaotic enough for cultivation and trafficking to thrive. The fourth conflict is the multi-faceted internal strife within Afghanistan itself, resulting from ethnolinguistic divisions, religious practice, warlords and power brokers, political relationships, gender relationships, and land and water rights, to name only a few. The fifth conflict is within Pakistan, going beyond the insurgency and including the crisis of governance in that country that has been internationalized to such an extent that it has directly affected its neighbor Afghanistan.

These conflicts are all winnable. Afghanistan became a failed state not because of the Afghans, but because it became the primary battleground for fighting Soviet imperialism and, later, transnational Islamic terrorism. It is not true that Afghanistan was “never a real nation” and so does not merit international concern or support. It used to be a relatively peaceful country with a centralized but weak government. It lacked the emphasis on security and the imperial infrastructure of its neighbors like Pakistan, former Soviet central Asia, or Iran. Nor has the concept of Afghan nationhood been made impossible by the extensive societal divisions. The current government in Kabul has not had its legitimacy fatally compromised
ab initio
by its alliance with the US and the coalition, which the vast majority of Afghans of all ethnolinguistic groups welcomed in 2001. Rather, it needs to take more steps to base its strength on that of the Afghan people and not appear to be so heavily bound to the West. The corruption that permeates so much of Afghan government is a more serious challenge, but the potential for establishing legitimate governance still exists. Even widespread fraud in the 2009 election did not defeat Kabul’s legitimacy. Afghans are not uniquely prone to internal and international conflict. For all the cultural conservatism of Afghanistan, there is widespread support for governance and rule of law, even if there has never been support for highly centralized rule from Kabul among grassroots Afghans. There is a deep desire for peace and security. Much of the insurgents’ strength has been in their ability to promise these things, even though what they deliver has usually turned out to be much grimmer indeed.

Though each is winnable, victory in none of these conflicts is assured.
⁶⁵⁷
Al Qaeda continues to enable terrorism throughout the world as well as
Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Afghan insurgency is resilient and well funded with outside support, with sanctuary across the border in Pakistan. Afghans may not have the resources to make up for wartime devastation or the capabilities to outgrow internal divisions on their own, and so need foreign aid that, if misapplied, can instead worsen these problems and create new ones, such as corruption. In recent years, patience with the government in Kabul was largely exhausted throughout Afghanistan. But in all of these options, the constraints that may prevent victory are less the results of the adversary’s strengths than the inability or unwillingness of the international community, including the US, and the Afghans to pay the price to counter them.

The US and Afghanistan

Many coalition leaders have demonstrated an inability to deal with Afghanistan’s complex realities. Their electorates are too disordered and preoccupied with pressing domestic issues to deal with or even to recognize the threat of transnational terrorism; in Europe there remains a widespread perception that the threat would be reduced by an end to the coalition support for Afghanistan. The US leadership, military and civilian, has tended to assume that problems facing the coalition’s policies originate from outside the US, and that America provides solutions, with little thought given to the potential that Afghan efforts could actually be smarter and better implemented or at least better suited to their native conditions. Despite large US and coalition involvement over the past several years and the certainty that policy decisions made in Washington
will
affect Afghanistan for better or worse, this remains an Afghan story, and therefore Afghan solutions must be part of the ultimate resolution. To the extent that Afghanistan is seen as an outsider’s conflict, with foreign troops, costs, casualties, and political realities determining what happens, it undermines the future, which will require Afghans making hard political decisions. This future will be difficult to achieve but has succeeded in the past, as the Bonn agreement and the
Loya Jirgas
that followed it demonstrated. The most important thing the outsiders could have done for Afghanistan was to have kept Pakistan from providing a sanctuary for the insurgency; this they have been unable to do. Military force, predominantly provided by
the US, only became increasingly important in Afghanistan after the US was unable, through diplomacy, persuasion, aid, and any of the other available policy tools, to sustain security after 2002–03. Before that, the “small footprint” of a limited US troop commitment appeared not only required by the emphasis on Iraq but also the approach best suited to Afghanistan; the fault was in staying with this concept when it became apparent that Afghan realities did not fit Washington’s plans. The focus needs to remain on Afghanistan, not the US, regardless of the importance of US policies to Afghanistan’s future.

On 27 March 2009, the new Obama administration announced a new “AfPak” strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, so designated to differentiate what it intended to do from what it had described as a lack of resources and priority by the previous administration. The Obama administration, despite the unpopularity of its predecessor, had taken over a bipartisan consensus that Afghanistan was a necessary war and one that must be won to prevent serious international consequences for years to come. In his inaugural address, President Obama committed to “forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.”
⁶⁵⁸

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was appointed special envoy to “AfPak,” providing a link between US policies toward the conflicts in both countries. The new administration’s policies included the deployment of an additional 21,000 US military personnel and hundreds of non-military personnel, government, and contractors to work in the military and aid efforts, an expansion of the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF), and the sacking of US GEN David Kiernan and his replacement by GEN Stanley McChrystal to head coalition military (though not aid or diplomatic) operations. In Pakistan, the military operations and the expanded US UAV campaign gained some success against Pakistani insurgents (the US carried out a reported total of 53 UAV attacks in Pakistan in 2009 compared with 36 in 2008), though the Afghan insurgents’ sanctuary in Pakistan remained effective.