I Think I Was Wrong About Afghanistan
I was talking to Graeme, a colleague who is also one of my best friends, about Afghanistan — he was embedded with Canadian forces battling the Taliban, and he came away extremely impressed. Because Canada has a tiny military, it has a bizarrely unspecialized military.* MPs are doing the work of infantrymen, to name one small example, and they are incredibly effective killers of insurgents. Unfortunately, they simply can’t expand their numbers. The Canadian effort in Afghanistan has stretched their forces very thin. So assuming we are going to ignore the broader strategic context and focus solely on the fight within Afghanistan’s borders, it is true, as Obama has argued, that more US troops would make a real difference.
At the same time, the insurgency is fueled by Pakistan’s fundamental strategic anxiety — a fear of being squeezed on both flanks by India, as Robert D. Kaplan explains in an Atlantic Dispatch.
The Karzai government has openly and brazenly strengthened its ties with India, and allowed Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif. It has kept alive the possibility of inviting India to help train the new Afghan army, and to help in dam construction in the northeastern Afghan province of Kunar, abutting Pakistan. All this has driven the ISI wild with fear and anger.
This is not say that fear is justified, but it is real and it is shaping the conflict. And so Kaplan emphasizes the central importance of active diplomacy designed to assuage Pakistani fears and get them on-side.
In the midst of all this, both Bush and Barack Obama talk simplistically about sending more American troops to Afghanistan. The India-Pakistan rivalry is just one of several political problems in the region that negate the benefit of more troops.
Kaplan ends on a really intriguing note.
The lesson: To get bin Laden, we need a coherent regional policy of development that draws all three countries into an organic embrace. A manhunt alone will fail. A policy of nation-building in Pakistan and Afghanistan will, counterintuitively, lead to a successful manhunt.
This actually sounds like something Obama would instinctively get. But he is framing his Afghanistan policy as part of an argument about Iraq. Still, one senses that he would get the non-military dimension of the conflict. My sense is that McCain would too, judging by the regional experts he’s surrounded himself with.
The Pakistani security community sees the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area far less simplistically than we do. It knows many Taliban fight without a particular worldview; they are merely ornery Pashtun backwoodsmen who feel left out of the power structure in Kabul.
Here I’m picturing Yosemite Sam.
The Pakistanis also know elements loosely aligned with Karzai, such as former mujahideen commanders Din Mohammed and Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, who do in fact have a clear anti-American, al-Qaeda-sympathetic worldview. Pakistan is far more threatened by Talibanization than the U.S. is, but victory will require deft diplomacy, including alliances with some Taliban elements against others.
There is a growing sense in neocon circles that Karzai has to go. I wonder about who the likely alternatives are — I’ll do some digging.
- Bizarre factoid. North Korea has 23 million people and a 1.2 million-man army. Canada has 33 million people and 75,000 active personnel in the Canadian Forces, a small fraction of whom are deployable combat troops.
excellent post. the last kaplan paragraph is the key to this whole mess. the tragedy is that after the afghan war there was a pretty good chance of implementing a development strategy. unfortunately, america was more obsessed with a manhunt for al qaeda and chose to outsource a lot of the work to regional warlords and completely ignored any development agenda. it wasn’t helped by the finicky nato allies unwilling to commit troops and pakistan’s unjustified fears of being surrounded.
as to who can replace karzai – this is another example of the possibly lost opportunity. the fragile coalition around karzai was built after some intense negotiations and horsetrading and was always susceptible to collapse if things didn’t go well. i’m not sure if there are any other figures out there who would be both acceptable to the central asian ethnicities without disenfranchising the pashtuns.
— shariq · Aug 4, 09:25 AM · #
I’ve heard some people actually think it would be a good idea for Zalmay Khalilzad to run. I’m afraid the US will back Gul Agha Shirzai, who was governor of Kandahar and is now governor of Nangahir. Most accounts I’ve read of him make him seem very bad. A couple of the governors of eastern provinces are supposed to have done pretty well, but I’m not sure how much support they have within the Pashtun tribal framework. They strike me more as technocrats than former mujahiddin commanders or people with strong tribal backing (although the former may be useful given how unpopular many former commanders are with the Afghan public and the latter could make them an ideal compromise candidate). The main opposition leader, Yunus Qanuni, seems like he would have difficulty getting any Pashtun support.
Karzai is someone I really don’t get. Is he really above the corruption? Or is he protecting his brothers who might be deeply involved in the opium trade? Why isn’t he willing to do more to confront Afghan leaders who undermine the Kabul government (like Shirzai did when he controlled Kandahar or Ismail Khan did in Herat)? Is it fear or canny politics?
— Zak · Aug 4, 02:17 PM · #
Afghanistan is by its very nature, fragmented by tribal borders, that do not respect the Durand line, from the Afridis and the Waziris in the East
to the Baluchi and Sind in the West and north to the Tadjik and Hazaras. As Kaplan himself reminded us, back in his first work on Afghanistan; the Soviet invasion was triggered in part by the resistance of tribal leaders like Ismail Khan to the Taraki regime’s policies. The record of working with the ISI and expecting a positive result (with the experience of Hamid Gul as an example) is not an edifying one. Karzai operates in a coalition; and his failure or success is determined by that fact.
— narciso · Aug 5, 03:53 AM · #