Juan Cole offers a five-point argument for why the "surge" of US and allied troops in Afghanistan is unlikely to work and therefore, implicitly, why an alternative plan of withdrawal would make better sense. But, unfortunately, the US generals and civilians in charge of this occupation want to remain in the country for many years to come. Obama seems to be going along. They tell us that this is a counterinsurgency policy that is aimed at "protecting the Afghan people" and will prove to be a successful approach. But, they add, it will require many years to take back the cities and thousands of villages using this counterinsurgency method.
The policy is currently being employed in the southern Afghan city of Marja, as Cole notes. At some point, they say, the Afghan army will take over the responsibility of bringing some sort of "security" to the country. There is no persuasive evidence yet that this has happened.
Some of you have viewed the DVD, Rethinking Afghanistan, which advances an argument against the US-led occupation. For a broader view of the Afghan situation from an Afghan woman, I recommend a book by Malalai Joya, A Woman Among Warlords. In addition, Joya's appearances on programs like Democracy Now and her speeches to audiences in America and Canada are readily available on the Internet. For now, here is Cole's sophisticated position.
Bob
----------------------------
Monday, February 22, 2010
Juan Cole, Informed CommentFive Questions for the Afghan Surge; Or, Getting Past the Hype Gen. David Petraeus, a straight shooter, admitted on Meet the Press Sunday that the Afghanistan War will take years and incur high casualties.. His implicit defense of President Obama from Dick Cheney on the issues of torture and closing Guantanamo will make bigger headlines, but sooner or later the American public will notice the admission. The country is now evenly divided between those who think the US can and should restore a modicum of stability before getting out, and those who want a quick withdrawal. The Marjah Campaign, the centerpiece of the new counter-insurgency strategy, is over a week old, and some assessment of this new, visible push by the US military in violent Helmand Province is in order.
There was never any doubt that the US and NATO would win militarily, fairly easily occupying Marjah and nearby Nad Ali. Marjah at 85,000 or so is a city smaller than Ann Arbor, Michigan. The campaign is only significant in a larger social and political context. The questions are:
1. Can the stategy of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, of taking, clearing, holding and building be extended deep into the Pashtun regions? Marjah is only a stepping stone to the key southern city of Qandahar, which has a population of a million, more the size of Detroit.
This outcome has yet to be seen. But for rural Pashtuns to come to love foreign occupiers is an unlikely proposition. Even the WSJ admits that in Marjah, the Marines are not exactly feeling the love from the civilians they have supposedly just liberated. Since the Taliban are typically not as corrupt as the warlords, in fact, to any extent that the US and NATO re-install corrupt warlord types in power, they may alienate the locals. And keeping civilian casualties low so as to win hearts and minds is key here. That task will become more difficult as the US inserts itself more deeply into Pashtun territory, since insurgent villages will have to be defeated. The Soviet occupation produced 5 million externally displaced and 2 million internally displaced, along with hundreds of thousands dead. A campaign in Qandahar could easily displace half a million people, and they might mind. Meanwhile, on Monday, the governor of Dai Kundi asserted that a US airstrike killed 27 persons, mostly civilians. There is also the question, raised by Tom Englehardt, of whether the US is capable of good governance in Afghanistan when it is not in Washington, DC.
2. Can the demonstration of vitality and of a sense of progress mollify NATO publics long enough to fight a prolonged war and do intensive training of troops and police over several years?
No. Over the weekend, the center-right government of the Netherlands fell over whether to keep Dutch troops in Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war is universally unpopular in continental Europe, and governments have troops there mostly in the teeth of popular opposition, because NATO invoked article 5 of its charter, 'an attack on one is an attack on all' with regard to the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001, attacks. It may take months after the next elections this spring for the Dutch to form a new government, in part because of the surging popularity of the far-right populist anti-Muslim 'Freedom Party' of Islamophobe Geert Wilders-- a smelly party the others will probably not want in their coalition. Holland's 2000 troops are likely to be withdrawn by late summer. Canada's military is also departing Afghanistan. Are these one-off situations, or are they the beginning of a NATO withdrawal over-all, which will leave Obama in the lurch? Australia is already refusing to take up the Dutch slack, and its government is under public pressure to get out, itself. While it is entirely possible that scandal-plagued rightwing billionaire Silvio Berlusconi will survive the next elections in Italy, it is also possible that he will not, and his successor may well want out of the unpopular Afghanistan quagmire. Moreover, the Pashtun insurgents may smell blood in the water with the Dutch withdrawal from Uruzgan (the home province of Mullah Omar), and target the smaller NATO contingents (the deaths of 6 Italian troops last fall raised public ire against the war).
There are about 45,000 NATO and other allied troops in Afghanistan, and 74,000 American. Obama wanted to increase the European contingent by 10,000, but NATO generally declined that offer, and now the NATO contingent may begin to shrink just when more trainers in particular are desperatedly needed. The Afghanistan National Army is supposedly nearly 100,000 strong, but many critics say the true number is half that, and that even that half is mostly illiterate, poorly trained, and often suffers from uncertain loyalties, drug use, or other debilitating considerations.
3. Can an Afghan army be stood up in short order that has the capacity to patrol independently and keep order after the US and NATO troops withdraw?
Unlikely. The answer to the question about Afghan military preparedness-- after nearly a decade of training and an investment of $1 billion that Afghan troops are not ready for prime time. In the Marjah campaign, they showed no initiative, no ability to fight independently. They are poorly served by their junior field officers, and they are 90% illiterate. (The NYT reporter expected to see them with maps out planning approaches!) The ethnic make-up of the particular Afghanistan National Army units sent into Marjah is also not clear. Almost no ANA troops hail from Helmand Province, and Tajiks (native speakers of Dari Persian, often from towns and cities) are vastly over-represented in the army. There is often bad blood between Tajiks and Pashtuns, the group that predominates in Marjah. The same skill set of the ANA most prized by the US Marines during the assault-- the ability to sniff out which households are Taliban-- may be a liability in the holding and building phase, since it stems from a decade and a half of Tajik Northern Alliance battles against the Taliban.
4. Can the Afghan public, which includes many groups (Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks) deeply harmed by Taliban rule, accept reconciliation, as well?
Unlikely. Former Northern Alliance leader popular among Tajiks, Abdullah Abdullah, warned Karzai against reconciling with the Taliban this weekend. Abdullah dropped out of last fall's presidential contest in protest against alleged ballot fraud in Karzai's favor. There is general hostility toward reconciliation with the Taliban among the parties representing northern, non-Pashtun ethnic groups.
5. Can so much pressure be put on the Taliban that at least their middle and lower ranks will accept reconciliation with the Karzai government? So far, there is no sign that the Taliban leadership still at large is interested in negotiations. A Taliban spokesman replied to Afghan President Hamid Karzai's call for reconciliation with Kabul over the weekend with a resounding 'No!'. Qari Muhammad Yusuf Ahmadi told the Afghan Islamic Press in Pashto that the Taliban would cease fighting when there were not further foreign troops in his country. He said, according to the translation in The News:
"The entire world knows that foreign forces have invaded Afghanistan and occupied this country. They have also started the fighting. Taliban will neither lay down weapons nor will hold talks with Karzai administration even in the presence of a single foreign soldier in Afghanistan. . ."
"The ongoing war in Afghanistan is between Afghans and foreigners. The responsibility of the war lies on the foreigners and their slaves. They continue fighting in the populated areas and have sent 15000 troops to small area like Marja; and are killing civilians and trying to impose infidels on Afghans."
"Karzai himself has no power. The foreigners control everything and the nation is fighting against them."
Commenting on the deaths of 12 civilians in Marjah, Qari Muhammad said: "Karzai should have said who martyred the people. In fact neither Taliban kill the people and nor destroy their houses. These are foreigners who are bombing the houses and killing civilians everywhere as they have brought miseries to the people of Marja."
On the other hand, those members of the Taliban shadow government now in Pakistani custody may be less categorical. A third Taliban commander, Maulvi Kabir (the shadow governor of Nangarhar Province) has been captured by the Pakistani military, allegedly based on information provided by Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar. Baradar, the military chief of staff for the Old Taliban of Mullah Omar, was picked up recently in Karachi in a joint operation of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and US intelligence, which picked up signals from Baradar. Serious inroads are being made by these arrests into the Taliban 'shadow government' of officials who plan out roadside bombings and other attacks in specific provinces of Afghanistan while hiding out in Pakistan.
Pakistan's Prime Minister, Riza Yusuf Gilani, and the military chief of state, Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, appear to believe that capturing these high Afghan Taliban leaders will give Islamabad leverage in a negotiated settlement of the contest between the Karzai government and the Pashtun religious far right, which is in insurgency. Obama's Afghanistan escalation among the sullen Pashtuns is a desperate policy, as dangerous as attempting to build a series of sand castles on the beach at high tide. Ironically, his bigger success has come in Pakistan, where he appears to have convinced the Pakistani elite to intervene decisively against their own, Pakistani Taliban, and also now to begin arresting the Old Taliban shadow government that is hiding out on Pakistani soil. If he can go further and convince Islamabad that its support of the Afghan Taliban was all a long a key strategic error that has blown back on Pakistan proper, he will thereby come closer to victory than he could by any military measures inside Afghanistan itself. End/ (Not Continued)
Showing posts with label Tajiks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tajiks. Show all posts
Monday, February 22, 2010
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
Counterinsurgency is destined to fail in Afghanistan, just as it did in Vietnam
William R. Polk argues in the following article that US counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is failing - and will fail - just as it did in Vietnam and as it did when the Russians attempted it in Afghanistan back in the 1980s. Counterinsurgency doctrine says that a combination of military force and civil aid is necessary. Polk contends that you cannot lay the basis for providing civil aid until all groups in the society come to believe that the aid is not being used to consolidate a foreign military occupation and the continuation of associated corruption in the government and among warlords.
Polk's plan would start with the US giving a firm and comprehensive date for the withdrawal of US troops. This is a first step. He contends that, once this is accepted as authentic, civil aid will be welcome by "traditional [village] councils, who "will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed and decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier." The Taliban already have agreed, he says, to negotiate once foreign forces are withdrawn. Once aid is offered and being delivered, and with foreign troops leaving the country, it will be hard for the Taliban to continue their warfare, given the great needs of the people. Polk implies that this aid would go directly to villages rather than through a central government.
Polk's analysis squares with our own and maintains that the US-led war should come to an end. He does not address how the political system, particularly the central government, will be reconstituted. He does not address how a national army, if there is one, can be organized in a way that it is not dominated by the Tajiks. And he does not address how the warlords and their militias can be marginalized or phased out. But the implication of his article is that all of these challenges will more easily reconciled or overcome in the absence of the US-led military occupation.
Bob
----------------------------
Missteps on Afghanistan
By William R. Polk
http://www.hnn.us/articles/122319.html - History News Network
William R. Polk was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. During the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations, he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Among his books are Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran. He is now at work on a book to be entitled Afghanistan: Descent into Unending War. He is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation.
In his final report on January 6, 2009 to the Security Council, the senior UN representative to Afghanistan, Ambassador Kai Eide of Norway, highlighted two issues that will determine events far into the future. The first of these was development aid and the second is building a military capacity for the central government. He and others have argued that failure to accomplish one or both is likely to result in what General Stanley McChrystal called “mission failure.” Eide may be right, but history suggests that even more danger may result from success.
The Vietnam war tells us why. Then, as now, we engaged in the “civic action” programs Eide urges that we increase. Also then, as now, our adversaries regarded them as hostile moves. The Viet Minh deliberately destroyed not only the beneficial contributions – clinics, schools, bridges – but also targeted those Vietnamese and foreign aid workers who were trying to help the people. If proof were needed for the diabolical nature of the Communist guerrillas, this was surely it. At least that was what many of my government colleagues then thought. It is also what many people today think of the Taliban and their similar actions. What could have made them act in this way?
The obvious, but rarely mentioned, reason is that insurgents see civic action programs as a counterinsurgency tactic. In Vietnam they were designed to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese and so win them away from the insurgents. The insurgents regarded our civil aid as more dangerous to their cause than our bombs.
Ironically, they were partly wrong. Neither we nor the Viet Minh recognized a fatal side effect of our program: because the South Vietnamese government was hopelessly corrupt, any aid we turned over to officials was apt to be stolen or even sold to the Viet Minh. So we took on ourselves the task of delivering the aid direct to the villagers. Since our officials were honest, the program worked.
But, without realizing it, we sidelined the very government we were dedicated to supporting: by our intervention, we literally became the government of South Vietnam. Of course, we remained foreigners – indeed a study made during my time in government showed that many villagers thought we were a new batch of French colonialists, perhaps Foreign Legionnaires. But, since we were doing the “good things,” and the Saigon government continued to do the “bad things,” in part through our aid efforts, we further weakened its claim to legitimacy.
How does this experience in Vietnam relate to Afghanistan? Those who point out that there are major differences are right, but the general context, dealing with a hopelessly corrupt government, is what we now face. Few competent observers think we can reform that government. So, while we at least talk about trying, we effectively by-pass it just as we did in Vietnam. Consequently, while history does not exactly replay, knowing it can sometimes stimulate our thinking. What might Vietnam teach us to question Ambassador Eide’s recommendations that we increase our civic action program?
Like the Viet Minh, the Taliban understand the purpose of civic action. Simply put, it is a counterinsurgency weapon. Indeed, we told them it was. As General David Petraeus said, “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.” To implement this tactic, the U.S. Army published “the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System” (Handbook 09-27 April 2009) which tells officers how to use money and civic actions programs to defeat insurgents. This is the basis of a training program at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas.
Our civic action program not only was informed by the Vietnam War, but mirrors the large-scale program undertaken by the Russians in Afghanistan. (It is odd that in his manual on counterinsurgency, General Petraeus never mentions the Russian program. Did he or the actual authors of the manual not know of it? As the philosopher George Santayana warned, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that explains the manual.) During their occupation of Afghanistan, the Russians poured in hundreds of millions of dollar-equivalents to civic action. It did not win Afghan hearts and minds.
Will ours? After conducting some 400 interviews, Andrew Wilder of Tufts University concluded that “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.”
This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them.
But it is clear that the Afghans need help. Without aid from abroad, the future of the people of Afghanistan would be grim and the chances for the reforms we have set as our goal would be unlikely. So can civic action programs be configured in a way that would make them acceptable? I believe they can. This is how:
Once we set a firm and believable date for actual withdrawal, the psychology of the war will change. This was not, of course, accomplished by President Obama’s vague statement that the process will begin in July 2011, particularly after what he announced was further weakened by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s definition of “withdrawal” as amounting only to a “handful” of the occupation forces. To be effective the date must be firm and comprehensive -- and be believed. Then, particularly if they can at least partly be made multi- or inter-national, aid projects will gradually cease to be seen as “ammunition in this war.” At that point, the traditional councils (known in various parts of the country as jirgas, ulus and shuras) that exist in, and essentially govern, virtually every one of Afghanistan’s approximately 23,000 villages) will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed or decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier.
Hopefully, by that time, negotiations with the Taliban – which even President Hamid Karzai has called vital and which he promised in September 2009 he would launch -- will begin. On his side, the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Umar, has also agreed to negotiate once the foreign forces are withdrawn. He, too, should be driven by the announcement of a firm date. In December he even “signaled” that the Taliban would not allow aggressive action by al-Qaida on other states from Afghanistan. We have said, essentially, that we are not interested.
If we get interested and the war winds down, the Taliban will cease to oppose a redefined form of civic action. The Taliban will have to permit it because, if they continue in the new context of the winding down of the war to destroy what the villagers want, they will lose their most important asset, the support of the people. And without that support, as Mao Zedong memorably put it, they will become like fish stranded without supporting “water.”
So the setting the date of withdrawal is absolutely crucial. It must be the first step.
Now what about the call Ambassador Eide, almost everyone in the American and British governments, and our military leaders have sounded to create a much expanded security apparatus for the central government?
I do not believe this is in either ours or the Afghan national interest. Again, consider what history can teach us.
For many years before the Russian invasion in 1979, Soviet training missions worked with the almost entirely Pashtun Royal Afghan Army and took many officers and trainees to Russia for advanced instruction and indoctrination. By world standards, the army was not an impressive force, but it existed, had coherence and was disciplined. So when the Russians invaded and occupied the country, they and their puppet government “inherited” a standing army. To it, they added approximately 100,000 well-paid militiamen. These forces actually performed reasonably well for the Russians during at least the early part of their occupation. But they did not enable the Russians to “win.”
Contrast this with our current position: we have not inherited an existing army. The old royal army was compromised by its relationship with the Russians and virtually disappeared in the aftermath of their withdrawal in 1989. Thereafter, the resistance forces, particularly the “Northern Alliance,” the Tajik-based guerrillas who had operated from the Panjshir valley under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, and their Hazara and Uzbek rivals fought one another for dominance all over the country. They had nearly destroyed Afghanistan when the Taliban moved in and defeated them. Most of their leaders, the “warlords,” ran away. When the United States invaded in 2001, and defeated the Taliban, it began to rebuild the power of the warlords as the cheapest way to control the country. Helped by America, these warlords decimated what remained of the Taliban. Out of this turmoil, the local winners were mainly the Tajiks.
Today, Tajiks, who number about one in four Afghans (roughly half as many as the traditionally dominant Pashtuns), hold most of the key positions in the government, including intelligence and political police, and command seven in ten of the army’s battalions. Unwittingly, therefore, we may have laid the basis for a civil war. That is a long-term potential danger, but other aspects of what Ambassador Eide has recommended and General McChrystal intends to implement are more immediately worrying.
Because today’s soldiers are without a background of training and, according to NATO advisers, nine in ten are illiterate and three in ten are drug addicts, turning them into an army will justify – indeed require, as both the American and British military commanders agree – our forces to remain in Afghanistan for years, or more likely, decades. Such a program on such a timetable will not only convince the Afghans that we have become a colonial power but will also serve to convince the adherents to the party line of al-Qaida that Usama bin Ladin is right to target America and Britain.
The second effect is that emphasizing the army will inhibit the negotiating process that nearly everyone is beginning to see as the only hope of ending the war on acceptable terms.
The third result is that the army will become a major drain on the limited resources of the country. Pentagon planners are already calculating how soon we can off-load the costs onto the Afghans. Pursuit of this objective necessarily will clash with the plan we must also try to implement of making Afghanistan reasonably secure and reasonably prosperous. Today they can barely feed themselves: an estimated 42 percent live on the equivalent of about 7¢ a day. It will be decades, if ever, before they can shoulder the sort of war we want them to fight.
The fourth result is (mercifully perhaps) a future danger: it is that since balancing civil institutions are weak and will take years to become strong, a military force on the scale General McChrystal is beginning to build is likely to lead once again to a dictatorship of the kind that destroyed the earlier attempts in the 1920s and 1960s to build a reformist, modern state.
Thus, it seems to me that the message Ambassador Eide has delivered and which many of the new “experts” on Afghanistan also espouse would lead us in precisely the wrong direction – toward a period of greater threats of terrorism, further damage to our society, economy and legal system, and will result in virtually unending war.
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Polk's plan would start with the US giving a firm and comprehensive date for the withdrawal of US troops. This is a first step. He contends that, once this is accepted as authentic, civil aid will be welcome by "traditional [village] councils, who "will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed and decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier." The Taliban already have agreed, he says, to negotiate once foreign forces are withdrawn. Once aid is offered and being delivered, and with foreign troops leaving the country, it will be hard for the Taliban to continue their warfare, given the great needs of the people. Polk implies that this aid would go directly to villages rather than through a central government.
Polk's analysis squares with our own and maintains that the US-led war should come to an end. He does not address how the political system, particularly the central government, will be reconstituted. He does not address how a national army, if there is one, can be organized in a way that it is not dominated by the Tajiks. And he does not address how the warlords and their militias can be marginalized or phased out. But the implication of his article is that all of these challenges will more easily reconciled or overcome in the absence of the US-led military occupation.
Bob
----------------------------
Missteps on Afghanistan
By William R. Polk
http://www.hnn.us/articles/122319.html - History News Network
William R. Polk was Professor of History at the University of Chicago. During the Kennedy and part of the Johnson administrations, he was the member of the Policy Planning Council responsible for North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Among his books are Understanding Iraq, Violent Politics and Understanding Iran. He is now at work on a book to be entitled Afghanistan: Descent into Unending War. He is the senior director of the W.P. Carey Foundation.
In his final report on January 6, 2009 to the Security Council, the senior UN representative to Afghanistan, Ambassador Kai Eide of Norway, highlighted two issues that will determine events far into the future. The first of these was development aid and the second is building a military capacity for the central government. He and others have argued that failure to accomplish one or both is likely to result in what General Stanley McChrystal called “mission failure.” Eide may be right, but history suggests that even more danger may result from success.
The Vietnam war tells us why. Then, as now, we engaged in the “civic action” programs Eide urges that we increase. Also then, as now, our adversaries regarded them as hostile moves. The Viet Minh deliberately destroyed not only the beneficial contributions – clinics, schools, bridges – but also targeted those Vietnamese and foreign aid workers who were trying to help the people. If proof were needed for the diabolical nature of the Communist guerrillas, this was surely it. At least that was what many of my government colleagues then thought. It is also what many people today think of the Taliban and their similar actions. What could have made them act in this way?
The obvious, but rarely mentioned, reason is that insurgents see civic action programs as a counterinsurgency tactic. In Vietnam they were designed to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese and so win them away from the insurgents. The insurgents regarded our civil aid as more dangerous to their cause than our bombs.
Ironically, they were partly wrong. Neither we nor the Viet Minh recognized a fatal side effect of our program: because the South Vietnamese government was hopelessly corrupt, any aid we turned over to officials was apt to be stolen or even sold to the Viet Minh. So we took on ourselves the task of delivering the aid direct to the villagers. Since our officials were honest, the program worked.
But, without realizing it, we sidelined the very government we were dedicated to supporting: by our intervention, we literally became the government of South Vietnam. Of course, we remained foreigners – indeed a study made during my time in government showed that many villagers thought we were a new batch of French colonialists, perhaps Foreign Legionnaires. But, since we were doing the “good things,” and the Saigon government continued to do the “bad things,” in part through our aid efforts, we further weakened its claim to legitimacy.
How does this experience in Vietnam relate to Afghanistan? Those who point out that there are major differences are right, but the general context, dealing with a hopelessly corrupt government, is what we now face. Few competent observers think we can reform that government. So, while we at least talk about trying, we effectively by-pass it just as we did in Vietnam. Consequently, while history does not exactly replay, knowing it can sometimes stimulate our thinking. What might Vietnam teach us to question Ambassador Eide’s recommendations that we increase our civic action program?
Like the Viet Minh, the Taliban understand the purpose of civic action. Simply put, it is a counterinsurgency weapon. Indeed, we told them it was. As General David Petraeus said, “Money is my most important ammunition in this war.” To implement this tactic, the U.S. Army published “the Commander’s Guide to Money as a Weapons System” (Handbook 09-27 April 2009) which tells officers how to use money and civic actions programs to defeat insurgents. This is the basis of a training program at the Combined Arms Center at Leavenworth, Kansas.
Our civic action program not only was informed by the Vietnam War, but mirrors the large-scale program undertaken by the Russians in Afghanistan. (It is odd that in his manual on counterinsurgency, General Petraeus never mentions the Russian program. Did he or the actual authors of the manual not know of it? As the philosopher George Santayana warned, those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps that explains the manual.) During their occupation of Afghanistan, the Russians poured in hundreds of millions of dollar-equivalents to civic action. It did not win Afghan hearts and minds.
Will ours? After conducting some 400 interviews, Andrew Wilder of Tufts University concluded that “Afghan perceptions of aid and aid actors are overwhelmingly negative.”
This background and these findings explain, I think, both why the Taliban blows up the facilities we build and why the general population allows them to do so: what we see as generous help to needy people, they see as part of a campaign by foreigners to subdue them.
But it is clear that the Afghans need help. Without aid from abroad, the future of the people of Afghanistan would be grim and the chances for the reforms we have set as our goal would be unlikely. So can civic action programs be configured in a way that would make them acceptable? I believe they can. This is how:
Once we set a firm and believable date for actual withdrawal, the psychology of the war will change. This was not, of course, accomplished by President Obama’s vague statement that the process will begin in July 2011, particularly after what he announced was further weakened by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’s definition of “withdrawal” as amounting only to a “handful” of the occupation forces. To be effective the date must be firm and comprehensive -- and be believed. Then, particularly if they can at least partly be made multi- or inter-national, aid projects will gradually cease to be seen as “ammunition in this war.” At that point, the traditional councils (known in various parts of the country as jirgas, ulus and shuras) that exist in, and essentially govern, virtually every one of Afghanistan’s approximately 23,000 villages) will begin to seek those things that will heal their sick, feed their hungry, repair their destroyed or decayed infrastructure and generally make their lives easier.
Hopefully, by that time, negotiations with the Taliban – which even President Hamid Karzai has called vital and which he promised in September 2009 he would launch -- will begin. On his side, the Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Umar, has also agreed to negotiate once the foreign forces are withdrawn. He, too, should be driven by the announcement of a firm date. In December he even “signaled” that the Taliban would not allow aggressive action by al-Qaida on other states from Afghanistan. We have said, essentially, that we are not interested.
If we get interested and the war winds down, the Taliban will cease to oppose a redefined form of civic action. The Taliban will have to permit it because, if they continue in the new context of the winding down of the war to destroy what the villagers want, they will lose their most important asset, the support of the people. And without that support, as Mao Zedong memorably put it, they will become like fish stranded without supporting “water.”
So the setting the date of withdrawal is absolutely crucial. It must be the first step.
Now what about the call Ambassador Eide, almost everyone in the American and British governments, and our military leaders have sounded to create a much expanded security apparatus for the central government?
I do not believe this is in either ours or the Afghan national interest. Again, consider what history can teach us.
For many years before the Russian invasion in 1979, Soviet training missions worked with the almost entirely Pashtun Royal Afghan Army and took many officers and trainees to Russia for advanced instruction and indoctrination. By world standards, the army was not an impressive force, but it existed, had coherence and was disciplined. So when the Russians invaded and occupied the country, they and their puppet government “inherited” a standing army. To it, they added approximately 100,000 well-paid militiamen. These forces actually performed reasonably well for the Russians during at least the early part of their occupation. But they did not enable the Russians to “win.”
Contrast this with our current position: we have not inherited an existing army. The old royal army was compromised by its relationship with the Russians and virtually disappeared in the aftermath of their withdrawal in 1989. Thereafter, the resistance forces, particularly the “Northern Alliance,” the Tajik-based guerrillas who had operated from the Panjshir valley under the leadership of Ahmad Shah Massoud, and their Hazara and Uzbek rivals fought one another for dominance all over the country. They had nearly destroyed Afghanistan when the Taliban moved in and defeated them. Most of their leaders, the “warlords,” ran away. When the United States invaded in 2001, and defeated the Taliban, it began to rebuild the power of the warlords as the cheapest way to control the country. Helped by America, these warlords decimated what remained of the Taliban. Out of this turmoil, the local winners were mainly the Tajiks.
Today, Tajiks, who number about one in four Afghans (roughly half as many as the traditionally dominant Pashtuns), hold most of the key positions in the government, including intelligence and political police, and command seven in ten of the army’s battalions. Unwittingly, therefore, we may have laid the basis for a civil war. That is a long-term potential danger, but other aspects of what Ambassador Eide has recommended and General McChrystal intends to implement are more immediately worrying.
Because today’s soldiers are without a background of training and, according to NATO advisers, nine in ten are illiterate and three in ten are drug addicts, turning them into an army will justify – indeed require, as both the American and British military commanders agree – our forces to remain in Afghanistan for years, or more likely, decades. Such a program on such a timetable will not only convince the Afghans that we have become a colonial power but will also serve to convince the adherents to the party line of al-Qaida that Usama bin Ladin is right to target America and Britain.
The second effect is that emphasizing the army will inhibit the negotiating process that nearly everyone is beginning to see as the only hope of ending the war on acceptable terms.
The third result is that the army will become a major drain on the limited resources of the country. Pentagon planners are already calculating how soon we can off-load the costs onto the Afghans. Pursuit of this objective necessarily will clash with the plan we must also try to implement of making Afghanistan reasonably secure and reasonably prosperous. Today they can barely feed themselves: an estimated 42 percent live on the equivalent of about 7¢ a day. It will be decades, if ever, before they can shoulder the sort of war we want them to fight.
The fourth result is (mercifully perhaps) a future danger: it is that since balancing civil institutions are weak and will take years to become strong, a military force on the scale General McChrystal is beginning to build is likely to lead once again to a dictatorship of the kind that destroyed the earlier attempts in the 1920s and 1960s to build a reformist, modern state.
Thus, it seems to me that the message Ambassador Eide has delivered and which many of the new “experts” on Afghanistan also espouse would lead us in precisely the wrong direction – toward a period of greater threats of terrorism, further damage to our society, economy and legal system, and will result in virtually unending war.
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