Right, so yet another "study" has just been issued, to the effect that Afghanistan in in imminent danger of collapse, becoming yet another failed State and of resuming its role as a haven and training ground for militant organizations hostile to the United States. The reason, of course, is our current committment to Iraq.
Oh, God, here we go again . . .
I have great respect for the service rendered to this country by the authors of this latest report, a retired Marine General and a career diplomat. That being said, however, this seems to be just another in a long series of predictions insisting on imminent doom . . . and it is wrong.
Let's leave aside that this study, like the reports which preceded it, don't match what either the Theatre commanders in Afganistan or the troops deployed there are reporting. It does, however, dovetail rather nicely with what much of the press chooses to report, and with the politically-driven agendas of some who are seeking higher office.
Now, does that necessarily mean that the study itself was politically-driven? Well, to a certain extent, yes, but I don't think that was the primary intent of its authors. I really don't have any reason to doubt the sincerity of their views, but I do question some of the basic assumptions made by them. But more on that in a moment.
We all have to understand, first of all, that there is a competition for military resources between Afghanistan and Iraq. This is dictated by the current size of the force, and so is a direct result of all the strategic decisions we have made since at least the end of Gulf War I in 1991. In other words, since the current force is less than half the size it was then, this shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It isn't that our level of committments has changed, only that our ability to meet those committments has changed.
Let's put it this way. Back in the 1980s, the age of the dinosaurs when I served, the strategic policy was that the United States have the capability to fight "two and a half" wars - that is, a major war in Europe, a major war in Korea, and a regional conflict somewhere else. By the early 1990s, that concept had changed to the "war and a half" concept, in which the United States should maintain the capbility to fight both a major war and a regional war at the same time. After the first Gulf War, that strategic policy changed yet again, into the so-called "win-hold-win" senario, in which the United States would maintain forces sufficient to first win a major war while holding on in a regional conflict until forces could be redirected from the successful conclusion of the major conflict to secure victory in the regional conflict. Finally, we have arrived at the current situation, in which the force is sufficient to conduct a single regional conflict at a time, with the possibility of having to concurrently fight a "major" war abandoned altogether.
The thread that binds all of these strategic shifts together is the decision we made, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the old Soviet Union, to reduce the size of the standing military. The so-called "peace dividend," the result of the dangerous delusion that the world absent the Cold War was a much safer place and therefore a large military establishment wasn't necessary, with the money freed up by having a smaller force better spent elsewhere.
So the military got smaller. Then along came Bosnia, and the military kept getting smaller. Then came Kosovo, and the military continued to get smaller. At the same time, the comittment remained to enforce the provisions of the post-Gulf War I cease fire, and the "No-Fly Zones" to protect the Iraqi Kurds, among others, and the military continued to get smaller. We continued to maintain our security committments in such places as Europe and Korea, and then Haiti and Somalia reared their ugly heads, and . . . the force continued to get smaller. Then came the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan . . .
We're spread thin, no question about it. And with the current size of the force, that's not going to get better any time soon, especially if places like Iran and North Korea continue to develop into problems that require our attention. Yet we have no one but ourselves to blame, because we wanted to remain a world power while we also wanted to shirk the responsibilities that go with maintaining that status.
Yet that is just one problem we have with Afghanistan, a relatively minor problem and one we could correct any time we choose to do so. That isn't the real issue here. What is are the people we are in Afghanistan with, the nature of that country and of the region, and there is very little we can do about that.
Winston Churchill is reputed to have once said that "The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them." Perhaps, but in the case of Afghanistan, we might very well be better off with a few less allies. Which, of course, would mean that we would have to step up and increase the size of our own military, but you can't have it both ways.
Understand that the U.S. forces deployed to Afghanistan are only one component of a larger NATO force. Remember that not only do we have forces deployed in the country, but so do the Canadians, the British, the French, the Germans and the Italians, among others. But of all the NATO countries with troops in the theatre, only the British and the Canadians are committed to the same level of military engagement as the United States. The ROEs - the rules of engagement - for the other NATO forces are so restrictive that those forces might as well not be there. One can not escape the conclusion that the other NATO contributors are more interested in not getting their troops into dangerous situations than they are in stabilizing Afghanistan. The problem is, war by its very nature is a dangerous business in which people get hurt, and Afghanistan can not be stabilized until both the Taliban and the organizations like Al Qaida, which support them, are beaten.
That is one major problem with Afghanistan. It is also one that is not going to change as long as the bulk of our NATO partners there continue to maintain a policy of "engaged non-engagement." In other words, you can't fight a war by not fighting it.
Another problem is the region itself. Pakistan, for example, despite claims of being an ally, is in fact doing very little to ameliorate the situation. A major thing to remember is that the Pakistani ISI, their intelligence service, created the Taliban in the first place, and that there are many officers both in the ISI and the Pakistani military who ae sympathetic to them. The fact that the Pakistani military is either unable or unwilling to control the border region, combined with the tribal loyalties and sympathies in that area to the Taliban and organizations like Al Qaida, pretty much guarantee that the region will remain unstable. Because of these facts, and because we are prohibited from pursuing Taliban and Al Qaida forces into the area, a safe haven has been created along the Afghani-Pakistani border. As long as that safe haven exists, both the Taliban and Al Qaida are given the benefit of a secure area in which they can rest, recuperate, train and choose to attack when and where they please. For as long as that situation is allowed to continue, we are repeating history: we allowed the same thing in Vietnam with North Vietnam and Cambodia. It didn't work then, and it's not going to work now, either.
Finally, there is Afghanisan itself. Despite what we may wish, it is never going to be a nation-state on the Western model, with a strong central government. It has, in fact, never been that way. It would be nice if the world did, indeed, work in the way we wished it to, but the reality is that it doesn't, nor does it particularly wish to. So, we must dispense with the notion that Afghanistan is ever going to be a nation-state as we conceive of that idea.
The truth of the matter is that Afghanistan is, like many such places on our unhappy globe, a tribal society. Primary loyalties are not, and never have been, given over to such distant concepts as a central government, or even to the nation, as we understand it. Rather, they are given over to immediate clan and regional tribe. Those are more immediate and tangible than a "national government," and have more of an immediate impact on the lives of the people. Because of this, Afghanistan has always been nothing more than a loose confederation of provinces, with a relatively weak central government and the real power concentrated in the hands of the provincial leaders.
Cooperation between those provincial leaders, and between them and the central government, is only going to last for so long as they can be convinced that is in their best interests. Therein lies the trick; if we wish to be successful, if we wish to "stabilize" the country and prevent a return of the Taliban, we must convince those provincial leaders that cooperation among themselves and with the government in Kabul is the key both to their success and their continuation in power. Remember, the Taliban didn't maintain control because it was loved by the people. It maintained control because it set itself up as the most powerful of the "warlords" and by convincing the provincial leaders that cooperation and subservience to them was the route to maintaining their own power. If we can not do that, then Afghanistan will, indeed, slide back into being a "failed State" and the ugliness that existed under the Taliban.
That is what the authors of this most recent study, and what most of us in this country, fail to understand. Nations, like people, are prisoners of their own histories. They do the things they do because that is what the world has taught them works. Inside every Afghan, for example, there is not an American just waiting to get out. They have no concept of or practice at liberal, Western-style government, nor is that something particularly applicable to their lives. We, as a people and a society, are the product of what we have been doing since 1776, and the traditions behind our practices reach even farther back, past Magna Carta to Classical Greece. The traditions and practices that underpin Afghan society reach back just as far, if not farther, and spring from much different roots.
If we want to be successful in Afghanistan, we can not try to force them into being mirror-images of ourselves. They will reject that out-of-hand. What we must do is understand those forces that have shaped Afghan society and make it what it is, and work within those parameters to achieve our goals. Otherwise, we will, indeed, fail.
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