More Change We Can Believe In

The President addressed the nation this evening, unveiling his new "plan" for prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. I didn't bother to watch, because I already knew what he was going to say, which was, basically, nothing. Just another case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And when I went and checked on what the President had to say, my heart kind of sank, even though it shouldn't have, as I knew better.

First of all, an additional thirty thousand troops is not going to significantly impact events on the ground in Afghanistan. Look, that sounds like a big number, but it is also a deceiving one. The question that should really be asked is just how many of those troops are going to be trigger-pullers? Given the typical tooth-to-tail ratio in the U.S. military - that is, the actual number of soldiers who do the fighting versus the number of soldiers who support the shooters - I'm betting that of that thirty thousand, less than five thousand will actually be putting steel on target.

If you think of Afghanistan as a house on fire, then sending in thirty thousand troops is a lot like trying to fight that fire with a garden hose. Minimal as it may be, those troops will have an impact at the tactical level, but none at all on the strategic level, and that is what we should be concerned with. It takes an enormous effort to project a force that far, and into a place as primitive as Afghanistan; for every shooter we send in, there are another three or four soldiers that have to follow him in order to provide logistical support. After all, a soldier on the sharp end is kind of useless if he doesn't have the "beans, bullets and bandages" to do his job.

To a large extent, the problems of Afghanistan don't exist within that country, but are a product of people and forces outside of the country. Iran, for example, is an irritant, but a minor one in the grand scheme of things. Yes, to make us uncomfortable, they will continue to ship weapons and "trainers" into Afghanistan, but Teheran lacks both the traction and the audience to ever be anything more than a bit player. Pakistan, on the other hand, is a different story entirely.

If we were capable of thinking in anything other than sound bites and could remember our history, we would recall that the Taliban, as an organized political force, was largely a creation of the Pakistani ISI - their military intelligence service - following the Soviet withdrawal in 1988. Pakistan had always had an interest in controlling events within Afghanistan; considering their "real" enemy to be India, they have always wanted a "stable" government in Kabul - or, at least, as stable as any Afghan government can be, but more on that in a bit - and one that they could control. And make no mistake about this, the Pakistani ISI bankrolled the Taliban, and to an extent far larger than anyone wants to admit, still does. Always remember the basic fact that he who controls the purse strings controls everything.

The real area of concern in the region is the so-called "tribal" areas that span the Afghan-Pakistan border. The various tribes that inhabit that zone are, for all intents and purposes, autonomous from any central authority. The central government is largely irrelevant to them, and within their respective tribal zones, they police and regulate themselves. That area has long been known to be a breeding ground of fundamentalism, and a major problem has been that the Pashtun tribe - the majority tribe within Afghanistan and the tribe from which the Taliban sprung - crosses over into Pakistan.

We've known since the beginning of our war in Afghanistan that the Afghan-Pakistan border has been exceedingly porous, and that the tribal lands on the Pakistani side of the border have functioned in the same manner as Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War, a safe haven in which the Taliban can regroup, train and resupply. Aside from maintaining a loose watch over the border from a handful of isolated garrisons, Pakistani authorities don't even try to enter the tribal zones, much less administer them. Itself a fairly radicalized institution, the only agency that does, in fact, have any traction in that area is, unsurprisingly, the ISI.

The moral of this lesson is that if you truly want to "stabilize" the situation inside Afghanistan - which is something of an impossible task to begin with, but we'll get to that - then you must first have the ability to seal off the border with Pakistan, cutting off the hostile forces from their safe havens on the other side of that line. Just given the terrain in that region, thirty thousand troops aren't going to be enough to do that. Look at it this way: one hundred and fifty thousand troops in Iraq weren't enough to seal that country's borders and prevent the flow of fighters from Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other countries and, by comparison, Iraq is a sandbox with infrastructure. All-weather paved roads, electricity and basic utilities are all few and far between inside Afghanistan.

Second of all, the President's so-called "new strategy" depends, in his own words, on "cooperating with those institutions in Afghanistan that are fighting corruption" and strengthening the central government in Kabul, as well as the government's security forces. In other words, we are to continue engaging in efforts directed towards "nation building."

There are, unfortunately, a couple of problems with that goal. The first being that, aside from Germany and Japan following the Second World War, there has never been a successful case of "nation building." Further, one could argue that we only succeeded with Germany and Japan because we first basically reduced those countries to rubble and eliminated their ability to resist us. Folks, those two countries were at our whim after 1945, and we occupied them for almost sixty years. In other words, they had no choice but to act as we dictated. That is hardly the case with Afghanistan.

Now, fighting corruption is a noble idea, but one that is ultimately doomed to failure and which betrays our fundamental misunderstanding of the culture in that region of the world. Indeed, in many areas of our unhappy globe. In what we like to call the industrialized, or First, world, corruption is a phenomenon in which someone decides to play the system in order for personal gain. In the way in which our institutions are set up, corruption is the exception and not the rule. But because we are raised in a society where we view that phenomenon as an aberration, we tend to believe that everyone, everywhere, holds that same view. And they do not.

Afghanistan, Pakistan and much of sub-Saharan Africa are tribal societies, where an individual's primary loyalty are toward clan and tribe, and not to something as vague and distant as nation and government. Corruption is endemic to those societies precisely because of their tribal nature. Poitical power and jobs are not meted out due to ability, but rather due to who is related to who. At one point or another, every society that has ever existed has operated on that basis and, while some have "evolved" to a point where that kind of activity is frowned upon, most have not. Corruption, as we term it, in a tribalized society is a cultural phenomenon, not a political or legal one. Rather than compete with someone outside of the tribe for a job based on merit or ability, it is far easier - and certainly more profitable for the tribe - to keep such things "in the family" as it were, especially if there are few jobs to begin with. Furthermore, in a society where opportunities are limited to begin with, it is also far easier to pick up a gun and protect what the tribe already has than it is to go and dig ditches for a living. And in a society where the warrior figure is venerated as an ideal, such as in Afghanistan, it is also certainly more prestigious than digging a ditch.

Nation building, as a concept, is further doomed in a place like Afghanistan because there is really nothing there on which to base those efforts. The very concept of a "Nation-State," as we understand the concept, is very much a product of liberal Western thought dating back to Classical Greece. In much of the world, what we call "nations" are really nothing more than the product of a few European colonial powers arbitrarily drawing lines on a map. In much of sub-Saharan Africa and southwest Asia, "nations" are really nothing more than collections of tribes who shouldn't be living together and who have no real interest in doing so. The former nation of Yugoslavia is a great example of that. As long as the strong man lived and was in charge, so did the pantomine of a functioning state. But as soon as Tito was gone, that state fractured along its ethnic - or tribal, if you prefer - lines and descended into blood conflicts. That same phenomenon is always present in African countries that periodically convulse in an orgy of genocide; those countries always fracture along tribal lines.

Afghanistan has never existed as a nation, at least as we understand that term. There has never been a strong, central government that exercised sovereignty over the country, even when there was a king who sat on a throne in Kabul. The closest Afghanistan ever came to being a nation as we understand it was when the Communists were in control, and we all know how that one turned out. The brutal truth of the matter is that Afghanistan has always consisted of a relatively weak central government in Kabul, who's control was pretty much limited to that city and the areas immediately surrounding it. The real political power in Afghanistan has always been wielded by the tribal leaders controlling the provinces, and "national" government was always characterized by the weak central government bribing the Provincial leaders when they could, and by playing them off against each other when necessary. It has been that way since before Ghengis Khan and the Golden Horde overran Afghanistan, and even the Mongols didn't try to bring the Provincial Warlords under control. And it isn't like the Great Khan is exactly known for his gentle diplomacy.

Finally, the President promised in his speech that we would begin withdrawing from Afghanistan by the summer of 2011. The problem with that is by doing so, he told the Taliban that all they have to do is hang on for eighteen more months, and then they'll win. Again, we betray our fundamental misunderstanding of why things are happening over there. The Taliban is very much a product of Pashtun society and, for as long as the Pashtuns exist, there will always be a constituency for them. The Taliban was a cultural phenomenon among that tribe long before the Pakistani ISI turned it into a political force, and it is the height of folly to believe that can be changed. Victory, such as it is, will never be defined in terms of defeating the Taliban and eliminating them as a force within Pashtun or Afghan society. Unless you are prepared to eliminate the Pashtun entirely, that is an impossibility. Rather, victory will be defined by somehow convincing the Pashtun themselves to marginalize the Taliban as a cultural, religious and political force, and that, too, may prove to be an impossibility. Success then lies in convincing the various tribes in Afghanistan to cooperate with each other, which inevitably leads us back to the model of patronage, bribes and, yes, coercion in getting the provincial leaders to cooperate with whoever controls Kabul.

The real problem with our approach to Afghanistan - and any other global "hot spot" you care to mention - is that there aren't any real strategists left in Washington, and probably haven't been any there since George Kennan sent his long telegram. Nobody in Washington seems able to think beyond the next election cycle, and make no mistake about this. Even though he used the word tonight, the President wasn't talking about strategy, or even the Operational art; he was talking about a tactical response to a strategic problem. Strategy involves thinking about the second, third and fourth-order effects of the things you do, and beyond. Yet the people involved in developing our so-called strategies seem to give up after considering the second-order effects in passing. To be brutally honest, the President's "strategy" in Afghanistan is not only going to fail, it is going to fail dismally. And, for so long as we continue to focus on tactical responses and call that strategy, anything we try to do is going to fail.