Losing Afghanistan?

[Sigaba]

This week's issue of The Economist leads with three stories on the war in Afghanistan. The first is below. The source is here. The second article presents an over view. It is lengthy and available here. The third article focuses on American public opinion and is available here. The newspaper's digital archive of articles on Afghanistan is available here.

The war in Afghanistan

Losing Afghanistan?
Aug 20th 2009
From The Economist print edition

To stop the country sliding out of control, the West needs more men and a better strategy

THIS is the just war, the “war of necessity”, as Barack Obama likes to put it, in contrast to the bad war, the war of misguided choices in Iraq. But as a deeply flawed election went ahead in Afghanistan this week, there were echoes, in the mission by America and its allies, of the darkest days of the Iraq campaign: muddled aims, mounting casualties and the gnawing fear of strategic defeat. Gloomy commentators evoke the spectre of the humiliations inflicted by Afghanistan on Britain in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th.

Americans, relieved to be getting out of Iraq, and caught up in a national row about health care, are paying little attention to the place. But if things there continue to slide, Afghanistan could turn out to be the biggest blot on the Obama presidency.

Why the West is there

The war is going badly. Much of the south of the country is out of government control. A scattered, disparate insurgency has gained strength and risks turning into a widespread insurrection against Western forces and the elected government they are backing (see article). In Britain, a sceptical public wonders what its soldiers are dying for. And as the costs and casualties continue to mount, Americans too will ask that question increasingly loudly (see article).

Western governments use a lazy shorthand to justify this war. Its purpose, they say, is to deny terrorists the base and haven that Afghanistan under the Taliban provided to al-Qaeda. But al-Qaeda’s surviving leaders are reckoned to have decamped across the border to the tribal areas of Pakistan, where Western forces do not tread. The other reasons that Western governments keep their soldiers in Afghanistan are harder to sell to voters: first, because a precipitate departure would damage the West’s global clout, and, second, to stop the country becoming the theatre for a war which could destabilise Pakistan and draw in other powers, such as Iran, India and Russia.

As the West struggles to maintain its weak hold on Afghanistan, so its ambitions there are narrowing. Early aspirations to bring peace, prosperity and decent government to the country have been replaced by the hope of establishing a functioning state and of improving security. By that measure, success in the short term will look much like stalemate. But the chance of achieving even these modest aims is being jeopardised by too few troops and a flawed strategy.

The shortage of soldiers has hampered the generals’ ability to hold territory and forced them to use air power to make up for the lack of numbers. The civilian casualties that are the inevitable consequence of conducting a war from the air are, in turn, damaging the war effort. The generals need more troops both to regain territory from the Taliban and to fight the war in a way that does not breed hostility to the West.

Yet swamping Afghanistan with foreign soldiers will never bring outright military victory. The surge that helped secure Baghdad was carried out in a smallish, densely populated area. Such tactics cannot be contemplated in a country as mountainous and rural as Afghanistan. If the West is to stop the place slipping further out of control, it needs not just to direct more resources to the place, but also to use them better. That means different approaches to three elements: the opposition, the government and aid.

The opposition, casually described as “the Taliban”, is far from a unified force in a country of great ethnic complexity. It includes not just religious zealots but all manner of tribal warlords and local strongmen. Many have alarming ideas and repellent social attitudes. But if Afghanistan is to be stabilised, the West will have to hold its nose and encourage its allies in government to do deals with them.

On the campaign trail, President Hamid Karzai has appealed to his enemies to make peace. But his government—inept, corrupt and predatory—does not look like a trustworthy partner. In parts of Afghanistan where insurgents have been driven out and the writ of the government has been restored, residents have sometimes hankered for the warlords, who were less venal and less brutal than Mr Karzai’s lot.

Cleaning up government is not just an end in itself but also a means to building a functioning state, for Afghans will not support an administration as corrupt as the current one. The West should therefore use its leverage over the government to insist that the next cabinet is dominated by competent technocrats, rather than thugs owed a favour.

How to spend it

The West is spending a fortune in aid to Afghanistan. As the new head of Britain’s army recently pointed out, it is likely to have to go on supporting the country for decades. Yet the roads that are foreign development’s proudest boasts also serve to meet the insurgents’ and drug-dealers’ logistical needs.

That is inevitable: infrastructure serves the wicked as well as the righteous. But the West has not spent its money as well as it could have. By giving too many contracts to foreigners, it has created grudges instead of buying goodwill. To most Afghan eyes, watching heavily guarded foreign aid-workers glide by in their Landcruisers, it is obvious that much of the money is going straight back out of the country. To a degree, this is forgivable: in such a poor country it is difficult to build the capacity to manage huge volumes of aid, and channelling more of the cash through the government may mean that more of it gets stolen. But that is a risk that needs to be taken to build support for the West and the government.

Taking even the rosiest view, the war in Afghanistan is likely to get more expensive, and worse, before it gets better. The mini-surge this year to enable the election to take place in most of the country will probably be followed by another to try to contain the growing insurgency. For the moment, Mr Obama is better off than George Bush was when Iraq went bad, because he enjoys broad political and popular support for this commitment. But as casualties mount, political pressure in America to announce a timetable for military withdrawal will intensify. To resist it, Mr Obama will need more men, a better strategy and a great deal of luck.

[The Reaper]

I do not think that the author has a good understanding of COIN, or Afghanistan.

TR

[Richard]

These guys seem pretty informed about the situation.

Thomas H. Johnson is a research professor at the Department of National Security Affairs and director of the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. M. Chris Mason is a retired foreign service officer who served in 2005 as a political officer on the provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan's Paktika Province. He's currently a senior fellow at the Program for Culture and Conflict Studies and at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington.

Richard's $.02

Democracy In Afghanistan Is Wishful Thinking
Johnson and Mason, CSMonitor, 20 Aug 2009

As the world watches today's presidential election in Afghanistan, Americans would do well to ponder the lessons of Vietnam.

The similarities are striking. The Republic of South Vietnam also held elections during the US intervention there, despite an ongoing counterinsurgency. Before American troops got involved, both countries had won upset victories over European powers after a decade of fighting, only to slide into another decade of largely north-south civil war.

As historian Eric Bergerud has noted, the United States lost in Vietnam ultimately not because of its deeply flawed approach to counterinsurgency, as damaging as that was, but because South Vietnam never established a government seen as legitimate by a majority of its people. Experts agree that a government that 85 to 90 percent of the population perceives as legitimate is the sine qua non of counterinsurgency success. South Vietnam never came close to achieving such legitimacy, and neither, unfortunately, has post-2001 Afghanistan. In terms of incompetence and endemic corruption, Kabul is Saigon déjà vu.

That's why we shouldn't read too much into today's election. Even if it were to yield a high voter turnout, have relatively few irregularities, and produce a strong majority for the winner, it won't give the new government legitimacy.

The father of modern sociology, Max Weber, pointed out that governments draw their legitimacy from three basic sources: traditional, religious, and legal. The first two are self-explanatory; by "legal," Weber meant Western-style democracies based on popular representation and the rule of law. And in this sense, political failure in Afghanistan was baked into the cake in the 2001 Bonn Process.

In its rush to stand up an overnight democratic success story, the Bush administration overlooked Afghan history. Indeed, it was willfully ahistorical. That's tragic, because Afghan history demonstrates conclusively and beyond dispute that legitimacy of governance there is derived exclusively from Weber's first two sources: traditional (in the form of the monarchy and tribal patriarchies) and religious. Either there has been a king, or religious leadership, or a leader validated by the caliphate (or afterwards by indigenous religious polities).

Often in Afghan history, legitimacy thus derived has been reinforced by other means, usually coercive and often brutal. For example, the rule of Amir Abdur Rahman, "The Iron Amir," (1880-1901) and that of the Taliban (1996-2001) were predicated on accepted sources of legitimacy of governance (dynastic and religious, respectively), but reinforced by totalitarian methods. These two examples make the point that legitimacy should not be conflated with popularity: having the authority to rule is quite distinct from being a popular ruler. American presidents, for example, are always legitimate leaders but not always popular ones.

This historical reality poses a major problem for the US. Democracy is not a coat of paint. A feudal society in which women are still largely treated as property and literacy hovers below 10 percent in rural areas does not magically shortcut 400 years of political development and morph into a democracy in a decade. The current government of Afghanistan's claim to legitimacy is based entirely on a legal source – winning an election. Yet this has no historical basis for legitimizing Afghan rule. The winner of today's election will largely be seen as illegitimate because he is elected.

The tragic mistake, which we warned against, was in eliminating the Afghan monarchy from a ceremonial role in the new Afghan Constitution. Nearly two thirds of the delegates to the loya jirga in 2002 signed a petition to make the aging King Zaher Shah the interim head of state, and only massive US interference behind the scenes in the form of bribes, secret deals, and arm twisting got the US-backed candidate for the job, Hamid Karzai, installed instead.

The same US and UN policymakers then rode shotgun over a constitutional process that eliminated the monarchy entirely. This was the Afghan equivalent of the 1964 Diem Coup in Vietnam: afterward, there was no possibility of creating a stable secular government. While an Afghan king could have conferred legitimacy on an elected leader in Afghanistan, without one, an elected president is on a one-legged stool.

An American cannot declare himself king and be seen as legitimate: monarchy is not a source of legitimacy of governance in America. Similarly, a man cannot be voted president in Afghanistan and be perceived as legitimate. Systems of government normally grow from existing traditions, as they did in the US after the Revolutionary War, for example. In Afghanistan, they were imposed externally. Representative democracy is simply not a source of legitimacy in Afghanistan at this point in its development. This explains in no small measure why a religious source of legitimacy in the form of the hated Taliban is making such a powerful comeback.

As was the case in Vietnam after the Diem Coup, there is little likelihood today of establishing a strong central government in Kabul which is genuinely seen as legitimate in the eyes of the Afghan people and which has significant public support across the country's ethno-sectarian divides. As a revision of the Afghan Constitution to restore a ceremonial monarchy is now highly unlikely, the only remaining option is to move away from counterproductive efforts to "extend the reach of the central government," which further undermine traditional sources of local legitimacy and resistance to the Taliban, and work instead to re-empower legitimate local authorities in a more decentralized state.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0820/p09s01-coop.html

[nmap]

I wonder - is the problem COIN (about which I know absolutely nothing), or something else?

The West is spending a fortune in aid to Afghanistan.

White House to Boost 10-Year Deficit Forecast to $9 Trillion .

Long-term projections for Social Security

I suspect that we simply will not allocate sufficient money over enough time to win the war.

[Richard]

I suspect that we simply will not allocate sufficient money over enough time to win the war.

Takes a lot more than $$ to win a war - and especially a conflict like this one in a region as complicated as this one.

Richard's $.02

[alfromcolorado]

Originally Posted by Richard

Takes a lot more than $$ to win a war - and especially a conflict like this one in a region as complicated as this one.

Richard's $.02

There you go complicating things...

[nmap]

Originally Posted by Richard

Takes a lot more than $$ to win a war - and especially a conflict like this one in a region as complicated as this one.

I have no doubt of that.

But my thinking is based on VP Cheney's observation that the war against terrorism was a generational war. And, too, in the discussions I see a timeframe of 10-20 years of consistent effort seems to be accepted as a requirement for some form of winning. Truly changing behaviors and attitudes such that the Taliban couldn't come back seems likely to take a decade at least.

So...is "nation building", and by implication extensive aid, both military and economic, a requirement for victory? I don't know, of course, buy my guess is that some would be necessary. And, too, there is the cost of maintaining a presence at that difference; its my understanding that logistics is an important issue in any operation.

Putting that together, it seems as if the U.S. economy could be an important (but, of course, not the only) factor. Sending aid abroad when domestic needs are unmet seems likely to annoy the voters. From this comes my view that economics may add pressure on the U.S. to abandon the effort, or to reduce the effort such that it cannot succeed.

However, I tend to look through the money lens too much, so I may be blind to important issues. Perhaps someone can provide additional light?