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| All for naught? (Kandahar Province, 2011) |
Mission Accomplished in Afghanistan? (Published at the Washington Times)
“It is really too bad,” says General
Elphinstone as Britain’s short-lived Status of Forces Agreement for Afghanistan
descends quickly into “ice and blood and groans and death and despair” in
George MacDonald Fraser’s historical fiction novel on the 1842 massacre at Gandamack. Anthony Cordesman could not have said it better
himself, judging by his December CSIS report
that spared no military kiss-up or diplomatic busybody. With the US troop
levels past their peak, and with post-2014 status of forces agreement (SOFA)
talks flirting with the so-called “zero-option,” what is “really too bad” is precisely
the US insistence that everything in Afghanistan is really too good: “The US
military needs to stop embracing the mission,” he concludes. “Civilians need to
stop overselling the merits of peace negotiations [.]”
Cordesman blames an “analytically
illiterate media” for giving a pass to the Pentagon’s “statistical rubbish” and
“worse than useless” reports on progress against the insurgency. Yet Cordesman’s
quaint talk of “insurgency” reveals his own blind spot to changing times: what the
Pentagon once called “battle space” is now “area of operations”; what were “combat
operations” are now “stability operations”; and what was long ago a “counterinsurgency”
is now a political-diplomatic attempt to tip-toe out of Afghanistan while avoiding
perceptions of American culpability for the Taliban takeover of the south and east
that will follow.
Far from being duped, the media and the
civilians once bullied by “runaway generals” are now getting just what they
wanted: a strategy hashed out by Rolling
Stone’s Michael Hastings and Fannie Mae chief turned National Security
Advisor Tom Donilon could hardly top the current strategy of quietly divorcing
counterinsurgency while keeping Afghanistan, with all of its political
toxicity, at an Iraq-style arms’ length.
Yet as Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s
authoritarian drift and al Qaeda in Iraq’s resurgence one year after the US
troop withdrawal from Iraq suggest, the arms’ length approach to negotiating
the endgame may be good politics, but it does little for counterinsurgency. COIN,
as Afghanistan veteran Emile Simpson stresses in his new book “War from the
Ground Up,” is premised on the idea that coordinated political-military
operations must earn the population’s trust. Even putting aside any notion of
America’s moral responsibility for post-2014 human rights abuses and civil war,
the most unsentimental among us have yet to explain why anyone should expect an
insurgency uninhibited by COIN to suddenly embrace introspection and reform its
tastes for terrorism.
The counter-coindinistas rebut that Afghans
are forcing our hand. “As we know from our Iraq experience,” says White House
advisor Doug Lute, “if there are no authorities granted by the sovereign state,
then there's not room for a follow-on U.S. military mission.” Yet the real lesson
from the failure to extend Iraq’s SOFA, as New
York Times reporter Michael Gordon details in his recent book, “The
Endgame,” was the US side’s “trouble taking yes for an answer.” Whereas
President Bush had successfully prodded Maliki to crack-down on Shiite
death-squads by forging a close relationship based on the notion that “you
don’t put your friends in an uncomfortable position,” Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton’s paradigm that “you don’t make peace with your friends” prevailed
over both Admiral Mullen’s troop level recommendation’s and Vice President Biden’s
very own 2010 prediction: “I’ll bet you my vice presidency Maliki will extend
the SOFA.”
What Afghanistan’s SOFA talks are really
about is perception. In Iraq, “the critical issue was not the US troop
presence,” argues political
advisor Emma Sky, “but the U.S. commitment to Iraq – and the building of a
relationship that went beyond military support[.]” Yet whereas the focus in Afghan talks thus far
is on American perceptions (“We are
leaving in 2014. Period,” Vice-President Biden has said), there is also the pesky
matter of Afghan perceptions. As one of my former Afghan staffers – a woman
who has braved repeated death threats for working with Americans – put it in an
email to me just this week, “My concern is getting bigger for 2014 when the US
troops withdraw from Afghanistan.”
The American aversion to putting lives at
risk for a lost cause, as well as the need to prioritize in the face of a deepening
debt crisis, necessitates that the specifics of the Afghanistan SOFA talks have
narrow parameters. The battle for perceptions, however, is wide open; yet for all
the talk of a soft power “reset,” it is a battle the US seems determined to
lose. Alas, you go to war with the
diplomats you have, and American diplomats are digging in for a “transformation
decade” of “silk road” dreams and Taliban co-governance. “In your arrogance,
you think you write the script,” says war correspondent
Lara Logan. “But you don’t.”
Indeed, as one former US official told
Dexter Filkins last summer, “Every plan for the future I’ve seen assumes a deal
with the Taliban.” But do we know who we are dealing with? If the US AfPak
Hands program is any indication, with its bizarre emphasis on training counterinsurgents
to speak Farsi over the Taliban’s Pashto, it would seem not. “I’d gone to Farsi
language training for four-and-a-half-months and I got sent to a
Pashto-speaking area,” said one
disillusioned AfPAk Hand in a testament to America’s botched soft power.
Even within the confines of a stringent
SOFA, the US can still exert influence. India, which still harbors COIN
illusions, judging by its recent decision
to train hundreds of Afghan Army officers at its Counterinsurgency and Jungle
Warfare School, is waiting for the day we end our fixation on pleasing our
enemies in Pakistan. We could work with Afghans to legalize poppy for medicine. We could redouble efforts to kill Mullah Omar – a symbolic
blow that would be more devastating to the Taliban than the loss of Bin Laden,
who had long worn out his welcome amongst Pashtuns. And we could adopt the Bush tactic of building
our allies’ trust and confidence via personal relationships and moral clarity.
“Countries don’t ‘end,’” writes Aatish
Taseer in his Pakistan novel Noon. “They rot away slowly.” For now, the rot continues in ways eerily similar to Fraser’s
Afghanistan, where the Royal Army was “forever patrolling and manning little forts, and trying to pacify
and buy off the robber chiefs, and people were wondering how long this could go
on. The wise ones said there was an explosion coming.”
