The Afghanistan Proving Ground

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Afghanistan has long humbled the ambitions of foreigners, but Kipling offers one account of quick and decisive victory. In “The Man Who Would Be King,” two ambitious Englishmen conquer Afghanistan by feigning insanity. The unruly mountain tribes find no quarrel with harmless lunatics, so the two make it all the way to remote “Kafiristan,” where they are taken for Gods. “If you could think us a little more mad,” say the unlikely victors, “we would be more pleased.” 

More and more, the US strategy in Afghanistan seems to be channeling Kipling. Few Afghans doubt that corrupt Afghan officials are largely to blame for billions of aid dollars yielding so little in sustainable gains (Kandaharis are still lucky to have six hours of electricity a day). But what puzzles them is how the US could look at such an outcome after $100 billion in nonmilitary assistance since 2002, or five times the annual GDP (which consists mostly of foreign aid), and say, as Special Representative James Dobbins did in July, “I believe Afghanistan may actually be the most successful international effort at reconstruction in a conflict or post-conflict country over the last quarter century.”

To be sure, most of that $100 billion went to project security, and much of the waste owes to the Taliban’s sabotaging of the very infrastructure projects that we are told will assuage their core grievances. But here again, Afghans wonder not so much why their security forces have suffered record casualties this year while wielding errant RPGs and growing increasingly reliant on the ISAF air support that is fading into the 2014 horizon. Rather, they wonder how the US could spend $57 billion since 2002 on training the Afghan National Security Forces, and somehow be so satisfied with the result as to have the Assistant US Defense Secretary recently praise the “rapid, remarkable development of the Afghan National Security Forces.”

And so the conspiracy theories abound.  A 2011 NATO “Red Team” report on ANSF perceptions of ISAF found that most ANSF respondents were suspicious of the US for providing massive aid to Pakistan knowing that Pakistan in turn aids the Taliban. “There is no explanation or excuse for such a stupid policy,” said one respondent. Even Afghan leaders, increasingly substituting populism for patronage as foreign dollars dry up, are leveraging this narrative.  Last November, Herat warlord-turned-Energy Czar Ismael Khan blamed “foreign conspiracies” for Afghanistan’s instability. In June, Vice President Marshal Fahim threatened to “take my weapon and go the mountains” if the 2014 elections bring more politicians with US links.  And President Hamid Karzai himself questioned US intentions in his June Doha speech: “If there is an increasing view among the youth in the Muslim world that radicalism is actively promoted by the West, the question is why and for what purpose?”

Perhaps Americans, troubled as they are by the recently revealed scope of the NSA’s domestic surveillance program, can identify with the mistrust of Afghans, whose country is in many ways a proving ground for the vast American surveillance state’s capabilities.  Consider the paranoiac effect, for example, of the US Army’s recently revamped “Inform and Influence Activities” (IIA) Field Manual, which is as much a précis of ISAF’s Afghanistan strategy as the Counterinsurgency Manual was for Iraq.  Previously known as “Psychological Operations,” IIA gives ISAF the green light to convince Afghans they have won, without getting caught up in actually winning.

Unfortunately, when Afghan officials launched an information campaign on the dangers of immigration last month in order to convince the rising number of asylum seekers to stay in Afghanistan (the leading country of origin for global refugees last year), most Afghans opted for their lying eyes. “The situation in the country forces people to flee despite the risks,” said one teen.  It was a manifestation of the manual’s own caveat: “if actions and messages are inconsistent, friendly forces lose credibility.”

Indeed, the messages and actions of the US in Afghanistan drifted so far apart last year that it was not Mullah Omar whose downfall the FBI precipitated via email hacking, but rather ISAF Commander John Allen and CIA Director David Petraeus, all at the whim of an FBI agent investigating “cyber-harassment” (it remains unclear whether the agent, who sent shirtless pictures to the “victim,” Jill Kelley, has been reprimanded). Yet meanwhile, one of the FBI’s main recommendations in its assessment of Major Nidal Hasan’s 2009 “workplace violence” attack at Fort Hood was to “guard against the inappropriate use of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion as a basis for investigative activity.”

Ironically, where consistency between message and action is concerned, the Taliban’s friends have demonstrated much greater coherence than the aloof surveillance state. “He’s not insane,” said Major Hasan’s lawyer of his client, who calmly gave Army officials a power point presentation on the justification for his actions (to defend fellow Muslims in the Taliban from attack) before carrying them out. Or as another US soldier, Naser Jason Abdo, put it after stating his allegiance to Mullah Omar’s jihad and attempting to repeat the Fort Hood attack in 2010: “I wasn’t insane or post traumatic.”

The band considers my Bruce Springsteen request...
"Got a wife and kids in Kandahar Jack"

Yet the US government, which has declared neither Hasan nor Abdo a “terrorist” due to the isolated nature of their attacks, conducts the War on Terror with far less coherence. And nowhere is the paradox more amplified than in Afghanistan itself, where Afghans wonder what use all the terrorist surveillance is when ISAF prefers talking to the Taliban over labeling it a terrorist group. ISAF even struggles to comprehend the cause of the Taliban’s “insider attacks,” with Gen. Allen once suggesting it could simply be the “strain” of Ramadan. 

“In the end, all relationships rest on trust,” said Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey in his recent re-nomination hearing.  Indeed, in the end even Kipling’s English conquerors fall, precisely when they betray their hosts’ trust. Many have noted that Afghanistan will never become a decentralized Jeffersonian democracy, but who knew it could so quickly become an Orwellian surveillance state? If we are done trying to "win" in Afghanistan, sanity requires us to give Afghans a shot at the former by unambiguously dismantling the latter.