Standard caveat, speaking only for myself here.
Eight years and a day ago the U.S. was attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists located in the U.S. but with a headquarters back in Afghanistan. Our subsequent invasion of Afghanistan routed the harboring regime, the Taliban, but was under resourced and failed to capture key leadership. The resources are coming now, but Al Qaeda appears to be based out of Northwest Pakistan at the moment where we appear to be successfully crippling them via good intel and predator strikes.
At present, I do not see anything in Afghanistan that makes the Nato presence strategically necessary. Preventing a Taliban take over is a worthy goal, but the Taliban was originally driven from power by cavalry backed by air power and special forces. That said, even if Afghanistan were taken over I do not believe the Taliban would be a threat to Pakistan any more than they were a threat when lasted they ruled, the Pakistanis certainly don’t seem to think so. The greater risk is Afghanistan becoming more of a failed state, but it is hardly the only failed state in the world with Al Qaeda sympathizers and trying to fix them all through occupation would be madness.
Secondarily, there is the humanitarian case. The last polling I’ve seen still had majority support among the Afghan people for the U.S. presence, albeit still depicting us as part of the problem, making this case a much more reasonable one than the humanitarian case for staying in Iraq. However, the trend was sufficiently negative that I’d be surprised if that was still the case, particularly after a fraud-filled election. It’s also worth noting that the war in Afghanistan is an incredibly inefficient means of pursuing humanitarian ends. Heather Hubert over at Democracy Arsenal gives an example of what efficient aid does, saving 10,000 children a day versus the mortality rate in 1990. Meanwhile in Afghanistan the bulk of the money goes to DoD and even under counter insurgency doctrine the DoD is not primarily an aid agency. As for efforts under US AID, in Iraq the Special Inspector General found that in 7 of 11 capacity-building contracts analyzed, 24% to 53% of the funding was spent on security subcontracts (I’d prefer SIG Afghanistan data, but that office was only recently stood up and only has five audits).
So do we abandon Afghanistan? I don’t think that’s necessary or appropriate. I think agree with Spencer Ackerman that it makes sense to work some aid through the provincial level but he’s also right that there are limits to the extent we can bypass the national government. I also tend to buy into some of Michael Cohen’s critiques but I rather doubt that the problem is the population-centric COIN model mission creep and that there’s a way to focus on the enemy. Focusing on the enemy is what the military naturally wants to do, I find it difficult to believe that the problem was that we were just under-resourcing an enemy-centric approach. Yes we did botch Tora Bora, but we’ve had thirty thousand troops there for years not even counting allied support.
I think Ackerman and Cohen’s ideas should be incorporated into a drawdown, one we should work out in cooperation with our allies and the Afghan government (though perhaps not just the national level thereof). As part of such a drawdown we could work out ways to provide some mix of aid (probably mostly financial and not necessarily through the central government), and air support. Such an arrangement didn’t work in South Vietnam in no small part because Congress was rightly concerned that we would be sucked back in. I think we would have far more credibility to maintain a lower level relationship if we worked out terms for departure began before the American and Afghan public demanded that we go.
I don’t object to more resources being poured in over the next eighteen months or so as part of this departure. However, I don’t think there’s patience in America or Afghanistan for an occupation beyond that point nor do I think that even a great strategy will be so radically successful as to change that. If I’m wrong and there is an up swell of public support in both countries due to effective counter-insurgency strategy, than both governments could certainly then renegotiate a deeper longer-term relationship.
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