It's crunch time in Afghanistan
Posted: Wednesday, September 09, 2009 9:16 AM
Filed Under:
Kabul, Afghanistan
ANALYSIS
By Jim Maceda, NBC News Correspondent
Aunt Dee is the real pundit of my family – an opinionated, 80-year-old independent spirit if there ever was one. You never know whom she’ll target next, so getting an e-mail from our own gadfly is always special.
Her latest feint and thrust – on the war in Afghanistan – came about two weeks ago: "Well, I have to get started on dinner so will close this now. We see nothing about that war in Afghanistan. It’s like it doesn’t exist. And, no one is asking Obama, ‘What are we doing there?’"
Since that e-mail, it’s as if every politician and editorialist – on both sides of the Atlantic – is reading Aunt Dee!
"What’s the mission?" asks one. "To prevent another 9/11," answers another. "To build a viable Afghan state," chimes in a third. And on and on...
Some analysts wonder why we’re even in Afghanistan at all, when most "terrorists" and terror attacks are in, or originating from, Pakistan. Other experts rejoin that if we withdrew from or failed in Afghanistan, then Pakistan – and the rest of South Asia with it – might implode.
A maelstrom of opinion has burst wide open, and in its wake, even traditional positions have shifted.
Debating what the ‘other war’ has become
U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke, a die-hard Democrat and astute peacemaker, sounds utterly hawkish on Afghanistan: "This is not Vietnam," he recently told me at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. "We’re here because the enemies of America, the people who did 9/11 … are out there, protected by the Taliban, and we have no choice but to succeed here."
On the flip side, George Will, an arch-conservative columnist, is now touting a kind of a Clintonesque way out, writing in the Washington Post that America should focus on cruise missile and drone attacks, and "do only what can be done from offshore" to minimize casualties. The war, in his mind, has gone on too long, and in any case, is unwinnable.
Of course, the debate is really about what that "other war," for years slightly off the radar screen, has suddenly become: A steady increase in body bags and coffins returning from front lines and the fearful likelihood of perhaps tens of thousands more U.S. troops heading into danger.
U.S. commanders talk about a "new strategy" to better protect the Afghan people – we’re told – so that they can rebuild their lives and thus have something bigger to lose in their own fight against the Taliban. This, we’re assured, is a tried and true counterinsurgency approach. It made a big difference in Iraq, and could be a game-changer in Afghanistan. Still, at least according to the latest polls, most Americans only see more violence, and death.
New York Times contributor Thomas Friedman wrote in a recent column that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan has morphed from "babysitting" a people to "adopting" a nation. Friedman believes that this much larger undertaking should be more thoroughly debated by the American public before we go any further.
Well, Aunt Dee, let the debate begin: What is the mission?
Again, why are we there?
The "believers" say that, ultimately, the mission hasn’t changed: disrupting al-Qaida, and along with it the Afghan Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban, the Haqqanis, the Mehsuds, and all the other jihadist militant groups and networks operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan before they spread their turbulence to India or to China or, once again, to America.
In 2001, that required a minimal number of U.S. forces "invading" behind pro-U.S. militias to defeat the Taliban. Eight years later, it means a substantial surge of U.S. troops and experts, "going long and deep" to build up Afghan forces and the "human terrain" in an attempt to lay the foundation of a state that can one day protect itself.
But the critics – growing by the day – don’t buy it. They say that nation-building is a waste of life and treasure in a narco-state whose government reeks of corruption, where the latest national elections remain mired in fraud, and where Taliban commanders, warlords, drug lords and armed civilians are often one in the same, under an ever-shifting turban.
So why are we there? Those in favor insist that the best defense against al-Qaida is a stable, self-sustaining Afghan government, especially in the land where 9/11 was hatched.
They say the U.S. needs to stay as long as it takes to see that Afghan government emerge. "There is no alternative but for the United States to remain committed to rebuilding a minimalist state in Afghanistan,’’ wrote Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist who is an expert on the Taliban, in Sunday’s Washington Post.
Those opposed say the U.S. – whatever its real intentions – increasingly appears to Afghans as occupiers, and predict it will fall into the same quagmire as the Soviets and the Victorian British before it. Losing lives and facing a ‘’roadless, broken and undeveloped country, an absence of any strategic points, a well-armed enemy with great mobility and modern rifles, who adopts guerrilla tactics,’’ as the young Winston Churchill, an embedded reporter for the Daily Telegraph, described the Anglo-Afghan campaign … in 1897.
Frankly, I’ve heard many intelligent, articulate voices on either side of the issue. Columnist Nicholas Kristof, in Sunday’s New York Times, argued effectively for more "modest goals" in Afghanistan, warning that "sending in more American troops … in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban …"
But equally compelling was Haroun Mir, an Afghan-American analyst living in Kabul, who recently told me to disregard the signs of plummeting U.S. support for the war. "What’s true is that the Afghan people welcome your presence here," he said. "After three decades of conflict, people are tired. Everyone wants to have a peaceful life. And we know that won’t happen here without the support of your forces."
But how many U.S. troops are necessary, for how long, and at what cost? George Will’s answer is "get out now." Otherwise, he believes, "Afghanistan would need hundreds of thousands of coalition troops, perhaps for a decade or more. That is inconceivable.’’
A decade or more …
Déjà vu all over again?
A decade ago, few Americans could have easily found Afghanistan on a map. Neglect and isolation were the petri dishes from which emerged the mayhem – civil war, the Taliban and Osama bin Laden.
Today, most Americans are finding out that Afghan tribes, who rule over a mostly lawless land, pay no mind to nuisances like international borders or "new" U.S. counter-insurgency strategies.
Amid all the chaos of opinion, framing a debate isn’t easy. Finding consensus is even harder. But I would break it down into two "generic" camps.
One camp is made up of those who think that the prospects for peace in Afghanistan are as elusive – even illusory – today as they were generations ago.
In his insightful book, "Butcher & Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan," BBC South Asia Correspondent David Loyn describes the events of 1840 (that’s right, 1840) in the same ethnic Pashtun areas where President Obama is most likely to send more U.S. troops.
Loyn’s account reads like a dispatch from any of today’s papers: "a growing Islamist insurgency … overstretched foreign troops unable to quell a widening and worsening conflict [read: NATO]; a cultural clash with Kabul as the occupiers behaved in a way that offended local sensibilities [read: "civilian casualties"]; an Amir who could not rule without foreign support [read: President Hamid Karzai] …’’
And another camp for those who believe that Afghan history was made to be rewritten, not repeated. Taming the militants in so-called "Pashtunistan," whether from Kabul, Jalalabad, Gazni or Kandahar, much less from London, Moscow or Washington, has never succeeded before. But, these optimists say, it might – just might – succeed today.
What to do about an ancient, distant land of impenetrable havens for holy warriors of all stripes, unified in their hatred of infidels and any central government?
It’s crunch time. The stakes are enormous. And Aunt Dee deserves some hard answers.
Jim Maceda is an NBC News correspondent based in London who has reported from Afghanistan regularly since 2001.
