Discussing the Unpersuasive Ways Forward

In one sense, all the discussion about how to move forward in Afghanistan is moot—until Barack Obama makes his do-I-stay-or-do-I-go decision, the how of either of the three main decisions (escalate, maintain but redirect, drawdown) really doesn’t matter too much. That being said, it’s still interesting to examine the many cases being discussed if only for how poorly reasoned they are.

First up is Peter Bergen, talking about why we need to stay and fight on.

If U.S. forces were not in Afghanistan, the Taliban, with its al-Qaeda allies in tow, would seize control of the country’s south and east and might even take it over entirely. A senior Afghan politician told me that the Taliban would be in Kabul within 24 hours without the presence of international forces. This is not because the Taliban is so strong; generous estimates suggest it numbers no more than 20,000 fighters. It is because the Afghan government and the 90,000-man Afghan army are still so weak.

This is actually not a given; regardless, the Taliban don’t need to conquer Kabul for anything other than the power of symbolism—they can eke out a reliable safe haven from the “Pashtun Belt” along the south and east. The 24 hour estimate is wildly exaggerated—without impugning anyone’s honor, let’s just say a “senior Afghan politician” has a good reason for scare-mongering on this front, especially if he gave up his western passport sometime in the last eight years.

Bergen ably highlights many of the flawed assumptions that seem to lie beneath most arguments for withdrawal—Afghanistan is not an invented nation, any more than the U.S. is, for example, and there is really no such thing as an infamous Afghan Xenophobia (again, at least any more so than an American xenophobia).

But beyond simply pointing out a few easily debunked Orientalist assumptions about Afghanistan, Bergan doesn’t really make any case. Trying to argue, as Ann Marlowe has, that Afghanistan today is better off than American ghettos in the early 1990s is not just unpersuasive, it borders on the racist (and still misleading, because no one liked the ghettos anyway). He’s right to say that a reduced CT mission leads to temporary and, in a very real sense misleading success, but declaring an obligation to the Afghans themselves does not immediately follow as the U.S. government’s solemn duty. From an ethical perspective, we most certainly do owe the Afghans better than the lazy half-assed mission we’ve given them so far, but the sad and difficult fact of international relations is that national interests are, in many respects, amoral. But Bergan doesn’t make a case for Afghanistan from an American perspective, at least explicitly… and that just won’t fly right now.

In the same issue of Time is well-known Afghanistan expert Leslie Gelb (ahem) saying… well, I don’t really know. In March he wanted a contradictory set of objectives (“separate out non-extremist Taliban,” “the Taliban are extremists and not to be trusted”), though now his thinking seems to have evolved a tiny bit. Even so, make sense of this:

Hawks on Afghan policy — those who favor defeating al-Qaeda through a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy involving up to 40,000 more U.S. troops — have divined a politically clever line of argument: Win or get out.

Its a phony choice. The hawks know there’s no chance of our simply pulling out of Afghanistan. That option isn’t even on the White House table, despite growing public desire to end the war. The true aim of the hawks, or all-outers, in this maneuver is to discredit the real policy alternative — the middle ground. Their ploy is to portray the middle way as simply a cover for getting out.

Okay, considering that in that very issue, the literal page before, Peter Bergen was specifically arguing against Gelb’s “middle ground,” methinks this is a poorly-disguised strawman. In fact, the only person I know who has presented the choices in Afghanistan as all-in or fold is Rajiv Chandrasekaran, and he was quoting anoni-staffers. Does Gelb make an honest argument?

Hawks on Afghan policy — those who favor defeating al-Qaeda through a full-blown counterinsurgency strategy involving up to 40,000 more U.S. troops — have divined a politically clever line of argument: Win or get out.

Its a phony choice. The hawks know there’s no chance of our simply pulling out of Afghanistan. That option isn’t even on the White House table, despite growing public desire to end the war. The true aim of the hawks, or all-outers, in this maneuver is to discredit the real policy alternative — the middle ground. Their ploy is to portray the middle way as simply a cover for getting out. (See pictures of Gitmo detainees.)

But there is a real and strong middle option: to put ourselves and friendly Afghans in a position to manage future terrorist threats in that country without a major U.S. combat role. We can accomplish this by doing what we actually know how to do: arm, train, divide the enemy, contain and deter.

This is the challenge with offering competing proposals: it sounds lovely, until you realize we have already tried those things. From top to bottom, Gelb’s ideas betray a shocking ignorance of both recent events and medium-term history, whether calling the British experiences there a success (another one???), or the strange assumption that either Iran or Pakistan would grant us overflight rights should we chose to dramatically downsize our presence there (as a landlocked country, “offshoring” is a bit complex).

Gelb is not a stupid man by any stretch—his credentials and experience speak more than enough for his obvious intelligence, but his ideas are just baffling. Arming people to defend themselves resulted in mass defections to the Taliban. Training the ANSF has been, at best, a mixed bag, with some good units and some appallingly bad units. We’ve been trying to negotiate with the Taliban (i.e. “split the moderates from the extremists”) since 2002 or so, the result being that most of the militants who were interested in reconciling already have. There are a few exceptions here and there, but if Gelb is to advocate more negotiations, then he should probably account for why the previous seven years of attempts have managed only to swell the Taliban’s numbers. Lastly, the contain and deter parts hold very little water: neither al Qaeda nor the Taliban have shown themselves particularly deterrable (in the case of the Taliban) or even containable. In fact, the only thing even sort of keeping the Taliban and AQ at bay in Afghanistan right now is a strong Western military presence. You can’t halt the spread of these groups through flying robots and SF raids.

But it’s not even the grand issues that bear reconsideration. People like to talk about corruption as the biggest problem in Afghanistan, too, especially when they want to highlight the vacuity of the military-only approaches of people like Bergen and Gelb. In this, CSIS’ Karin von Hippel is a great example:

The opportunity provided by this confluence of conditions — in Afghanistan and the West — should be seized by all actors without delay. A new, more mature and responsible partnership needs to be forged, one that is publicly grounded in the mutual recognition that both the Afghan government and coalition countries have fallen far short in delivering on promises. Both sides of the partnership need to commit to radical changes in performance, and shift from co-dependence to mutual reinforcement.

Starting with the Afghan side, the Afghan government is riddled with corruption and has been mostly unable to deliver basic services and security or establish minimal rule of law standards. This, in turn, has enabled the Taliban to return in a far more lethal and networked manner than a decade ago. Elections that are increasingly being viewed as illegitimate have only provided additional fodder for the Taliban propaganda machine, and undermine what little support the Afghan government may still have with its people.

I’ll never argue with her contention that the International Community has systematically failed the Afghan people, and the results have been catastrophic (no joke, I was arguing this in January of 2008!). But at the same time, while it is a serious issue, corruption cannot be said to be the entirety of Afghanistan’s problems: neighboring countries that are near Afghan on Transparency International’s corruption index—countries that have also had to deal with Islamist insurgencies like Tajikistan and Uzbekistan and even Iran, have not seen the populist spread of the Taliban like Afghanistan has.

Corruption, therefore, cannot be the sole cause of the Taliban. That is because the Taliban gain legitimacy through the systematic failure of both Afghanistan’s government and the Aid Complex that has parasitized it. Even the grand thinkers on reforming Afghanistan don’t seem to grasp just how fundamental the problems really are, whether corruption (which IS a serious problem, just not the ONLY problem), sloppy and unresponsive governance, a broken economy, shattered infrastructure, an uncontrolled border, and a constitution seemingly designed to encourage abuse and authoritarianism, with duplicated ministries all overseen by different NATO countries so we all can feel productive.

Increasing transparency, as von Kippel advocates, is a necessary part of them. But it’s only a teeny tiny part of it, and so universally agreed upon it’s more a truism than a serious argument.

And that’s the real problem in all of this. The debate exists in the realm of truisms and sloganeering, with everyone speaking such beautiful empty nothings it’s difficult to disagree unless one writes an entire treatise. Which is what this post is teetering on the verge of becoming. The point is, knowledge must inform our policy choices as much as principle—having one without the other leads to really terrible choices. Surely our experts owe us that much, yes?