Last Saturday, the New York Times, which bills itself as the "newspaper of record," did an extensive piece on our efforts in Afghanistan http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/12/world/asia/12afghan.html?_r=1&ref=asia&oref=slogin. The Geek gives the NYT a thumbs-up for resurrecting the forgotten Afghan adventure from the obscurity which it does not deserve.
Moreover, the Geek commends this article not so much for what is contained within it so much as how it inadvertently shows the critical deficiencies in both the formulation of American policy and the nature of American journalism.
OK, people, what do Afghanistan and Iraq have in common?
Ignore the obvious such as a US led coalition invaded both. Or that each was ruled by a government we (and many others) considered obnoxious. You can even set aside that the US got itself bogged down in a long, bloody, frustrating counterinsurgency which it had neither planned nor properly prepared for.
Now that the really, really obvious commonalities had been disposed of, we can eliminate some others. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the US employed far too few troops, particularly infantry maneuver battalions at the outset. In both cases too much credence was given to the purportedly positive effect of our mobility and firepower--its ability to "shock and awe." Then there is the unfortunate fact that insufficient attention was given to the state of play in each the day after conventional forces were defeated and victory declared.
Hiding under all these very obvious and almost as obvious commonalities is a very important, very basic feature. It is a feature that can be overlooked only with risk. It was ignored by US policy makers, policy implementers, and the NYT alike.
So, give it over, Geek!
Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq is a nation-state. Neither has had a history as a nation-state extending more than a few decades.
Both Iraq and Afghanistan are mere geographical expressions. Each was manufactured by forces external to their inhabitants for reasons that in no way were organic to the people who lived within the artifacts of borders.
Afghanistan was finally assembled by the pressures of two empires, the Russian and the British, in their fat guys bumping bellies approach to the expansion of empire during the era of the "Great Game" a hundred and more years ago. While there had been an Afghan kingdom for a few centuries, it had always been a loose and fractious assemblage of differing ethno-linguistic groups with the Pushtu being the largest single component.
The presence of either a strong, clever, and able king assured a degree of unity between the several groups. Even better was the presence of an external threat. A British or Russian military penetration would find the hills crawling with locals eager to nail a foreigner. No venue proves the truth of the statement, "pressure consolidates long before it fractures," better than Afghanistan.
The amphyctony called Afghanistan was both called into existence and permitted to continue to exist because it served the interest of both Great Britain and Imperial Russia for it to exist as a buffer. (The fact that the local natives were darn good at killing invaders may have had something to do with the decisions in London and Moscow.)
To summarize all the important little bits about the place. Afghanistan is a buffer area inhabited by differing ethno-linguistic groups that do not necessarily get along nor want to get along with one another. A charismatic, strong, and wiley man can provide a semblance of central government--particularly if the area faces an external threat. Other than as a buffer, there is no reason for Afghanistan to exist.
It isn't pushing the reality envelope too far to assert that should Afghanistan be permitted to simply fade away in a crimson haze of inter-group fighting, the world would neither note nor mourn its passing. Neither would the inhabitants. Each ethno-linguistic group would merge with its neighbors across the now erased borders.
Get a grip on this. Nation building is a nice, warm, fuzzy idea that requires the semblance of an identifiable, reasonably unitary group of people living in a definable region which by consensus of the inhabitants exists within recognizable borders. Afghanistan does not meet this basic criterion.
Thus the emphasis that the Times and several of those interviewed placed upon nation-building is unsupportable. Equally unsupportable was the thrust given by the current Administration upon "regime change" in Kabul, kicking the (admittedly) distasteful Taliban out and putting a "democratically elected" government in.
Simply put, just because the "international community" (whatever that is), the UN or the White House and Congress think that an entity called Afghanistan exists and ought to continue existing does not change reality. The entity in question is an artificial creation of dead empires. If we are to be honest, we must say our goal is to create out of a loose congeries of mutually rather antipathetic peoples a functioning nation-state as such is understood in Washington or London or Beijing.
This will be the Labor of Sisyphus on steroids. Think in terms of decades, even generations.
Strategically, the first and most basic mistake of the current Administration and the Pentagon war planners was the statement of goal for our invasion. We should have focused simply on the capture or total destruction of the al-Qaeda leadership cadre. Other than killing any Taliban fighters who confronted us, we should have ignored the regime.
We didn't have a realistic goal.
As the definition of victory arises organically from the political goal of the war, any definition which we had was irrelevant to the realities on the ground. Victory would have been easily defined if we had focused on the destruction of al-Qaeda. As we didn't have the right goal, we could not enjoy a victory.
Since our goal was both hazy, too expansive, and not achievable, there is no surprise that our theory of victory emphasizing an economy of force effort whose impact would be magnified by our advanced technology driven capacities in battlefield surveillance, intelligence acquisition, and high lethality firepower delivery was the equivalent of playing Ultimate Frisbee with truck tires.
In the final analysis, given our wrong-as-a-soup-sandwich political goal and our irrelevant definition and theory of victory, the Times' carping about the redeployment of assets from Afghanistan to Iraq (a war the paper loves to hate) is both false and misleading. The well-meaning assessments offered by many of those interviewed simply illustrate how little the US understood and understands about Afghanistan.
One more feature of American thinking demonstrated by the article and those whose words appear in it is the nature of our capacity for both mirror imaging and self-delusion.
We thought that Afghanistan is a nation-state just like ours in which differing cultures and peoples can share a sense of overarching belonging and fidelity. This is not so.
We imagined that we would hate living under a repressive theocracy such as Taliban and thus believed the Afghans did to. This is not so, at least not for many.
We believe in the value of elections and representative democracy and imagined the Afghans would to. This is not so.
We believed that we could win some sort of meaningful victory on the cheap in lives and time. This is not so.
Belief is not reality. Get a grip on it.
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