On their first meeting, Sherlock Holmes impressed Dr. Watson by deducing that the doctor had just come home from the Second Afghan War. When asked to explain this feat, Holmes replied, "Elementary, my dear sir! You've returned in a body bag."
By any measure, the war in Afghanistan is lost, in the sense that victory is no longer possible and time favors the insurgents. The Taliban are resurgent, well supplied, in control of the countryside and operating from safe havens in Pakistan against a discredited, corrupt and weak puppet regime in Kabul, a teetering discredited government in Pakistan, and a hodgepodge of Western allied forces. Global terror networks have reformed and evolved and nothing we do in Afghanistan or Pakistan will result in their destruction or even weakening. Meanwhile the US is once again caught in its classic quagmire - it went in pursuing a vision, but has stayed to fight a local insurgency.
President Obama has unveiled his plan for "AfPak". The optimism of its presumptions is staggering, it's a plan based on a series of improbable events clicking together perfectly. As usual, the subsequent debate has been light on facts and heavy on baseless cavalier assumptions. After the flip, I try to present the facts and analyze the Obama plan.
It is not my intent in this diary to debate the merits of the war in Afghanistan, or the righteousness or justice of America’s cause. Such debates are better left to paid propagandists, and I’m on my own time, so I prefer to deal with the facts on the ground. The real issues in any war are, can it be won and is it being won? If those questions are answered in the negative, the speculations about casus belli and jus belli become academic. So let’s take a look at the progress of the war, and evaluate the possible effect Obama’s new policies could possibly have on the outcome.
The war in Afghanistan, now in its 8th year, is going badly by any measure. Of course, heavily armored Western forces with unlimited air support cannot be defeated in the field by lightly armed guerillas, who also cannot hold cities against a coordinated mechanized assault. But what has happened is that the Western and Afghan government forces are virtually confined to bases, controlling nothing more than the ground on which their fortifications stand. There are a few safe zones remaining, where one can move about if accompanied by armed guards, but the conservative estimate is that 70 percent of Afghanistan is under Taliban control, which areas include the immediate surroundings of Kabul, which now finds itself under siege. The media, no longer able to continue maintaining that this war has been won, as they did until 2007, are now portraying it as a stalemate, because while the US is unable to defeat the resistance, likewise the guerillas are unable to defeat Western forces in pitched battles. This hollow argument is reminiscent of the claim the US was very fond of making during the Vietnam War, that American soldiers never lost a single battle in that war, leaving the uninformed to wonder why then they lost the war so decisively. The truth, acknowledged by every modern counterinsurgency strategist, is that insurgents have triumphed in the vast majority of the asymmetrical conflicts of the 20th century, without ever winning a single pitched battle, and such empty victories are entirely unnecessary for an insurgent victory. The insurgent wins through slow strangulation, infiltration and patience, and avoids getting involved in slugfests with much heavier armed counterinsurgent forces until his advantage is overwhelming. The most spectacular tactical defeat the US can fear from the Taliban is the ambushing of a convoy or the storming of an outpost, but these apparently minor victories are actually more momentous for the course of the insurgency than any setpiece battle could be.
An undeniable fact, crucial to understanding the inevitability of Western defeat in Afghanistan, as it was crucial to explaining the Soviet defeat there, is that the insurgents enjoy safe and extensive cross border bases and reserves of manpower across the border in Pakistan, which under all modern counterinsurgency theories makes them unbeatable. No insurgent force in possession of such safe havens has been defeated in modern history, and yet this fact is treated as a minor inconvenience by the pundits back home, something that can be solved through periodic missile strikes and aid to the impotent Pakistani government.
According to Mao's theory of guerilla war, the Taliban are now in Phase 3, the final stage of an insurgency, during which the guerilla is in a position to actually mount large scale offensives after having seized the country side and confined the government troops to the cities. An insurgency shifting from Phase 2 (conquest of the countryside, delegitimation of the government) may appear to be stalemated, while it is merely pooling its strength for the final push. And indeed, a large scale Taliban offensive, involving possibly hundreds of thousands of fighters coming into Afghanistan, is now underway as the snows melt in the mountain passes. The initiative in Phase 3 is with the guerilla, and the initiative in Afghanistan and Pakistan is with the Taliban. The outcome of this year’s Taliban offensive will likely decide the range of options available to the US in Afghanistan much more than anything Obama currently proposes. One is reminded of the situation in Vietnam on the eve of the Tet Offensive – while the American leaders reassure the public that success is at hand and downplay the ability of the enemy to pose any significant threat to our marvelous armed forces, the enemy have already begun putting the finishing touches on their victory.
To fully understand the situation, we must recognize that the Taliban launching this offensive are not the parochial religious students that once ruled Afghanistan. This movement has taken on global proportion - what once referred to a backward provincial regime in Afghanistan, a forgotten pariah on the world stage, now comes to denote a conglomeration of hundreds of thousands of fighters, politicians, spiritual leaders and rebels, whose exploits against the world's finest armies capture the minds of boys in the Muslim world and far beyond. The concept now stands for a hardcore defiant resistance to Western influence and the weakness of the corrupt regimes of the Third World.
We must also understand the nature of the resistance movements arrayed against us. The flow of aspiring mujahidin from all over the world is now going nearly exclusively to the Taliban, men and women from all over the world are now traveling to Pakistan to become a part of this resistance movement. Muslims living in the former colonial centers are going to Afghanistan to fight to fight their own countrymen who serve the regimes they live under but despise. The allure and romanticism inherent in this movement is largely incomprehensible to a non-Muslim Western mind and so often tends to be overlooked by the public, the media, and the policymakers, but it is there and it is far stronger than the lure of American money or the fear of American bombs.
The Taliban have now become the epicenter of both the global mujahidin movement, which brings together people from all over the world in a unified fight against the forces threatening the independence of the Muslim world, and of the Islamist jihadi movement. The two should not be confused or conflated. While the mujahidin movement is primarily a defensive phenomenon, the jihadis pursue an aggressive expansionist vision of a totalitarian Islamic state. The two movements can cooperate in a war of liberation of a Muslim country, such as the one now taking place in Afghanistan, or they can come to blows, as they did in Iraq in 2008. The difference between the two movements can be seen through the example of the Bosnian War – many mujahedin fought on the side of the Bosnian Muslims, but their intent was not to establish a Sharia state as is the intent of the Taliban; their modest goal was simply the defense of their Muslim brothers from non-Muslim aggression, and they had no problem cooperating with the Americans in achieving that goal. Another good example is Iraq – the limited success which the US has enjoyed there in 2008 has been largely due to the split between the two branches of the resistance – the mujahedin were fighting to resist the occupation, and ceased fighting when the US convinced them that that a reduction in violence was the best way to speed the end of the occupation. The Islamists, on the other hand, continued fighting to establish a Caliphate in Iraq, and were marginalized as a result. Should the mujahedin elements come to believe that the US occupation is continuing despite the cessation of their resistance, the insurgency will quickly explode again. Nearly every Muslim and many non-Muslims view the mujahedin as heroes, but only a small minority within the Muslim world supports the radical totalitarian agenda of the Islamists, with most Muslims thinking of them as not real Muslims, who do not act in accordance with the Koran, and call them "takfiris" – those who like to tell others how to worship. It is important to keep this distinction in mind when viewing conflicts in the Muslim world, though the lines become blurry when both factions are fighting on the same side in a particular conflict. However, a difference in tactics remains, the mujahedin typically attempt to avoid inflicting collateral damage on other Muslims, while the Islamists feel that such casualties are a small price to pay for even a minute victory in the jihad, and do not shy away even from attacks on mosques or other purely Muslim civilian targets.
Many use "al Qaeda" as a catchall term for the jihadist movement. However, the movement predates al Qaeda, and will not be defeated with the elimiantion of al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is merely a symbol of this movement in the eys of the Westerners, and it does not exercise any vital command and control or financiang functions that cannot devolve somewhere else in the unlikely event the Americans are somehow actually able to destroy this organization. For this reason, the pretense that this war can be brought to an end by the elimination of al Qaeda's top leaderhip is unrealistic.
Finally, we must avoid viewing the Taliban as a monolithic group. In addition to being made up of mujahedin, jihadi, and purely nationalist elements, this grouping encompasses many who fight for local or personal reasons, or for profit. As the power of the Taliban grows and the power of the Afghan government wanes, many warlords who previously supported the government or even fought against the Taliban, switch sides to be on the winning team. The various groups are bound together with loose ties of feudal loyalty and their common enemy, and are able to operate with some level of cooperation. This hodgepodge nature does not weaken the general thrust of the movement, because the overall strategic goals of an insurgency can be effectively accomplished by many parties simultaneously working together to push the government forces out of their particular sectors and coordination is not required. Likewise, the movement is not weakened by the peeling off of some of these fellow travelers, whose functions are often duplicative.
To counter the anticipated Taliban offensive and to prevent the fall of the entire AfPak region to the Islamists, Obama has proposed a new plan which can be broken down into eight parts. Let's take them one at a time.
- New Policy on Pakistan.
To counter the fact that the Taliban enjoy cross border safe havens which make them invulnerable to counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, the US will seek to bolster aid and support to Pakistan to improve Pakistan's capabilities in fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda on their side of the border as well as promoting good governance and strengthening democratic institutions. Naturally, military aid takes precedence, a la guerre comme a la guerre.
"[W]e must focus our military assistance on the tools, training and support that Pakistan needs to root out the terrorists," Obama said during his speech on Friday. "And after years of mixed results, we will not, and cannot, provide a blank check."
Obama intimated that the US Predator campaign would continue. "Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders," Obama said. "And we will insist that action be taken -- one way or another -- when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets."
To date, the US has conducted more than 50 airstrikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which pace has accelerated under Obama, as well as several ground raids in an effort to dismantle al Qaeda and Taliban leadership and training nodes. These actions, which have a destabilizing effect on the Pakistani government, have failed to push the Pakistani military to take action on its own, or to weaken the Taliban or al Qaeda.
During this time, the Taliban have taken over most of the Northwest Frontier Province, often via negotiations with the government. Quetta remains the location of the Taliban's executive leadership council, while the greater Baluchistan province hosts scores of training camps and recruitment centers, and large swaths are under Taliban control. Elements within Pakistan's intelligence service and the military continue to actively support the Taliban and other terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Mixed results, indeed.
The truth is that Pakistan is a victim of its own attempts to manipulate the Islamist movement to become a tool of its covert foreign policy. The Americans shared Pakistan's ambition, and supported various Islamist movements as a check on the rise of socialism in the Muslim world, and then later as a weapon of war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. When the US tried to take a more directly dominant role in the Middle East after the end of the Cold War, the Americans walked into their own trap, and became enmeshed in the very web of interminable insurgency that they had set for the USSR to deter its entry into the region.
But the blowback has been far worse for Pakistan. For them the insurgency is on the front step, it is inside the house, there is no escape from it, no "over there" they can fight to keep it from their throats. The Pakistani military has launched numerous campaigns against the Taliban, none of which have borne any fruit, and many of which have resulted in humiliating peace treaties which cede ever greater areas to Taliban control. The Pakistani state simply cannot survive the prolonged civil war that would be necessary to clear the Taliban out of the thousands of valleys within the Northwest Frontier Province. Clearing the Taliban from their mountain strongholds, and dismantling the networks of cells that thrive in Pakistan's cities, is realistically impossible.
Not surprisingly, the Pakistani prefer to focus on immediate existential threats, such as the collapse of their economy and the fatal flaws in their government, and to avoid a mortal confrontation with the Taliban forces. The greatest irony here is that even as the US tries its hardest, by bribes and by threats, to get Pakistan to attack the Taliban in order to deflect the attention of at least the Pakistani Taliban from Afghanistan, Pakistan is trying its hardest, through a similar regime of carrots and sticks, to channel the Pakistani Taliban into Afghanistan. So even as the US sends money to Pakistan to fight the Taliban, Pakistan funnels this money directly to the Taliban to fight the Americans.
American policymakers ignore this basic contradiction in aims, add prefer to think that the bankrupt and divided Pakistani government has the capacity to defeat the vibrant and growing movement which is strangling it from the inside, but is somehow unwilling to do so. On top of this first assumption, the Americans make a second one - that a few billion a year in military and economic aid will not only overcome this strange suicidal reluctance, but also give Pakistan the means to defeat a fully developed and entrenched Islamist insurgency, something that the far stronger militaries of the US, Israel, Britain, France, and the USSR have repeatedly failed to do. When adding the consideration that the Pakistan/Afghan Taliban movement is probably the most powerful instrument for jihad that the world has seen since the Ottoman Empire, the hope placed on Pakistan's ability to disrupt the Taliban protostate within its borders becomes a mere fantasy, an imperialist’s midsummer night's dream.
Even the Democrats in Congress, long a pliable rubber stamp for America’s wars of aggression, are starting to have questions. Continuing with Bush era levels of aid ($10 billion over 8 years under Bush vs. $1.5 billion per year under Obama) while Pakistan’s economy craters, and calling it a major new commitment cannot possibly change the underlying situation. But the cautionary measure urged - benchmarks - is as toothless and meaningless in Pakistan as it was in Iraq. Is the US going to leave if a benchmark is not met? Of course not, it is not that easy to get rid of Uncle Sam once he gets his foot in the door. Pakistan knows that the aid it receives comes as a result of US needs, and not as a reward for some action Pakistan may undertake. The US will continue funding Pakistan so long as it has forces in Afghanistan, on the mere hope that doing so might create a second front for its enemies the Taliban. In fact, the worse the situation becomes, the more aid Pakistan is likely to get. So the benchmarks might play well among those in the American public who have no real memory of the Iraq War or whose memory is so hopelessly distorted by the layers of propaganda as to be useless (this description unfortunately applies to a majority of the American public).
Reaction in Pakistan, where the reality of the situation is inescapable, has been at best lukewarm.
Ayaz Amir, a newspaper columnist and a member of parliament for the main opposition party, Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N, said the increased aid promised by Obama would "just increase the cesspools of corruption."
"They will just create a class of war profiteers . . . which is a recipe for demoralization," Amir said. "Pakistan has to do its own thinking, be left on its own and the Americans have to get the hell out of Afghanistan."
- Aid to Afghanistan.
The results achieved by billions in previous US aid to the region are, in a word, "heartbreaking". In the face of this undeniable failure, the Obama Administration acknowledges that:
"For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don't work," Secretary of state Hillary Clinton said. "There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line."
We are scrubbing every single civilian program," Clinton said. "This is part of my mission as secretary of state. We are looking at every single dollar as to how it's spent and where it's going and trying to track the outcomes. We want to see real results."
The weak Afghan government is even less capable of effecting its destiny than its Pakistan counterpart, and likewise realizes that what they are being paid for is simply existing, inasmuch as their existence represents a hope that the Americans cherish in spite of its improbability, a hope that someday they will be able to offer help the US in its campaigns, and will serve as a reliable vehicle of US interests in the region. So once again the Obama administration resorts to platitudes intended for purely domestic consumption (well, actually the Europeans are also fond of dreaming of a functioning Afghanistan, but their politicians tell them different tall tales.)
Based on Mrs. Clinton's comments above, one might conclude that the problem is actually that the Bush Administration never wanted to see results, never tried to track outcomes, and most importantly, never looked at every single dollar to see how it was doing. With a little more diligence, we'll able to cut the waste and start seeing results! In reality, billions in aid have been sent to Afghanistan since 2001, from the US and many other countries. These funds were used for various reconstruction projects supervised by NATO countries such as Canada and Germany who take real pride in their expertise in running civilian reconstruction, or, in many cases, just evaporated in a cloud of waste and corruption as is so common in chaotic environments. As can be expected given their control of much of the country and its resources, a significant part of US aid ends up in the coffers of the Taliban.
The only check to this inevitable and foreseeable waste and counterproductive use of billions of dollars, Obama again offers the fig leaf of benchmarks, that will dangle impotently from the allocated funds until they are either modified to cover up failure, or forgotten about, or made irrelevant, like Iraq's benchmarks have become. Even this toothless regime remains mostly aspirational at this time, while the aid heading to the region is very real and quantifiable (at least until it reaches its destination, at which point it becomes ever more nebulous until it seemingly evaporates without a trace).
Although the administration is still developing the specific benchmarks for Afghanistan and Pakistan, officials said they would be the most explicit demands ever presented to the governments in Kabul and Islamabad. American officials have repeatedly said that Afghanistan has to make more progress in fighting corruption, curbing the drug trade and sharing power with the regions, while they have insisted that Pakistan do more to cut ties between parts of its government and the Taliban.
Once again, this tough talk is based on the strange assumption that the Afghans and Pakistanis are in no way motivated to improve the condition of their countries and protect their very lives, and instead have spent most of the previous 8 years napping. This of course overlooks the obvious fact that a hundred times more Afghans and Pakistani than Americans have lost their lives in furtherance of the American objectives. You can level a lot of legitimate accusations against the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan, but accusing them of apathy would not be one of them. When residents of a burning building won't emerge, the presumption should not be that they are staying in because of laziness and a lack of urgency, and the solution should not be throwing in money and tear gas grenades to motivate them to come out.
- Military escalation.
No comprehensive American plan would be worthy of the name without a dramatic escalation in the number of boots on the ground. Given nearly inexhaustible supplies of men and materiel, the US has the capacity to avoid having to acknowledge a defeat by simply pouring in more of everything and covering up the situation in a storm of high explosives. All told, the 24,000 additional American troops that Mr. Obama has authorized almost precisely matches the original number of additional troops that President George W. Bush sent to Iraq two years ago. It's made up of approximately three infantry combat brigades, some elite formations, and various advisors, trainers, etc. Proportionally though this increase is far more dramatic than the Iraq surge, nearly doubling the number of American soldiers in country and bringing the overall American deployment in Afghanistan to about 60,000.
Obama has taken pains to avoid any comparison between this escalation and Bush's surge. In fact, the administration is using language to make its policies appear as different from Bush era policies as possible, despite the obvious and unavoidable continuities.
The administration has stopped using the phrase [War on Terror], and I think that speaks for itself," Mrs. Clinton told reporters at a United Nations-led conference on Afghanistan. "I haven't gotten any directive about using it or not using it. It's just not being used."
I wonder if anybody considered no longer using the term "Taliban"? Maybe they would also fade away, and it would certainly make it harder for the press to report their latest successes. I guess now that we are no longer engaged in a War on Terror, the people we are bombing will eventually realize that as well, ending the cycle of blowback and retribution once and for all.
In any event, sending another 24,000 troops, who will be joined by 2,000 extra British soldiers fresh off the Basra suicide watch and some other hapless NATO auxiliaries, cannot dramatically change the situation in this country of 32 million people. Unlike Iraq, where the balance of gravity was in the cities and could be shifted by taking and holding the vital urban centers, in Afghanistan, the insurgency is based in remote mountains, valleys and tiny villages. The Soviets had 150,000 Soviet and 400,000 Afghan soldiers, and were nowhere close to choking off the free movement and support networks of the insurgents.
- Increase the size of the Afghan Army and police forces.
The plan is to accelerate the expansion of the Afghan National Army from an estimated 80,000 troops to 134,000 and the police force to 82,000 policemen by 2011. Not mentioned by Obama is the creation of the Afghan Public Protection Force, the local security force designed to provide security for villages, roads, and installations. A pilot program of an estimated 4,000 members is currently underway in Wardak province, and if successful, may expand elsewhere. This program replaces Bush's previous failed attempt to create a similar force, then called the
Afghan National Auxiliary Police. In some ways it resembles the Iraqi Awakening Councils, as can be expected since both policies were implemented by General Petreaus. But in other respects it is different and far more ambitious.
Just how many fighting men and of what quality the Americans manage to squeeze out of this war weary land remains to be seen; previous results have been disheartening. There's just something about fighting for a weak and corrupt puppet government while having orders barked at you in a language you do not understand by soldiers who have come to occupy your country that doesn't really motivate a man to give his all to the cause. Regardless, under the most optimistic projections, these troops will be battle ready by around 2012, and the war will have been won or lost by then anyway.
- Reconciliation efforts.
The US will seek to divide the reconcilable elements of the insurgency from the irreconcilables, and then defeat the hard core elements of the insurgency. Obama described this process as follows:
There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who've taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course. And that's why we will work with local leaders, the Afghan government, and international partners to have a reconciliation process in every province.
Talks with the Taliban have been ongoing for several years now. But with the strength of the Taliban and the territory under their control greatly increased, and in the midst of their massive spring offensive underway, it is unclear to me why any Taliban would surrender relying on amnesty from the impotent Afghan government and place themselves at the mercy of American intelligence services. The idea is described by the Taliban themselves as lunacy.
The shabby treatment received by Iraqi mujahedin who chose to switch sides and work for the Americans in defeating the Islamists will no doubt also dissuade many potential waverers among the Taliban. For this reason and many others, the previous negotiations yielded no significant results. It is highly unlikely that anybody would abandon the resistance at this time, absent a significant defeat in this year's offensive. The withdrawal of all Western forces is a necessary precondition to any demilitarization of the Taliban, but of course, the Westerners cannot leave until they defeat the Taliban or acknowledge their own defeat, which their imperial pride will not allow, locking the two sides in a vicious cycle that can only be resolved by military means.
- A civilian push.
The US will surge the so-called "soft power" elements in addition to the military troop surge. It has been reported that more than 400 civilians from State, Commerce, Agriculture, Justice, and other government agencies will be sent to Afghanistan to improve governance, the economy, and agriculture. This will bring the number of staff at the Kabul Embassy to 900, always a reliable sign of an independently run non-colonial country. Naturally, Bush never sent any civilian teams to aid reconstruction, and NATO have not devoted the last 8 years to doing exactly the same things with little success. Areas which were initially peaceful and received significant amounts of reconstruction and other aid, have nevertheless fallen to the Taliban.
The purely theoretical presumption that an empire can win the hearts and minds of colonials by improving their material conditions has been belied on numerous incidents by popular resistance movements that proved that the power of ideas such as patriotism, nationalism or religion is far stronger than gratitude for whatever small benefits the invaders can bestow, especially when the occupiers build a well one day and shoot up the village the next, based on some faulty intelligence. Whatever gratitude there was will likely be further undermined by the severe famine which is gripping Afghanistan in part as a result of the disruptions caused by the occupation.
- Afghan governance reforms.
The US and Coalition will attempt to hold the Afghan government accountable for its actions and promote reforms and good governance. The US will
"seek a new compact with the Afghan government that cracks down on corrupt behavior, and sets clear benchmarks, clear metrics for international assistance so that it is used to provide for the needs of the Afghan people."
Given the dreadful state of the Afghan government, much more than attempts to hold the government responsible is needed. The government is currently in the midst of a constitutional crisis, as President Karzai's term runs out in April but the elections can't be held until August. Karzai intends to stay in office during the interim, and the Afghan Supreme Court has come out in support of this plan, but this has been a very destabilizing year for the government and it will only get worse in the run up to the elections.
Additionally, the Karzai government is sliding ever farther away from the democratic liberal values which it was supposed to bring to Afghanistan.
Women's rights have been dramatically curtailed, as the government tries to establish its fundamentalist credentials in an effort to gain legitimacy among the conservative population attracted by the Taliban's radical purity.
Underscoring the fragile state of this government, there has been talk coming from the Americans about the possible appointment of some sort of American picked unelected minder for President Karzai to ensure that the Afghan government stays on the "right" curse. Of course such a development would destroy the already tenuous legitimacy of his government. So far this is probably nothing more than a trial balloon sent up by somebody in American intelligence, but the need to replace or curtail Karzai might become very real depending on the results of the presidential elections currently scheduled for August.
- International/Regional cooperation.
The US will seek to resolve problems in Afghanistan by working together with Afghanistan's neighbors and the major players in the region.
"[T]ogether with the United Nations, we will forge a new Contact Group for Afghanistan and Pakistan that brings together all who should have a stake in the security of the region -- our NATO allies and other partners, but also the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China," Obama said. "None of these nations benefit from a base for al Qaeda terrorists, and a region that descends into chaos. All have a stake in the promise of lasting peace and security and development."
From the beginning of the very international mission to Afghanistan, the US had hoped to have other parties shoulder a significant part of the burden, a hope that has not panned out up to now. Now, with a renewed sense of purpose, the US is talking to Iran, Russia and other neighboring nations about Afghanistan. In this context at least, the growing strength of the Taliban does provide an advantage, as countries which may have previously been happy to see the US get bled in Afghanistan now become alarmed at the very real possibility of having a much strengthened and aggressive Taliban state on their doorstep in the near future.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (which includes China, Russia, Iran and many Central Asian neighbors of Afghanistan) has already met, now there’s a UN summit for 80 nations, next up is the NATO and G-20 meetings, and there is much buzz in the air. However, given the continued accusations leveled by the Pentagon against Iran and given the US' continued efforts to impose a sanctions regime on Iran over its nuclear program, it is difficult to see what motivation or ability Iran would have to actually aid the American effort.
Many times before have the regional players made empty statements about the need for greater involvement and cooperation. Russia has been working with the US for years, and has recently allowed the US to use its territory to ship certain categories of supplies to the Afghan theater. However it is difficult to see what Russian can do to fundamentally change the course of history and the balance of power in the region, having failed to do so even at the peak of its power. So while pleasant pronouncements will come pouring in, effective action by any of these parties, especially in the midst of a global economic crisis, is very unlikely.
This is not to say that none of Obama’s initiatives will produce any improvements in the current situation. In some ways they are bigger and more ambitious than anything Bush undertook. The number of troops committed is higher, the number of airstrikes on Pakistan is greater, there are more money and more international meetings than ever before. At the very least, the world will politely listen to Obama’s rehashed proposals, and break into applause at the appropriate times, allowing Obama to claim some victories on the diplomatic front to show off to the wavering public at home. As one European diplomat put it,
Of course we love Obama's plan. What other plan is there?"
But I (and I am not alone in this) fail to see how any of this noise will reverse the actual situation on the ground, which is that the Taliban and allied formations are stronger than they have ever been. They are in control of 70 percent of Afghanistan and 90 percent of Pakistan’s frontier provinces and the numbers of veteran troops they can field in this year’s offensive is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands. Pakistan is nearing collapse as a result of the continued destabilization coming in from across the Afghan border and in the form of US missiles raining down on Pakistani civilians. The Afghan government is moribund, Karzai is illegally holding on to power even as the West schemes to supplant him.
Nothing that we have done has made the lives of Afghans any better; women’s rights are at the level they were under the Taliban, and a severe famine is looming, which the occupiers have done nothing to prevent. Hundreds if not thousands of civilians are dead at the hands of the coalition. The people of Afghanistan are tired of war and chaos and more and more are looking to the Taliban for salvation.
Into this situation strives the always amnesiac United States, and in essence offers a do over. In the midst of a gigantic offensive by the enemy, as our soldiers struggle just to survive in their fortified outposts, we are acting as if this is a brand new day in which we are free to plan and implement programs at our leisure, as our enemies patiently wait for us to make the moves. As the enemy steadily tightens its grip on our throat, we offer them an honorable surrender and wonder why there are no takers. This optimistic, arrogant and fantasy based approach is only possible because the American population has been carefully sheltered from the facts of the war, and trained to view the American forces as nearly invincible and America itself as immune for the laws of history because of its exceptional nature. Given the fact that the West only last year begun to acknowledge that this war has not been an outright victory, this continued refusal to face reality is not surprising, but it is no less tragic for that.
The sad reality is that the US will be lucky to lose less than 500 soldiers and hold on to Kandahar this year. No reconstruction programs will get off the ground in the midst of large scale warfare and famine gripping the land. No amount of aid can make the Pakistani government do what it cannot do. No outside power, particularly not the ones the US is still poking in the eye with one hand while reaching out with the other, will step in to ease our imperial burden. Every advantage in this situation is with the insurgent. Eventually this nation will wake up from its rosy militarist fantasies, and come to understand that the question in Afghanistan isn’t what rehashed chestnuts of imperialist policy we can throw in to keep the pot boiling, but how many more people will die before the US acknowledges its defeat. We can only hope that Obama will begin working on an exit strategy, as he hinted that he would, before this war consumes his entire Presidency and begins to undermine his domestic agenda, and does not fall into the trap of escalating in order to avoid having to admit defeat, as so many Presidents have done before.