Meanwhile in Afghanistan

Afghanistan -- It's Time to Go
A Rantburg Opinion by Steve White

I hate to say it.

It is time to leave Afghanistan.

I strongly supported George W. Bush's leadership and our entry into Afghanistan after 9/11. We had been attacked by a terrorist group that used a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan to train and plan. Al-Qaeda killed thousands of my countrymen and women. We had to go get them, and Afghanistan is where they were.

George Bush, that misunderestimated man, articulated our goals for our operations in Afghanistan in late 2001 --

First, to destroy as much of al-Qaeda as we could and deny them the use of Afghanistan as a base of operations for their large-scale terror and insurgency campaigns.

Second, to remove the Taliban from power as a punishment for supporting al-Qaeda.

It was the right thing to do. Using air power, special forces and Marines, we cleaned out most of al-Qaeda, liberated much of Afghanistan from Taliban control, and set the stage whereby al-Qaeda could not return in any strength without our knowing it and fixing it. We were not perfect but we achieved both goals.

Then we blew it by insisting on nation-building.

I understand how it happened. Mr. Bush listened to the Europeans, and that's usually a mistake. It was the professional hand-wringers who invoked Colin Powell's 'Pottery Barn' rule: you break it, you own it. Supposedly it was the U.S. who 'broke' Afghanistan so we had to 'fix' it, not withstanding the facts that there had rarely ever been a functional Afghanistan, and whatever there was in the past had been broken by the Soviets and the Taliban.

We tried. We brought in tens of thousands of soldiers and Marines. We brought in reconstruction advisors, military advisors, and diplomats. We worked to fix the country. Perhaps if the Pashtuns and the Pakistanis (but I repeat myself) had behaved it would have succeeded. But the ISI, supported quietly by the Saudis, could not allow us to beat the Taliban and thereby remove the Pashtun lands from their influence, and so we continue to bleed.

Worse than the ISI has been our own failure to recognize, in Afghanistan today as in other countries in past generations, that 'nation building', particularly done by outsiders, generally does not work. Afghanistan is firmly rooted in the 10th Century (AD or BC is a fair question) with the thinnest veneer of 20th century life in the larger cities. The people there are more tribal than on just about any patch of land on the planet. There is no nation to build. If building a single Afghan republic within the current borders is our goal, we have already failed and will continue to fail for the next century. Having gone through our own nation-building in the Americas and Europe over the last five centuries we many times fail to understand that large swaths of Asia simply are not, and will not be for a long time, inhabited by people with a sense of national identity.

Some point to a defeated, post World War II Germany and Japan as examples of successful nation building. But we did not 'build' nations there, we rebuilt them from the rubble of what were, prior to hostilities, successful nations. Germany had been a leading power in Europe. Japan had been the strongest nation in East Asia. After bombing them flat and occupying them it was a matter of removing the evil political class, re-educating the people and reconstructing the physical plant. Both Germany and Japan had a national self-identity. They were not built, they were reassembled.

What's more, we had no external power in either of these countries that interfered with our reconstruction. We failed in nation-building in Vietnam in large part (besides never understanding the Vietnamese people) because the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam never let us go forward. Today we are failing in Iraq because Iran continues to meddle, and we are failing in Afghanistan because of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Just as the price of confronting the Soviet Union over its meddling was too high to contemplate, today the price of confronting those who interfere with us is one that we will not pay. Simply watch the long dance of 'sanctions', negotiations and rhetoric with the Islamic Republic of Iran: no nation besides Israel will confront them, and the West is working to constrain the Israelis, not the Iranians.

We have not been able to solve the problem of tribalism. We are not able to change Pakistan. We have not been able to persuade the ISI to leave us alone. And we won't, because of the oil, remove the House of Saud.

An alternative approach would be to remove the heavy presence in Afghanistan and return to the original light footprint of late 2001. Keep Bagram airbase, and use our air power and special forces to suppress al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Make the logistics as simple as we can so that we do not have to depend on Pakistan. We could arm the Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara tribes in the north and west. We could try to split and co-opt the Pashtun tribes.

All that would require a compliant central government in Kabul, and we have no evidence that Hamid Karzai or his successors would be willing to let us stay. Karzai doesn't see the Taliban as an existential threat; they're just one more local, Pashtun sub-tribe to him. Worse yet, arming the other tribes might allow them to fight each other as much or more than they fight the Taliban.

The result of a 'light war' (or light kinetic action if you prefer) is simply a slower bleed on our resources and our brave military people. We could suppress the Taliban, at least for a time, but we would not solve the problem. It also rankles our own sense of how the world should be and puts us in the position of favoring one tribe over another with the resulting bloodshed on our hands. Tribal favoritism was a favored strategy of European colonial powers, perfected in places like the Congo, Rwanda, Burma and the Ivory Coast. We would simply be implementing a 21st century imperialism. Is that who we are? Most Americans would say, 'no', and they would be right.

We have tried nation building. We have tried to help. We have fought with one hand tied behind our backs. None of that has worked.

Pack it up and bring our people home.

Keep the satellites and the drones in place. Watch the Taliban. Make it very, very clear to them that the next time they allow a terrorist group to use their land to come at the United States, there will not be a next time ever again.

It is time to go.
Posted by Steve White 2012-02-26 00:00|| E-Mail|| Front Page|| ||Comments [54 views ] Top