The Policy Battle in Afghanistan

With the increase in terrorist attacks, narcotics production, and general political disarray, Afghanistan is progressively becoming viewed as a failed state. Something must be done, however, to insure global security. Two deeply divided camps have emerged as forerunners in the debate.

A country in chaos

When U.S. Envoy Richard Holbrooke, in a recent visit to a refugee camp in Pakistan, told 38-year-old refugee Aslam Khan that a woman he mistakenly identified as Khan’s daughter was “beautiful”, an awkward silence reigned. ¹ “Your daughter is beautiful”, experts on the region quickly confirmed, was something that you should never say to a rural Pashtun. ² Saying such a thing, in a Pashtun’s eyes, is very similar to informing him that you wish to dishonor him and his family. Holbrooke’s situation is in many ways indicative of American involvement in Afghanistan. Faced by a complex, decidedly unwestern society, in which 50 percent of the population speaks Afghan Persian or Dari, 35 percent speaks Pashto, and another 30 other minor languages exist to ensure a tribal complexity unmatched in nearly anywhere in the world, U.S., NATO and other forces, collectively known as the International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, are still struggling to deal with an area in which a smorgasbord of cultural disparities exist. To glance at a color-coded map of the tribal areas in Afghanistan is akin to looking at a swirling tie-die shirt composed of tens of colors, blended and well mixed together.

First and foremost in the minds of American commanders,is the resurgence of Taliban troops in the area. The Taliban have been particularly effective in recruiting thousands of young Afghan men, and attacks on allied troops have dramatically increased over the past year. ^{3 4} The revival, which has seen attacks soar 59 percent over the past five months, has increased the chances of a potential sabotage of the elections scheduled for August 20 of this year, as well as a boost of funding to the insurgents. ⁵ Even without the possibility of attacks on August 20, the election itself is a significant problem; American approval of an extension of current President Hamid Karzai’s term from May until the elections in August have allowed the Taliban to dismiss the upcoming polling as a sham, and many Afghans view the election as another example of American manipulation. Corruption within the Karzai government is widespread: a recent international index measuring corruption listed Afghanistan as 176 out of 180. ⁶ Indeed, 76 percent of Afghans think that corruption is a major problem, which is not exactly a vote of confidence for their leaders. ⁷ With such a widespread public corruption problem, even the Taliban may appear to be a viable option when compared to the largely ineffective Karzai government, which is currently enjoying a significant drop in public approval ratings. The Taliban reign supreme in many areas of the country. When, for example, an Afghan civilian wished to drive trucks loaded with fuel across the country, it cost him $6,000 to bribe the police to not tip off the Taliban. ¹⁹

America will find that it will increasingly have to deal with the security and political situation alone. Canada, for example, has made good on its promise to recall its badly needed 2,500 troops from Afghanistan after sustaining high numbers of casualties in the dangerous southern areas of the country, creating an even larger problem for the Americans. The recent situation has lent some credence to the acronym that U.S. troops have given the ISAF: “I saw America fight.” ⁸

The high levels of narcotics produced in the Afghanistan have also helped spawn turmoil in the country. As the leading producer of opium in the world, the crop is highly lucrative and a staple of many Afghan farmers who rely on it to feed their families. Opium makes up to 60 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. The profits from the opium supports the Taliban, who force Afghan farmers to grow the crop so that they can tax what is grown. It is estimated that the Taliban, as an overall group, make around $300 million a year from the opium trade, enough to sustain operations in southern Afghanistan for a year. ⁹ In many ways, the counternarcotics activities by the ISAF have endangered counterterrorism efforts. When allied troops crack down on opium farmers, they only succeed in further alienating themselves in Afghan eyes. All the while, these measures force farmers to find other means of sustenance, which the Taliban eagerly provides. But even if the supply of opium could be diminished, the price would be driven up, and could possibly not even affect the Taliban’s net profits.

Yet perhaps most frustrating for ISAF troops is that much of the war in Afghanistan is not dependent on the war in Afghanistan, but on what is happening across the border in Pakistan. The Pakistani government has been historically deferential when dealing with the relatively powerful Taliban presence living in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, which are bordered by Afghanistan in the west. In 2001, as al-Qaeda and the Taliban searched for refuge from the deadly onslaught of American forces, they found a relatively safe haven in FATA, in which Pakistani troops were turned back time and time again. ¹⁰ Indeed, “61 percent of Pakistanis thought that Pakistan should not cooperate with the United States in combating extremism, and 72 percent supported a peace deal with the insurgents.” ¹¹ That many Taliban attacking U.S. troops today were recruited in Pakistan can only further complicate future Afghan strategy.

Shifting strategy

The whole situation seems to be poised on the brink of failure, and American leaders are facing an array of seemingly impossible issues. So what is to be done with Afghanistan? From this dilemma, two camps have emerged. The first is the proponents of a counterinsurgency strategy, colloquially known as COIN, who argue that Afghan nation-building is paramount to American and global security. It is vital, counterinsurgents argue, to ensure that Afghanistan does not fall back to pre 9/11 conditions, in which the Taliban safely harbored al-Qaeda terrorists who succeeded in breaching America’s security. In addition, counterinsurgents generally view Pakistan as an extremely fragile country in which the Taliban and al-Qaeda are rapidly encroaching. They view Pakistan’s security as tottering on disaster, which could have potentially global implications if the Taliban were to take over the nuclear sites protected by the Pakistan military, as well as block the supply routes to Afghanistan that America needs so badly. ¹²

Counterinsurgents are, in some ways, modern day Wilsonians in that they advocate for a non-isolationist policy, but are injected with a dose of realism, in that it is not of utmost importance how Afghanistan and Pakistan are secured to ensure future American safety, but simply that they are secured, regardless of ideology. An al-Qaeda victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan, counterinsurgents worry, would spur support for radical Islam and further danger the United States and its allies.

The counterinsurgency strategy hinges on a population-centric campaign, in which ISAF troops focus not simply on fighting the Taliban in a purely military-based operation, but rather on securing the Afghan population from harm. In a recently published report by the Center for a New American Security, a Washington defense centered think-tank the authors insisted on metrics to define success in Afghanistan. Violence, it was admitted, will rise, but the most important number was not the quantity of Taliban or al-Qaeda killed, or the number of NATO and U.S. troops killed, but rather the number of civilian deaths. ¹³ Without a committed citizenry that feel safe and secure enough to have faith in the Afghan National Army (ANA) and ISAF troops, the article stated, the population will turn to the omnipresent alternative; the Taliban. How the population will be secured is subject to interpretation, although a popular argument advocates for a decrease in airstrikes, specifically that of the drone variant, which often inflicts numerous casualties on the civilian population and further alienates them. In addition, citing the success of the surge in Iraq, counterinsurgents argue for an increase in troop levels in order to better train ANA forces. Further, it is also important to counterinsurgents to secure as many possible woleswali, or low level districts, as possible from the Taliban, who currently hold approximately 25 percent of the areas.

David Kilcullen, a leading counterinsurgency advocate who coined the term “accidental guerilla” to describe ad hoc insurgents who fight only to remove foreign invaders from their country, thinks that in the time frame of “five to ten years at least” it is possible to gain a victory in Afghanistan. This could be done by “building a resilient Afghan state and civil society” while creatively building the national infrastructure and attempting reconciliation with the protean elements of the Taliban. ¹⁴ Success must be redefined, as the CIA’s ex-station chief of Pakistan, Milton Bearden, argues; “Committed al-Qaeda fighters should be shown no quarter. The Taliban, however, range from irreconcilable Salafist fanatics and narco-traffickers to bored punks carrying Kalashnikovs for less than ten dollars a day.” ¹⁵ That is precisely the problem, the other side of the aisle; commonly known as realists, argue. Redefining success, realists state, simply means to redefine failure; to actually crush al-Qaeda we would need “a force of 300,000 to 400,000, one that would go into Pakistan.” ¹⁶ That Afghanistan is winnable in present circumstances is a chimera that could potentially cost hundreds, if not thousands of more lives, realist thinking goes. In this thinking, the best option would be to use Special Forces operations as well as targeted airstrikes against as many al-Qaeda targets as possible, and then, as Michael Scheuer, the CIA veteran who was in charge of the bin Laden unit in the 90’s recently said: “Get out in six months.”

Realists often view the counterinsurgency strategy as one built of flawed assumptions, Primarily that the Taliban constitute a threat to the United States and that reconciliation is possible. As Fonti Christia, Assistant Professor of Political Science at MIT, said scornfully: “Admitting their lack of knowledge about the precise character of the insurgency, [U.S. policy makers] equate reconciliation with merely cajoling Taliban foot soldiers into crossing over to the U.S. side.” ¹⁷ In this view, there is a consistent muddling of the terms “counterinsurgency” and “counterterrorism”. The Taliban, it is therefore argued, should not be conceived as threats because, first, the Taliban had nothing to do with the al-Qaeda-facilitated 9/11 attacks and, second; “the Taliban was a reluctant host to al-Qaeda in the 1990s and felt betrayed when the terrorist group repeatedly violated agreements to refrain from issuing inflammatory statements and fomenting violence abroad.” ¹⁸ Afghanistan and Pakistan, additionally, should not be viewed as instrumental to the fall of al-Qaeda as there is no need for a small cell of people to have a major base; indeed, the operations area for the 9/11 attacks was in Germany. Furthermore, realists insists, Pakistan is not at threat of having their nuclear weapons taken, as their army is well-funded, capable of following orders, and has the ability to fight off insurgent threats.

So they built as men must build…

In the end, it may be that the counterinsurgency proponents have already won the debate. The Obama administration, for its part, has indicated that they are in it for the long haul. The administration has committed to Afghanistan for some time and, in doing so, committed to the counterinsurgency cause. The vast attempt at nation building of the Bush administration is gone, and while Obama advisors all agree that the scope should be significantly smaller than in years past, they all also agree that it is imperative that there is an assured American troop presence in the years to come. ²⁰ So it comes as no coincidence that 17,000 troops have been dispatched to the precarious southern regions of Afghanistan, as well as an additional 4,000 troops who are being sent to train Afghan forces. “The safety of people around the world is at stake”, President Obama has said. By mounting major offenses against the Taliban in the past month with the additional troops, it is evident that America has dedicated itself to an Afghanistan in which counterinsurgency policy is held dear, and that has no easily fixable situation.

References

Francisco: The Asia Foundation

comments