Foreign Policy In Focus

By all accounts, the war in Afghanistan was a non-issue in last week’s mid-term elections. As poll after poll has shown, the number one issue was jobs and the economy. Afghanistan ranked at or near the bottom of the list.

And yet, polling also shows that Americans are more optimistic about the direction of the economy than they are about the prospects of the war in Afghanistan. According to the most recent RBC Consumer Outlook Index, only 25 percent of Americans believe that the economy will get worse over the next year. Meanwhile, a vast majority of Americans (somewhere around 60 percent) believe that we are losing the war in Afghanistan.

If these numbers even come close to reflecting what Americans think, two things should have been true: the Democrats should have been able to convince voters to stick with their economic strategy and opponents of the war should have been able to convince voters to abandon the current strategy in Afghanistan. 

But of course, neither of those things happened. Republicans succeeded in turning the electorate against the administration’s economic agenda and supporters of the war succeeded in keeping Afghanistan off the table altogether. The existence of a double-standard could not be more clear. 

As we wallow in the post-election depression, we might stop for a moment and play a little what-if exercise. What if the same standard that was applied to the economy in this election were applied to the war in Afghanistan?

First, of course, there would have been a discussion of the war’s cost and its contribution to the soaring deficit. Between 2003 and 2008, the deficit went from $6.4 trillion to $10 trillion. Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes have shown that at least a quarter of that increase came directly from the war in Iraq. Currently, the U.S. is spending $3 billion dollars a week on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Stiglitz and Bilmes estimate the total cost of these wars, including medical care for veterans, will be between 4 and 6 trillion dollars. These numbers make the bank bailout, estimated at $350 billion (most of which has already been recovered), and Obama’s recent stimulus, which was trimmed to just $34 billion, look like pocket change.

Secondly, there would have been a backlash at the call for patience in seeing the war through. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell told voters that Obama and the Democrats in Congress had two whole years to turn the economy around. Now, they said, it’s time for a change. Imagine if they had applied the same logic to Afghanistan—which entered its ninth year one month before the election. Even if one concedes that the strategy changed under Obama, that would still be two years. If two years is long enough for a referendum on the economy, why isn’t it long enough for a referendum on a war? 

Last but not least, there would have been a backlash against Obama’s war. The Republicans and Tea Partiers succeeded in making voters believe that Obama had single-handedly undermined their freedoms. Despite the fact that the health care and stimulus bills passed by the administration were products of compromise with the insurance companies and financial institutions, Republicans spoke of Obamacare, Obamanomics, and Obamunization. As general-in-chief, Obama had more power to shape the war in Afghanistan than he did healthcare or the economy.

What if the president’s opponents had expressed the same vehemence against Obama’s war as they did against the administration’s other policies?

Had even one of these things happened, I would be willing to credit the Republicans with fostering a real debate about the war, something that, up to this point, the Democrats have utterly failed to do.

"Troops were poised to retake the most nefarious area of all, the horn of Panjwai, an area 19 miles long and 6 miles wide where the Taliban had built up a redoubt of command posts, courts and mined areas over the last four years. Afghan and American troops mounted an airborne assault into the region last weekend."
— New York Times, 10.21.10 

Dial the calendar back to April 1970, and shift the scene from southern Afghanistan to South Vietnam. Then the all-important piece of turf was the "Parrot's Beak," a slice of Cambodia jutting into Vietnam's Kien Tuong Province, just 40 west of Saigon. The "Beak" was the supposed dwelling place of the elusive COSVN, the headquarters of the North Vietnamese army. Take the "Beak," said the U.S. military, and we will break the back of the insurgency.

So, following the screening of the Movie "Patton," President Richard Nixon sent tens of thousands of U.S. and South Vietnamese Army troops (ARVN) troops into Cambodia on April 30 to turn the tide of the war against the insurgents.

But COSVN wasn't there, nor were any North Vietnamese troops. It seems that two weeks before the attack, COSVN sent out a memo detailing the U.S. operation and pulled everyone out. What the Parrot's Beak operation did accomplish was to further weaken the Lon Nol dictatorship in Cambodia and pave the way for a Khmer Rouge victory. It also killed a lot of Cambodian peasants, who, of course, went into the U.S. "body count" of dead insurgents for the month. 

Those North Vietnamese troops did not vanish, however, they just followed Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap's dictum of "Disperse where the enemy is strong, concentrate where the enemy is weak." They went somewhere else. Five years later the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese took Saigon.

Jump ahead 35 years to the current U.S. and NATO offensive going in Kandahar Province, southern Afghanistan.

"We now have the initiative. We have created momentum," says British Maj. Gen. Nick Carter, commander of NATO forces in southern Afghanistan and in charge of the Kandahar operation. The police chief of the local district, Hajii Niaz Muhammad added, "We broke their [the Taliban's] neck."

But the fighting has been low key, and few weapons have been seized. A Taliban fighter told the Times, "We are not there anymore."

Where did they go? 

PUL-E-KHUMRI, Afghanistan -- The Taliban's influence in northern Afghanistan has expanded in recent months from a few hotspots to much of the region, as insurgents respond to the U.S.-led coalition's surge in the south by seizing new ground in areas once considered secure.
— Wall Street Journal, 10/18/10

In recent weeks the Taliban have been launching attacks in Badakshan, Balkh, and Samangan, formally among the most peaceful in the country. "Day by day, the Taliban are advancing into new districts," Baghlan provincial council chief Mohammad Rasoul told the Journal. Attacks have more than doubled and the Taliban recently assassinated the governor of Kunduz Province.

Disillusionment with the government has helped fuel the insurgency.

"People don't love the Taliban—but if they compare them to the government, they see the Taliban as the lesser evil," Baghlan Governor Munshi Abdul Majid told the Journal.

While Gen. Carter is calling Kandahar the key to defeating the insurgency, his counterpart in Northern Afghanistan, Maj. Gen. Hans-Werner Fritz, commander of NATO's 11,000 troops in the north, sees it differently: "The northern part could become the game-changer for all of Afghanistan," he says, because much of the fuel for the U.S. and NATO passes through Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, as does Kabul's electricity.

U.S. Col. Bill Burlson, commander of the 1^st Brigade of the 10^th Mountain Division, sums up the dilemma of the Afghan War: "In order to deny the terrain to the enemy, you'd have to have people all over Afghanistan in combat outposts. But since that would take hundreds of thousands of troops, 'You've got to pick and choose where you hold.'" 

And when you "pick" one place, the Taliban will "choose" another.

There is always a Parrot's Beak, a Fish Hook—yet another "strategic" battle in the Vietnam War—a horn of Panjwai, a hill, or a valley that is the "key" to winning a war against an insurgency. But there are millions of hills and valleys and horns and beaks, and they are as meaningless in Afghanistan as they were in Vietnam and Cambodia. 

All this talk about the "horn of Panjwai" would be laughable were it not for the fact that this nonsense translates into a lot of pain, death and destruction. It also tends to harden positions on both sides, making peace that more elusive.

More of Conn Hallinan's work can be found at Dispatches from the Edge.

Two pieces in Wednesday’s New York Times allege progress on two key fronts in the United States’ engagement in Afghanistan. Reporter Carlotta Gall offers a comparatively jubilant piece valorizing a supposed “rout” of Taliban forces in the vital province of Kandahar. Comparing the success favorably to the ill fated and highly publicized Marja incursion of last year, Gall credits much of the advance to the skillful employment of the new High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or Himars, a precision rocket-delivery system that has enabled coalition forces to attack Taliban supply routes, command centers, and weapons facilities. Taken aback by the intensity of the strikes as well as the perceived unfriendliness of some local residents, many Taliban soldiers have buried their weapons and fled for the time being to Pakistan. 

While NATO commanders express a great deal of encouragement at the development, there remains ample space for skepticism. No amount of expensive innovation in armaments can provide for a sustainable counterinsurgency operation – witness Iraq, where insurgents hobbled the massive Pentagon apparatus with the development of the IED, which is said to cost no more than a pizza. Clearing a field of weeds is of little efficacy without the sowing of a strain of seeds suitable to local conditions. While the Afghan National Army remains a relatively popular national institution, its shortcomings are well documented. However thoroughly the area is cleared of Taliban soldiers, it is difficult to imagine anyone other than the Taliban returning, as they have promised to do, or else a local warlord filling the void, the latter of which would hardly be alien to the greater thrust of American strategy in the country. While some warlords have pressed down on the Taliban, it was the very proliferation of such disreputable figures that created a climate favorable to the Taliban in the first place. 

Thus even at its most successful, a military-led counterinsurgency campaign remains inherently unsustainable. This is particularly well illustrated by a PBS Frontline piece from last year called “Obama’s War,” which documented the incursion into Marja. The piece features footage of American soldiers speaking with local residents as Taliban soldiers fire shots off in the distance. The bullets are not meant to strike anybody but rather to disrupt the conversation and remind the villagers of an undeniable political fact: the Taliban will remain long after NATO has declared victory and gotten out, and they are keeping track of who speaks to whom. With such an unmistakable cue within one’s own earshot, where would you hedge your bets?

Nicholas Kristof, in yet another piece on mountain climber turned master school builder Greg Mortenson, offers a tale of progress of a different sort. Kirstof reminds us that Mortenson has been able to bypass the security blankets of bullets and bombs to build schools even in Taliban-held territory. Staffing his development crews entirely with locals and consulting with village elders, Mortenson has provided for an education program that locals are willing defend against the Taliban, even while the organization eschews the protection of NATO soldiers.

“Aid can be done anywhere, including where Taliban are,” Mr. Mortenson said. “But it’s imperative the elders are consulted, and that the development staff is all local, with no foreigners.”

In volatile Kunar Province, which borders Pakistan, the Taliban recently ordered a halt to a school being built by Mr. Mortenson’s organization, the Central Asia Institute. But the villagers rushed to the school’s defense. The Taliban, which have been mounting a campaign for hearts and minds, dropped the issue, according to Wakil Karimi, who leads Mr. Mortenson’s team in Afghanistan.

In another part of Kunar Province, the Central Asia Institute is running a girls’ primary school and middle school in the hear t of a Taliban-controlled area. Some of the girls are 17 or 18, which is particularly problematic for fundamentalists (who don’t always mind girls getting an education as long as they drop out by puberty). Yet this school is expanding, and now has 320 girls, Mr. Karimi said. 

While the construction of schools is not a silver bullet for the Afghanistan werewolf, surprisingly simple elements of Mortenson’s approach offer a refreshing contrast to military-led efforts. Aligning educational priorities with those of local leaders, he has created space for local Taliban leaders to do the same by demonstrating the value of such projects to locals and reconfiguring the Taliban’s incentive structure. The success of this approach is born out in the experience of other Track II organizations as well: 

Government schools regularly get burned down, but villagers tell me that that’s because they’re seen as alien institutions built by outside construction crews. In contrast, CARE runs 300 schools in Afghanistan and not one has been burned down, the aid organization says. The Afghan Institute of Learning, run by a redoubtable Afghan woman named Sakena Yacoobi, has supported more than 300 schools and none have been burned, the institute says. Another great aid organization, BRAC, runs schools, clinics and microfinance programs — and operates in every single province in Afghanistan.

Then there’s the Global Partnership for Afghanistan, which is based in New York and helps Afghan villagers improve agricultural yields in the most unstable parts of the country. Some Taliban commanders have even sent word inviting the group into their areas.

One hopes that it is not passé to invoke the celebrity at the center of Three Cups of Tea. But given that we seem to have defined our Afghan strategy along a willful conflation of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and given further that the Taliban are unlikely to disappear in the near term (even if they must camp out in Pakistan for a time), it seems eminently pragmatic to align our stars with those who can improve the condition of Afghanistan and nourish its hearts and minds even while keeping neighborly company with the Taliban. To invoke the lexicon of civil society, acts of solidarity will carry themselves much further than acts of imposition.

However precise, no expensive rocket system will accomplish that.

It’s obvious to everyone now – except, of course, the usual Washington ‘patriots’ and lotus eaters – that the fat lady is singing in Afghanistan, and the US is down to looking for a political frame to cover its defeat and departure. As shocking as that may be to those who still believe in the absolute sovereignty and power of nation states, it’s just the most visible example of a trend US policymakers – and governments at large – refuse to acknowledge.

The ‘Other Guys’ are winning. 

The simple fact is that the days of nation states fighting and winning wars is just about over. Modern wars, such as Afghanistan, are far more likely to be between states and non-state entities than between/among states. And, if we’re willing to look at it objectively, we can see that the OGs (gangs, tribes, sects and all those miscellaneous ‘post national’ groups that constitute ‘Other Guys’) have a very good chance of winning those wars. 

Here’s why. 

First, ‘winning’ is defined differently by OGs. Different crews have different goals and different metrics for success. It might be to seize the levers of state power. Or it might be a ‘picador’ model – just enrage, bleed, weaken and limit the options of the beast, whether for profit, payback, or so it can’t effectively interfere with you. Or a ‘Baghdad Bazaar’ model – create a ‘sinkhole’ where your crew can control a given resource, such as electricity, diesel fuel, water, security or even property rentals as a means of livelihood. While states play for power and control, OGs play for autonomy and enterprise, and their ‘profits’ include belonging, fun, prestige and group security as well as livelihood.

Second, the ‘evolution of lethality’ means states no longer have a monopoly on violence, nor exclusive access to/control of deadly technologies. It’s open source and anybody can play. Today, the great levelers are small arms and IEDs which, as Mexico and dozens of other examples demonstrate, allow OGs to resist and even defeat state forces to assume local control. As reverse engineering, ‘fab labs’ and 3D printers proliferate. However, OGs will be able to field state of the art weapon systems, including highly effective man-portable anti-air and anti-armor missiles. With that kind of ordnance, conventional military units offer OGs a target rich environment.

Strategy and tactics have developed and distributed, too. Anyone, almost anywhere, can now go online and download training materials from the US Army and a plethora of other players. From Sun Tzu to small unit tactics, mortar gunnery and weapon-specific guides, everything you ever wanted to know about warfare is accessible and free. 

Third, the ‘porosity’ of globalization means there are lots of boundaries, seams, edges and overlaps where OGs can live, hide and thrive. One consistent characteristic of successful OGs is access to safe havens for respite and refit. Think Cambodia for the North Vietnamese, Venezuela for the FARC and Pakistan for the Taliban. Those boundaries and seams also provide access to resources, and markets for OG entrepreneurs. 

Fourth, a growing percentage of the global population – in developing and industrialized regions – has legitimate grievances that, left unresolved, provide sympathy, support and recruits for OGs. Just as Mao spoke of guerillas swimming in the sea of the people, OGs survive and thrive among a population that resents the state – whether for acts of omission or commission. As life gets worse for the majority of the planet’s inhabitants – and even more important, their hopes for a better future fade – OG habitat expands.

Fifth, ROI is on the side of the OGs. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to be the opposition than the state. Credible estimates suggest that pulling off the 9-11 attacks cost Al Qaeda somewhere in the neighborhood of $250,000. Contrast that with the fact that the US has spent on the order of $3 trillion since that time with its various reactions, and you start to see the advantages of the OG approach.

Or consider the near meltdown of the Washington, DC area a few years ago when the sniper was doing his thing. One lunatic, with nothing more than a confused kid for a companion, a beater Chevy and a Bushmaster XM-15 currently available online for $1,250, virtually shut down the area. Contrast that investment, plus a couple dozen rounds fired, with 10 dead and millions of dollars lost through averted economic activity and direct intervention / mediation costs.

Now imagine what might have happened if the sniper had intention beyond pathology and was part of a capable network. That kind of return on investment is easily available to OGs, and nation states cannot begin to respond in a cost-effective way.

Sixth, traditional state methods of suppression are both inefficient and insufficient. You can’t fight ideas and information flows with firepower. Success in a complex social system comes from strong identity, networking and relationships, which states are increasingly unable to provide. And while states actually have to redress issues to prevail, OGs only have to relentlessly point them out and exploit them. Most critically, states have to win. OGs only have to not lose.

In this volatile environment, stability and success – within and among states – can only come from forging ‘mutually assured security’. Nation states must move beyond their legacy thinking derived from colonial roots and Cold War paranoia, and begin to build mutually beneficial relationships that foster genuine security, equity, justice and well-being for all.

If not, they’re headed for the dust bin of history – sooner rather than later. 

After a 10-day blockade, the Torkham border crossing to Afghanistan in the Khyber Pass was reopened by Pakistan. It had, of course, been closed after a U.S. helicopter gunship mistakenly killed three Pakistani troops in a raid for which U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson apologized and called a "tragic accident."

Washington must have breathed a sigh of relief not only because it can resume its operation, but because the situation had become embarrassing. At IPS News Gareth Porter had painted this picture on Friday: "Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported Friday that 6,500 NATO vehicles are backed up along the entire 1,500 km route from the port of Karachi to the Khyber Pass."

The convoys rolling again is, in fact, an oopportunity missed. Porter also noted that the halt in NATO convoys had momentarily "brought an end to the unilateral attacks in Pakistan pushed by Gen. David Petraeus and forced Washington to make a new accommodation." Furthermore, it might have made it "impossible for Petraeus to make the argument in the future that the United States can succeed in Afghanistan, given the refusal of Pakistan to budge on the issue." [Emphasis added.] 

You've heard the vaguely Eastern expression "Within crisis lies opportunity." In this case, within chagrin would have lied opportunity. In its refusal to uncategorically go after insurgents within its borders (which it engages less as if they were a threat than a chance to hone the fighting skills of both its army and the Taliban), Pakistan might seem to be an endless source of headeaches to Washington.

But, if, along with refusing to commit itself wholeheartedly to eliminating the Palistani Taliban, Pakistan had kept the border closed, the case could have been made that Pakistan not only seeks no help with its internal security but in shoring up Afghanistan as a bulwark against India. The United States could then have begun in earnest to back away from the crime scene that has become Afghanistan.