Sad, But Inevitable

Afghani Rope-a-Dope

It is looking likely that the US will depart Afghanistan in abject failure.  American Exceptionalism has overreached itself again. 

Below is a sober account on the progress of the war from Paul McGeough, the Chief Correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald.  

Obama faces insurmountable battle in Afghanistan

PAUL McGEOUGH

December 20, 2010

After almost a decade, the fix is in and the news is bad. Just as Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai has Barack Obama precisely where he wants him, so too Pakistan has the US leader where it would like to keep him - up against a wall, writing big fat cheques.

There have always been three essential elements to this conflict in Afghanistan. The first two essentials are whatever might be achieved militarily and what could be achieved in governance to sustain any military gains. But just as important is the extent to which neighbouring Pakistan will come to the party, to facilitate these two. And in the absence of gains either in governance or with Pakistan, any counter-insurgency effort almost certainly will fail.

 

Accounts of the mechanics of the Obama White House's review of progress in the war - announced last week - suggest that the military swayed the debate with evidence of some tactical success in the south of the country. Perhaps. But the President would do well to pay more attention to the reports of the intelligence services, which go a good way to explaining the impossible task ahead.

Some senior US officials are concluding that the message in President Karzai's repeated lashing-out at the West, is that even he does not believe in the US-led counter-insurgency. And last week a senior US military official told The Washington Post: "Pakistani sanctuaries [to which Taliban fighters retreat to rest up and/or resupply] are crucial - if you can't solve that problem, you can't win."

In much of the US debate, there is an implicit belief that the Afghans are a stupid people.
Far from it. They see the nonsense in being asked to have faith in an American-led campaign that is in retreat. They have no great desire to be connected to a Kabul government that is obscenely corrupt.

And when Washington talks up its retraining of the Afghan military and police services, Afghans see partisan militants who will snap to attention at the first order from their local warlords - who forever will be grateful for all the US funding that went into training, arming and supplying this generation of Afghan fighters.

Lamenting the institution-building failure of the first decade in Afghanistan, an International Crisis Group briefing-paper last month offered this judgment: "Successive US administrations deserve much of the blame … From the start the policy was untenable, selecting some of the most violent and corrupt people in the country, stoking them up with suitcases of cash and promises of more to come and then putting them in charge was never a recipe for stability, never mind institution-building."

Afghans have seen this thuggish element of their society at work before. It was in the 1990s when the people demonstrated a collective capacity to make what, on their terms, was a sensible decision on how to get on with their lives in relative security - they welcomed the Taliban.

This is not to say that Afghans like the Taliban.

But there are two counts on which they worry about the Americans. One, what they hear from Washington is a constant refrain about getting the hell out of Afghanistan; and two, with its failure to develop a believable political process and a proper system of justice, locals are inclined to a jaundiced view that Washington endorses the corruption that takes its place.
Ironically, while Obama still tries to talk about getting out of Afghanistan, even by a sleight of hand which has diminished his proposed July start of the draw-down to a more distant all-foreign-troops-out by 2014, Afghan pessimism has soared.

A year ago 70 per cent believed their country was going in the right direction; today just 50 per cent hold to that belief. And fewer Americans care - 60 per cent now believe that the war has been worth fighting.

Such is the questionable value of the huge foreign-aid spending in Afghanistan, that the former commander of NATO forces there, David Richards, co-authored a piece in the current issue of Foreign Affairs which suggests ''it might have been better and considerably more efficient if the international community had simply airdropped bundles of money throughout the country".
Similarly, the argument that Washington needs to be patient and not make matters worse by quarrelling with Islamabad, misses the point - if Pakistani stubbornness can deliver little more than it does now, then all the military and civilian surging in Afghanistan is a wasted effort.

Two points on the timeline are far more pertinent than Obama's insistence that he start bringing troops home next year - even if, as his Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, puts it, it is by just a ''handful'' of troops. One, this is now America's longest war; and two, the US has been in Afghanistan for longer than the USSR's failed 1980s bid to impose its will on central Asia.
Sisyphus might have gone home long ago. But Obama can't - he has become a hostage to his own script. Listing a litany of problems, the International Crisis Group briefing paper concludes: "All these … have led many to believe it is time for the foreign forces to leave. Unfortunately, a rush to the exit will not help Afghans nor will it address the very real regional and global security concerns posed by the breakdown of the Afghan state."

 Let's recap.  Candidate Obama had to have a war he could advocate and support on the campaign trail to prove his "exceptionalist" credentials.  Iraq was out; Afghanistan was in.  "Afghanistan is where we should be fighting," he said.  Once elected, he had to back up his rhetoric.  Over many months US military strategy was morphed to fit Obama's world view of progressive enlightenment (talk in good faith as equals to other nations; acknowledge the limitations of the US; conflicts diminish; fear and suspicion recedes; peace and harmony break out).  The US was no longer to fight terrorism, but ignorance, illiteracy, poverty, corruption in Afghanistan alongside its chosen Afghani partners (the corrupt Karzai government).  The campaign became one of "nation building"--long touted by anti-insurgency experts as the key to defeating popular resistance movements. 

Obama bought this approach because it roughly fitted in with his progressive ideology.  It was politically palatable and the least worst of a bunch of bad options.  Ironically it manifested the very worst of an ideology he professed to disavow--American Exceptionalism.  (Obama has long yearned to replace American Exceptionalism with Woodrow Wilson style American Internationalism).  In Afghanistan under Obama, the US has continued full-tilt in pursuit of an idea that it can save the world for democracy and make other nations "safe" and "freedom loving"--that is, it can make other nations espouse secular humanist Western values.  But equally inept was Obama's determination that the mission in Afghanistan had to change quickly from a military one to a civil Marshall-Plan cause.  Hence, his announcement that he would start withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in 2011, and an all out withdrawal by 2014.  This assuaged his pacifist inclinations and mollified the left wing of the Democratic party.  It also ensured, as the final nail in the coffin, that the whole Afghani experiment would prove out to be a reckless boondoggle, as McGeough argues. 

Nations which arrogantly rebel against the Living God end up stewing in a noisome witchs' cauldron of their own making.  The United States is no exception!