It should come as no surprise that it will take longer than expected to reconstruct 30 years of destruction in Afghanistan.
This week, top U.S. and NATO commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said the campaign to secure Kandahar, a key Taliban stronghold, will require more time than originally planned. The most astonishing part of Gen. McChrystal's admission was that it took him so long to reach it. There is good reason to be skeptical that the U.S.-led coalition can reduce violence, eradicate corruption, and build a capable Afghan government that can take over the fight before U.S. troops draw down next summer.
While the West may tend to underestimate the potential of the Afghan people, and blame them for the mission's present failings, many of these problems reflect more the inherent complications of nation-building than an issue of the Afghans themselves. For sure, most Western officials and analysts (including myself) would say that country's amalgam of disparate tribal and ethnic groups, many of whom have historic grievances against the others, hampers stabilization and reconstruction efforts. However, as Assistant Professor of Economics at West Virginia University Christopher Coyne points out in his book, After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, "while we know what a successful reconstruction entails, we lack an understanding of how to bring about the desired end."
In any country, not just Afghanistan, the values, customs, traditions and belief systems of a foreign people goes beyond a foreign policymakers' ability to control. After all, for every West Germany or Japan, there is a Somalia or Vietnam.
As my colleague and I mentioned last year in our paper, Escaping the Graveyard of Empires, merely increasing our knowledge of Afghanistan's local politics will not guarantee success; presuming we can simply learn what ethnicities and communities can be "peeled off" from militants does not necessarily mean we will reach the ends we seek or yield the outcomes we want.
We have difficulty predicting behavior and tinkering with communal identities right here at home, how can we succeed in creating incentives that will make the people of occupied countries prefer our systems and way of life over and above their own. After nearly a decade at war in Afghanistan, after billions of international investment, funding and training its military, enforcing Western rule of law, and foreign values and customs, NATO and the United States have collectively failed, and in the process, have demonstrated the failure of nation-building.
As an anonymous blogger recently wrote about the mission after attending the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) conference at its Afghanistan/Pakistan Center of Excellence:
"If we were trying to build a house, and that house kept falling apart, we could just plausibly conclude that our house-building effort suffered from a problem implementation-shoddy workmanship, inadequate resources, and things like that. However, without evidence to the contrary, we could just as plausibly conclude that we had sloppy blueprints....I'm leaning towards that sloppy-blueprints explanation of how the Afghan conflict is going right now."
Unfortunately, however, people in Washington are too afraid to admit that we don't have all the answers. But if, as some people say, rebuilding Afghanistan is necessary for U.S. security, I say, sometimes the necessary is the impossible.
# # # Malou Innocent is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C.
Follow Malou Innocent on Twitter: www.twitter.com/IndianBrownAle
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Lesson learned, don't ask the trigger-pullers to be nation-builders.
Forget Rumsfeld!
we are well on our way to be the next one. We should learn from the lessons of history.
Every Empire historically that invaded this country despite its advanced military prowess
has always fell short of its goals. The" REAL" enemy has and always will be a financial one. the secret of this, is they "KNOW IT" and "WE DO NOT". Lets us leave now while we have our pants. we have already lost our shirts and shoes over the past 8 years. how much more are we willing to lose is the question? let us not fall victim to false pride that somehow we are different and better of those that failed and cannot happen to us. Many of those that went before us believed the same thing. A Financial "IED" is what this war has become to our economy. Afghanistan is a FINANCIAL TRAP! A trap for a nation to fall victim of its pride. Look at the numbers, they do not add up and do not bode well for continued spending. We must Declare "VICTORY" and "LEAVE" is our best option.
Failed states attract international terrorists plain and simple. Bombing Afghanistan in the 1990's didn't work and neither did those special forces assaults (which Innocent so adamantly advocated, God knows why...). Stabilizing the government so it can deal with the Taliban is the only realistic solution to ending international terrorism coming from Afghanistan.
The Taliban are difficult to defeat because they have sanctuary in Pakistan. Spending about the same time in Afghanistan we have less than a tenth of the casualties. We hardly lose aircraft or armored vehicles as where the Soviets lost 451 aircraft, 150 tanks, and 1,100 armored vehicles. Not to mention the Soviets didn't have to worry about traveling across the world and had no ethical restrictions.
Afghanistan will be safe and the war done when it is able to defend itself from Taliban incursions and/or the Taliban in Pakistan are crushed.
Sorry but our soldiers are not supposed to be gladiators.
We can't even imagine what these people's lives are like.
Helping sometimes takes a lot of patience. Perhaps instead of leaving it up to politicians in Washington, why not let someone like my brother, who had tea with a "tribal chief", make more decisions--because these guys understand better than any politician sitting in their air conditioning in comfort.
He is at once disgusted and dismayed at the "alliances" that we have formed with war lords, thugs, private militia leaders and weapons traffickers. He believes that many of the people that we are training, arming, funding and enabling are no better than the people that we are fighting. He laments the corruption that has infected the Afghan bureaucracy, and he views with dark humor the reports that suggest that Afghanistan might some day have independent, professional, capable police and security forces. He holds no expectation that Afghanistan will develop enduring civil or democratic institutions.
I wonder if my brother the captain has ever met your brother the captain. Maybe over tea?
I honestly wish people would stop being so bipolar about this. Between the two of you are perspectives of naivete and nihilism.
ahava, from my collective understandings is that US's presence has dramatically improved the lives, survivability, and security of the Afghan people. The Taliban wiped out nearly half a million Afghans during the 1990's. A lot of people haven't forgotten this and greatly appreciate having this security that keeps the Taliban in most situations out.
Y2K, you are without a doubt correct about the endemic corruption, the dirty dealings, anti-pathy towards foreigners etc. However, 1. At the very least they prefer to deal with US foreigners than the Taliban, 2. bribing is a big part of their culture as it is in many parts of the world, 3. building unsavory alliances is what keeps the blood from flowing (Afghans have a culture of being bought). Many of these things are unsavory for Westerners, but this is life. Your brother seems so disgusted by the way things are run there he blankets the entire problem. This is a natural bias, Afghanistan used to be a very stable country and like all countries it is not without its problems. There are many third world countries in which if you looked into them you would find disgusting but are in fact rather stable. Our duty is to stabilize the country not make it into another Germany or Japan.
We have spent a long time doing things the wrong way but if you pay attention to the radical change in approach (human terrain mapping, building relationships with individual tribes, peace building, communication, etc) over the last several years you would realize we are onto something. We got into something entirely new and after years we finally figured out what to do, hence the new COIN doctrine which mostly focuses on connecting with the community instead of ignoring them.
We live in a fast food culture where we expect instant results. We have only recently changed our course in what appears to be the right direction. McChrystal was trying to be honest to our leaders and us when he says this won't happen instantly.
You must also keep in mind that once upon a time Afghanistan was a stable country until USSR came and then Pakistan. Keep in mind that the USSR took away land ownership, which is one of the most integral parts of Afghan culture and Pakistan's Taliban killed about 400k, something which doesn't go over too well with most Afghanis.
We are not in the graveyard of empires (never mind this is a fallacy, considering that many of its occupiers thoroughly subjugated Afghanistan) particularly since we aren't conquering it. Almost entirely of what fights us aren't Afghans but the non-native Pakistanis.
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eileenflemingWAWA 03:47 PM on 6/10/2010"You can't understand the Taliban without knowing about America's covert operations in the region in the 1980s. Back then, President Ronald Reagan's administration, mainly through the CIA, used the Pakistani Intelligence services to fund, arm, and train Afghan and foreign Islamist jihadis to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Pakistan subsequently used "channels built with U.S. money" to install in Afghanistan a friendly government -- the Taliban.
"Later, after the George W. Bush administration invaded the country and the U.S. ousted the Taliban, it installed Hamid Karzai as president and returned many of the old Islamist jihadis to power in his government. Thus, this peculiar, well-established fact underlies the current war in Afghanistan: the United States sponsored both sides..."
http://wea
We see none of that today.
Even the training given by our military seems to have disappeared considering it took about 6 years before the Taliban was able to emulate (poorly) Iraq's IED campaign.
We are today befriending, training, funding, and arming the same corrupt, violent, unprincipled trash that we supported during their fight against the Soviets, only this time we are doing it to try to drive out the Taliban.
The "locals" in Afghanistan get that history, even if you don't.
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Richard Pearce 02:26 PM on 6/10/2010But, starting in on fixing up the first floor also ignores the basic issue, the foundation.
The Afghan foundation (it economic base) is not strong enough to hold up a centralised government, let alone a democratic centralised government. In fact, it is barely strong enough to hold up localised democratic governments, or non-democratic regional ones.
A top down approach will not work, nor will a one-size-fits-all national bottom up approach.
It will take treating each region (and maybe even each community) as a seperate problem (with lessons learned in one used to inform the approach in the next, but not a copy and paste approach), working to establish an economy and government that is not corrupt and not dictatorial in each, and then trying to meld them together.
But this mostly depends on how effectively we can keep Pakistan out of Afghanistan.
Take for example: "after billions of international investment, funding and training its military, enforcing Western rule of law, and foreign values and customs"
This has never really happened. There has been very little in real investment.
As far as enforcing any rule of law, forget it, in the rush to 'democracy' they never bothered to build the institutions first that are needed to support it, and instead threw together a corrupt and incapable 'government'.
Add that to the fact that the place was largely ignored for almost 7 of those 10 years.
You are absolutely correct (we didn't put our backs into it until recently).
The problem that you describe has come from the air power/air force culture that took place shortly after the first Gulf War where American politicians thought (because of massive air power success in Iraq previously）they could solve all our problems by air and minimal troops. This in turn gave many air force and naval aviators (like Wesley Clark who was the architect of the Kosovo bombing campaign and Rumsfeld) key defense positions in which to dictate US security policy. It was nearly believed that troops on the ground would become obsolete until we came back to Iraq.
Strangely enough the UK took this approach shortly after WWII in occupying its colonies shortly after which they lost nearly all of them...
It seems people learn from the wrong history...