By Steve Hynd
It was eight years ago yesterday that Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force bill that led, only three weeks later, to the invasion of Afghanistan. The bill passed 98-0 in the Senate and 420-1 in the House with only Rep. Barbara Lee saying "some of us must urge the use of restraint."
Belatedly, some Dem lawmakers are urging restraint - Feingold, Feinstein, Sanders and Murtha, for example. All have recently argued either that there should be no further escalation of US forces or that it's time to bring the troops home. They might wish that they'd done so far earlier, for the adventure in Afghanistan has fizzled. And according to a new CNN poll only 39 percent of Americans favor the war in Afghanistan, with 58 percent opposed.
The evidence for at the very least a drawdown - a repurposing of the mission back to pure counter-terrorism and a vastly reduced footprint in the region - seems to me to be overwhelming. Prof. Donald M. Snow, at the website of the Atlantic Council, explains why the barriers to a nation-building success are now insuperable - Afghans and their American occupiers want two different sets of things.
One of the differences is certainly about what kind of postwar stability the country wants. From an American perspective, the answer (although rarely phrased this way) is the westenization of the country: a strong central government with popular support that can engage in the kinds of orderly development that can transform Afghanistan into a vibrant, secure, and anti-Al Qaeda place.
But is this what the Afghans want? Afghanistan has NEVER had a strong central government, and the ethnic basis of Afghan politics suggests that the emergence of a government that represents the aspirations and loyalties of most of the population is a pipe dream, or at least a long-term goal well beyond the immeidate or near-term horozon of possibility. What if the best one can expect in Afghanistan is a reversion to the very loose, tribally based system of government (based around the loya jirgas) that existed in pre-Soviet Afghanistan? Such a structure would be, as it always has been, highly decentralized, with great degrees of regional autonomy and tribal control. What if this is what the Afghans want? And what if that autonomy included the continued de facto provision of sanctuary to elements of Al Qaeda?
These are not fanciful questions to ask. They are also indicative of the kinds of conflicts that almost always emerge between the indigenous elements in the kinds of states where outsiders intervene and the intervenors. If there was agreement about how to run the place, after all, there would probably not be a full-scale insurgency that required countering. The indigenous population eventually has to sort out the situation and reach its own accord, which may or may not have much to do with the interests and desires of the intervening party.
What America currently wants is impossible given the illigitimate Afghan central government, the illiterate and corrupt Afghan security forces and the hostility of Afghans to the occupation. The US cannot even manage the civilian surge which was supposed to be the crucial part of Obama's strategy, defusing that hostility. In such circumstances, a drawdown is warranted, as is a goodly bit of honesty about what motivates the Afghan insurgency, which is stronger than ever after eight years. As Faryal Leghari writes in the Kuwait Times:
Protracted military engagement is the least desirable option in military circles. It is equally tedious for politicians running the show. It becomes trickier when it is a nationalist insurgency, drawing its support among the population. Such is the case in Afghanistan.
Despite the dissenting voices crying hoarse that insurgency is surviving only by terrorising people and by getting support from across the border, the reality is otherwise. It is not possible that these factors could drive the insurgency.
... If the purpose is to �defeat, dismantle and destroy� the Al Qaeda, then efforts to delink the insurgents from the terrorist organisation should be boosted. Therein lies the key to a win, one that requires recognising the insurgency for what it actually is; a nationalist struggle.
Delinking the nationalist insurgency - and various factional fighters interested only in tribal or ethnic issues - from the true terrorists will be far easier if the causus belli for the nationalists, the obvious and heavy-handed occupation, is removed.
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