Counterfactual, Not Counterintuitive

By Steve Hynd

In the L.A Times today, CNAS members Richard Fontaine and John Nagl put forward the claim that Afghanistan's incredibly fraudulent election doesn't undermine the Afghan government's legitimacy, and therefore doesn't undermine the notion of foreign occupying powers practising a counter-insurgency strategy there.

Here's Fontaine and Nagl's core argument - and its obviously a strawman.

Prospects for such an outcome in Afghanistan actually look better now than they did in Iraq in early 2007. To begin with, unlike Iraq -- where success hinged on persuading a critical mass of the Sunni Arab community to accept the bitter reality of a Shiite-led government -- no deep existential issue drives Afghans (primarily Pashtuns) into the arms of the insurgents.

In fact, according to polls and other evidence, the overwhelming majority of Afghans, including Pashtuns, remain hostile to the Taliban's ideological agenda and unenthusiastic about a return to the medievalism that was inflicted on the country when it was last in power. The inroads the Taliban has made mainly reflect the failures and abuses of the Afghan government at the local level, not transcendent grievances about ethnic or sectarian divides.

For this reason, the national government in Afghanistan almost certainly retains greater legitimacy among the people than did the Iraqi government before things began to turn for the better there.

Leave aside that most observers think the Iraqis largely ignored the opportunity for reconcilliation and that violence there is back on the upside, for the moment.

Fontaine and Nagl's argument fails because their argument is predicated upon the Taliban being the whole of the insurgency -and it isn't. The UK's DfID study, a recent Senate report and leaks of current US intelligence analysis reveal that most of the insurgency, while it might take training from the Taliban, could care less about the Taliban's ideological agenda. Between 70 and 90 percent of insurgents are motivated by resistance to occupying invaders or by the ethnic divides - the domination of Tajiks in a government ruling a Pashtun majority - that Nagl says don't exist. The Taliban just pay them to do lip service to their ideology and run under their banner.

The argument most resembles those of Iraq in 2003 and 2004, when the Bush administration were demanding that all insurgents were Al Qaeda long after it became obvious to everyone else that such simply wasn't the case. And the Bush administration's refusal to see that was a major factor in the spiral downward that destroyed what was left of Iraqi civil society between 2004 and 2007.

Nagl knows all this, though, and it's not like him to be this dishonest in his arguments. I wonder whether his name was simply appended to work by Fonaine to give it some credibility. There's obviously going to be a question of competence hanging over any op-ed involving the guy who was John McCain's senior foreign policy advisor from 2004 until the end of McCain's failed presidential run - which failed at least partly because McCain was seen as too willing to drop bombs or invade all and sundry, from Iran to Russia. Fontaine obviously had input on "Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran", "we're all Georgian's now" and "we can muddle through in Afghanistan". Joining CNAS doesn't change a neo-conservative into a neo-liberal, it's just career opportunism.

Of course, Fontaine and Nagl do have one thing right, but are drawing the wrong conclusions from it. Out in the Afghan countryside, where illiteracy is rampant and electronic media do not penetrate, most Afghans probably will just shrug and go back to what they were doing when the U.S. and its allies whip up legitimacy for Karzai's band of thieves out of whole cloth. But that doesn't mean those rural Afghans will accept the Kabul government as legitimate. What they'll mostly go back to doing - at least in Pashtun areas - is being a broad-based insurrection against foreign occupiers and the ethnically-alien crooks those occupiers imposed upon them.

Even Afghans think Fontaine and Nagle are wrong. Nagl's colleague David Kilcullen recently pointed out another flaw in the Fontaine/Nagl line: "Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms". And without those reforms corruption and ethnic tensions will only get worse - including those crippling Afghan security forces.  Haroun Mir, of Afghanistan�s Centre for Research and Policy Studies, recently said:

This whole process is a failure,� ... �I think the accusations of fraud have become so big that even if we go for a run-off I doubt we will be able to rescue any credibility for these elections.�

�It�s just too late, especially in terms of security

Fontaine and Nagl's op-ed is a sign of growing desperation about the biggest current Military-Industrial adventure among think-tank hawks who get paid to think by the people who make tanks.