By Steve Hynd
The guy who is making AfPak news today is Matthew Hoh, a fairly junior Foreign Service officer and former Marine officer who has resigned his post as the most senior U.S. civilian in the Zabul province of Afghanistan over the conduct of the occupation. His resignation letter is here.
Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency�s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation�s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.
I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of nuclear weapons. However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries. Finally, if our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminal and drug lords, then if we bear our military and financial contributions to Afghanistan, we must reevaluate our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.
Spencer Ackerman points to the central part of Hoh's case - that Afghanistan is already past the "tipping point" at which anything the U.S. does there can have a beneficial effect great enough to outweigh the negative effects of being an army of occupation propping up a corrupt and unrepresentative government.
But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there � a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.
Hoh, it has been pointed out, has only been "on the job" less than a year and might thus be expected to go the way of John B. Keisling, the diplomat who resigned in protest at the invasion of Iraq - consigned to a historical footnote. But Hoh is not the only person making these arguments. Veteran Australian correspondent Paul McGeough said much the same in his excellent recent speech to the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra.
McChrystal, I fear, has arrived too late � for Afghanistan and for Washington. He is asking for a huge act of faith on two fronts � first, by the international community; and second by the Afghan people. But after almost a decade of these constituencies having their trust abused, the miracle promised by McChrystal is a mirage, an ephemeral outcome that even with inevitable, subsequent requests for thousands more troops and billions more in reconstruction dollars likely will not eventuate. The general wants a blank cheque for a jalopy on which he offers no warranty.
I have been asked to address the �strength of the insurgency.� But quite apart from the usual considerations of its fighting numbers, weapons and funding � which I'll come to � the Afghanistan insurgency's greatest strength is the combined, and for a long time, quite deliberate weakness of the Coalition and its treacherous allies in the Kabul government. The McChrystal blueprint might have worked in Year Two or even in Year Five of the conflict � and I stress 'might have' � but at this stage it's too little and it's too late.
Paul "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg recently said the same in an interview and so has regional expert Christine Fair in a recent interview with The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss:
Q. So, what do you think we should do?
FAIR: "I think we should do what's currently being discussed, which is: realize we can't win the counterinsurgency, because it's not ours to win. Foreigners don't win at counterinsurgency, locals do. And locals are not going to win this, because this local government is just so sub-optimal! Bad government is worse than no government at all. We can keep building the Afghan army, the police � but they can't ever pay for it. They can't pay for their own election! How are they going to pay for an army?
"I think we should go ahead, keep throwing resources at training, try to set up some trust fund to pay for this when it stabilizes, but really get our troops out of kinetics. The more troops we have killing people, the harder it is. Everyone blames us for everything. When the Taliban kills civilians we get blamed, because without us there would be no insurgents. When we kill civilians, the Taliban of course exaggerates the numbers and says that we killed women and children going to the mosque, or whatever, whatever makes us look really bad. We get blamed for propping up this corrupt government. So I think we should be scaling back the COIN effort, recognizing that it's not winnable. � Rather than sending our men and women to their doom, we should be asking questions. What is the alternative to COIN? Take for granted that we're going to lose the COIN. How do we secure ourselves against Al Qaeda?"
Q. But is Al Qaeda such a big threat?
FAIR: "I'm with you. This has been a fake argument."
When US forces take the lead role using today�s COIN theory and doctrine in actuality they are not conducting COIN since the insurgency is �not theirs to counter� because the responsibility to counter it should belong to the sovereign nation that is faced with insurgency. While the US can and must support the activities by correctly applying applicable COIN theory (adapted and adjusted for the unique culture and traditions and the conditions that exist in the conflict area) to support that sovereign nation, when the US takes the lead and pushes the host nation to a secondary role in its own country then the US takes on the role of occupier. They are conducting �pacification operations�
Endlessly reaching for COIN-based, decades-long occupation and pacification operations as the best answer to problems is the very definition of creating an accidental Empire. COIN as currently understood by the powers-that-be in America is inevitably a colonial adventure. In such adventures, the "tipping point" is always far easier to find than anything that could be termed "success". The U.S., all these experts agree, has already reached that point.
Update: Add national security expert Prof. Donald M. Snow to the list of those who think the occupation itself is the main problem:
It should be obvious to all concerned that the United States armed forces are as much part of the problem as they are the solution in Afghanistan. Why? Because we are foreigners, or more precisely, foreign occupiers. That outsiders who overstay their welcome (which we certainly have to many Afghans) become the �enemy� rather than the �liberators� (the way we like to think of ourselves) only makes simple sense.
...The continuing presence also means two perverse dynamics that have been raised in earlier postings. One is that they become the poster children for Taliban recruitment, since the Taliban openly appeal for Afghans to join their ranks to throw out the occupiers. When Admiral Mike Mullen (chair of the JCS) referred to the �apparently inexhaustible� supply of Taliban recruits in the country, he failed to add that our presence helped make that supply available. The other is that the dependence the regime has upon the occupying forces to confront the insurgency and to survive is also testimony to the lack of independence the government has; to some, the government that collaborates with the outsiders is no more than a puppet at best, a quisling at worst. Our presence, one of the intended purposes of which is to promote legitimate government, does just the opposite to the extent that independence is part of the definition of good government held by the people.
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