The rather shocking and sudden way in which a recent Rolling Stone article brought about the forced resignation of the top U.S. general in Afghanistan has, together with other milestones, churned up some long-ignored questions about what allied forces are doing there in the first place. In recent weeks, the 1,000th U.S. soldier was killed there, as well as the 300th Brit, and the war became officially the longest in American history. More and more, mainstream voices are beginning to question what is now, fully, Obama’s war.
At the New York Review of Books blog, Garry Wills writes that “McChrysal does not matter“; if there’s one take-away from the Rolling Stone piece, it isn’t the general’s insubordinate remarks but that the time has come to, as Wills puts it, “get out!”
The conflict around McChrystal will only matter if it is the occasion of recognizing what a fool’s errand he was sent on. Any military replacement will only repeat his calls for more time, more troops, more recognition of the failed policy of “counter-insurgency” (COIN). Hastings’s real point is signaled early in his Rolling Stone piece:
The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want.
In June 11th’s New York Times, I was struck to see, on the front page, an article about Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s expression of doubt in the very foreign troops propping up his fragile regime, while on the back page columnist Bob Herbert argued that it is probably time for us to leave. Then, two days later, the newspaper reported on a treasure trove of mineral deposits in the country—which, it turns out, isn’t really news at all, but seems to have been re-announced in order to appeal to resource-hungry cynicism in the hopes that it might renew people’s commitment to the war effort.
From McChrystal’s insubordinate remarks to the new-old minerals, there is a campaign afoot to distract the conversation from the basic questions toward which more and more observers are beginning to drift: Are the foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan doing any good? Have they ever? Do we have any idea what they’re really supposed to be doing there in the first place?
The danger is that people will—they already have—become simply resigned to an endless and pointless war because they don’t know any better or feel they have any choice. There is a choice. We have to begin devoting ourselves to developing practical, realistic, nonviolent strategies for how foreign troops can withdraw from Afghanistan with a minimum of cost to the people who live there, as well as for how a political arrangement can be brokered that will finally bring some stability to the region. This is not a utopian, unrealistic proposal. What’s utopian and unrealistic is the combat mission that has been dragging on there, continually firing the coals of radicalism since 2001. Finally the mainstream is beginning to come around to the fact that a non-military resolution—rather than military resignation—is the only sensible way forward.
Even George Will uses the same language as Garry Wills in his column today, saying, “The American undertaking in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand” and calling the war “surreal.”
Nathan, your final paragraph addresses the crucial issue.The withdrawal of all the foreign military presence will not end the violence for the people of Afghanistan. As you say there may need to be a wider regional agreement in which the damaging effects of imperialism and power politics can be removed.
Imperialism? Seriously? You ACTUALLY believe that?
The 1893 Durand Line as you doubtless appreciate DK, marks the boundary in part between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
As Wikipedia notes:
“It was established after the 1893 Durand Line Agreement between the Government of colonial British India and Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan for fixing the limit of their respective spheres of influence.”
In this case it is clear that the British influence was military rather than say cultural, which would be a reasonable description of imperialism.
If you’re saying that Britain made a great number of mistakes during it’s colonial period and creating borders, you would be correct. I took what you said to mean American imperialism which was not your intent. My apologies.
Cheers
Which exactly of GEN McCrystal’s comments were insubordinate? When news first leaked of the article, I was expecting some bombshell like the general calling Obama a clueless wimp or advocating some off the reservation strategy. Reading the article four times, I found nothing insubordinate from McCrystal. NOTHING. Some of his staff were less made less than flattering remarks, but virtually all of them about Holbrooke, Eikenberry and Biden. All three of them publicly or through leaks questioned the course of action championed by McCrystal and signed off on by Obama. That being said, McCrystal serves at the pleasure of the President and if Obama wants to make a change he’s certainly free to do so.
– “Are the foreign troops fighting in Afghanistan doing any good? Have they ever?” Fighting COIN and nation building takes ALOT of time. Foreign armies have had quite a few issues trying to CONQUER Afghanistan. We are not there to conquer, so we have yet to see if we have the political backbone to finish a job that may take 10 more years.
– “Do we have any idea what they’re really supposed to be doing there in the first place?” Is this a serious question?
I have serious disagreements with your last paragraph and will address those below.
Cheers
The last paragraph…
If someone can come up with a “practical, realistic, nonviolent strategies…with a minimum of cost to the people who live there…that will finally bring some stability to the region.” They will win a DESERVED Nobel Prize. Insomuch as there are quite a few very smart people examining the situation, and they cannot find a solution that fits your criterion, it follows that your expectations do constitute a “utopian, unrealistic proposal.”
There are strong arguments that our failure to confront terrorism emboldened OBL and Al-Qaeda to attack the United States with support and sanctuary from the Taliban in Afghanistan. The outline for our actions in Afghanistan is FM 3-24 Counterinsurgency http://www.scribd.com/doc/9137276/US-Army-Field-Manual-FM-324-Counterinsurgency. This is the blueprint of the US success in Iraq. The conditions in Afghanistan make similar results much more difficult and will take much more time. In Iraq you had a reasonably educated population with a basic understand of the rule of law, a reasonably effective police and military, an established infrastructure, and a functional central government. In Afghanistan you have a poorly educated population, an ineffective police and military, centuries without an effective centralized government, and no infrastructure to speak of.
The overarching question is does the United States have the stomach to finish. It is not in our national interest, nor the Afghan people’s best interest for us to cut and run.
Cheers
Ah yes, that “US success in Iraq.” Lack of basic amenities, jobs and security, just for starters. I suspect you would agree that very few Iraqis would agree with your description of the ongoing occupation of Iraq as a success. Yet you label it as such anyway. What does that say about you?
Shannon, the joys of democracy…the ability to complain about jobs, amenities, and security without having a bullet in the back of your head. How do Irais feel? Suppose it depends if you’re Shi’a, Sunni or Kurd.
If I didn’t know better, I would think you’d argue that Iraq was better off with Hussein. No reasonably intelligent person would make that argument.
What does it say about me? Oh, I don’t know. That I know much more about the topic than you do? That I’m correct? Both?
What is most sad is that “US success” (Iraqi sovereignty and democracy)leaves such a bad taste in your mouth.
The imperialism question, I think, is a pertinent one here. D., I sympathize with your reluctance to associate the language of “empire” with what the U.S. is doing, and I try to avoid using it myself. What we’re up to is something quite different from what, say, Britain did in India, and the two systems shouldn’t be mistaken for one another. However, what is at play today does bear certain resemblances to it. In Iraq, there has been success in calming the violence and building a government. But with it, the U.S. has built for itself the largest embassy of any country anywhere in the world. We’re making sure that our success there enables us to continue to be a very heavy-handed presence in the region—the kind of presence that, in his own country of Saudi Arabia, was what made Bin Laden target the U.S. in the first place. So I think there is some cause for being ambivalent about our alleged success there. It may be something we regret down the line.
As for counterinsurgency tactics, and the like: it’s worth noting that, while soldiers with big guns are still at the center of it, Petraeus’ counterinsurgency manual takes steps toward a nonviolent approach to conflict management. It emphasizes “hearts and minds” and “soft power.” A winning element of the Iraq surge, too, was a strategy of putting our troops in harm’s way, stationing them in the neighborhoods they were meant to be protecting in order to strengthen relationships with the locals. In these respects, it represents a step toward a more nonviolent way of waging conflict, and that deserves to be recognized. Still, there’s no way around the fact that, to many Afghans, we look like an invading army no matter how you slice it. They aren’t going to trust our men with guns no matter how nice we try to be. And every time a drone fires a missile or a plane drops a bomb on a wedding party to kill a militant (and everyone else present), we’ve made more enemies, more people who will not be susceptible to our good intentions.
A familiar theme of discussion on this site is a perverse admiration for the endless patience people are willing to give military attempts to solve problems. Our country has spent the last decade and vast, vast amounts of money on fighting that has produced relatively little progress; terrorist attacks have grown more common, the Taliban is growing stronger, and al-Qaeda is a bigger brand than Nike. I’m not asking for a Nobel Prize miracle. I’m asking that we spend anything like the kind of effort and resources and patience (and even the sacrifice of our own lives) on nonviolent efforts before we decide that sending more armed (however, again, well-meaning) 20 year olds overseas is the only option we’ve got.
Nathan, I’m glad you’re hesitant to call something imperial when it is not. I think the resources we put into the US embassy in Baghdad is a demonstration of commitment to the democratic Iraq, not one of conquest. America’s overarching goal in the Gulf is to keep the lines of trade open. That is in our national interest and much of the world’s interest.
American presence in the region had been quite limited until the 1980s, and that was escorting tankers while the Iranians and Iraqis killed each other in prodigious numbers. In 1990, this little event happened when Iraq attempted to annex Kuwait and threatened the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Iraq was ejected, but still posed a threat to our Gulf allies. At the Saudis invitation, we kept a relatively small force in Saudi Arabia to enforce the no fly zone and those forces maintained a small footprint. Can any rational person condone OBL’s actions with the US providing security assistance to our allies at their request?
I’ve read Petraeus’ work and it is not really warfighting, it is nation building. You are correct in that nation building requires much greater reliance on economic, diplomatic and social sources of power with military power to support those efforts. For this to be successful, certain prerequisites need to be in place first. A “surge” in Iraq would not have been successful because there was not an effective central gov’t and no Iraqi police force/military. These deficiencies were overcome rather quickly. When all the pieces were in place, the surge worked magnificently. The problem with Afghanistan is that the central government is a big question, the Afghan police/military are not effective and the culture is more tribal and distrusting (probably rightly so) of outsiders. Until these problems are solved, gaining trust much more difficult to impossible to achieve. COIN operations will still be violent, can’t get around that because the insurgents themselves will only be stopped with kinetic operations. The goal is to isolate them from the civilians and see the Afghan gov’t as a better solution to their problems. I think Petraeus uses 6 additional insurgents are created for every civilian casualty.
No one is advocating a military solution to all problems. Military folks will be the first to tell you that. Heck, I am not a fan of nation building, but that is the best option to prevent these sorts of attacks in the future. The fact remains though, the US military can do things that no other organization in the world can do and at the same time provide the environment that the other government organizations and NGOs can do their work.
If the US is attacked on the scale of 9/11, I do not want wait and hope nonviolent solutions where none exist. Evil men did evil things. Using harsh language will not stop them. Giving in to them will not stop them. This just emboldens them. Violence has always been a part of humanity and nature. We are evolving to the point where we can limit innocent casualties. Democracy has reduced violence where democracy has taken hold. Civilization is moving forward.
The solutions to these complex problems are not solved in a short amount of time.