Afghanistan

  Walking away is simply not going to work. It will not even make people in the West feel good about themselves. It will instead bring things back to the 1990s, with regional powers—especially Pakistan—backing Afghans in a proxy war, creating a huge humanitarian crisis among other disasters. It will not make today’s networked terrorists focus their activities on a different set of target countries. It will mean that those in Pakistan’s security services who bet on the Taliban will have succeeded. But that is unlikely to be good news for Pakistan. The consequences of their previous policies created the current insurgency, and more such policy implementation may prove fatal to the future of the country. As it is, violence is eroding away what Pakistan actually needs: strengthened civil society, revitalization of the economy, and development. This is especially the case in the FATA, which needs these things more than even the remainder of Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban did not create the four percent female literacy that currently cripples the FATA, but they surely have taken advantage of it and the lack of development, political isolation, and economic marginalization that goes along with it.

  People in the US and the West need to care about Afghanistan and the regions it borders because the threats there have still not been defeated and thus have the potential either to strike at them directly, as on 9/11, or create a crisis by turning Afghanistan back into an international anarchic battleground and Pakistan into Somalia with nuclear weapons. Just as Afghanistan is not a graveyard673—people do not live in graveyards—neither the US nor NATO is an empire. Empires used to be able to triage away places like Afghanistan, full of independent-minded people with many weapons and few exploitable natural resources. The Romans built Hadrian’s Wall. The British drew the Durand line. Neither was a viable long-term solution. They could keep out invading warbands or lashkars, but not the movement of individuals or ideas. The West found this out when transnational terrorism planned in Afghanistan led to the 11 September 2001 attacks. Pakistan found this out when their Afghanistan policies, supported by military and civilian governments alike since the 1970s, incubated the Pakistani insurgency that was threatening Islamabad in 2009. The impact of any failure in Afghanistan cannot be limited to Afghanistan.

  Neither the globalized world economy nor the globalized security system that sent NATO troops to the battlefields of Afghanistan can build a new frontier to protect themselves from terrorists and insurgents. An effective frontier is a flexible economy-of-force approach that allows those manning it to decide which outsiders are a threat and which can be incorporated into the system. The world of the frontier is a far cry from the world of the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, where “you are either with us or against us.” Pakistan remains the friend of the US, yet has been both “with us and against us” with regard to its Afghanistan policy.674 The money that enables terrorist and insurgent action comes heavily from friendly countries, including Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Even Al Qaeda, a group that thinks in moral absolutes and acts with bloodshed, has been successful because it has been able to deal with those that are both with it and against it, including the Pakistani security services and Afghan and Pakistani Pushtuns who do not share their worldview, religious practices, or focus against a primary enemy that is also a distant one.

  With the coalition’s limited sense of the history of Afghanistan and why it is the way it is today, there has been too strong an emphasis on the short-term goals of the coalition partners. There have been too many outsiders who sought to reverse the whole course of Afghanistan history since 1973 during a unit’s tour of duty, or before the next donor conference or before the next election. Not all these frustrated outsiders are Westerners. They include the Pakistanis who have seen their strategy backfire and Arabs who have seen their religious proselytizing resisted and their clients proven unreliable. Similarly, there are enough negative examples of policy failures in Afghanistan to warn future decision-makers. The US in the 1990s tried disengagement. The Soviets in the 1980s tried massive firepower, bribery, and political consolidation. The Afghan Khalqi Communists in 1978–79 were willing to murder everyone who opposed them. King Zahir started in the 1930s to build centralized state power but failed to check the growing power of the Communist opposition that was receiving Soviet support. None of these policies worked. There is no alternative to an incremental, trial-and-error approach, stressing effective feedback that reflects the nuances of Afghan realities rather than what the decision-makers want to hear.

  Success in Afghanistan means creating a country that is viable in security and economic terms. With aid, the Afghans were able to have a Golden Age and defeat the Soviets. In recent years, there have been enough Afghan successes among the larger picture of disappointment and frustration to suggest how they might once again accomplish great things. Policies need to leverage the proven dedication and courage of the Afghan people rather than their divisions and polarization, emphasizing the strengths of society rather than the reluctance to take individual responsibility or avoid corruption that stems from its collectivist nature. Faith needs to be embraced as a foundation of society rather than a tool of fundamentalist politics. Insisting on Afghan responsibility and backing Afghan solutions is important; but those who seek to have the Afghans responsible for their own security or economy in a finite, single-digit number of years so that the foreign combat troops can go home and aid can be reduced are sending the message that the Western commitment will be a transient one. This is the message that has inspired Pakistan to view the Afghan Taliban as a policy tool rather than a threat and Afghans to view any access to money and power as an opportunity to get what they can while they can, making the cycles of dependency and corruption harder to break. Only a long-term commitment by the US and the coalition can make fundamental changes in these perceptions.

  For a long-term commitment to be potentially sustainable by the US and its allies, Afghan forces will have to be able to carry the burden of combat operations, but in a controlled manner, as the rapid expansion of the ANSF offers many potential pitfalls, stretching the limited pool of competent and literate Afghan leaders and creating a force that will be dependent on foreign aid for its funding. Afghanistan will need to offer legitimate governance throughout the countryside and be able to point out that their enemies offer neither peace nor Islam, despite their claims. The US should commit itself to enable Afghans to build a future for the same reasons it defended West Germany in the Cold War and South Korea after the Korean War. In Germany, when the threat was internal Communist penetration, the US and its allies countered with building democratic institutions. When the threat was Soviet tanks through the Fulda Gap, the US and NATO countered that by committing large forces to Europe’s central front. Today, unlike the Cold War, there is no peer competitor to the US. There are individual adversaries, each requiring a different set of actions to counter them. Some of the most persistent adversaries—including the Pakistani military—are, in many ways, also friends. As with the Cold War, there will likely be no substitute for US engagement. Afghanistan, like Israel, may never be at peace, may have tensions with its neighbors (even those that are US friends), have a percentage of the internal population more or less permanently alienated from the state, deal with lingering corruption, and endure adversary relations between elites. But to survive this way requires a commitment from the US that will be more important than the number of troops, and to get to this relatively stable situation requires a near-term military commitment to stabilize the situation, so that a new generation of Afghan leaders and elites of all ethnolinguistic groups can move in and demand and work for effective governance, a functional private sector economy, and a civil society.

  Winnable Conflicts

  In 2001, Afghanistan was a country without hope. It experienced the Taliban, a civil war, poverty, and misery. Then, in the wake of the US-led coalition intervention, hope arrived. Hope for functional politics, effective development, and a better life. When the schools reopened on 21 March 2002, it was the
first time in decades that an Afghan government had done something embraced by its entire people. It was a good day.

  This book has been about what has happened to this hope since then and why it has dried up but not yet all turned to dust. Hope was not a stupid illusion in 2001. It was stupid for the Soviets in 1979 to have thought that the combination of massive firepower and local political clients would allow them to achieve their policy goals in Afghanistan. In 2001 it was all going to be different. Since 2001, Pakistan’s policies, US and coalition failures in policy formulation and implementation, and the self-serving and short-sighted actions of Afghanistan’s political elites all soaked up Afghanistan’s hope like so many sponges.

  Afghanistan is still a winnable situation. The US and coalition partners know how to defeat terrorism and insurgencies, as well as creating governments that have at least a change for internal legitimacy and international acceptance, and have the means to do it again. There is no pathology unique to Afghanistan that kills empires that touch it or means that actions that succeeded elsewhere are doomed to failure there. Even in the most developed countries, it is widely said that the main cause of problems is solutions, and each solution identified for Afghanistan has the potential to create further problems. The question is thus not so much whether the US can prevail, but whether it is willing to pay the considerable costs associated with so doing. This will not be easy. Afghanistan is a country where actions tend to have high transaction costs and yield low returns. In the short term, the Afghans are either going to have to have the transaction costs paid for them (such as aid funding the creation of the ANSF), or they are going to have to do things their own way, which could open the door to other, less ideal, options, such as extractive state practices or looking to competing regional players such as Iran for support.

  The US and its coalition partners are tired of the cost and casualties. There is no arguing that the returning dead and the financial drain are even more difficult to accept when the rationale for all of it was largely undiscussed or not understood. Even those who supported the heroism of their own country’s forces were shown it outside of its larger context. The conflict has become unpopular. To the electorates, Afghanistan remains a distant and alien country and the Afghans a little-known or understood people. The 2009 debate in the US was over troop levels. In the region, it was seen as being about commitment. An increase in US force levels will, in return for its costs, have the potential to buy time to turn trend lines around and put in place lasting solutions. But none of this is likely to succeed if friends or adversaries alike discern a lack of US commitment and a preoccupation with an exit strategy.

  If the US disengages—in terms of commitment more so than the actual number of military personnel on the ground—Afghanistan’s remaining hope will turn to dust. The US troops, the humanitarian NGOs, the Afghan expatriate investors, and all who have helped build on Afghanistan’s hope since 2001 will go home. The hard men from the Vortex will yell themselves hoarse with triumph and, with the help of their supporters in Pakistan, will go back to waging a civil war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, hard pressed to survive the blowback of its previous Afghanistan policies that came home in 2001, will find it harder still to hold on in a world where Islamic radicalism has a new stronghold over the Durand Line and their goal of controlling Kabul is likely to prove as elusive as it was pre-2001. If the Pakistani military’s perception of inevitable US disengagement is realized, there is no reason to believe Pakistan will be able to control what may emerge in Afghanistan, or, indeed, if anyone can. Those looking to create a clash of civilizations will tell the disaffected from Morocco to Mindanao that they have beaten the Americans as they beat the Soviets, and those governments that stand between them and an Islamic future cannot stand.

  It is not simply prestige that is at issue, but the confidence and perceptions of billions of people as to who will control their future. If the infidel foreigners are forced from Afghanistan—not just their troops, but their culture and their global economy—where can they not be defeated? In the Middle East? The territory of the long-lost Kingdom of Grenada (identified as unredeemed by Al Qaeda)? The terrorists will find a new place to plan their schemes of burning buildings and bodies everywhere. Most Afghan elites will go into exile. Some Afghans will go on fighting the terrorists and insurgents, going back the mountains where the fighting started in the 1970s, and they will weep bitterly for Afghanistan and its lost hope. And a few foreigners will come to see them and write it down.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In recent years, I have often been asked to talk about Afghanistan on television, to the media, to governmental and non-governmental groups. This book is what I wish I had time to say.

  I started out talking about Afghanistan, but I have realized that I cannot explain what is happening in Afghanistan without reference to the situation in Pakistan. Conversely, it is hard to set out a way to attain a relatively peaceful Afghanistan—one where development and reconstruction can take place throughout the country—without first having solved the crises and pathologies that threaten Pakistan. Even if this should happen, other crises and tensions—Kashmir, Palestine, political, economic, and demographic problems—will continue to have an impact in Afghanistan.

  This book is about Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan: countries, people, conflicts, and importance. The bottom line is that the book is written for non-specialists to explain what is happening there and how it might turn out better. While it refers to past events (and includes a chronology and glossary), this book does not set out to review the post-2001 history of the Vortex—and those who live or are operating in it—the inadequacies, failures, and limitations of all the participants—US, coalition partners, international organization, non-governmental organizations, Pakistani and Afghan alike—since 2001 would require a book much longer than this one. Despite the heroic and selfless acts of many, progress has been slow and frustrating but has been nonetheless real.

  This book is a survey and an introduction to a complex and highly nuanced current situation, intended to provide insights beyond that of news accounts and to provide commentary at greater depth than is provided by opinion pieces. Many aspects of the conflict deserve whole book-length treatments to themselves. I have had to go over programs or events that need in-depth treatment in a sentence and, in a country of great diversity and complexity, have had to generalize with a top-down view, although I have tried to avoid the Kabul-centric approach that so often afflicts outsiders, meaning that there is no problem when Kabul is secure, but if Kabul is unsecure they shift to crisis mode. This is not primarily a work of military analysis. It would be possible to fill a whole book on each of the US, UK, and other NATO and coalition diplomatic and aid capabilities, armed forces or intelligence services in the current conflict. The conflicts in the Vortex are not primarily military. The insurgency in Afghanistan—the conflict that NATO has deployed its troops to win—is of a type of war where accepted wisdom limits the military dimension to providing at most a fifth to a quarter of any ultimate solution. This is reflected in the emphasis on these aspects of the conflict in this book rather than my preference for the strategy, tactics, and technology of military action that I have focused on in my three previous books on Afghanistan (and those I wrote on the Soviet military, NATO armed forces, and other subjects). Rather, this book attempts to explain why these events came out the way they did, usually with reference to realities in Afghanistan or Pakistan that pre-existed 2001. Indeed, some of them pre-existed just about everything.

  Afghanistan can kill you; it will make you sick; but it will never bore you. I am often asked why I picked Afghanistan to write about; my response “You don’t pick Afghanistan, Afghanistan picks you” is a cliché but actually true. Afghanistan and the Afghans deserve better. In the wake of the victory of 2001, Afghanistan was, for once, full of hope. What happened to that hope and how it can be revived before it disappears entirely into smoke, leaving more years of conflict and heart
break, is the subject of this book.

  I would like to thank Anne Marie Shackleton for all her help and support. I am particularly grateful to Ian Drury, editor and comrade-in-arms for many years, and to Claiborne Hancock and Jessica Case at Pegasus Books in New York, for making this book a reality. Those that read the manuscript to help prevent me from making errors (which are, of course, all my own) include: John Jennings, Prof. Thomas Johnson, Prof. Charles Kamps, Dr. Sean Maloney, Julie Sirrs, Esq., and Andrew Smith, Esq.

  I am also grateful to many press offices, government relations and spokespeople from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US and coalition governments and military forces. I would also like to thank the US and ISAF military units with which I have been embedded for their help and support. Their provision of information, interviews, transportation, accommodation and, when required, protection in the field made this book possible.

  One of the benefits about having been writing about Afghanistan and Pakistan since the early 1980s and traveling often to the region is the benefit of continuity. This has also put me in the debt of a tremendous number of people, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Europe, and the US over the years who have provided information or helped me out. Because security concerns and retribution fears are very real, I have not identified many sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many interviews were on a not-for-attribution basis and much wisdom was received preceded by “don’t quote me on this.” Where violence and political retribution are daily events, this is understandable. Many of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan and Pakistan I did not seek to identify, but my gratitude toward them is nonetheless real. These over the years have included but are certainly not limited to: Dr. Abdullah, Dr. Khalid Akram, Dr. Hedayat Amin Arsala, Dr. Joseph J. Collins, Anthony Davis, Hadji Daoud, Otilie English, Engineer Mohammed Es’haq, Anders Fange, Massoud Farivar, Benedict FitzGerald, Sayid Hassan Gailani, Dr. Ashraf Ghani, Dr. Thomas Gouttiere, Dr. Max Gross, Nasrine Gross, Hadji Abdul Haq shaheed, Prof. Ali Ahmad Jalali, Dr. Thomas Johnson, Dr. Philip Jones, Peter Jouvenal, Hekmat Karzai, Kenneth Katzman, Ambassador Massoud Khalili, Dr. Elie Krakowski, Jonathan Landay, Jolyon Leslie, Dr. Nancy Lubin, Ambassador Ahmad Zia Massoud, Ambassador Walid Massoud, Haroun Mir, Fawad Muslim, James Phillips, Gay-Leclerc Qaderi, Ahmed Rashid, Dr. Olivier Roy, Dr. Barnett Rubin, General Rahmatullah Safi, Mrs. Sara Safi, Dr. Ziba Shorish-Shamley, Dr. Tom Tulenko, and General Abdul Rahim Wardak. For many others, who provided knowledge, interviews, support, source material, encouragement, and so much more, I can simply say thank you.