to support the Afghan Transitional Authority and its successors in the maintenance of security in areas of Afghanistan outside of Kabul and its environs, so that the Afghan Authorities as well as the personnel of the United Nations … can operate in a secure environment.
The central premise of the American and allied effort became “rebuilding Afghanistan” by means of a democratic, pluralistic, transparent Afghan government whose writ ran across the entire country and an Afghan national army capable of assuming responsibility for security on a national basis. With a striking idealism, these efforts were imagined to be comparable to the construction of democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II.
No institutions in the history of Afghanistan or of any part of it provided a precedent for such a broad-based effort. Traditionally, Afghanistan has been less a state in the conventional sense than a geographic expression for an area never brought under the consistent administration of any single authority. For most of recorded history, Afghan tribes and sects have been at war with each other, briefly uniting to resist invasion or to launch marauding raids against their neighbors. Elites in Kabul might undertake periodic experiments with parliamentary institutions, but outside the capital an ancient tribal code of honor predominated. Unification of Afghanistan has been achieved by foreigners only unintentionally, when the tribes and sects coalesce in opposition to an invader.
Thus what American and NATO forces met in the early twenty-first century was not radically different from the scene encountered by a young Winston Churchill in 1897:
Except at harvest-time, when self-preservation enjoins a temporary truce, the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or public war. Every man is a warrior, a politician, and a theologian. Every large house is a real feudal fortress … Every village has its defence. Every family cultivates its vendetta; every clan, its feud. The numerous tribes and combinations of tribes all have their accounts to settle with one another. Nothing is ever forgotten, and very few debts are left unpaid.
In this context, the proclaimed coalition and UN goals of a transparent, democratic Afghan central government operating in a secure environment amounted to a radical reinvention of Afghan history. It effectively elevated one clan above all others—Hamid Karzai’s Pashtun Popalzai tribe—and required it to establish itself across the country either through force (its own or that of the international coalition) or through distribution of the spoils of foreign aid, or both. Inevitably, the efforts required to impose such institutions trampled on age-old prerogatives, reshuffling the kaleidoscope of tribal alliances in ways that were difficult for any outside force to understand or control.
The American election of 2008 compounded complexity with ambivalence. The new President, Barack Obama, had campaigned on the proposition that he would restore to the “necessary” war in Afghanistan the forces drained by the “dumb” war in Iraq, which he intended to end. But in office, he was determined to bring about a peacetime focus on transformational domestic priorities. The outcome was a reemergence of the ambivalence that has accompanied American military campaigns in the post–World War II period: the dispatch of thirty thousand additional troops for a “surge” in Afghanistan coupled, in the same announcement, with a public deadline of eighteen months for the beginning of their withdrawal. The purpose of the deadline, it was argued, was to provide an incentive to the Karzai government to accelerate its effort to build a modern central government and army to replace Americans. Yet, in essence, the objective of a guerrilla strategy like the Taliban’s is to outlast the defending forces. For the Kabul leadership, the announcement of a fixed date for losing its outside support set off a process of factional maneuvering, including with the Taliban.
The strides made by Afghanistan during this period have been significant and hard-won. The population has adopted electoral institutions with no little daring—because the Taliban continues to threaten death to those participating in democratic structures. The United States also succeeded in its objective of locating and eliminating Osama bin Laden, sending a powerful message about the country’s global reach and determination to avenge atrocities.
Nevertheless, the regional prospects remain challenging. In the period following the American withdrawal (imminent as of this writing), the writ of the Afghan government is likely to run in Kabul and its environs but not uniformly in the rest of the country. There a confederation of semiautonomous, feudal regions is likely to prevail on an ethnic basis, influenced substantially by competing foreign powers. The challenge will return to where it began—the compatibility of an independent Afghanistan with a regional political order.
Afghanistan’s neighbors should have at least as much of a national interest as the United States—and, in the long run, a far greater one—in defining and bringing about a coherent, non-jihadist outcome in Afghanistan. Each of Afghanistan’s neighbors would risk turmoil within its own borders if Afghanistan returns to its prewar status as a base for jihadist non-state organizations or as a state dedicated to jihadist policies: Pakistan above all in its entire domestic structure, Russia in its partly Muslim south and west, China with a significantly Muslim Xinjiang, and even Shiite Iran from fundamentalist Sunni trends. All of them, from a strategic point of view, are more threatened by an Afghanistan hospitable to terrorism than the United States is (except perhaps Iran, which may calculate, as it has in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, that a chaotic situation beyond its borders enables it to manipulate the contending factions).
The ultimate irony may be that Afghanistan, torn by war, may be a test case of whether a regional order can be distilled from divergent security interests and historical perspectives. Without a sustainable international program regarding Afghanistan’s security, each major neighbor will support rival factions across ancient ethnic and sectarian lines. The likely outcome would be a de facto partition, with Pakistan controlling the Pashtun south, and India, Russia, and perhaps China favoring the ethnically mixed north. To avoid a vacuum, a major diplomatic effort is needed to define a regional order to deal with the possible reemergence of Afghanistan as a jihadist center. In the nineteenth century, the major powers guaranteed Belgian neutrality, a guarantee that, in the event, lasted nearly one hundred years. Is an equivalent, with appropriate redefinitions, possible? If such a concept—or a comparable one—is evaded, Afghanistan is likely to drag the world back into its perennial warfare.
IRAQ
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush articulated a global strategy to counter jihadist extremism and to shore up the established international order by infusing it with a commitment to democratic transformation. The “great struggles of the twentieth century,” the White House’s National Security Strategy of 2002 argued, had demonstrated that there was “a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.”
The present moment, the National Security Strategy document stressed, saw a world shocked by an unprecedented terrorist atrocity and the great powers “on the same side—united by common dangers of terrorist violence and chaos.” The encouragement of free institutions and cooperative major-power relations offered “the best chance since the rise of the nation-state in the seventeenth century to build a world where great powers compete in peace instead of continually prepare for war.” The centerpiece of what came to be called the Freedom Agenda was to be a transformation of Iraq from among the Middle East’s most repressive states to a multiparty democracy, which would in turn inspire a regional democratic transformation: “Iraqi democracy will succeed—and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Teheran—that freedom can be the future of every nation.”
The Freedom Agenda was not, as was later alleged, the arbitrary invention of a single president and his entourage. Its basic premise was an elaboration of quintessentially American themes. The 2002 National Security Strategy document—which first announced the policy—repeated the arguments of NSC-68 that, in 1950, had defined America’s miss
ion in the Cold War, albeit with one decisive difference. The 1950 document had enlisted America’s values in defense of the free world. The 2002 document argued for the ending of tyranny everywhere on behalf of universal values of freedom.
UN Security Council Resolution 687 of 1991 had required Iraq to destroy all stockpiles of its weapons of mass destruction and commit never to develop such weapons again. Ten Security Council resolutions since then had held Iraq in substantial violation.
What was distinctive—and traditionally American—about the military effort in Iraq was the decision to cast this, in effect, enforcement action as an aspect of a project to spread freedom and democracy. America reacted to the mounting tide of radical Islamist universalism by reaffirming the universality of its own values and concept of world order.
The basic premise began with significant public support, especially extending to the removal of Saddam Hussein. In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act with overwhelming bipartisan support (360–38 in the House and unanimously in the Senate), declaring that “it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.” Signing the bill into law on October 31, the same day as its passage in the Senate, President Clinton expressed the consensus of both parties:
The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region … The United States is providing support to opposition groups from all sectors of the Iraqi community that could lead to a popularly supported government.
Because no political parties were permitted in Iraq except the governing Baath Party, which Saddam Hussein ran with an iron fist, and therefore no formal opposition parties existed, the President’s phrase had to mean that the United States would generate a covert program to overthrow the Iraqi dictator.
After the military intervention in Iraq, Bush elaborated broader implications in a November 2003 speech marking the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. Bush condemned past U.S. policies in the region for having sought stability at the price of liberty:
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.
In the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century, traditional policy approaches posed unacceptable risks. The administration was therefore shifting from a policy of stability to “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” American experience in Europe and Asia demonstrated that “the advance of freedom leads to peace.”
I supported the decision to undertake regime change in Iraq. I had doubts, expressed in public and governmental forums, about expanding it to nation building and giving it such universal scope. But before recording my reservations, I want to express here my continuing respect and personal affection for President George W. Bush, who guided America with courage, dignity, and conviction in an unsteady time. His objectives and dedication honored his country even when in some cases they proved unattainable within the American political cycle. It is a symbol of his devotion to the Freedom Agenda that Bush is now pursuing it in his postpresidential life and made it the key theme of his presidential library in Dallas.
Having spent my childhood as a member of a discriminated minority in a totalitarian system and then as an immigrant to the United States, I have experienced the liberating aspects of American values. Spreading them by example and civil assistance as in the Marshall Plan and economic aid programs is an honored and important part of the American tradition. But to seek to achieve them by military occupation in a part of the world where they had no historical roots, and to expect fundamental change in a politically relevant period of time—the standard set by many supporters and critics of the Iraq effort alike—proved beyond what the American public would support and what Iraqi society could accommodate.
Given the ethnic divisions in Iraq and the millennial conflict between Sunni and Shia, the dividing line of which ran through the center of Baghdad, the attempt to reverse historical legacies under combat conditions, amidst divisive American domestic debates, imbued the American endeavor in Iraq with a Sisyphean quality. The determined opposition of neighboring regimes compounded the difficulties. It became an endless effort always just short of success.
Implementing a pluralist democracy in place of Saddam Hussein’s brutal rule proved infinitely more difficult than the overthrow of the dictator. The Shias, long disenfranchised and hardened by decades of oppression under Hussein, tended to equate democracy with a ratification of their numeric dominance. The Sunnis treated democracy as a foreign plot to repress them; on this basis, most Sunnis boycotted the 2004 elections, instrumental in defining the postwar constitutional order. The Kurds in the north, with memories of murderous onslaughts by Baghdad, enhanced their separate military capabilities and strove for control of oil fields to provide themselves with revenue not dependent on the national treasury. They defined autonomy in terms minutely different, if at all, from national independence.
Passions, already high in an atmosphere of revolution and foreign occupation, were ruthlessly inflamed and exploited after 2003 by outside forces: Iran, which backed Shia groups subverting the nascent government’s independence; Syria, which abetted the transfer of arms and jihadists through its territory (ultimately with devastating consequences for its own cohesion); and al-Qaeda, which began a campaign of systematic slaughter against the Shias. Each community increasingly treated the postwar order as a zero-sum battle for power, territory, and oil revenues.
In this atmosphere, Bush’s courageous January 2007 decision to deploy a “surge” of additional troops to quell violence was met with a nonbinding resolution of disapproval supported by 246 members of the House; though it failed on procedural grounds in the Senate, 56 Senators joined in opposition to the surge. The Senate majority leader soon declared that “this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” The same month, the House and the Senate passed bills, vetoed by the President, mandating that American withdrawal start within a year.
Bush, it has been reported, closed a 2007 planning session with the question “If we’re not there to win, why are we there?” The remark embodied the resoluteness of the President’s character as well as the tragedy of a country whose people have been prepared for more than half a century to send its sons and daughters to remote corners of the world in defense of freedom but whose political system has not been able to muster the same unified and persistent purpose. For while the surge, daringly ordered by Bush and brilliantly executed by General David Petraeus, succeeded in wresting an honorable outcome from looming collapse, the American mood had shifted by this point. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination in part on the strength of his opposition to the Iraq War. On taking office, he continued his public critiques of his predecessor, and undertook an “exit strategy” with greater emphasis on exit than on strategy. As of this writing, Iraq functions as a central battlefield in an unfolding regional sectarian contest—its government leaning toward Iran, elements of its Sunni population in military opposition to the government, members of both sides of its sectarian divide supporting the contending jihadist efforts in Syria, and the terrorist group ISIL attempting to build a caliphate across half of its territory.
The issue transcends political debates about its antecedents. The consolidation of a jihadist entity at the heart of the Arab world, equipped with substantial captured weaponry and a transnational fighting force, engaged in religious war with radical Iranian and Iraqi Shia groups, calls for a concerted and forceful international response or it will metastasize. A sustained strategic effort by America, the other permanent members of the Security Council, and potentially its regional adversaries will be needed.
THE PURPOSE AND THE POSSI
BLE
The nature of the international order was at issue when the Soviet Union emerged as a challenge to the Westphalian state system. With decades of hindsight, one can debate whether the balance sought by America was always the optimum. But it is hard to gainsay that the United States, in a world of weapons of mass destruction and political and social upheaval, preserved the peace, helped restore Europe’s vitality, and provided crucial economic aid to emerging countries.
It was in the conduct of its “hot” wars that America found it difficult to relate purpose to possibility. In only one of the five wars America fought after World War II (Korea, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Iraq, and Afghanistan), the first Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush, did America achieve the goals it had put forward for entering it without intense domestic division. When the outcomes of the other conflicts—ranging from stalemate to unilateral withdrawal—became foreordained is a subject for another debate. For present purposes, it is sufficient to state that a country that has to play an indispensable role in the search for world order needs to begin that task by coming to terms with that role and with itself.
The essence of historical events is rarely fully apparent to those living through them. The Iraq War may be seen as a catalyzing event in a larger transformation of the region—the fundamental character of which is as yet unknown and awaits the long-term outcome of the Arab Spring, the Iranian nuclear and geopolitical challenge, and the jihadist assault on Iraq and Syria. The advent of electoral politics in Iraq in 2004 almost certainly inspired demands for participatory institutions elsewhere in the region; what is yet to be seen is whether they can be combined with a spirit of tolerance and peaceful compromise.
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