Daily Times

The Trump administration reportedly is in the throes of concocting a ‘new’ strategy for Afghanistan. No White House wants to lose a war especially one that has its provenance in 1980 with the decision to arm the Afghan Mujahedeen against the invading Soviet army and in 2001 with the US invasion into Afghanistan to punish al Qaeda for the attacks of September 11th. The war is now in its sixteenth year with no end in sight.

About this war, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis bluntly observed: “we are not winning.” Nine years earlier in January 2008, another Marine four star general and former NATO military commander James Jones signed out a report for the Atlantic Council (in which I participated) that began “Make no mistake: NATO is losing in Afghanistan.” The reaction was so intense that the sentence was softened to read, “The West is not winning.”

Why is the diagnosis today as stark as it was nearly a decade ago? The answer in part explains the tragedy engulfing Afghanistan. In simplest terms, no feasible solution to the conditions in Afghanistan ever existed beyond stationing several hundreds of thousands of troops for an indefinite period to ‘pacify’ the country. And history showed that this option never worked. Nor has convincing or coercing Pakistan to alter its policies towards Afghanistan and the Taliban succeeded.

Pashtunwali, that is the Pashtun creed that stresses honour, hospitality and revenge, and the diverse ethnic divisions along with the de-centralisation of power and authority away from Kabul were never conducive to any regime imposed by outside forces. With corruption a way of life and essential to basic societal functions including the conduct of business, Western culture and politics were anathema to Afghans regardless of ethnicity. But the British, Russians, Soviets and today America and NATO failed to understand or ignored that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires.

The first of the current strategic blunders was George W. Bush’s shift of aims from capturing or killing Osama bin Laden in 2001 to what was euphemistically called ‘nation building.’ The central idea was that by modernising Afghanistan, Afghans would be better able to make the country safer, more secure and more stable. A constitution was written as the American Founding Fathers rather than Afghans would have preferred. The noble goal of educating women became vital to this mission.

Unfortunately, a very diverse Afghan society was not prepared to accept westernization. Selecting Hamid Karzai as the first president ensured a dysfunctional government would follow in which corruption flourished. And isolating Iran as part of any solution was foolhardy.

President Barack Obama’s ‘surge’ of military forces in 2009 yielded only a temporary respite. But a whole of government beyond over reliance on military action was desperately needed if there were any chance of ending the conflict successfully. Ashraf Ghani, a western educated economist, ascended to a presidency crippled by a political negotiation that made his Tajik rival and adversary Dr Abdullah Abdulla a co-CEO, a situation that was untenable.

With corruption a way of life and essential to basic societal functions, including the conduct of business, Western culture and politics were anathema to Afghans regardless of ethnicity

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s much earlier recommendation of shifting to a counter-terrorist strategy and reducing the size of the western commitment might have worked. But Barack Obama made Afghanistan “the good war” and instead reinforced the Bush strategy with the surge of 30,000 forces. Today only two choices exist. And both are not good.

Cutting and running which is how the US vacated Vietnam in 1975 were and are politically unacceptable. Hence, the US can persist with the current commitment perhaps augmented with a few thousand more troops for, possibly, many more decades. There is precedence: American forces are still deployed in Germany and Japan seven decades after World War-II with a profound exception. Both states were and are at peace.

Second, the US and its allies can adopt a variant of the Biden strategy, namely a small presence designed to contain the terrorist threat and resurgence of al Qaeda or the growth of the Islamic State. This is not a short-term either. But it would be conducted with far fewer forces and with minimum emphasis on nation building. Training of Afghan security and police forces would continue possibly conducted by civilian contractors to lessen the military profile.

Neither of these choices is appealing and indeed has enormous flaws and risks. Tragically, after sixteen years of committing substantial treasure in blood and money — possibly in excess of a trillion dollars — with no end in sight to make Afghanistan safer and more secure, the alternative ranges from bad to worse.

The writer has served on the Senior Advisery Group for Supreme Allied Commander Europe (2004-2016) and is currently Senior Adviser at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council, chairman of two private companies and principal author of The Doctrine of Shock and Awe. His next book due out this year is Anatomy of Failure: Why America Loses Wars. It argues failure to know and to understand the circumstances in which force is used guarantees failure. The writer can be reached on Twitter @harlankullman

Published in Daily Times, August 3^nd 2017.