President Obama and Afghan President Hamid Karzai will meet
later this week to discuss the terms of American withdrawal from
the twelve-year long war in Afghanistan. Obama is moving forward
with his scheduled removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan by the
end of 2014.
The American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. John Allen,
reportedly wanted to keep the more than 60,000 U.S. troops in
country through this year’s fighting season. Nevertheless, the
White House is going ahead with a withdrawal schedule that will
reduce the force this summer and to leave only about 25,000-30,000
troops there by spring of next year, and as few as 3,000-4,000 by
the end of next year.
That’s too much and too fast for the neocons. They who devised
the “nation-building” strategy — and its military implementation,
“counterinsurgency” — are rebelling against the idea.
In a Wednesday Wall Street Journal
piece, two top neocons — Frederick and Kimberly Kagan — argue
that we have to leave substantial forces in Afghanistan
indefinitely or we will have wasted a decade of war. The Kagans
were close advisers to Gen. David Petraeus when he was the
commander in Afghanistan. They believe we need to recommit
ourselves to the “counterinsurgency” strategy that has already
failed.
The Kagans define success in Afghanistan as driving al Qaeda
from the nation and preventing its return. They point out correctly
that the “global al Qaeda movement” is headquartered in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border region and is home to the largest
concentration of regional and global Islamist terrorist
organizations in the world.
The neocons attribute this to the fact that Pakistan “does not
effectively govern, police, or control” the large area on its side
of the border. They say that the Afghan government, though fighting
hard in the region, hasn’t succeeded in controlling the larger area
on its side of the border.
From this, they conclude that we can’t withdraw from Afghanistan
lest we allow al Qaeda’s return. They believe the Afghanis won’t
allow the Taliban to return to power. What nonsense. The Taliban
will re-impose its rule easily by force and al Qaeda will be with
them when they do. The Kagans admit that the counterinsurgency’s
goal was not to build Afghan forces so that they could function
without our help. In essence, that is an admission that
counterinsurgency requires us to fight forever in Afghanistan
without doing what is necessary to truly defeat our enemies be they
al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the Pakistanis. As long as Pakistan
supports the Taliban and al Qaeda, they will fight on.
The neocons won’t face the facts. Success in Afghanistan was
never about driving al Qaeda and the Taliban out and preventing
their return because the former was possible but the latter is not.
Success meant defeating those enemies wherever they were, and by
focusing on nation-building and counterinsurgency we diverted
ourselves from that goal. In fact, our counterinsurgency in
Afghanistan was designed in comprehensive disregard of the criteria
for a successful counterinsurgency. It was, and is, a con job.
The person who best understood modern insurgency warfare was
David Galula, a French officer who learned it while serving in
China, Algeria, Greece, and Indochina. As Galula wrote in his
seminal Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice,
for a counterinsurgency to succeed the counterinsurgent forces have
to be able to offer the population two things: security and a cause
that the insurgent cannot and which is more attractive to the
population than the insurgent’s cause.
Galula didn’t live to see us ignore his theory and strategy in
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, a huge nation with
tribally divided population, there was never the prospect of having
enough U.S. troops there to provide local security. Hundreds of
thousands could be sent and wouldn’t be enough.
What cause does the U.S.-Afghan counterinsurgency offer that
could possibly be more attractive to the Afghan population than the
pure Islamism which al Qaeda and the Taliban — with the dedicated
assistance of Pakistan — promise? None whatever. Islamism is so
deeply embedded in Afghan society that nothing can be more
attractive to the tribal leaders and their peoples. Our
nation-building/counterinsurgency strategy never dealt with these
hard truths. The neocons conned George Bush, David Petraeus, and
Barack Obama, who merely compounded Bush’s mistakes.
Afghanistan is much the same now as it was when the British were
driven out after their defeat in 1842, as it was when the Soviets
were driven out in 1989. And it will be much the same, and probably
worse, after we leave.
The neocon commitment to their nation-building con job seeks an
endless commitment of American troops and funding. They argue that
if we withdraw now, the Afghan forces would be “immobilized on its
bases and unwilling to patrol.” As Bing West proves in his book,
The Wrong War, that is the case now even with American
troops joining the Afghans in too many fruitless missions. When we
leave, the Afghan forces will melt back into the population, fading
quickly at the first sign of a Taliban offensive. Those who don’t
abandon the fight altogether will join with the Taliban and fight
for their return to power.
The neocons say that Pakistan doesn’t govern its tribal areas to
their liking. But Pakistan’s view of success in Afghanistan is very
different from theirs, and in it Pakistan is succeeding. Pakistan’s
support for al Qaeda and the Taliban is notorious and dedicated. To
expect Pakistan to do otherwise is ignorant and other-worldly. If
we wanted to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban, and prevent their
return to Afghanistan, we would have had to compel Pakistan to
change its Islamist view of the world. That is beyond our power to
do, so the neocons have just ignored that fact.
We have been defeated in Afghanistan by Islamism, by our
misapprehension of the theory of counterinsurgency warfare, and by
Pakistan’s Islamist commitment to al Qaeda and the Taliban.
We can stay in Afghanistan for another year or another century.
But nothing in the nation-building-cum-counterinsurgency strategy
will change the facts that dominate Afghanistan and its neighbors
Pakistan and Iran. And no matter how long we stay, no matter how
many American lives are sacrificed while they tinker with the
flavor of their secret sauce for counterinsurgency, it will end as
it is ending now, in failure.
Obama is right in pulling our forces out of Afghanistan. The
slow pace of withdrawal is timed politically, to delay the public
consequences beyond 2016, but in that calculation he may not
succeed. We have accomplished nothing that will last much past our
withdrawal, whether it comes next year or some time later. The only
question is what we do afterward?
None of Obama’s foreign policy team — Chuck Hagel as Defense
Secretary, John Brennan as Director of Central Intelligence, and
John Kerry as Secretary of State — will want to take any action to
prevent the resurgence of Afghanistan-based terrorism. They won’t
want to act decisively to prevent Iran from achieving nuclear
weapons. And, most of all, they don’t want to defeat the global
threat of Islamism.
As former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is fond of saying,
weakness is provocative. Nation-building is the biggest mistake we
have made since 9/11. Because of it, we are much weakened and our
enemies are stronger.
