Arguments for and against continuing the Afghan War

Two recent op-eds published in the British press -- one by Gideon Rachman for the Financial Times (The west has lost in Afghanistan), the other by Con Coughlin for the Telegraph (The West will pay a terrible price if we leave Afghanistan in the lurch) mirror the debate in the United States about whether the ISAF-led war is worth continuing and whether it can be won. Coughlin's highly emotional appeal is offset by Rachman's wry recitation of grim facts.

I think the best resolution to the debate is found outside the two views. The West can't wash its hands of the war but it can continue trying to do so in ways that only prolong the worst aspects of the war. The latest hastily improvised war 'plan' helps the very people the U.S. went into Afghanistan to fight, and exacerbates the very conditions in the Afghan government and society that the ISAF countries find most counterproductive to the war and stabilization efforts in the country.

So this is one person in the two-man canoe bailing water while the other scoops water from the lake and dumps it in the canoe. This is a comedy routine, not a war plan or even an exit plan.

The west has lost in Afghanistan
by Gideon Rachman
March 27, 2012
The Financial Times

Five years ago the Americans were refusing to speak to the Taliban. Now the Taliban are refusing to speak to the Americans. That is a measure of how the balance of power has shifted in Afghanistan. The western intervention there has failed. As Nato prepares to withdraw from the country in 2014, it is only the scale of the defeat that remains to be determined.

A senior Pakistani official comments sardonically: “I remember when the Americans used to say that the only good Taliban was a dead Taliban. Then they talked about separating the reconcilable from the irreconcilable. Now, they say, the Taliban are not our enemy.” In fact, Nato and Taliban forces are still enemies on the battlefield. But in a desperate effort to leave behind a stable Afghanistan, the US and its allies are also battling to include the Taliban in the political process. However, the Taliban are in no rush to negotiate – and recently broke off talks. With western troops on their way out, there is little pressure on them to compromise now.

Although it was the presence of al-Qaeda that led Nato into Afghanistan, the dreadful nature of the Taliban regime gave the fight an extra moral dimension. Visiting western politicians were always eager to visit a newly opened girls’ school – and to stress the progress for women’s rights.

The Americans insist that the Taliban’s participation in the political process is still dependent on them accepting the current Afghan constitution, which contains all sorts of protections for human rights, and commitments to gender equality. But Afghan reality never matched the words on the page. As one EU foreign minister says: “Three-quarters of the population can’t actually read the constitution, because they are illiterate.”

Even under the current government, the situation of Afghan women is pretty grim. Last week Human Rights Watch released a report highlighting the hundreds of women who are currently jailed in Afghanistan for “moral crimes”, such as resisting a forced marriage, or even complaining about rape. But there have been gains for women, too, particularly in schools and in the cities – and these are likely to be threatened as the Taliban regains influence. For Hillary Clinton, who has made the promotion of women’s rights a theme of her time at the US state department, this must be an especially bitter pill.

The reality, however, is that the killing of Osama bin Laden last year has given the US government all the “closure” it needs to justify a withdrawal from Afghanistan. Nato’s goals for the country are now minimal and focused entirely on security: Afghanistan must never again provide a haven for terrorists – and the country must not become a “failed state”.

Even these minimal goals may not be achieved. The focus of Nato’s efforts has been training and equipping the Afghan security forces, so that they can take over from western troops. But funding the Afghan military costs $8bn-$9bn a year. Will the west continue to be willing to plough that sort of money into Afghanistan – with so many competing claims on funds? If not, as Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister put it at this weekend’s Brussels forum: “We will have given 100,000 people training and a gun, and then made them unemployed.”

Even if the Afghan military hangs together, Afghanistan is quite likely to descend into civil war. That, in turn, is likely to continue to further radicalise the Pakistani Taliban – because of the tribal, military and religious links on either side of the border.

When President Barack Obama came to power, he privately labelled Pakistan “the most frightening country in the world” – and insisted that the Afghan problem could not be separated from the fate of its much larger neighbour: hence the insistence on the ugly term “AfPak”. In the rush to get western troops out of Afghanistan, however, the Pakistani problem is in danger of being neglected.

That too is a mistake, because the situation in Pakistan is just as frightening as when Mr Obama took power. Mr Bildt, a recent visitor to the country, describes it as being in the grip of “hysterical anti-Americanism”. That mood will only be intensified by the news over the weekend that no US servicemen will face charges over the Nato air strike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last November.

The idea that the US is plotting to seize Pakistan’s nuclear weapons has become an obsession, both for the Pakistani media and for much of the country’s ruling class. In response, Pakistan is cranking up the production of nuclear weapons and distributing them all over the country. Given the radicalisation of opinion in the country and the amount of fissile material it is producing, the American nightmare of “loose nukes” is looking uncomfortably realistic.

As a result, the US will remain deeply engaged in counter-terrorism in south Asia. But the drone strikes on jihadists in the tribal areas of Pakistan – which have been the source of America’s biggest successes – are a double-edged sword. They have devastated the leadership of al-Qaeda. But they have also fed the rampant anti-Americanism that can breed the next generation of terrorists.

As a top Pakistani official puts it: “The number three in al-Qaeda has been killed at least five times. But there is always a new number three. It is the mentality that gives rise to al-Qaeda that you need to defeat.” Unfortunately, that mentality is once again on the rise – in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
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The West will pay a terrible price if we leave Afghanistan in the lurch
By Con Coughlin
March 30, 2012
Telegraph

The regime in Kabul needs significant military and financial aid to hold off the Taliban after Nato's withdrawal.

As someone who has been an unapologetic defender of the military campaign in Afghanistan, I found visiting the British war cemetery in Kabul this week a deeply humbling experience.

Set into the crumbling, whitewashed walls is a poignant memorial to all our brave men and women who have lost their lives fighting for a cause few these days either comprehend or support. The plaque listing their names is next to a monument to the victims of another era of British military involvement in Afghanistan – those who perished in our two ill-fated military interventions in the 19th century.

There had been 150 neatly marked graves in the cemetery of those who fought in the campaigns of 1839-1842 and 1879-1881, but when British troops returned to Kabul in 2001, following the overthrow of the Taliban, they found the cemetery had been desecrated, the headstones vandalised – no doubt the doing of Taliban sympathisers. The headstones have since been lovingly restored.

But I am struck by this awful thought: unless there is a radical change in the way the conflict is going, the well-tended graveyard may once again end up being pulled apart by a resurgent Taliban.

When I entered the cemetery, the total number of British war dead in Afghanistan stood at 405; by the time I left an hour later, that had risen to 407. Two soldiers had been shot dead by an Afghan officer who had, apparently, taken exception to their refusal to grant him permission to enter the British base at Lashkar Gar because he did not have proper accreditation.

What is particularly depressing about this “green on blue” incident – in Nato-speak, the Afghans are “green” and Nato soldiers are “blue” – is that one of the main reasons we still have a division deployed to southern Afghanistan is to help transform the native security forces into a credible fighting unit. If our troops are to be withdrawn from harm’s way, then the Afghans need to reach a level of competence and effectiveness that enables them to take charge of their country’s security, rather than relying on a motley collection of foreign forces – there are currently 50 nations contributing to Nato’s mission – to do the job for them.

Why not let them sort out their own mess, I hear you cry? We have paid a high enough price for this benighted country, and all the thanks we get is Afghans turning their guns on our soldiers. If only it were that easy.

Politicians on both side of the Atlantic are determined that, at the very latest, all Nato combat operations will have ceased by the end of 2014. The only problem with this laudable plan is that, as things stand, there is no realistic prospect of the Afghans being in a position to take care of themselves in two years’ time.

For a start, their security and police forces, though vastly improved from the rabble inherited by Nato when it first deployed to the country in the summer of 2006, rely heavily on the backing of Western troops – primarily American and British – to conduct missions.

And it is likely that they are going to need our support well beyond the proposed withdrawal date. Afghan army recruits have proved themselves to be good fighters – which is hardly surprising in a country where random butchery is a national pastime. But sustaining a competent military operation requires more than good fighting qualities: logistics, intelligence and air support also have a crucial role to play.

If, however, the West’s support for Afghanistan after the 2014 withdrawal amounts to no more than running the equivalent of Sandhurst in Kabul, as outlined by Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, this week, then the country’s military will simply collapse, with all the implications that will have for their security and ours.

“It is wishful thinking to think the Afghans can stand on their own when we finish fighting in 2014,” a senior Nato official told me in Kabul. “They are going to need all kinds of help – helicopters, intelligence, training – if they are going to be able to stand up to the Taliban and their allies when we leave.”

There is certainly no suggestion that the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies are on the point of renouncing their campaign of terror against the West and allowing Afghanistan to settle back into its former role as Central Asia’s main trading hub.

The almost daily attacks on Nato forces suggest the Taliban has no desire to commit to peace negotiations, while the recent spate of shootings by an al-Qaeda gunman in Toulouse has again highlighted the value of southern Afghanistan as a training centre for Islamist militants. Mohamed Merah, the 24-year-old Frenchman who killed seven people during a week-long shooting spree, visited Kandahar as recently as 2010, as part of his rite of passage from petty criminal to full-blown al-Qaeda terrorist.

Intelligence officials have told me that there are hundreds of al-Qaeda sympathisers in neighbouring Pakistan just waiting for the opportunity to return to Afghanistan and re-establish the training camps that were used to mastermind the September 11 attacks.

The other area where the West must demonstrate its commitment after 2014 is in its willingness to continue financing the Afghan government and military for at least another decade, until the country is able to develop its economy to the point where it can pay for itself. Compared to the tens of billions of dollars that have poured in during the past decade, the cost of post-2014 support is a relatively modest $4.3 billion.

But such is the general mood of apathy in the West that it is proving difficult even to raise this sum ahead of May’s Nato summit in Chicago, when the future of Western commitment will be discussed.

Sir William Patey, who retires as Britain’s ambassador to Kabul today , told me when I visited him at his office at the heavily fortified British Embassy that “we should get out now” if we were not prepared, at the very least, to fund the Afghans until 2024. Britain’s policy of withdrawing its troops and leaving the country in a stable state “is totally dependent on the international community to bankroll the Afghans for a number of years to come”, he said.

Certainly, if Afghanistan is allowed to revert to its former anarchy, then many more deluded young men like Mohamed Merah will be making their way to al-Qaeda training camps in the country.

And if that happens, then the sacrifices of the brave British men and women who are commemorated in the military cemetery in Kabul will have been in vain.
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