The United States recently reached an awful milestone in Afghanistan. One thousand Americans have been killed in the war there since the start of fighting in 2001. With the United States stuck in that country for at least another year, and with the casualties mounting recently, we are likely to see many more deaths of American servicemembers. Now, unlike Iraq, which was an unprovoked blatant violation of international law, Afghanistan is a bit more complicated. But the question is whether the United States is doing more good than harm by staying on.
> I’ve wrestled with that. There is the danger of the Taliban rushing in to fill a vacuum created by a U.S. withdrawal. I am troubled by the incomparably terrible record of the Taliban in power, especially toward women and religious and ethnic minorities. But a good case can be made that the United States is currently not doing Afghanistan and its people any favors. William Polk in The Nation advocates that the only way out is for the Obama Administration to set a firm date for departure and to help arrange a national tribal council (loya jirga) meeting. “A loya jirga held soon is the best hope to create a reasonably balanced national government,” he writes. “This is partly because in the run-up to the national loya jirga, local groups will struggle to enhance or protect local interests. Their action will constitute a brake on the Taliban, who will be impelled to compromise.
Today, the Taliban enjoy the aura of national defenders against us; once we are no longer a target, that aura will fade.” Besides, much of the mess in Afghanistan can be attributed to two sources: the awful government of Hamid Karzai, and the shelter given to the Taliban by the Pakistani intelligence agencies. The Obama Administration seems to have concluded that trying a softer approach toward Karzai may pay better dividends. But going by Karzai’s comment that the issue of his brother Ahmad Wali, an alleged drug dealer, has been resolved, the Obama team may need to try something yet quite different. "Afghan history portends an unhappy end for such a ruler, whether at the hands of his foreign patrons or his own people," writes Boston University Professor Thomas Barfield in the recently published "Afghanistan: A Political and Cultural History." "A tree whose roots are rotten may still stand, but it is only a matter of time before it crashes under its own weight or is blown over by a sandstorm."
Then there is the issue of the Taliban leadership being safely ensconced across the border. In spite of Pakistani help in the arrest of a number of top Taliban leaders in recent months, the basic approach of its intelligence apparatus hasn’t transformed. “There is no apparent change in Pakistan’s attitude toward the leadership council of the Afghan Taliban, which manages the insurgency from in and around the city of Quetta, in southwest Pakistan, several diplomats said,” the New York Times reports. “The Afghan Taliban, under Mullah Muhammad Omar, remains Pakistan’s main tool for leverage in Afghanistan.” And there is little indication, in spite of increased pressure from the Obama Administration in the wake of the failed Times Square bombing, that this will alter as long as Pakistani security policy is predicated on countering India in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Afghanistan has suffered from being at the receiving end of an overdose of the military and little else. Per capita aid to the country was as scanty as $66 per year as late as 2005, Barfield points out. A calculation by an NGO in 2008 estimated that “a staggering 40 percent [of foreign aid since 2001] returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries.”
We need a new approach in Afghanistan.