Authors: David Isby
Winnable Conflicts
In 2001, Afghanistan was a country without hope. It experienced the Taliban, a civil war, poverty, and misery. Then, in the wake of the US-led coalition intervention, hope arrived. Hope for functional politics, effective development, and a better life. When the schools reopened on 21 March 2002, it was the first time in decades that an Afghan government had done something embraced by its entire people. It was a good day.
This book has been about what has happened to this hope since then and why it has dried up but not yet all turned to dust. Hope was not a stupid illusion in 2001. It was stupid for the Soviets in 1979 to have thought that the combination of massive firepower and local political clients would allow them to achieve their policy goals in Afghanistan. In 2001 it was all going to be different. Since 2001, Pakistan’s policies, US and coalition failures in policy formulation and implementation, and the self-serving and short-sighted actions of Afghanistan’s political elites all soaked up Afghanistan’s hope like so many sponges.
Afghanistan is still a winnable situation. The US and coalition partners know how to defeat terrorism and insurgencies, as well as creating governments that have at least a change for internal legitimacy and international acceptance, and have the means to do it again. There is no pathology unique to Afghanistan that kills empires that touch it or means that actions that succeeded elsewhere are doomed to failure there. Even in the most developed countries, it is widely said that the main cause of problems is solutions, and each solution identified for Afghanistan has the potential to create further problems. The question is thus not so much whether the US can prevail, but whether it is willing to pay the considerable costs associated with so doing. This will not be easy. Afghanistan is a country where actions tend to have high transaction costs and yield low
returns. In the short term, the Afghans are either going to have to have the transaction costs paid for them (such as aid funding the creation of the ANSF), or they are going to have to do things their own way, which could open the door to other, less ideal, options, such as extractive state practices or looking to competing regional players such as Iran for support.
The US and its coalition partners are tired of the cost and casualties. There is no arguing that the returning dead and the financial drain are even more difficult to accept when the rationale for all of it was largely undiscussed or not understood. Even those who supported the heroism of their own country’s forces were shown it outside of its larger context. The conflict has become unpopular. To the electorates, Afghanistan remains a distant and alien country and the Afghans a little-known or understood people. The 2009 debate in the US was over troop levels. In the region, it was seen as being about commitment. An increase in US force levels will, in return for its costs, have the potential to buy time to turn trend lines around and put in place lasting solutions. But none of this is likely to succeed if friends or adversaries alike discern a lack of US commitment and a preoccupation with an exit strategy.
If the US disengages—in terms of commitment more so than the actual number of military personnel on the ground—Afghanistan’s remaining hope will turn to dust. The US troops, the humanitarian NGOs, the Afghan expatriate investors, and all who have helped build on Afghanistan’s hope since 2001 will go home. The hard men from the Vortex will yell themselves hoarse with triumph and, with the help of their supporters in Pakistan, will go back to waging a civil war in Afghanistan. Pakistan, hard pressed to survive the blowback of its previous Afghanistan policies that came home in 2001, will find it harder still to hold on in a world where Islamic radicalism has a new stronghold over the Durand Line and their goal of controlling Kabul is likely to prove as elusive as it was pre-2001. If the Pakistani military’s perception of inevitable US disengagement is realized, there is no reason to believe Pakistan will be able to control what may emerge in Afghanistan, or, indeed, if anyone can. Those looking to create a clash of civilizations will tell the disaffected from Morocco to Mindanao that they have
beaten the Americans as they beat the Soviets, and those governments that stand between them and an Islamic future cannot stand.
It is not simply prestige that is at issue, but the confidence and perceptions of billions of people as to who will control their future. If the infidel foreigners are forced from Afghanistan—not just their troops, but their culture and their global economy—where can they not be defeated? In the Middle East? The territory of the long-lost Kingdom of Grenada (identified as unredeemed by Al Qaeda)? The terrorists will find a new place to plan their schemes of burning buildings and bodies everywhere. Most Afghan elites will go into exile. Some Afghans will go on fighting the terrorists and insurgents, going back the mountains where the fighting started in the 1970s, and they will weep bitterly for Afghanistan and its lost hope. And a few foreigners will come to see them and write it down.
I
n recent years, I have often been asked to talk about Afghanistan on television, to the media, to governmental and non-governmental groups. This book is what I wish I had time to say.
I started out talking about Afghanistan, but I have realized that I cannot explain what is happening in Afghanistan without reference to the situation in Pakistan. Conversely, it is hard to set out a way to attain a relatively peaceful Afghanistan—one where development and reconstruction can take place throughout the country—without first having solved the crises and pathologies that threaten Pakistan. Even if this should happen, other crises and tensions—Kashmir, Palestine, political, economic, and demographic problems—will continue to have an impact in Afghanistan.
This book is about Afghanistan and the borderlands of Pakistan: countries, people, conflicts, and importance. The bottom line is that the book is written for non-specialists to explain what is happening there and how it might turn out better. While it refers to past events (and includes a chronology and glossary), this book does not set out to review the post-2001 history of the Vortex—and those who live or are operating in it—the inadequacies, failures, and limitations of all the participants—US, coalition partners, international organization, non-governmental organizations, Pakistani and Afghan alike—since 2001 would require a book much longer than this one. Despite the heroic and selfless acts of many, progress has been slow and frustrating but has been nonetheless real.
This book is a survey and an introduction to a complex and highly nuanced current situation, intended to provide insights beyond that of news accounts and to provide commentary at greater depth than is provided by opinion pieces. Many aspects of the conflict deserve whole book-length treatments to themselves. I have had to go over programs or events that need in-depth treatment in a sentence and, in a country of great diversity and complexity, have had to generalize with a top-down view, although I have tried to avoid the Kabul-centric approach that so often afflicts outsiders, meaning that there is no problem when Kabul is secure, but if Kabul is unsecure they shift to crisis mode. This is not primarily a work of military analysis. It would be possible to fill a whole book on each of the US, UK, and other NATO and coalition diplomatic and aid capabilities, armed forces or intelligence services in the current conflict. The conflicts in the Vortex are not primarily military. The insurgency in Afghanistan—the conflict that NATO has deployed its troops to win—is of a type of war where accepted wisdom limits the military dimension to providing at most a fifth to a quarter of any ultimate solution. This is reflected in the emphasis on these aspects of the conflict in this book rather than my preference for the strategy, tactics, and technology of military action that I have focused on in my three previous books on Afghanistan (and those I wrote on the Soviet military, NATO armed forces, and other subjects). Rather, this book attempts to explain why these events came out the way they did, usually with reference to realities in Afghanistan or Pakistan that pre-existed 2001. Indeed, some of them pre-existed just about everything.
Afghanistan can kill you; it
will
make you sick; but it will never bore you. I am often asked why I picked Afghanistan to write about; my response “You don’t pick Afghanistan, Afghanistan picks you” is a cliché but actually true. Afghanistan and the Afghans deserve better. In the wake of the victory of 2001, Afghanistan was, for once, full of hope. What happened to that hope and how it can be revived before it disappears entirely into smoke, leaving more years of conflict and heartbreak, is the subject of this book.
I would like to thank Anne Marie Shackleton for all her help and support. I am particularly grateful to Ian Drury, editor and comrade-in-arms
for many years, and to Claiborne Hancock and Jessica Case at Pegasus Books in New York, for making this book a reality. Those that read the manuscript to help prevent me from making errors (which are, of course, all my own) include: John Jennings, Prof. Thomas Johnson, Prof. Charles Kamps, Dr. Sean Maloney, Julie Sirrs, Esq., and Andrew Smith, Esq.
I am also grateful to many press offices, government relations and spokespeople from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the US and coalition governments and military forces. I would also like to thank the US and ISAF military units with which I have been embedded for their help and support. Their provision of information, interviews, transportation, accommodation and, when required, protection in the field made this book possible.
One of the benefits about having been writing about Afghanistan and Pakistan since the early 1980s and traveling often to the region is the benefit of continuity. This has also put me in the debt of a tremendous number of people, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Europe, and the US over the years who have provided information or helped me out. Because security concerns and retribution fears are very real, I have not identified many sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many interviews were on a not-for-attribution basis and much wisdom was received preceded by “don’t quote me on this.” Where violence and political retribution are daily events, this is understandable. Many of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan and Pakistan I did not seek to identify, but my gratitude toward them is nonetheless real. These over the years have included but are certainly not limited to: Dr. Abdullah, Dr. Khalid Akram, Dr. Hedayat Amin Arsala, Dr. Joseph J. Collins, Anthony Davis, Hadji Daoud, Otilie English, Engineer Mohammed Es’haq, Anders Fange, Massoud Farivar, Benedict FitzGerald, Sayid Hassan Gailani, Dr. Ashraf Ghani, Dr. Thomas Gouttiere, Dr. Max Gross, Nasrine Gross, Hadji Abdul Haq
shaheed
, Prof. Ali Ahmad Jalali, Dr. Thomas Johnson, Dr. Philip Jones, Peter Jouvenal, Hekmat Karzai, Kenneth Katzman, Ambassador Massoud Khalili, Dr. Elie Krakowski, Jonathan Landay, Jolyon Leslie, Dr. Nancy Lubin, Ambassador Ahmad Zia Massoud, Ambassador Walid Massoud, Haroun Mir, Fawad Muslim, James Phillips, Gay-Leclerc Qaderi, Ahmed Rashid, Dr. Olivier Roy, Dr. Barnett Rubin, General
Rahmatullah Safi, Mrs. Sara Safi, Dr. Ziba Shorish-Shamley, Dr. Tom Tulenko, and General Abdul Rahim Wardak. For many others, who provided knowledge, interviews, support, source material, encouragement, and so much more, I can simply say thank you.
David Isby
Washington, 2010
Introduction
1.
Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Archie Tse, “One in 4 Afghan Ballots Face Check for Potential Fraud,”
The New York Times
, 21 September 2009.
2.
Charles Bremner and Michael Evans, “British Envoy Says Mission in Afghanistan Is Doomed, According to Leaked Memo,”
The Times
(London), 2 October 2008.
3.
Gary Langer,
Public Opinion Trends in Afghanistan
, ABC News, 11 February 2009. While polling methodologies in Afghanistan are often problematic, due to societal tendencies to give a polite response and the diversity within provinces (provincial capitals are often unlike rural areas) among other issues, they are valuable to point out trends (especially when asked in the same way over a period of years).
4.
Carlotta Gall, “Leadership Void Seen in Pakistan,”
The New York Times
, 24 June 2008, pp. A1, A12.
5.
Anthony H. Cordesman,
The Afghan-Pakistan War: The Rising Threat: 2002–08
. Washington, 11 February 2009, CSIS, p. 57.
6.
Kate Clark, “Taliban’s 100M Dollar Opium Takings,”
BBC News
, 24 June 2008.
7.
Talk at the Atlantic Council, Washington, 22 April 2009.
8.
Ali Ahmad Jalali provided this reference.
9.
See generally: Antony Arnold,
The Fateful Pebble
. Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993.
10.
Louis Dupree, “Afghan and British Military Tactics in the First Anglo-Afghan War.”
Army Quarterly
, v. 107, n. 3, 1977, pp. 214–221.
11.
Amnesty International,
Afghanistan: All Who Are Not Friends are Enemies. Taliban Abuses Against Civilians
, April 2007.
Chapter One
12.
Sources: Louis Dupree,
Afghanistan
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Richard F. Nyrop and Donald Seeking,
Afghanistan: A Country Study
(Baton Rouge, LA: Claitor’s, 1901;
http://memory.loc.gov/frd/cs/aftoc.html
).
13.
ABC polling, 11 February 2009.
14.
Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin, “Hoarding Nations Drive Food Costs Even Higher,”
The New York Times
, 30 June 2008.
15.
Olivier Roy provided this regional division.
16.
Afghanistan Human Development Report
, 2007, executive summary.
17.
The concept and definition of jihad as it has applied to Afghanistan is a critical issue. Much of the extensive literature on radical Islam does not come to grips with the tension between the multiple theological and operational approaches to jihad. Sources include: Ayesa Jalal,
Partisans of Allah, Jihad in South Asia
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Laurent Murawiec,
The Mind of Jihad
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Laurent Murawiec,
Pandora’s Boxes. The Mind of Jihad, Volume II
(Washington: Hudson Institute, 2007).