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During the campaign, Candidate Obama said repeatedly that among Bush's mistakes was his involving us in Iraq, where there was no threat, while failing to focus resources on the real battle against terror, Afghanistan. This week, President Obama announced his first step in redressing this and is sending 17,000 American troops to Afghanistan. But it isn't entirely clear what they will do there.
Human beings have the curious trait of believing things to be true without evidence in support of them. Many observers--and I am among them---have said for so long that Afghanistan was the real battleground that we have all come to accept the truth of it. In the days just after 9/11, there was little doubt that the nexus of the attack was the Islamic revolutionary movement. And we drove these perpetrators out of Afghanistan, only to watch them wander back in a frustrating verification of the axiom that it takes more resources to hold an objective than it does to take it in the first place.
We are nearly a decade down the road and actually seem farther from success in Afghanistan than we were in the days after we routed the enemy. The resource-intensive nature of post-combat operations has already been mentioned, but there are other factors as well.
First, Afghanistan isn't Iraq. There has been a history of centralized government in Iraq, a cosmopolitan country with a tradition of cohesion, but Afghanistan is poor, fragmented and tribal. There is little infrastructure there, most of it constructed decades ago by the Russians, and at least partially as a result there is almost no legitimate economic activity. Anyone who thinks that propelling Afghanistan from the 8th Century into the 21st will take anything less than decades and trillions is not paying attention.
Second, economic development is a second-order result of security, and securing the provinces has not and will not be easy. One reason is that Pakistan is part of the solution, and, to paraphrase Eldridge Cleaver, it is now part of the problem. In a startlingly unhelpful decision, Pakistan has formally ceded control of its border with Afghanistan to the enemy. Pakistan's president found it too tough to deal with the region and has merely decided to ignore it. If you ask Obama's national security professionals what is our most pressing security problem, they will say that it is Pakistan. Without access to Waziristan and the assistance of Pakistan, it's hard to see how we can reduce---to say nothing of eliminate---the threat to Afghanistan.
And so what are 17,000 more American troops going to do in Afghanistan? It is difficult to say. How many do we really need? That's hard to say, too. Indeed, without a clearly articulated series of military, political and economic objectives in Afghanistan, one wonders how we intend to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda, secure and maintain the allegiance of tribal chiefs, and forge a stable nation from a land that looks and operates today just as it has for more than a thousand years.
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Thanks. As much as an extremist as I am---and as we all tend to be on some subjects, especially as we get older---I find it useful to cut to basics, something we all learned as brand new soldiers.
