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President Obama has unveiled his administration's strategy for Afghanistan, and it is both more---and less---than most observers expected. Loudly touted as a plan, it is really a broad strategy, a brush of assumptions, both implicit and explicit, and a modest objective that will be no easier to achieve just because it is limited.
The president's major assumption, that our experience in Iraq can't inform us about Afghanistan, is right on the money. Whatever one can say about the foolishness of going to war in Iraq, and about the strategic and tactical ineptitude after the fall of Saddam, the success of operations in the past two years demonstrates that a central government in a relatively modern country can succeed. It isn't over yet, of course, and Iraq could go to pieces at any time, but there is cause for hope there.
But anyone who is waiting for a proper central government to administer Afghanistan may have to wait forever. Afghanistan and Iraq are Muslim countries, but otherwise they are nothing alike. As cosmopolitan as Iraq is, Afghanistan is uneducated and medieval. It has almost no commerce, save the cultivation and sale of opium, and is among the poorest nations in the world. Landlocked and mountainous, it is a rugged, spare land with people to match. The dominant ethnic group is Pashtun, but there is no national cohesion, and allegiance is to the local tribal chief. Trying to forge a nation-state from the disparate allegiances faces formidable, almost insurmountable obstacles and is unlikely to succeed at any bearable expenditure of men and materiel.
But withdrawing from Iraq and increasing the American force in Afghanistan was a campaign promise. And the American national security team has reiterated that the battle against Muslim revolutionaries must be fought there, rather than on the streets of Riyadh and Cairo. In a demonstration that even bureaucrats can learn, the articulated objectives in Afghanistan seem relatively limited: to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist haven, not to turn the place into a Pashtun Iraq. The president will be happy merely to reduce the number of attacks and level of violence. And because the place is politically and socially regional, success in, say, Helmand and Kandahar alone will be cause for celebration.
The president plans to have as many as 60,000 Americans in Afghanistan---about half of what we now have in Iraq---but that is unlikely to be adequate, even for the limited objectives, because the mission needs not just combat troops but also intelligence assets, command and control units, mobile training teams, and special operations forces in substantial quantities. It will also be interesting to see if this administration can integrate our military capability with other instruments of policy, requiring as it does the exertions of Executive Branch bureaucrats, who have in the past refused noisily when they were asked to do anything more dangerous or laborious than negotiating the Beltway in rush hour.
The mission will be one of long duration, too, probably decades. And in the end, its success will largely be dependent on Pakistan---politically unstable, home to terrorists and armed to the teeth.
are nothing alike. The population of Afghanistan is widely dispersed, and vast tracts of the country are unpopulated. It is a land of rugged terrain and lpeople to match, and most Afghans are poorly schooled or illiterate.
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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.
