I don’t have an opinion on whether it will ultimately be better for Afghanistan if Abdullah Abdullah wins the presidential election or if the victory goes to the incumbent, Hamid Karzai. The final numbers are not in yet, and it looks quite possible that it will go to a run-off election. In some ways, Abdullah Abdullah would be a nice fit. His father was a Pashtun originally from Kandahar and his mother was a Tajik. Yet, during the Soviet War, Abdullah became aligned with legendary Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Massoud, who would go on to command the Northern Alliance. As a result, Abdullah’s base of support is largely from the northern, non-Pashtun part of the country and there is a lot of concern that a run-off election could spark a north-south civil war. Even if it doesn’t, the Pashtuns may not accept Abdullah and his coalition as legitimate leaders of the country. I simply can’t know for sure.
What I think is more important than who becomes the next president of Afghanistan is hearing the administration articulate some plan for the government there to raise the kind of revenues they’ll need to fund security forces that can make the country stable. Even if we successfully train-up and arm security forces in sufficient numbers, there is no money for the Afghans to maintain those forces. This is a problem we are not facing in Iraq, where billions of dollars are available to the central government through the sale of oil. While the logistics of leaving Iraq are difficult, they aren’t insurmountable, and we have a plan that is being implemented. This is not the case in Afghanistan.
We are sending in more troops to try to roll back the recent deterioration in security. That may be the prerequisite for making progress, but I don’t see the economic plan that is needed for us to have a legitimate exit strategy. Right now, our exit would leave the country without a government. I don’t want to see us do that. But I don’t want us to stay indefinitely if we don’t have a good plan for how Afghanistan’s government can take over for us. How is Afghanistan going to get their economy moving? How are they going to collect revenues?
My instinct is that it would be better for Karzai to go because his government is rife with corruption and dependent on opium-selling warlords. But, I don’t know that Abdullah could do a lot better and it would be better to avoid a resumption of Pashtun/Non-Pashtun hostilities.
I don’t have a good solution to suggest. But I want to see our government discussing these matters so I can have some understanding of where we’re trying to go and if it makes any sense.
I am not at all confident that the U.S. gov’t is any better prepared today to help the Afghans than they were in 2001. Today we have different principals and deputys in place, but the lack of farsi/urdu/dari speakers and the lack of people to make a commitment to stay in Afghanistan for years in a huge impediment to solving the problem.
And just speaking the language is not enough. We need people that can think in pastunwali. We need people that can bridge the central Asian (Uzbek, Tajik) to Pashtun mindset.
Karzai seems to be a “go-along-to-get-along” type of person. Corruption is rife and the gov’t gets a substantial amount of revenue from drug smugglers.
And, yet, with nukes next door in Pakistan and a Taliban in the tribal areas, we simply cannot walk away.
In my eyes, the plan should be to get out ASAP. No residuals, no roots, nothing.
I think the emphasis on security forces is misplaced. Sure, it’s important for the government to be able to maintain law and order, but if that is our (and their) only goal, all we are doing is helping to establish a police state.
The alternative? In addition to supporting Afghan police forces, we should ramp up our work on economic development. We’ve been doing some of this lately — simple stuff like helping with water supplies, seeds, and other agricultural supplies — and it’s been successful at both replacing opium poppy production and reducing support for the Taliban. The average rural Afghan family isn’t growing poppies because they care one way or another about western junkies; they’re doing it to make a living. If they can make a living, preferably a better living, from growing something else, they will.
We should be thankful that the Republicans are out of power right now, as they’d never go for this kind of touchy-feely but common-sense maneuver. The GOP thinks solely in terms of coercion through force. The problem with that kind of thinking is that we will never achieve control over Afghanistan. No one, including the Afghans themselves, is capable of achieving control over Afghanistan. This isn’t entirely unique to Afghanistan, despite its reputation as the graveyard of empires. If most Americans had no respect for the law and a near-total disbelief in the legitimacy of our government, we’d dissolve into chaos no less total than that of Afghanistan.
And yes, I know this falls under the general heading of “nation building”, and yes, it’s hard work. That said, nation building through military occupation is impossible work. Dynamite doesn’t build buildings, and armies don’t build nations. Mind you, dynamite is often used early in the process of construction, and there’s a role here for the military, too. But if we persist in acting as if the whole job — or even a large part of it — can be done by an army, we’ll see about as much success as we would building an office tower with dynamite.
I’m probably more open to the idea of spending blood and treasure to help rebuild Afghanistan for purely humanitarian reasons than most Americans, but even if that was our motive — and frankly, our biggest problem in Afghanistan may be that no one is quite sure what our motive is — I think that it would be better for us to pull out now and leave the Afghans to their own devices than to make things worse by pursuing an aimless course that bears little more resemblance to an actual strategy than it did under Bush.
Part of my point is that security and economic development are related. Frankly, Afghanistan needs to be a police state, at least to the degree that the police need to be the strongest force in the country. Until that is the case, the central government cannot win support and cannot raise revenues.
What I don’t see in Afghanistan is a way to sustain whatever we help build.
Are the police the strongest force in our country? Every time we have one of our (fortunately rare) mass riots, we see that they are not very powerful at all. And yes, I get that you meant relative to the warlords, but the power of the warlords comes not only from their relatively small private armies but also from their control of relatively small streams of money.
If the average Afghan is self-sufficient enough to no longer need the patronage of the warlords, then the police will be strong enough to resist the warlords’ armies because the vast medium in which both police and warlords operate, the Afghan people, will demand it.
We don’t have warlords here not because we have a strong central government — though that certainly helps — or because there aren’t enough guns in private hands to supply private armies a thousand times over, but because we wouldn’t tolerate them. We don’t need the patronage, and if there were private armies operating in our neighborhoods, we’d rat them out to the cops.
I think our only real difference of opinion here is over the amount of armed force necessary to sustain development gains. I think those gains will be, to a certain extent, self-sustaining because they directly undermine the warlords’ patronage system.
Yes, because the armed forces are barred from operating on our home soil, the police are ordinarily the most powerful force in our country. The only exception to that would be when the National Guard is called out. The state police can reasonably expect to be able to outgun any militia that exists in this country, and if they can’t they can call on the Guard.
Another Obama screwup. We’re $13 trillion in the hole, we’ve got major crises on the domestic front, and we’re messing around in another country on the other side of the globe that has a long history of making fools of imperial nations?
Oy, Oy, Oy….
Noz makes a similar but different point.
And so we sit in our living rooms and basements and debate what Afgans need. And discuss how we can give it to them. As though they are little children who are in need of our guidance.
I know, I know! What they need is… is… economic development!
No, no, what they need is… a police state!
Or.. or …… to grow pomegranate instead of opium!
Of course how they will enjoy all these gifts while we bomb weddings and reserve the right to invade any building we chose nobody ways.
What fools Americans are! We still think that what we are best at giving to foreigners is prosperity and jobs and hope.
But it is not true. American is a military industrial complex to its core. What we are best at giving foreigners (particularly brown ones) is death and destruction and torture.
It’s what we are. You are a fool is you believe differently after the last forty years.
nalbar
I doubt it will make any difference who the president is, Afghanistan isn’t ready for democracy. The US/West did things backwards in Afghanistan (and Iraq and Russia and …): Paul Collier on Rebuilding a Broken Nation.
How’s that pipeline across Afghanistan coming?
If we leave Afghanistan, who will defend the pipeline? After all, that was reason for overthrowing the Taliban in the first place.
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Main goals defeat Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, avoid any surrender to Taliban rule and start nation building. We’re in for the long haul, however all resources will be focused on Af-Pak region. This election is a major defeat for the Taliban. They tried to disrupt the election with an all-out assault in recent weeks. They failed, the people won and showed great courage. The cooperation between Pakistan and the US is at an all time high due to the Obama administration and building of trust.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Protection racket. Make the drug dealer’s pay protection money and we won’t napalm their poppy fields. What good is having a big military if you can’t extort people.