On Afghanistan, Can We Talk?

I don’t think Hamid Karzai is a terrible guy. I just think he’s incapable of governing Afghanistan. What I don’t understand is why we would think we can succeed where he has failed. He gets his hands dirty trying, because you have to get your hands dirty if you want to make a sincere effort to govern Afghanistan. But, why would we want to get our hands dirty? Recent intelligence reports suggest that the majority of insurgents in Afghanistan are more motivated by simple avarice and xenophobia than any religious fundamentalism. Ironically, this leads to non-sequiturs like this:

Indeed, the intelligence reports say the Taliban movement that harbored the Al Qaeda terrorist network before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks is responsible for only a small share of the rising attacks – mostly in southern Afghanistan, according to the officials…

…It…raises prospects for reconciliation with some of them. For example, two major insurgent groups are believed to have allied with the Taliban to protect their sphere of influence, not to wage a holy war against the West.

And, similarly, this:

US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States because it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.

The nonreligious motivations give American war planners some hope that they can reduce the power of these militias, and perhaps even co-opt their support with a new set of strategies and incentives.

There are a couple of obvious problems with this logic. First of all, the fact that the majority of these soldiers are not religiously motivated means that they represent much less of a threat to us than we might imagine. It also means that a collapse of the central government in Kabul doesn’t automatically augur a return of Taliban rule or renewed safe-harbors for al-Qaeda training camps. The latter concern is definitely heightened in any situation where Afghanistan returns to a completely failed state. But there are ways for us to manage that threat short of garrisoning the whole country. Another problem is that determining that the real issue is avarice and xenophobia opens up a irresolvable can of worms. Our presence, then, is the biggest problem, and the only solution is to become the most effective paymaster/sugar daddy. If Karzai’s government is only corrupt because corruption is the only effective means of control, then we stand to corrupt ourselves by taking more responsibility for maintaining order. With the world’s biggest opium trade, it’s inevitable that we’d become compromised in some very nasty business. In fact, we already have been embarrassed, with a recent front-page New York Times article alleging that Karzai’s brother is an opium kingpin who has been on the CIA payroll for years. If the game is to be the one throwing around the most cash, eschewing any dealings with the opium trade seems like a losing proposition.

Perhaps the problem in Afghanistan is cultural and structural. It seems that there is something about the place that precludes anyone, Afghan or not, for exercising central control. If every mountain valley expresses its own form of xenophobia, there really isn’t a national Afghan identity. Sometimes it seems like even terms like Pashtun or Tajik are too broad to really express the kind of cellular and tribal reality on the ground.

The international community does have an interest in preventing Afghanistan from returning to the kind of unremitting civil war it endured once the Soviets invaded in 1979. There is an humanitarian interest, if nothing else. But there must be ways to help Afghanistan other than increasing our failed effort to prop up a failed government there.

I think Barack Obama is thinking along these same lines, but I get the feeling that he isn’t getting the right advice. There’s a certain inertia that sets in in our national security apparatus that makes radical change difficult. And, frankly, our national security apparatus has been lying to us for so long that it is difficult for them to stop on a dime and say, like Emily Litella, “Oh, those Taliban? Never mind.”

But, perhaps, that is what it is time to do. Maybe Obama has to give a speech where he explains that we’ve been misled about the threat from the Taliban and the nature of the insurgency in Afghanistan. Maybe he needs to reset the bullshit and stop catapulting the propaganda. We do have concerns about what is going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Let’s try being honest about that. Maybe then we can have a better discussion about our options.