A Post on Afghanistan

Without any consistent or particularly well informed opinions about the war in Afghanistan myself, I've been pretty hesitant to post anything on the subject. Unlike domestic politics or economic issues or even, to a certain extent, the conflict formerly known as the War in Iraq, I still haven't found a moral or logical framework through which I can really understand what is going on in Afghanistan. I certainly envy those who can claim with absolute certainty that the occupation of Afghanistan is just as futile and immoral as the occupation of Iraq. I think in most respects, I tend to agree with that argument.

The only thing keeping me from going out and buying an angry bumper sticker is that a) getting the hell out of dodge strikes my uninformed self as a pretty severe violation of the campsite rule, much to the detriment of the region's security and overall well-being and b) I suspect that there might be a strategic middle ground in which the U.S. military (and diplomatic and development sectors) support a few well defined goals of security and economic development. So far the entire argument has been confined to a linear scale of how many troops we have on the ground. But I suspect that, within certain obvious constraints, the number of troops we have in Afghanistan is only as productive as our overall strategic approach. If we continue to support a corrupt and illegitimate central government (and it is possible that any central government in Afghanistan will be perceived as such regardless), without working diplomatically at the local level, as we did in Iraq (the success of which I think cost swept under the rug called "The Surge"), then it probably doesn't matter how many troops we send into that particular meat grinder.

I do wish my thinking on the subject could be a little bit clearer. But after all, all of my points of reference come various credentialed persons on the internet and the radio, all of whom seem equally well informed and well intentioned, and none of whom I feel more inclined to trust over any other.

Except for a few. Which is the point of this post. Rather than hem-and-haw at you, and offer completely useless "on the other hand" kinds of arguments ad nauseum, I'll direct you to an interview with Juan Cole. Obviously very well informed (though more so on Middle Eastern issues, I think), he was consistently right-on in his writing on the Iraq War. And so for that reason, I tend to trust what he says. Which is all I feel equipped to do, at this point.

Excerpts:

Let's back up and talk about what the goal is in Afghanistan. Your strategy and your tactics are going to come out of your goal. I'm a little bit afraid that, in regard to the goal, you see a lot of mission creep. The goal has become standing up an Afghan government and an Afghan military that's relatively stable and can control the country. There's a lot of state-building involved in that.

I am a severe skeptic on this score. I don't think that's a proper goal for the U.S. military. I think we are dealing with a tribal society of people who, as a matter of course, are organized by clan and have feuds with each other, and feuds with other tribes, and feuds with their cousins. I think that Washington misinterprets this feuding as Talibanism, and thinks that if you put a lot of troops in there, you can pacify the country and settle it down.

I just think it is a misreading of the character of the country. Afghanistan is a country where localism is important, where people don't like the central government coming in and bothering them. There's a sense in which the communist government of the 1980s, backed by the Soviet Union, wanted to drag Afghanistan kicking and screaming into the late 20th century, and to do that you had to impose central government policy on the countryside and on the villagers. And the villagers rose up and kicked the Soviets and the communists out. They were outraged, in part, against the centralizing tendency of Kabul.

So, I just think that Afghanistan is a country that needs a light touch. You just have to accept that there's going to be a certain amount of disorder in the countryside as long as people are organized tribally. And if you put 100,000 or 150,000 Western troops in there, that's just more people to feud with.