Team Infidel
Forum Spin Doctor
New York Post
March 24, 2009
Pg. 25
By Rich Lowry
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Can Afghanistan become another Iraq? A few years ago, that would've been a question full of foreboding. Now, it expresses an aspiration.
The Afghan war has, as any US officer will tell you, long been "under-resourced," a word that in a counter-insurgency war is almost always a synonym for failure. While Iraq had 15 US combat brigades before the surge and 20 during it, Afghanistan was in the low single digits and will only reach six brigades with the addition of the 17,000 troops President Obama just ordered.
A US general has a pointed formulation for the relative priority of the two wars over the last seven years: "If you needed it in Iraq, you got it; if you needed it in Afghanistan, you figured out how to do without it." That has changed, but by how much and for how long will be defining questions for the Obama administration.
The challenges in Afghanistan bear an uncanny resemblance to those in Iraq prior to the surge: insufficient coalition force levels, making it impossible to secure the population; a population that's sitting on the fence, waiting to see whether the insurgents or the coalition has more staying power; an indigenous army that's too small, and a police force plagued by incompetence and corruption; a weak political leader at the top who is triangulating between the coalition and its enemies. (President Hamid Karzai is both unpopular and likely to win re-election in August.)
On top of all of this, Afghanistan is a broken country, shattered by the Soviets and by years of civil war. It would be a poor and ramshackle nation a complex patchwork of ethnicity and tribes even without the serial catastrophes that have befallen it.
In the Pashtun areas of the south, where the insurgency is strongest, 25 percent of children live less than five years, average life expectancy is 45 and half of men and more than 80 percent of women are illiterate. The opium trade equals more than half of the GDP of Afghanistan, with as much as $500 million a year of the illegal largesse going to the insurgency (and the defense ministry's operating budget is just $58 million).
All of this calls for realism about what can be achieved here, but doesn't justify despair. Afghanistan is not about to fall to a revitalized Taliban. The capital, Kabul, can go weeks without an attack. Even with civilian casualties up 45 percent over the last year, they're still half the current level in post-surge Iraq, and Afghanistan has a larger population.
Yet Afghanistan isn't susceptible to quick fixes, either. Scaling back our commitment to focus on only counterterrorism operations targeted strikes against high-value targets risks a generalized collapse that would make much of the country a safe haven for terrorists and empower the extremists across the border threatening the Pakistani government. A regional meltdown would become all too possible.
Reconciling with elements of the Taliban is another fantasy, since there are no moderate Taliban with whom to reconcile. Less-committed local fighters can be pulled away from the insurgency, but only if the insurgency is first beaten back.
No, the only way we can succeed in Afghanistan i.e., create a government minimally competent and decent enough to sustain itself is by undertaking the hard work of counter-insurgency, as we did in Iraq with the surge.
That means deploying the troops necessary to protect the population and either forcing extremists to fight (and be killed or captured) or to flee. It means continuing to build the Afghan National Army, the nation's most respected institution. (It's set to grow to 140,000 by early 2012, and Obama could authorize a doubling from there to more than 250,000.)
It means building governmental capacity, from the central government on down through the provinces and districts. It means giving farmers an alternative to poppy cultivation and young men sources of income other than getting paid to fire RPG's at the coalition.
No one here underestimates the difficulty of this task, the work of years. But the implicit message from American commanders is that the Afghan war hasn't failed, it hasn't truly been tried.
US commanders are confident that the Taliban doesn't have much inherent popular appeal (opinion surveys bear them out) and that widespread war-weariness makes the establishment of order possible.
Afghanistan isn't the inevitably ungovernable basket-case of popular imagination. It enjoyed relative stability through much of the 20th century, before its agony commenced in the late 1970s.
But nothing will be possible without a fight. Already this year, with the traditional warm-weather fighting season just beginning, coalition casualties are running at twice the rate of a year ago, a product both of a mild winter and commanding Gen. David McKiernan's determination to keep after the enemy.
Adding US troops in areas in the south that haven't had a coalition presence and where the Taliban is sure to resist will mean a long summer of combat. It will give the Left and the media who've turned on what they had long held out as the "good war" more occasion to declare Afghanistan the latest Vietnam.
Since the effect of this wrenching work won't be evident until next year's fighting season, it will obviously create a political vulnerability for Obama. He'd do well to note a crucial element of the surge in Iraq a president with a stomach of steel.
March 24, 2009
Pg. 25
By Rich Lowry
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN -- Can Afghanistan become another Iraq? A few years ago, that would've been a question full of foreboding. Now, it expresses an aspiration.
The Afghan war has, as any US officer will tell you, long been "under-resourced," a word that in a counter-insurgency war is almost always a synonym for failure. While Iraq had 15 US combat brigades before the surge and 20 during it, Afghanistan was in the low single digits and will only reach six brigades with the addition of the 17,000 troops President Obama just ordered.
A US general has a pointed formulation for the relative priority of the two wars over the last seven years: "If you needed it in Iraq, you got it; if you needed it in Afghanistan, you figured out how to do without it." That has changed, but by how much and for how long will be defining questions for the Obama administration.
The challenges in Afghanistan bear an uncanny resemblance to those in Iraq prior to the surge: insufficient coalition force levels, making it impossible to secure the population; a population that's sitting on the fence, waiting to see whether the insurgents or the coalition has more staying power; an indigenous army that's too small, and a police force plagued by incompetence and corruption; a weak political leader at the top who is triangulating between the coalition and its enemies. (President Hamid Karzai is both unpopular and likely to win re-election in August.)
On top of all of this, Afghanistan is a broken country, shattered by the Soviets and by years of civil war. It would be a poor and ramshackle nation a complex patchwork of ethnicity and tribes even without the serial catastrophes that have befallen it.
In the Pashtun areas of the south, where the insurgency is strongest, 25 percent of children live less than five years, average life expectancy is 45 and half of men and more than 80 percent of women are illiterate. The opium trade equals more than half of the GDP of Afghanistan, with as much as $500 million a year of the illegal largesse going to the insurgency (and the defense ministry's operating budget is just $58 million).
All of this calls for realism about what can be achieved here, but doesn't justify despair. Afghanistan is not about to fall to a revitalized Taliban. The capital, Kabul, can go weeks without an attack. Even with civilian casualties up 45 percent over the last year, they're still half the current level in post-surge Iraq, and Afghanistan has a larger population.
Yet Afghanistan isn't susceptible to quick fixes, either. Scaling back our commitment to focus on only counterterrorism operations targeted strikes against high-value targets risks a generalized collapse that would make much of the country a safe haven for terrorists and empower the extremists across the border threatening the Pakistani government. A regional meltdown would become all too possible.
Reconciling with elements of the Taliban is another fantasy, since there are no moderate Taliban with whom to reconcile. Less-committed local fighters can be pulled away from the insurgency, but only if the insurgency is first beaten back.
No, the only way we can succeed in Afghanistan i.e., create a government minimally competent and decent enough to sustain itself is by undertaking the hard work of counter-insurgency, as we did in Iraq with the surge.
That means deploying the troops necessary to protect the population and either forcing extremists to fight (and be killed or captured) or to flee. It means continuing to build the Afghan National Army, the nation's most respected institution. (It's set to grow to 140,000 by early 2012, and Obama could authorize a doubling from there to more than 250,000.)
It means building governmental capacity, from the central government on down through the provinces and districts. It means giving farmers an alternative to poppy cultivation and young men sources of income other than getting paid to fire RPG's at the coalition.
No one here underestimates the difficulty of this task, the work of years. But the implicit message from American commanders is that the Afghan war hasn't failed, it hasn't truly been tried.
US commanders are confident that the Taliban doesn't have much inherent popular appeal (opinion surveys bear them out) and that widespread war-weariness makes the establishment of order possible.
Afghanistan isn't the inevitably ungovernable basket-case of popular imagination. It enjoyed relative stability through much of the 20th century, before its agony commenced in the late 1970s.
But nothing will be possible without a fight. Already this year, with the traditional warm-weather fighting season just beginning, coalition casualties are running at twice the rate of a year ago, a product both of a mild winter and commanding Gen. David McKiernan's determination to keep after the enemy.
Adding US troops in areas in the south that haven't had a coalition presence and where the Taliban is sure to resist will mean a long summer of combat. It will give the Left and the media who've turned on what they had long held out as the "good war" more occasion to declare Afghanistan the latest Vietnam.
Since the effect of this wrenching work won't be evident until next year's fighting season, it will obviously create a political vulnerability for Obama. He'd do well to note a crucial element of the surge in Iraq a president with a stomach of steel.