National - by Surekha Ratnatunga on Friday, October 9, 2009 9:00 - 6 Comments - 228 views
Yesterday, American entered its ninth year at war in Afghanistan. Currently six months short of Vietnam and four shy of the Revolution, Afghanistan will be the longest conflict in America’s history. The real question is how big a lead it will build.
President Obama ruled out significantly downsizing US presence in the region, but remains unsure of whether to increase troops and by how much. The current commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, has requested up to 40,000 additional soldiers to combat the Taliban-insurgency. Forty thousand may be a realistic figure of what is required to “win” in Afghanistan, but it is far from what is desired by the American public.
Everyone but the White House seems to have a strong opinion about which direction the war in Afghanistan should go (which is hardly surprising, given no one but the White House makes the decision). The New York Times aggregated the views of its op-ed contributors, who put an emphasis on defeating the insurgency by training Afghans to lead the fight. One suggestion advocated recruiting insurgents to create an “Afghan Public Protection Force,” which might actually gain some tractions given the statement released on the Taliban website declaring they pose no threat to the West. The Taliban want to distinguish themselves from al Queda and position themselves as only fighting to prevent the conversion of “the country of the proud and pious Afghans into a colony.” However, bringing the Taliban back into the Afghan political fold may put at risk the fragile democracy America established in the country, especially after the occupation ends.
Other advice included eradicating corruption in the government (err, easier said than done), and setting up a functioning tax system to allow a principled government of the future to generate revenue. All 10 opinions explicitly or implicitly call for an increase in troops to provide Afghanistan with the stability needed for institution-building, which is sound in theory but I’m also not too sure it is drastically different from what America has been doing in practice for the last eight years.
Photo from Flickr user The U.S. Army under the Creative Commons License.
6 Comments
George Harris
Great post, but I dunno if the “fragile democracy” in Afghanistan can be meaningfully called a democracy at all. Free and open elections tend to be a common feature of democracies.
Chris Kennedy
At the Intelligence “Squared” debate at Kimmel this week where they debated whether “American cannot and will not succeed in Afghanistan/Pakistan,” an NYU student asked what sorts of “institutions” of democracy the U.S. intended to establish in Afghanistan before we are ready to leave.
The only institution the Con-side (America will succeed-side) was able to offer was “a powerful and well-trained military” and that “Afghanis will ultimately decide their own institutions.”
the “Pro Afghanistan-War” side’s inability to think beyond military and security really struck a chord with me. Everyone always talks about “nation-building” and “democracy” being our goals, but rarely is any detail offered about what this will look like in Afghanistan.
Maybe they have photo-copied our Constitution for them… at least that’s something…
Chris Kennedy
Keep in mind, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the Debate, that the panelists who debated the issue were some of the foremost advocates of either side, including authors, former Department of Defense officials, and Bush administration officials. It was televised on Bloomberg Station and broadcasted on NPR. So I’m not talking about some random NYU kid who was stumped by a hard question.
Sadly, that’s not terribly surprising. The US war engine has no real apparatus for installing stable governments–only tearing them down. And even if we had an effective civilian nation-building force, good luck pulling that off in Afghanistan.
PURNYU Debate Tonight on Afghanistan | NYU Local
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General James Jones, the U.S. National Security Advisor recently said that there
are fewer thatn 100 al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan.
If our mission, as stated, was to drive al Qaeda out of that country, it seems that the mission is virtually accomplished.
Al Qaeda is not a country or an army. It is an ideology, and if we plan to attack, occupy and re-build every country where they show up, we are on a Fool’s Errand.
It was the U.S. who trained and equipped the Taliban from 1979 forward. Now they
are well established and are winning the hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan. The corrupt Karzai government, which evidently stole the recent election wants us to stay in Afghanistan to keep them in power. This is an internal political struggle in which we have no legitimate role.
We should not waste one more life or one more dollar in this misadventure