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Greg Mills
July 2009
As the West place more troops in Afghanistan, there are lessons to be
learned from history. Avoid making the same mistakes that others made in
the past, for otherwise the war will not be won.
WESTERN GOVERNMENTS are pouring more troops into Afghanistan. But this
strategy is doomed to fail unless they can master the far harder tasks
of counter-insurgency, state-building and development. Winning the
Afghan war is about politics, people and jobs.
Although the success of the surge in Iraq and the recent military
victory by Sri Lankan government forces over the Tamil Tigers may have
emboldened those favouring the military as the principal providers of
stability, this is a chimera. In Afghanistan this approach will create
at least as many problems as it might solve.
Two Afghanistans
According to conventional wisdom the principal problem is that the
footprint of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan
is too small to secure a vast, mountainous and inaccessible terrain.
Whereas Western forces in Kosovo blanketed that micro-state at a ratio
of one soldier per 0.3km2, the ISAF ratio has been around 50 times less.
Being ‘troop-light’ supposedly results in a balloon-effect: as ISAF
pushes in one area, the Taliban squeezes out to somewhere safer which
ISAF cannot simultaneously cover.
But this argument presupposes that the fresh increase of 22,000 troops
will be enough to fill the harsh ungoverned spaces especially of south
and eastern Afghanistan. It presumes that the Taliban are not spoiling
for a fight. More importantly, that the surge will be useful in
supporting a political solution accepted by the bulk of Afghans.
While President Hamid Karzai has proven an instantly sartorially
recognisable if not entirely popular figure in the West, he has been
underwhelming in leading his fractious country to peace. This is partly
because of his own inadequacies, his absence of vision and delivery, the
corruption allegations which taint his family, and partly because he
was, whatever the subsequent electoral niceties and his attempts to put
distance between himself and his foreign benefactors, initially elevated
by outsiders. And if only one homily is true about Afghanistan, it’s
that foreigners have historically a limited welcome and grace period to
get things done.
But Karzai’s weakness also relate to the fissures in Afghan society, and
to the failings of Western approaches. There are two Afghanistans. The
Afghanistan of those who believe in the possibility of a peaceful and
prosperous multi-ethnic society, a progressive extension of the
cosmopolitan Kabul the city’s elite once experienced, the type of Afghan
that earnest Westerners talk to and prefer to hear. Then there is the
Afghanistan of a hard-scrabble, prosaic existence in the country-side,
where tribalism pervades and law and order is defined less by the law
than the Koran, chauvinism, deterrence and retribution.
Karzai has not bridged the gap between the two Afghanistans. And the
surge alone will not enable him to do so.
Until now the West’s development efforts have foundered because its
methods do not intersect those of Afghan power groups. For example, are
attempts to open up the economy and stimulate growth in the best
interests of those who prefer to keep power close to their chests? Put
differently, where the plans of outsiders are linear in their intent and
actions, Afghans are deliberately vague, non-committal and apparently
unhelpful and thankless.
This creates a dilemma for the West. Walking away is not an option. If
nothing else, 9/11 illustrated the costs of complacency, just as Iraq
demonstrated the folly of rationale invention. Doing nothing and
allowing Afghanistan to fester, and likely fall apart violently is not
in anyone’s interests.
The Lessons of Afghanistan
So what to do?
The first lesson: do not give the insurgents what they want. The Afghan
war is an instance of asymmetric means (where one side uses its weakness
to military advantage). It is also, more profoundly, a war of asymmetric
ends (where both sides do not want the same thing). The presumption that
both sides in Afghanistan want the fighting to end may well turn out to
be foolish. Instead, cultural differences in the attitude towards war as
a way of life favor a long war.
Second, in each and every country example, the process of recovery from
conflict to stability involves the same formula: Jobs, a stake in the
system, political accommodation, security, stability, education,
long-term investments in public goods, and so on. All of these aspects
are part of a virtuous (or, if they are not attended to, vicious) cycle.
In Afghanistan economic differences mirror the attitudinal divide, and
make reforms more treacherous. Alienation over access to wealth coupled
with historical enmities is a volatile mix, where access to income and
jobs is determined by sub-national allegiances and connections.
Stability thus rests on understanding what sort of job-producing economy
is possible in Afghanistan and, as the border cuts between one people,
Pakistan.
Third, accept the way local systems operate. Local solutions, including
political choices, need not only to be respected but encouraged. This
means avoiding a design and dogma that will ‘show’ the locals how things
should be done. The Western concept of tolerant multiculturalism might
chime with the worldview of a Kabul elite, but may be meaningless or
threatening to many others. Always the West should not set too many
operating guidelines, but rather a few clear ‘red lines’ over which
Afghans should not transgress, such as attacking coalition forces,
giving Kabul the space necessary to pursue nation- and state-building.
Rather than focusing on perfecting its tactical responses, the West has
to be less linear and more strategic in building the alliances necessary
to achieve the goal which is increasingly lost in the contemporary
lexicon about ‘stability’, ‘comprehensive approaches’, ‘peacebuilding’
and ‘development’: Ensuring Afghanistan is not used as a base for
terrorism.
Finally, in the same vein, the West should not try to do everything at
once. It does not have to fill all ‘ungoverned spaces’. It should be
willing to let some areas ‘go’ while concentrating on those things and
places it prefers, picking the fights where it and not the Taliban
chooses. Only then might the war in Afghanistan be winnable.
Greg Mills heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, an
institutional partner of the S.Rajaratnam School of International
Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University. He served in 2006 as
an adviser to the commander of the International Security Assistance
Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and head of his Prism analysis cell based in
Kabul. He is currently a visiting scholar at Cambridge University.
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