By John Hannah
In today's Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens rises to the
defense of Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Toward the article's close, Stephens
writes that:
It would be ... useful
if some of Mr. Karzai's more acerbic Western critics could ask themselves why
matters went abruptly south in Afghanistan after several years in which they
had gone swimmingly well under Mr. Karzai. ... The answer has a lot less to do
with Mr. Karzai's performance than with NATO.
Stephens's
basic point is worth bearing in mind. Ever since last year's presidential
campaign, there's been an unfortunate tendency to assess America's Afghan
campaign as one long, steady downward spiral to disaster. "Eight years of
drift," according to Obama administration officials seeking to explain
their lengthy deliberations over strategy and troop numbers. But, as
Stephens suggests, the reality is a good deal more complex. The fact is that,
after a period of genuine progress following the Taliban's removal in late
2001, the situation in Afghanistan only began to deteriorate markedly between
2005 and 2006. Suicide attacks quintupled that year. Remotely detonated
bombs more than doubled. Insurgent attacks nearly tripled. And the trends
have steadily worsened every year since. The question is why? What changed
in that time period that might help account for the sharp decline in America's
war fortunes?
I certainly don't have an exhaustive answer, but I do have a
few ideas that merit consideration:
1. Zalmay Khalilzad left
Afghanistan
Khalilzad served as President Bush's special envoy for
Afghanistan from the country's liberation in 2001 until 2003. In 2003, he
became U.S. ambassador. Khalilzad had an extraordinary relationship with
Karzai, spending hours alone with him on a daily basis -- mentoring, advising,
reassuring, hectoring (the latter only in private). The relationship
allowed Khalilzad to succeed, far more often than not, in getting Karzai to do
the right thing. Karzai had enormous confidence in Khalilzad -- and, more
importantly, in the unflinching U.S. support that was manifested in Khalilzad's
role.
Khalizad
left Afghanistan in the summer of 2005. Since then, no other U.S.
official has come close to replicating his relationship with Karzai. On
the contrary, we've seen an ever-widening breach of trust and confidence
between Karzai and the United States, bottoming out this spring when the Obama
administration let it be known that it was "desperately searching"
for an alternative to Karzai. Causal lines are always hard to draw, but
it's difficult not to discern a significant connection between the end of
Khalilzad's tenure in Kabul and the mounting frustrations with Karzai's
performance in Washington. At a minimum, this suggests that now that Karzai's
second term is a done deal, the Obama administration needs urgently to find a
way to rebuild its badly tattered relationship with him. Can that be
done with the people currently in charge of Afghan policy? That's a tough
question, but it needs to be asked.
2. NATO assumed overall
command for the Afghan mission from the United States.
Most importantly, NATO took over operations in southern
Afghanistan, the heart of the Taliban insurgency, in mid-2006. Karzai and
the Afghans fretted throughout 2005 about the planned handover to NATO, urging
the U.S. not to follow through. Despite repeated assurances from
Washington, the Afghans palpably feared that the transition to NATO reflected
the start of America's ultimate withdrawal from Afghanistan. Psychologically,
this perception of declining U.S. commitment almost certainly had the dual
effect of dangerously demoralizing the Afghan government and people (resulting
in counter-productive hedging behavior), while emboldening the Taliban.
Similarly, the Pakistani government -- believing the United States to be once
again headed for the Afghan exits -- was encouraged even further in its double
game of maintaining an "option" for returning a friendly Taliban to
power in Kabul.
Militarily, the shift to NATO, particularly in the south,
undeniably resulted in a significant loss of combat effectiveness on perhaps
the war's most important front. While America's British, Dutch, and
Canadian allies fought valiantly in Helmand and Kandahar provinces, they were
no match -- frequently by their own admission -- for the extraordinary fighting
skills of their U.S. counterparts. With only some exaggeration, a senior
Afghan official once told President Bush that 800 U.S. troops had generated a
greater sense of security and well-being among the population in Helmand than
8,000 NATO forces.
Finally, at an administrative level, putting the
26-member alliance in charge made a hash of command and control in the Afghan
theater, undermining severely the unity of military and civilian effort that is
essential to successful warfare, especially counter-insurgency operations.
Whatever the merits of ramping up NATO's role -- e.g., the importance of
multilateralism; the need to divert greater U.S. attention and resources to the
deteriorating situation in Iraq -- the benefits, in retrospect, have not been
worth the costs in terms of advancing U.S. war aims. Since late 2008, the
United States has been engaged in a delicate effort to re-balance the
relationship between America and NATO, and to once again take ownership of the
Afghan war in a much more aggressive way. The Obama administration's
decisions on increasing troop numbers, as well as changes that have already
been made in command and control arrangements in Afghanistan, are a crucial
part of that essential return to full-blown U.S. leadership of the war effort.
3. America's failure
to hold Pakistan to account for its support of the Taliban became fully
manifested.
I vividly recall that from 2003 onward, Zal Khalilzad
repeatedly tried to warn U.S. officials about the need for a strategy that
would aggressively counter Pakistani efforts to resurrect the defeated Taliban.
President Karzai and his security advisors harped constantly on the same
issue. Yet it was all to no avail. Special Afghan pleading, some
officials complained. The Musharraf government is already under enough
pressure assisting our efforts to kill and capture al Qaeda operatives, others
said. Whatever the excuses, far, far too little was done. As a
result, by 2005-2006 the Taliban, as a serious insurgent force, began coming
back with a vengeance. Even then, Washington was slow to respond in
developing a serious policy to address Pakistan's double-dealing. Not
until 2007-2008 did talk get serious about dramatically expanding operations to
target Taliban leaders and disrupt their operations in Pakistan. It was only at this point that the United States began putting together a comprehensive diplomatic, economic,
and military plan designed to pressure and empower the Pakistani government to
act seriously against the Taliban monster it had encouraged along the Afghan
border. To its great credit, the Obama administration has expanded and
fully resourced this effort with Pakistan in ways that, at long last, are
beginning to show signs of tentative progress.
There
are, no doubt, a host of other causes that contributed to the war's downward
spiral. But the larger point is that the United States did enjoy a
significant period after the Taliban's downfall when real progress was being
made. The causes of that success and why things began going badly need to
be studied closely. The bottom line is that the deterioration of recent
years was not inevitable. Rather, it resulted from real shifts -- and
failures -- of policy, many of which are subject to U.S. control, influence and
correction.
It's, of course, true that the costs the U.S. may need to
endure now in correcting past mistakes will almost certainly be higher than if
we'd gotten it right the first time. But not nearly as high as the costs
of allowing the Taliban to return to power, allied with al Qaeda, with its
sights firmly set on taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan.
David McNew/Getty Images
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