How to Win Afghanistan? Nation Building.

Posted By Paul Miller Tuesday, March 22, 2011 - 2:46 PM Share

General David Petraeus, Commander of the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, told Congress this week "I am concerned that funding for our State Department and USAID partners will not sufficiently enable them to build on the hard-fought security achievements of our men and women in uniform.  Inadequate resourcing of our civilian partners could, in fact, jeopardize accomplishment of the overall mission."

Congressional testimony is usually bland and does not often contain any real news.  Petraeus' remarks mostly wrote themselves:  he started by announcing that the Taliban's momentum "has been arrested," but progress is "fragile and reversible."  You might as well say "Progress Made, Challenges Remain."  Nothing new here.

But then Petraeus came out with that bombshell about funding for civilians near the end of his testimony.  He could not have been more stark.  We will lose the war in Afghanistan unless we pony up more money for our civilian efforts-which is to say, for nation building.

Nation building, as I've argued earlier, is not international charity.  It is not a superfluous and dispensable exercise in appeasing western guilt, an expensive tribute to humanitarianism, or an act of unvarnished selflessness and goodwill.  Nation building is a response to the threat of failed states that threaten regional stability.  It is a pragmatic exercise of hard power to protect vital national interests.  In the context of Afghanistan, nation building is the civilian side of counterinsurgency, the primary objective of which is to "foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government," according to the Counterinsurgency Field Manual Petraeus wrote.

Afghanistan's weakness threatens America's security.  State failure, chaos, or Taliban rule in Afghanistan will provide a safe haven for al-Qaida, destabilize western Pakistan and endanger its nuclear weapons, become a worldwide headquarters for narcotics traffickers, discredit NATO, invite Iranian and Russian adventurism, and sully self-government and civil liberties in the Muslim world.  We must rebuild Afghanistan to prevent these catastrophic outcomes.

There are no practical alternatives.  Vice President Biden and a growing chorus of others believe we should give up rebuilding Afghanistan and, instead, sustain an indefinite worldwide assassination campaign against al Qaida's senior leaders.  His view of the war is myopic, narrow, and troubling.  Such a campaign would do nothing to address Pakistan, the drug trade, NATO, the other great powers, or any of our other interests across South Asia.  It is also morally troubling -- it amounts to a declaration that we reserve the right to kill anyone we deem to be a terrorist, anywhere in the world, forever.  Call it the Biden Doctrine of the Forever War.  States should not maintain a state of war indefinitely just because it is too inconvenient to settle the political conditions that led to the war in the first place.  War should be the last resort, not the first.

Nation building in Afghanistan is the only pragmatic policy option that will secure the full range of our interests in South Asia and yield an actual end-point to the war, which is why Petraeus is right to be alarmed about the funding levels for our civilians.  They are the ones who are acting as embedded advisors to Afghan ministers; helping set up local dispute-resolution councils in provinces and districts; dispensing funds for Afghans to build roads, schools, and hospitals; training Afghans on electric power plant maintenance; and helping cut deals between rival Afghan politicians in Kabul.  These things are, in fact, vital war aims because they help create stability in Afghanistan and, thus, South Asia.  Under-funding these efforts amounts to trying to kill our way out of the insurgency, which we all know is impossible. 

Plenty of critics challenge this assessment on the grounds that it can't be done-because nation building is impossible, because Afghanistan is ungovernable, because we've already lost, because Karzai is corrupt and illegitimate, because the Afghans are invincible warriors who will inevitably defeat any foreigners, etc.  I've responded to most of these objections elsewhere (see here, here, and here for starters).  I might also invoke the ethos of the Seabees in World War II:  "the difficult we do immediately.  The impossible takes a little longer."  No one said rebuilding Afghanistan would be easy; but foreign policy isn't supposed to be easy.  If it were, we'd have world peace by now.

Finally, there is another reason to stick it out in Afghanistan, a reason that is often overlooked or simply discounted by critics.  Helping the Afghans is the right thing to do.  Afghanistan was the worst country on earth in 2001.  We dithered about for the better part of a decade before coming to our senses around 2007-8 and started putting out even a half-hearted effort.  If today we can do no better than to walk away and leave the place a shambles, it will be a national disgrace.  The Afghans deserve better.

 

NICOLAS19

3:20 PM ET

March 23, 2011

worst country of Earth

Excuse me? Afghanistan was the worst country on Earth (on what scale? who gave the marks? who was the best?) so it deserved to be invaded an occupied by the US? Now, after 10 years of looting, you decide that they really deserve better, and start healing some of the damage you have done? How about not invading and not destroying it on the first place?

Well, enough with the questions. In 2001, the US was attacked by a multinational organization. The government just had to attack somebody, they would've been seen as weak otherwise. Among the many AQ related countries they chose Afghanistan, because... well, thats a fair question, my bet is that it precedes all the other countries in the Alphabet, so it was easier to find on a map using the index.
Given the superior military, the conventional resistance was swiftly crushed. The US started subduing the country. With all their trigger-happy soldiers and sadistic contractors, they couldn't even occupy the land properly.

This folly continued for a few years, then came the guy of change and said: "hey, lets send in more Tommys, that'll teach 'em!". So there came more sadists and murderers, but they were duly outdone by a bunch of under-equipped, starving guys and children, defending their country.

The guy of change was puzzled (thinking isn't his strong point, anyway). "I can't afford more Tommys and we are getting pounded hard. So lets pretend that we asked for this pounding (which is actually his strong point) and in reality we just want to peacefully nation-build". Word was sent to the loyal opposition who was ready and eager for the rescue, using all the banalities and empty phrases the government accumulated through these years.

Now read: "Afghanistan was a bad place, ready to be destroyed for the sake of its badness. We are heroes who are never defeated. Sometimes we are defeated, yes, but it is never because we are idiots, no, it is solely because the enemy is evil! In fact we never wanted to conquer Afghanistan, we destroyed it just to be able to re-build everything because Afghans deserve better (than us)!"

 

MARTY MARTEL

5:58 PM ET

March 27, 2011

'Winning in Afghanistan' is NOT an option

The roots of the ‘current Afghan tragedy’ are in Washington where Bush administration decided to allow Musharraf to spirit away by airlift hundreds, if not thousands, of Taliban operatives cornered by the advancing Northern Alliance in Kunduz in November, 2001. Pakistan relocated those Taliban cadres including Mullah Mohammed Omar in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan (now relocated to Karachi by Pakistani ISI to protect them from possible US drone attacks) and Haqqani network (HQN) in North Waziristan from where Mullah Omar’s QST and Haqqani’s HQN have been planning raids in Afghanistan ever since.

To add insult to the injury, Bush decided to go after Saddam’s imaginary WMDs with full US military force, thereby denying Afghanistan with necessary US troops to secure it safely.

Duplicitous Pakistan has poor U. S. over the barrel. US can NOT use its aid leverage to force Pakistan to stop supporting terrorist groups who kill US/NATO troops in Afghanistan day in and day out because US needs Pakistan’s help in ferrying supplies to those very US/NATO troops.

As Afghan President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/2010 after WikiLeaks leaks, “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“

Even Afghanistan’s national security advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta has asked a similar question in a Washington Post article on 8/23/2010: “While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor (Pakistan) continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified? Despite facing a growing domestic terror threat, Pakistan “continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure “requires confronting the state of Pakistan that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool”.

But Obama administration has already started back channel negotiations with Afghan Taliban leadership safely ensconced in Pakistan. Pakistan will assure the success of such talks to hasten US departure similar to North Vietnam’s peace talks with Henry Kissinger in 1973. That façade of peace will crumble once US leaves and Pakistan will bring back Taliban rule just as Communists took over in Vietnam.

US has decided to sacrifice Afghanistan at the altar called Pakistan.

 

TINNAS

2:35 AM ET

April 12, 2011

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ITONLYSTANDSTOREASON

9:34 PM ET

April 4, 2011

What's wrong with me ...

when I support about 90% of the arguments of a Shadow Government opinion?

I respect Joe Biden on domestic policy, and he's at least serious enough about foreign policy that he deserves a hearing. However our acts have helped tear down Afghanistan and we have a moral obligation to not abandon them again as well as pragmatic reasons to be concerned.

My biggest fears center around whether we have a viable model for nation building. For 60 years we have tried to export Western know-how and institutions under the heading of development. Hundreds of volumes have been written on the failures of such programs.

One of the classic failures has been thinking we could build government capacity by routing development projects through government ministries and agencies. The result is usually a rentier government, based not on rents on the export of local resources, but on collecting rents on the distribution of foreign capital. Not based on the wealth and well-being of communities, they have skewed incentives and do little to foster development.

We've already done a lot of damage with our speed-at-any-cost approach in Afghanistan, building up networks already able to dominate rural communities. Fortunately there are also village-based efforts which offer some balance. Empowered communities are the real source of nation-building, not outside efforts.

 

Shadow Government is a blog about U.S. foreign policy under the Obama administration, written by experienced policy makers from the loyal opposition and curated by Peter D. Feaver and William Inboden.

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