Questioning the "Good War"

A U.S. Army soldier watches the sunrise near Zabul, Afghanistan. (Photo: Sgt. Adam Mancini/U.S. Defense Department)

Peter Bergen has an optimistic take on Afghanistan -- what he calls "the good war" -- in this month's Washington Monthly. Bergen's thesis is that most critics of Obama's Afghan policy don't understand Afghanistan -- that they throw out "facile comparisons" to Vietnam and Iraq.

To illustrate this, Bergen mostly cites statistics, none of which are terribly convincing.

Bergen points out, for example, that two million Afghan children are in school. Not terribly impressive in a country of 33 million people -- two-thirds of whom are under the age of 25.

Or mobile phone penetration, which Bergen notes has hit 16 percent in Afghanistan. That's notable, given that Afghanistan didn't have a mobile phone system under the Taliban. But it trails far behind its neighbors -- Pakistan, for example, with 50 percent penetration, or Iran with 61 percent.

I'm not trying to be glib about Afghanistan, which has suffered terrible brutality over the last few decades and has good reason to lag its neighbors. That's exactly the point, though: Bergen draws an optimistic conclusion from a few scattered indicators of economic development, but the fundamentals are grim. 53 percent of the Afghanistan population lives below the poverty line. At least 40 percent of Afghans are unemployed. The country has no meaningful industry; its chief export is opium. The Afghan road system is one of the worst in the world, and rail is nonexistent.

So while Afghanistan's mobile phone penetration rate is commendable, it's also a sideshow. The Obama administration has identified creating a viable economy in Afghanistan as one of its goals for the war -- but that outcome is decades away.

Bergen makes a slightly more compelling case about the Afghan security situation. He's right to observe, for example, that the Taliban numbers perhaps 20,000 men -- less than one-tenth the size of the mujahideen force that stymied the Soviets in the 1980s. And the NATO forces in Afghanistan are finally applying proper counterinsurgency techniques. As Bergen writes about the newly-arrived U.S. and British forces in southern Afghanistan:

These are not the kind of units that do peacekeeping; they will go in and clear areas of the Taliban and, most crucially, hold them. This will be a major improvement in a region where NATO forces have often had enough manpower to clear areas but not to hold them.

But the Afghan army isn't nearly ready to secure these areas; NATO troops will have to clear and hold, and then keep holding, perhaps for years. The Afghan army won't hit its recruiting goal -- 134,000 troops -- until 2011. And the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, admitted earlier this month that the army actually needs to be twice that size to properly secure Afghanistan.

If NATO trainers do succeed in building a 268,000-man Afghan army -- a four-to-five year process, at best -- then it creates another vexing problem: Who pays for the army? As Juan Cole noted earlier this month, it would require several billion dollars per year to maintain, a sum that dwarfs the annual budget of the Afghan government. Afghanistan's leaders would be forced to beg the international community for handouts.

This is the real problem with Obama's Afghan strategy: The war might still be "winnable," but if we define victory as creating a stable Afghan state with a democratic government and a functional economy, the war will not be won in two years, or four, or eight. It will take decades. The international community will need to pony up tens of billions of dollars; NATO troops will need to remain in Afghanistan indefinitely.

Is that politically feasible, with world governments facing mountains of debt and stagnant economies in their own countries? Unlikely.

Rory Stewart, a former British diplomat and a man deeply concerned about the Afghan people, offered a contrarian take in the London Review of Books. Stewart wants a withdrawal of most NATO forces -- drawing down to, say, 20,000 troops -- and a limited focus on counter-terrorism and development projects run by NGOs.

He says the administration's larger goals -- counter-insurgency and a government-run economic development program -- are simply unachievable.

The ingredients of successful counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Malaya -- control of the borders, large numbers of troops in relation to the population, strong support from the majority ethnic groups, a long-term commitment and a credible local government -- are lacking in Afghanistan.

[...] Afghanistan is starting from a very low base: 30 years of investment might allow its army, police, civil service and economy to approach the levels of Pakistan.

Bergen's essay represents the "Washington consensus" on Afghanistan: the war was bungled for the last eight years, but it can be won by applying counterinsurgency lessons from Iraq.

I think that's an overly optimistic assessment; Stewart's take is closer to reality. He isn't suggesting that the West give up on Afghanistan. But he is right to propose a more modest strategy -- one that doesn't try to create a strong, transparent, democratic government in a country that has never had one, nor demand decades of commitment from countries unlikely to give it.