So Long, Afghanistan Strategy

The West admits it can make no progress in Afghanistan without the help of the Taliban. With that admission, they’re preparing the folks back home for a troop withdrawal from the primitive nation.

A change is coming in the West’s Afghanistan policy. The Americans wish to clearly broaden their presence with the addition of another 17,000 troops. Other countries that, like Germany, have an Afghan presence as part of the ISAF force will also increase troop strength there.

At the same time, civilian components of the coordinated effort will be beefed up as a developmental enticement for those Afghan citizens willing to cooperate in reconstruction and, at the same time, as a military whip against violent extremists. Finally, U.S. President Obama announced that he wants to open a dialogue with peace-loving Taliban factions in an attempt to pacify the country with their help.

What’s been grandiloquently touted here as a change in strategy for Afghanistan that’s supposed to serve also as a model for NATO actually serves, quite simply, to prepare the public at home for something that has been quietly acknowledged for months: Afghanistan is a country that is best pacified by abandoning it.

A departure from the original war goals

If one recalls the start of America’s mission in Afghanistan, it had a relatively clear goal: the Taliban government gave safe haven to the al-Qaeda terrorist network where they planned their September 11th attacks, then refused to hand over Osama bin Laden and his accomplices. So the radical Islamic government that sought to preserve the political and social Middle Ages in Afghanistan had to be removed.

The NATO nations were in agreement with that goal and they supported their wounded comrade, the United States. They found an ally in the fragmented troops of the Northern Alliance, but the alliance was more interested in opposing the Taliban than in attacking al-Qaeda terrorists. The thought of replacing the government in Kabul with tribal warlords was also out of the question.

The mission to capture Osama bin Laden has not succeeded to date, despite the vast armada deployed by the United States to accomplish that. But along with the West’s de facto takeover of the third poorest nation on earth, a new dynamic was set in motion that produced new war goals all by itself, mainly the democratization and economic reconstruction of the country patterned after the West. What goals could NATO troops, politicians and developmental aid workers have had when they arrived on the scene to find no functioning government because it had been driven out by NATO’s advance?

Contradictory realities

The expectations for Afghan development therefore became oriented to western standards and it’s not possible to lower one’s aims when it comes to democracy, human rights or constitutional nations. The West couldn’t fathom the fact that tribal members would vote the way their leaders wanted them to. It was unfathomable to them that some communities opposed allowing girls to attend school and that punishment in accordance with Sharia law was unacceptable to them.

The West’s Afghanistan project quickly and dramatically butted heads with the realities on the ground: the Middle Ages met the Postmodern. A worse laboratory for nation building could hardly have been chosen. Precisely the presence of western troops and aid workers in the country was enough to fan the flames of military conflict in large portions of the country. That, in turn, encouraged corruption and stimulated an independent Afghan development as much as it hindered it.

When Obama now says he wants to talk to moderate Taliban figures, it at least sounds like a first step toward realism – not only because the United States is acknowledging that representatives of radical Islam belong to the overall picture in Afghanistan as surely as wooden wheels belong on an donkey cart, but it serves also to clarify things because these negotiations have been ongoing for a long time, albeit in secret.

Western politicians still have the problem of explaining to the voters why it’s necessary to cooperate with extremists if they want to see any progress in Afghanistan. That begs questions like what it is they expect to accomplish in a country where corruption, tribal fealty, regionalism, religion, and history all stand in the way of western-style development. To what end does the West spend billions of dollars and sacrifice the lives of its soldiers? Just for a few more human rights or for a little bit of democracy?

Such deliberations are difficult to fathom in the comfort of one’s own home when every western soldier, aid worker or diplomat on the scene faces decisions every day as to how much corruption he’s willing to tolerate, how much he’s willing to cooperate with undemocratic tyrants and how many human rights violations he’s willing to overlook.

The United States and Germany have undertaken a hesitant step onto the contradictory soil of Afghan reality by deciding to negotiate with the Taliban. Now, new debates will ensue over what they expect to accomplish there and at what price. After that’s all decided, one obvious course will still remain: withdrawal from Afghanistan.