Securing Afghanistan

Will Afghanistan become Obama’s Vietnam? Put that way, the question begs another: Should NATO troops exit post-haste from a country that over the past two centuries has become an empire trap? Like the British and the Soviets, America knows the torments of a conflict without end in sight, steadily deadlier, and increasingly criticized by international public opinion as more and more civilians and soldiers fall. What are the boys – and their French, English, German and Turkish allies – doing in this country of war and stones where nothing grows but death and poppies?

Let’s get it straight right away: abandoning Afghanistan today would be a mistake. How could we abdicate to the Taliban, who, through their words and deeds incompatible with human dignity, suppress the slightest freedoms? If the Afghanis are tired of foreign militaries, the return of these religious insurgents would be even more unbearable. The Taliban are all Pashtuns, the ethnic majority that controls the south, but what of the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, the Hazara, who, among the poorest on the planet, aspire foremost for peace?

It would take a lot of cynicism to find the sufferings inflicted by the Taliban on the people – on women in particular – preferable. The allies didn’t contribute to the elimination of that brutal and repressive regime in 2001 only to give it free reign eight years later, with the added risk of letting al-Qaida prosper unconstrained on Afghan soil like it did before September 11th.

For all that, the American methods won’t be able to stay static, as President Obama has reinforced the GI contingent with 21,000 troops, bringing the total to some 68,000 soldiers. General Stanley McChrystal, the military commander for Afghanistan, is convinced of as much, and recommends a change of strategy.

“If luck is with you, why rush? If luck is not with you, why rush?” goes an Afghan proverb. But the wisdom has its limits. It’s time to stop this blind war that kills civilians (2,000 last year) faster than enemies. Stop this war, armed to the teeth with aerial bombardments and columns of tanks, that is driving to despair a people who are, on top of it all, powerless victims of and spectators to the weaknesses of the economy, the administration, and justice – in a word, the State, abandoned to the corruptions and frauds of the Karzai clan.

How many innocents killed at weddings, how many schools destroyed, villages annihilated, pointless humiliations and scares? With, as the only result, the incomprehension and the hate from the poor people: in these long months, they haven’t seen the start of any help, of a foundation of reconstruction; meanwhile the traffic of poppies converted to heroin prospers and lawless war lords rise, absolved by the president in the name of a pseudo-“national reconciliation” hiding pathetic electoral calculations.

Stay, then. Not forever. Two or three years, say the least pessimistic. Stay, but change faces. Send Rambo home, with his mixture of violence and ignorance, and substitute regional experts, capable of winning “hearts and minds” – that’s the official language – concerned with protecting the inhabitants rather than firing into the crowd. Move from an all-out war on terror to a more targeted anti-insurgency, more discreet, if not secret. With a conviction: that its systematic occupation, with its blunders and horrors that creates Taliban fighters, is what radicalizes them, by mixing discontented local leaders with dangerous and suicidal ideologues. Madness, this situation where it’s war that creates the enemies, and not the reverse…

Under the aegis of generals David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. is preparing a new strategy, more humble and subtler: seek out contact, offer proof of respect, help residents with their needs in domains as varied as agronomy and agriculture, mechanics, engineering; try to win over the “moderate” members of the Taliban, more justly qualified as “reconcilable,” those who were pushed into the camp of the extremists by brutal force.

We need to secure Afghanistan, not terrorize it. Reassure, develop, construct projects. As for the enemies: divide them, undermine them; only eliminate them as a last resort.

It’s too early to say if this course will succeed. At least it seems better adapted to the situation. On the condition that the new soldiers don’t reinforce the Afghan’s perceptions of dealing with an army of occupation. How else to perceive the men who travel only in armored vehicles, when they’re not in helicopters? Each one knows that for a people, victory starts when the troops retreat.

But what of the errors committed by Westerners since the attacks of September 11, 2001, in particular by George W. Bush when he declared a war without mercy on terrorism? Should he have orchestrated a deafening crusade while the enemy was laying low in the shadows? Should he have declared war on countries and on populations while the effectiveness of discretion became clear? The evidence says no.

At the end of December 2001, with strong aerial support from the Americans, the Afghan Mujahidins overthrew the Taliban regime. Al-Qaida was no longer in Afghanistan, but withdrew to its rear bases in Pakistan. And yet NATO deployed troops in the whole country, while the danger had migrated towards other horizons. The opening of Guantanamo and American secret prisons (including in Kabul), the acts of torture, the incarceration of innocents: all this created a climate in Afghanistan hostile to foreign powers. And when, starting in 2003, President Bush carried his effort to Iraq, withdrawing troops from Afghanistan with the support of the international community, the Taliban forces had plenty of latitude to reconstitute themselves, feeding on the frustrations and the troubles of the population in order to recruit.

Paradox: it was under the American Bush and his Pakistani ally Musharraf (ambivalent in the fight) that the Taliban regained its vigor. From there came the necessity, still existing today, of a foreign presence to make up for the weakness of the Afghan military and police. The Americans, like their European allies, are banking on an “Afghanistanization” of the conflict. The process will be slow and difficult. They all hope that they’ll then be able, finally, to break camp, after having established some national armed forces. That they’ll have contributed to the emergence of a rule of law likely to restore order and security, province by province, road by road. That daily life will be, simply, livable.

It’s likely that President Karzai (the Westerners’ man, at least at the beginning) will be reelected. But he has so disappointed that he have to accept another mode of exercising power, one that facilitates the restoration of justice and of development, and that acknowledges the democratic advances wanted by the Afghan people.

The commanders know it: the more popular discontentment subsides, the more the moderates will renounce violence; and more the search for a dialogue, necessarily dangerous, with the radical Taliban will be useless. Is it possible? It’s certainly indispensable for a country and a populace that is dying away from thirty years of war.