The 10-year War

Ten years after the first bombs fell in Kabul – on the 7th of October 2001, the War in Afghanistan is not the news of the day in the US. President Barak Obama didn’t arrange any public events to pay honor to the longest military engagement of his country since the Vietnam War.

“In the months ahead, our patience will be one of our strengths,” said ten years ago the former American president George Bush. Even the most patient ones, though, have hardly thought that the coming months would turn into a decade. For this period of time, more than 2 million soldiers have been deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Almost 4,500 found their death in Iraq, about 1,700 – in Afghanistan. The injured have mounted up to tens of thousands.

Was it worth it?

A recent CBS News Public Opinion study shows that almost 6 out of 10 Americans think that the presence of international forces in Afghanistan is unnecessary. Only two years ago, the majority of the American people supported the lengthy mission. Today, 7 out of 10 agree that the war has continued longer than they expected. One out of three veterans who took part in one of the military conflicts after 9/11 believes that the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t worth it.

The withdrawal of the majority of the American troops is planned for 2014. The 350,000 personnel of the Afghani army and the Afghani police are supposed to take over and to keep the country under control. They will have to keep their grip on the big cities, the Northern part of Afghanistan and as much as possible of the rural South and to withstand the attacks of 25,000 – 30,000 Talibans. About 30,000 American troops will also stay in the country, primarily in order to provide training to the local forces. At first, that looks like a reasonable plan to map, but a more thorough approach reveals a different reality.

Depressing Reality

“If we want to leave behind, when we withdraw, something that doesn’t collapse shortly after we go, then Afghanistan is going to have to be different politically than it is now,” says Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow for defense policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. “A general rule, the longer outsiders spend in Afghanistan the more depressed they become about the place,” adds to that The Economist’s correspondent in Afghanistan. In his report on the 10-year war, he states the grim facts of the real situation on the ground: the non-government organizations complain about not being able to get work done in a country harboring an ever increasing number of Talibans who are going stronger year after year; foreign workers are in danger even when walking on the street; human rights organizations’ representatives often go through the shock of discovering that prisoners are put to cruel torture in government prisons or through the horror of watching a video showing Taliban troops using stones to beat up someone to death.

Besides, Western diplomats in Afghanistan face the challenge of working with Hamid Karzai who won the elections in 2009 with the help of millions of fraudulent ballots. Actually, all four elections hold after 2001 have been accompanied by low electorate participation and persistent fraud.

The international forces, which may have been a lot more enthusiastic in the beginning, are now discouraged. The number of casualties increases every summer – the “official” war season in Afghanistan since the passages to Pakistan are impassable at winter time. 2011 is actually the only year that shows a reduction of the number of casualties, but night missions, which used to be very successful in terms of eliminating Talibans, turned out poor results and brought numerous civilian losses.

The population in the Southern part of the country is shrinking while the one to the East is growing, along with a booming agriculture that pushed NATO to focus its efforts in this direction. Despite of the numerous attempts to destroy the vast poppy fields, the lucrative plant is still the main source of income for the majority of the locals. The failure to push agricultural development towards other forms of production was not hard to predict, but it is also quite dangerous since it threatens the very basis of what the so called Afghani state is built on.

Who will stay?

As far as it comes to those 350,000 Afghani troops, supposed to withstand the numerous threats, the situation is troubling. A lot of effort has been directed towards the Afghani army and the Afghani police. The majority of them, though, have turned to be made of beginners who lack military experience and hardly know what to do with a weapon. In a recently published Time magazine article, they were depicted as a group of poor, illiterate, opium smokers who sign up for volunteers out of lack of other alternatives.

Since it has become clear that the Taliban element can not be completely eliminated, the hope is now on negotiating with their units. Over the course of the years, the American understanding that the only good Taliban is the one in jail has changed significantly. Today, persuading rebels to give up on their weapons and accept money and work in exchange has become an important part of the military strategy in the region. For now, though, even this strategy hasn’t brought much result.

“There’s no objective to try to turn Afghanistan into Switzerland in 10 years or less,” says CIA’s director David Petraeus. What Americans should pray for after the withdrawal, though, is to not see Afghanistan turning into a second Somalia.