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Not so long ago, everybody, it seemed, believed in the Afghan war. Put in 20th-century terms, Afghanistan was World War II (the Good War) while Iraq was Vietnam (the quagmire). During the campaign, there was hawkish talk of dispatching more troops to fight in the country in which bin Laden had plotted the attacks of September 11, and the arrival of Gen. David Petraeus, fresh from the success of the surge in Iraq, appeared to signal a new day in the war that began in that terrible autumn more than seven years ago.
The dark and stubborn reality, though, is that there is no clear way ahead for us in Afghanistan. As John Barry and Evan Thomas write in this week's cover, the parallels with our tragic struggle in Southeast Asia are compelling—and depressing. To evoke the Vietnam analogy is not to be dovish or defeatist; it is, rather, to recognize that we are engaged in a war for noble ends that is not going well, and which may never go well given the circumstances. Like his predecessors four and five decades ago, President Obama faces two kinds of choices: bad and worse. (But one good choice, in my view, is the appointment of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan; the architect of Dayton, he has done the impossible before, and may again.)
Even defining our objectives is complicated. We can surely agree that the central mission is, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, "to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and its allies." If victory in Afghanistan is defined as the prevention of terror attacks elsewhere—and that is a good definition—how do we achieve it? The common-sensical answer is that we fight the insurgents in the short and middle term while building a government in Kabul that will keep the Taliban from regaining power. (Any student of Vietnam will sense a parallel or two.) The problems with this scenario are mind-numbing in their number and complexity. Military victories—understood as the death of one's enemies—come at a high and ever-proliferating cost. In Afghanistan, it is difficult for Americans to kill members of the Taliban without creating new enemies among tribesmen in and around the field of fire, even when the tribesmen have no interest in jihad. The Karzai government, meanwhile, is corrupt, and Afghanistan has never been given to centralized rule. Extremists have safe havens in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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As Fareed Zakaria argues, calibrations in our counterinsurgency strategy are crucial, as is strengthening the Kabul government. The most significant course correction, Fareed believes, lies in distinguishing between the Taliban and Al Qaeda insofar as possible. Inevitably, there is some overlap, but a successful counterinsurgency requires that enough people buy into the idea that the military force—in this case the Americans—is a good thing for them. There is, Fareed says, "a powerful military advantage to moving in this direction. Al Qaeda is a stateless organization that controls no territory of its own. It can survive and thrive only with a host community. Our objective should be to cut off Al Qaeda, as far as possible, from its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan … Even the most hard-line Taliban—the so-called Quetta Shura led by Mullah Omar—have at various points made overtures to the Afghan government, always asking that they be distinguished from Al Qaeda."
For a glimpse of the wider tangle of issues facing the new president, I commend Lally Weymouth's interview with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who stalked off a stage at Davos after debating Gaza with Shimon Peres. When Lally asked whether he expected Obama to "play a more even-handed role" between the Palestinians and the Israelis, Erdogan replied: "There is no justice right now. We expect justice from now on." So many expectations, so much to do.
© 2009
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