Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam

Just three months ago, Afghanistan was the "good" war. It was, according to all the conventional wisdom, the "real" central front in the war on terror, the war we had to win, the place to fight Al Qaeda, and the war we should have been focusing on all along. Nothing much has changed in Afghanistan since Barack Obama won the election, but conventional wisdom is swinging fast to the opposite viewpoint. Opinion makers on the left and the right are discovering that Afghanistan is hard to fix, that Al Qaeda is really in Pakistan, and that the "good war" might not be so good after all.

One thing that has not changed, apparently, is Obama's determination to succeed in Afghanistan. He's right to hold firm. Afghanistan is hard, and always was, but we can still succeed. It has not been the sanctuary for Al Qaeda since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, but it is still important. Afghanistan may have lost its luster as a stick with which to beat the Bush administration for invading Iraq, but it has not lost its importance to American national security. Obama is right to try to win, and he deserves the full support of the nation.

But once again the policy debate seems to be focusing on the philosophical problem of defining success rather than the practical problem of actually succeeding. It is essential, of course, to consider what American national security really requires in Afghanistan before committing to some arbitrary set of goals. And the challenges of making any real progress in Afghanistan are daunting, especially to a country exhausted not so much by the war in Iraq as by the bitter and emotionally draining debate about that war. The current economic crisis is naturally the emergency uppermost on the minds of Americans and their leaders, and "fixing" Afghanistan has come to seem like a very unpleasant distraction. The chorus of voices insisting that we redefine our aims in Afghanistan to something more readily attainable is therefore growing loud. Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, racked by civil war and foreign invasions for 30 years, riven with ethnic seams and ancient tribal enmities, and utterly unsuited to the growth of modern liberal democracy, so it is said. Our real interests in Afghanistan consist of preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens there, and we can do that, according to many, by focusing narrowly on killing terrorists rather than trying to build an Afghan state.

As in Iraq since 2006, the search is on for a middle-way strategy in Afghanistan that will achieve our minimal national-security requirements without forcing us to defeat a determined set of enemies and create a modern state. Unfortunately, as in Iraq, there is no such strategy. Attempts to use targeted attacks on key individuals to destroy a well-established terrorist network over the past decade have failed repeatedly. Limited and discriminate attacks in Afghanistan and Africa in the 1990s failed to weaken Al Qaeda seriously. "Small footprint" operations in the Horn of Africa failed to prevent Islamist terrorists from seizing most of Somalia in 2006, from making millions of dollars out of maritime piracy, or from re-emerging recently as a renewed threat to the region. Pinpoint attacks backing local armed forces in Afghanistan in 2001 did not destroy Al Qaeda—they merely disrupted the group and forced it to flee to Pakistan, where it reformed. Ongoing targeted strikes in Pakistan continue to disrupt the network, but show no signs and offer no promise of destroying it. Even when we have had large numbers of troops in a country—as in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002—targeted strikes have killed hundreds of key terrorist leaders, but could not on their own destroy enemy networks. In both countries, in fact, terrorist activities and reach grew in spite of the success of targeted attacks when such attacks were the focus of our efforts. There is simply no recent historical evidence to support the assertion that small-footprint targeted attacks against key nodes of a terrorist network will by themselves destroy that network or even seriously degrade it over time.

There is considerable evidence, however, that effective counterinsurgency operations can render large areas extremely inhospitable to terrorist networks, destroying some and forcing others to leave. That was the result of the surge strategy implemented in Iraq in 2007 and 2008. Targeted attacks against key terrorist leaders continued throughout the surge and played an extremely important role in its success. But we were able to inflict enormous damage on Al Qaeda in Iraq and numerous other insurgent and terrorist groups by complementing this skillful counterterrorism method with concerted efforts to provide security to the population, improve the provision of services and work toward political resolutions of disputes that had been generating support for, or at least tolerance of, the terrorists' presence. In the areas of Afghanistan where similar approaches have been used, the results have been comparable.

The task of applying counterinsurgency lessons learned in Iraq and elsewhere to Afghanistan is not straightforward. Afghanistan, particularly the Pashtun areas where the insurgency is concentrated, has its own very distinctive culture and even way of fighting. Whereas Iraqis accept the movement of fighters through cities and villages, and even fighting within settled areas, as a regrettable but normal part of warfare, many Afghans do not. From the days of the Soviet invasion, Afghan armed conflicts have been primarily rural. The Soviets occupied all of Afghanistan's major cities rapidly, and the enemy never really contested them. The mujahedin instead concentrated on attacking the roads connecting key population centers, isolated Soviet outposts and Soviet convoys. The Taliban uses similar methods against us today. "Living among the people" and "protecting the population," key elements of our success in Iraq and key tenets of successful counterinsurgency anywhere, must be appropriately adapted to the cultural environment of Afghanistan. Our skillful battalion and brigade commanders have developed an understanding of how to do this in some areas. What we must do now is build a flexible and comprehensive approach suitably tailored to the variations among Afghanistan's various regions.

Counterinsurgency also requires helping to establish adequate governmental structures that are seen as legitimate by the overwhelming majority of the population. So-called realists argue that the United States should not attempt to "impose" a "Jeffersonian democracy" on so benighted a land as Afghanistan (they said the same of Iraq as well). The reality is that no one is proposing to impose democracy on Afghans—Afghans want representative government. There is no significant movement within Afghanistan (other than by the Taliban and other extremist groups that can be collectively labeled "the enemy") to adopt any system other than representative government. And no one imagines that Afghan democracy will look like American democracy or even like Italian or Israeli democracy. Recognition of the uniqueness of democracy in Iraq led to the neologism "Iraqracy," which perfectly encapsulates Iraqi politics today. Afghanistan's name does not lend itself to the same sort of literary legerdemain, but the idea is the same. A multiethnic, multisectarian state can be stable only if it is ruled by a strongman willing and able to use force and brutality to suppress minorities or if it has a representative government. Considering that the Soviets killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and generated more than 5 million refugees with a deliberate campaign aimed at dehousing large sections of the population but still lost, it is difficult to imagine an Afghan strongman succeeding in such a fashion. Even the brutal but indigenous Taliban were able only to create a weak state that was quickly toppled by a handful of CIA agents with bags of cash supported by American aviation. The options before us are therefore stark: we can proceed with efforts to build a stable, multiethnic, representative state; we can simply leave and hope that Afghanistan's internal power struggles play out differently from the way they have for the past 20 years; or we can pull back to a small-footprint posture focused on whacking bad guys, knowing that we won't be able to destroy their networks but that we will have to keep hitting them forever.