Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam

The sensible approach—one might say the most realistic approach—is to continue with efforts to help the Afghans establish a stable state that rejects terrorism. The key problem we face is that the current government is neither effective nor seen as legitimate. Once hailed as Afghanistan's savior, President Hamid Karzai looks increasingly like a liability. His government is deeply corrupt and he has done very little to address the corruption. He appointed governors and district leaders (who are not elected in Afghanistan as they just were in Iraq) with an eye toward consolidating his own power rather than enfranchising the population. And now he is adopting an increasingly strident anti-American tone while turning ever more to Iran and Russia for support of all varieties to offset the waning of American backing.

What to do? Many, but by no means all, of the problems we now face in Afghanistan result from errors made by the Bush administration and NATO. President Bush consistently overpersonalized foreign policy, as is well known, focusing on his personal ties to key leaders. President Obama has an opportunity to reverse that policy by emphasizing that the United States does not back individuals in other states' political contests, but instead supports legitimate democratic processes and their outcomes.

A recently returned U.S. commander offered an anecdote that explains the overall challenge well. Having helped to clear a village of the enemy, he earned the trust of the village elders in large part by interacting productively with them and respecting their authority and traditions. When the elders came to a problem that they could not readily solve, they brought it to him and asked him to offer a solution, which they swore they would all accept. He demurred, realizing that even with their promise to accept his decision, it would still be his decision and not theirs. The elders withdrew to consider the matter, and the process iterated several times. When the American commander had finally convinced the elders that he really would not resolve the problem for them but that he would support a solution they came up with, they found a solution themselves.

This is a key element of counterinsurgency in a nutshell. American forces must play the necessary role in providing security. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq or anywhere else, the only thing that can legitimize the presence of foreign military forces is that they deliver safety to the people (something, it should be noted, that the Soviets and the imperial British before them never did or tried to do). But the United States and its allies do not impose their own solutions on local problems except in the most dire circumstances where all indigenous authority has collapsed. The results of forcing local leaders to step up and resolve their own issues often generate solutions that Americans find bemusing—we would never do things that way. But one of the most important lessons we learned the hard way in Iraq is that helping the Iraqis figure out how to find Iraqi solutions to Iraq's problems was both a key to success and something in which Americans could play an essential role as moderators, brokers, peacekeepers and a source of pressure to compromise. The same is true in Afghanistan.

Success will not be quick or easy. The enemy is not that strong; hyperventilating reports that the "Taliban" controls some huge percentage of the country completely misrepresent the reality. Afghan public support for the Taliban's policies, or for a return of the Taliban to power, remains very low. Nor is there one single "Taliban"—the term has been abused so much that it now encompasses many disparate groups with tenuous relationships and sometimes conflicting aims. But getting at the enemy and, more important, protecting the population from the enemy is in many respects harder in Afghanistan than it was in Iraq because of the terrain. Most of Iraq's threatened population was concentrated in and around a handful of cities and towns along three river valleys interwoven with relatively dense and high-quality road and highway systems. A significant portion of Afghanistan's population is also concentrated in and around a relatively small number of cities, but the enemy does not reside in the cities, roads are extremely poor and in some areas nonexistent, and the poverty of the country is such that enemy attacks on key lines of communication can lead rapidly to starvation. Protecting the population that is now harboring insurgents and terrorists—either willingly or out of fear—requires projecting both force and civilian assistance up valleys via tracks that are often not even Humvee-accessible and working village by village at altitudes sometimes above 10,000 feet.

The Afghan theater is also much sparser than Iraq in every sense. Saddam Hussein's vast armies littered the landscape with military bases and infrastructure that U.S. forces could easily fall in on. Protecting an urban population allowed U.S. troops to move straight into abandoned houses and other buildings to live with the people. Afghanistan offers neither kind of basing. If we want to put more troops in Afghanistan and get them out among the population, we will have to build camps and bases for them at every level. There is simply a limit to how fast the Afghan theater can usefully absorb more American troops at this stage.

Success will also require fixing structural problems within the U.S. and NATO headquarters. The Afghan mission was turned over to NATO in 2006 primarily for the purpose of giving NATO a purpose in the post–Cold War world. The assumption was that the task was primarily one of nation-building and peacekeeping, not counterinsurgency. As a result, the supreme headquarters in Afghanistan, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), now commanded by Gen. David McKiernan, is not built to plan and conduct theaterwide counterinsurgency operations. Nor is there a three-star headquarters in Afghanistan similar to the Multinational Corps-Iraq, which then–Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno used to develop the plans in 2007 that implemented the counterinsurgency concepts of Gen. David Petraeus. These deficiencies will have to be rectified before we can reasonably hope to have a detailed and coherent military plan.