Tough call on Afghanistan

Offering his opinion on what constitutes pornography, in a case up for a ruling in the Supreme Court in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart said simply: "I know it when I see it". Like pornography, the war in Afghanistan, which entered its ninth year last Wednesday, lacks clearly defined parameters. Is it a "counter-insurgency war", a nation-building mission, a military campaign to decimate the Taliban and uproot Al Qaida? And how do you measure the margin of victory, when all is good and done, in such a conflict?

In the next few weeks, US President Barack Obama, along with his team of foreign policy and national security advisers, will make a decision that could define, or ultimately derail, his presidency. He is faced with two options: to escalate the war by sending an additional 40,000 US soldiers to reinforce the 68,000 already there, as General Stanley McCrystal, the man Obama hired to to turn the war around, recommended in a report last month, or to craft an alternative strategy altogether.

McCrystal is now warning that a strategy narrower than the one he is advocating would be "ineffective", rendering the Afghan campaign a lost cause. In other words, he is calling for a strategy that says escalate or be damned, not unlike the one that General William Westmoreland urged on Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam war, with disastrous results for his presidency. "I will not seek nor will I accept my party's nomination for another term as your president", a beaten-down Johnson was reduced to telling the nation in March of 1968.

The decision that Obama must make soon will not be easy. A military victory is a tall order. And nation-building in a country like Afghanistan, where 60 per cent of civil servants never graduated high-school, and where the culture of corruption is pervasive, will take decades. And who, at any rate, said that occupying armies are qualified to "build" nations (unless we're talking about, say, countries like Germany and Japan, after the Second World War, where social, political and economic infrastructure was already in place)? And to achieve that goal via counter-insurgency measures is even more problematic.

Against opting for escalation

In an open letter to President Obama, published in the current issue of the liberal Nation magazine, enjoining the president against opting for escalation, William Polk, author of Violent Politics, a study of a dozen insurgencies around the world, beginning with the American revolution, wrote: "When I was in government, we were told we could achieve victory in Vietnam by the same combination of force and counter-insurgency recommended by your advisers in Afghanistan. But as the editors of the Pentagon Papers concluded, the ‘attempt to translate the newly articulated theory of counter-insurgency into operational reality... [through] a mixture of military, social, psychological, and economic measures... all failed dismally'.

The long and short of it is that the US has no business being in Afghanistan — except to defeat Al Qaida. Americans' quarrel is not with the Taliban. This insurgent group may be reactionary, brutal and medieval in its world view, but its adherents are natives of Afghanistan, often illiterate farmers from remote villages in the countryside, but they have no beef with the US so long as the US does not occupy their country, rule over them, or foist an unpopular and corrupt government on them. Al Qaida, on the other hand, are a different order of business. They are theoreticians and ideologues — with twisted theories and ideologies, to be sure — often with university degrees, who hail from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and elsewhere, and possessed of a larger, transnational agenda. War against Afghans, even with the substantial surge in troops that Gen McCrystal demands, promises to be long and violent, costly in life and treasure to those launching it.

Foreign invaders discovered that for themselves, beginning in antiquity with Alexander the Great's invasion of the "Land of the Bones" more than 2,300 years ago.

In more recent history, the British, at their peak of power, tried repeatedly, between 1842 and 1919, to subdue the country, but finally failed, as did, in the 1980s the Russians, from whom the Afghan Mujahideen exacted a heavy price before it was all over.

The American public's weariness over the war is evident in polls. And the president appears not only to be wavering over whether to yield to his military commanders' request for more troops, but considering a shift in America's strategy. He gave a hint of that shift — to an exclusive focus on confronting Al Qaida, now ensconced in Pakistan's ungovernable and lawless areas of Waziristan — in a speech at the National Counterterrorism Centre in McLean, Virginia, last Tuesday.

Indeed, why pick a fight with the Afghan people, choose their leaders, and impose alien concepts of "nation-building" on them? As things stand today, few in that faraway, enigmatic land welcome the American presence in their midst. "Many Afghans regard us as foreign, anti-Muslim invaders", wrote Polk in that open letter to Obama. "And they see that the government we are backing is corrupt and rapacious." Now that's a tough call for nation-builders, even ones with the seemingly unlimited resources of a country like the United States.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.