Defending Obama's Afghan Gambit

While the ambitious nation-building mission Obama has been trying to complete does not look promising, the West has no choice but to stay the course.

Did Obama start a new war in Afghanistan? That is the premise of Ann Coulter's reasoning.  If she does believe that, it would help explain why she supported the 2001 intervention while disagreeing with the 2010 surge.  Couter writes :

Yes, Bush invaded Afghanistan soon after 9/11. Within the first few months we had toppled the Taliban, killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaida fighters and arranged for democratic elections, resulting in an American-friendly government.

Then Bush declared success and turned his attention to Iraq, leaving minimal troops behind in Afghanistan to prevent Osama bin Laden from regrouping, swat down al-Qaida fighters and gather intelligence.

At the time, Ann Coulter was in favor of invading countries like Afghanistan and converting their inhabitants to Christianity (if my memory's good). That sounds quite ambitions too.

The problem is, of course, that the Taliban were regrouping (as they never stopped doing), that Bin Laden and Mullah Omar had not been captured, that Pakistan was not reliable and that the Afghan government (while possibly friendly) was fragile and not particularly reliable either. Under Coulter’s theory, however, anything short of the reestablishment of al-Qaida bases could be tolerated: Afghanistan is just a remote country we don't really have to care about.

But, if we don't want al-Qaida to return to their pre-9/11 position, they have to be stopped at one point or another (especially if the situation in Kabul worsens). When we hesitate to prevent something from happening, we usually hope that we'll be able to "contain" it. Just as we will contain a nuclear Iran, we plan to contain an al-Qaida-infested Afghanistan.

There is just one problem here: if we could contain al-Qaida in Afghanistan, we would already have done it before 2001.  But we didn't. That is because Bin Laden's bases were far away, commando operations were extremely risky, and cruise missiles had to fly over Pakistan (which made it necessary to alert the Pakistanis to the strike lest they mistakenly assume an attack from India). To hit al-Qaida effectively, the U.S. military had to invade Afghanistan or have the Northern Alliance do the job. So it sounds a bit surprising to hear people talk about "counter-terrorism" strategies when those used before 9/11 have been quite ineffective -- hence 9/11.

Containing al-Qaida from bases more or less scattered around Afghanistan looks promising at first, but it is impossible to target al-Qaida assets without proper intelligence, which can only be obtained through permanent and reasonably friendly contacts with the population. Short of establishing some permanent presence in the villages and understanding what is going on there, there is not much point in being in Afghanistan at all.

However, it is absolutely true that the current war in Afghanistan is problematic on several accounts. Basically -- and this is just as true in France as it is in the U.S. – it’s very difficult for our leaders to explain (in few words) what we are doing there, or to convince the public that we are making progress (which is far from certain anyway). Defining progress is actually quite complicated, as well.

What is happening with Afghanistan has happened countless times in history. We started a limited war, but we failed to keep it limited. According to a popular anecdote, sometime in the 1950s, the Syrian government asked Nasser if he was willing to join in a limited war against Israel. Nasser replied that he was on board as long as Ben Gurion accepted the principle of a limited war too.

Limited wars are not an impossibility, but they are part of a conception of diplomacy and international relations that democracies rejected long ago. A limited war scenario in Afghanistan would have consisted of going in, breaking everything (there wasn't much to break), killing as many Taliban and al-Qaida "Arab" fighters as possible, getting out quickly and promising to return as often as necessary.

That sort of strategy has to be completely unilateral (otherwise you can't promise to come back whenever you need to), without UN Security Council approval, without involvement from UN agencies or humanitarian NGO's and with no speeches about reconstruction. In the case of Afghanistan in 2001, that probably meant handing Kabul to the Northern Alliance and letting them take control of the country as best they could, while we conducted operations against al-Qaida if needed. That would have been a mess, as the Northern Alliance was disorganized after Massud's murder and about half of Afghanistan was not at all prepared to accept a Northern government. But even that "plan" could not be implemented without at least the approval of Russia, which would have weakened its unilateral character.

Maybe such a strategy could have been efficient. Maybe not. But it is hard to see what else we could have done had we wanted a limited war. The problem with limited wars is that they involve a level of open cynicism that has been considered acceptable for most of human history, but not since democracy has become the dominant form of government in the West. It is possible that in 2001, the Bush administration could have used 9/11 to act in this fashion, but no one knows if that would have been such a good idea, and in any case, that is not what they did.

So whether the Bush administration was right or wrong to act this way, the ambitious nation-building mission that McChrystal has been trying to complete was started in 2001, not last year. The prospects are far from satisfying. At best, we will get a working Afghanistan (more or less), al-Qaeda free, but useless and continuing to require time and money.  This Afghanistan will continue to keep the U.S. military busy while other problems will appear. There isn't much to rejoice about.

But the West has to win. Losing this war would mean that our enemies will learn we can be defeated.  Second, our failure to hold Afghanistan would allow al-Qaida to reestablish their 2001 base.  That is what Ann Coulter is, in effect, proposing.