AMERICA IS LEAVING AFGHANISTAN. Plans may call for a minimal, non-combat military presence for another year or two beyond 2014, but we should not be fooled. The trajectory of American policy in South-Central Asia has been clear since President Obama’s West Point speech of December 1, 2009. However deliberately, we are headed inexorably for the exit.
Core American interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan have been, and remain, simple: to drive al-Qa’ida from both countries and to end the terrorist safehaven. The first goal has proved largely achievable. The second has not.
Immediately after 9/11, in decisions in which I played some role, we sensibly limited the means we would employ in pursuit of our goals to those that would and could be achieved by Afghans, knowing that only those could be sustained. Our current abandonment of Afghanistan is the product of a subsequent colossal overreach, from 2005 onward, which ultimately saw the deployment of 100,000 American troops, supplemented by another 40,000 from NATO and allied nations, and the expenditure, at our peak, of some $100 billion per year.
In the process, we overwhelmed a primitive country, with a largely illiterate population, a tiny agrarian economy, a tribal social structure, and nascent national institutions. We triggered massive corruption through our profligacy; convinced a substantial number of Afghans that we were, in fact, occupiers; and facilitated the resurgence of the Taliban. For all the billions spent and lives lost, there is little to show, and most of that will not long survive our departure. If there is a principal reason for that catastrophic lapse in collective judgment, it is that we decided, in typically American fashion, that failure was not an option. If Afghans were transparently unable to make of their country what we believed it needed to be in order to achieve our notion of victory, then by God we would do it for them.
In fact, failure is always an option. That was true in Vietnam; we are finding it true of Afghanistan today.
The American reaction to the failure of our imperial overreach in Afghanistan is unfortunate. Rather than adapt our timeline and our notions of an achievable victory to reality, we are simply going home. Having failed by trying to do too much, we are set to compound our failures by doing too little.
Prediction, they say, is difficult—particularly concerning the future. But there are some things we can foresee with confidence. Afghanistan has been in the grip of civil war almost continually since the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. The three years following the defeat of the Taliban was but a respite, and the civil war will likely grow more acute following the departure of American and NATO combat troops. The religio-ethnic divide between the Taliban and the former Northern Alliance, combined with a lack of governance and the ruthlessness of the Taliban’s domestic terror tactics, ensure that large parts of the country, particularly rural areas in the south and east, will be subject to Taliban rule.
To remain viable and capable of resisting the Taliban, the Kabul regime will remain dependent upon U.S. and other foreign support, probably to the tune of several billions per year. Financial support will mean more to its survival than foreign troops. The fall of the Najibullah regime in 1992 was the result not of the Soviet military withdrawal three years before, but of the cutoff of Soviet aid. The few non-combat American troops set to remain in Afghanistan for a year or two will be useful primarily as hostages. As long as they remain, some level of American financial support will continue. But it is crystal-clear from past history that there will be no substantial foreign assistance to Afghanistan in the absence of foreign troops. Without the vital need to protect their own forces, it is most unlikely that either the United States or other Western governments will follow through on their pledges of assistance. What happens to the Kabul regime thereafter is anyone’s guess, but the prognosis is not good.
Some would argue that none of this matters. Even if the Taliban were to return to power, they say, surely the clerics would have learned a lesson from the misfortunes that befell them post-9/11. They point to the assurances long given by the Taliban leadership, that theirs is a national movement, nothing more, and that they will not allow Afghanistan to be used as a platform from which to attack other countries.
We should not be assuaged. True, the Afghan Taliban is not an organization devoted to global jihad. The Taliban did not encourage and certainly did not participate in the terrorism sponsored by al-Qa’ida. But they will not turn their backs on, still less cooperate with infidels against, those whom they consider devoted and pious Muslims resisting the oppression of America and the regional governments it supports. Their thinking tends to be binary: Is a particular course required by Islam, or not? There is no reason to believe that those we regard as international terrorists will be turned away if they seek the future support of the Taliban.
In fact, the future threat posed by an Afghan safehaven has increased. Pakistan is beset by a religiously motivated insurgency. That insurgency will not go away, even after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pakistani militants have already shown a penchant for maintaining safehavens in Afghanistan and launching attacks toward the east. Given their religious sympathies and close, longstanding affiliation with Pakistani religious extremists, not to mention their own latent antipathies toward Islamabad, it is simply not credible that the Afghan Taliban would refuse to permit the Pakistani Taliban to operate from areas under their control.
It is one of the great ironies of the current situation that although the insurgency in Pakistan is largely an unintended consequence of the American occupation of Afghanistan, and despite Pakistan’s conviction that the government in Kabul is antagonistic toward it, the survival of an anti-Taliban regime in Afghanistan is in Islamabad’s critical national interest. And given Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities, the survival of moderate, secular governance there is in our interest. If the Taliban were to prevail in Afghanistan and establish unfettered control, the results for Pakistan would be serious, if not disastrous. Despite appearances to the contrary, the Pakistani state is not on the verge of collapse. But the future undoubtedly holds surprises for us all, and in Pakistan those surprises are unlikely to be pleasant.
A wise American policy would see continued, open-ended U.S. engagement in the region. A small but effective American force designed to train and equip a sustainably small Afghan army would be supplemented by a limited number of specialized CIA officers and Special Forces troops whose job would be to identify, train, and organize Afghan tribals in areas beyond the effective reach of Kabul who have the desire, the ability, and the indigenous leadership to resist Taliban domination. In effect, the United States would aid counterinsurgency in areas within the ambit of Kabul and promote insurgency in those areas outside it. The American presence also would provide the platform from which to strike groups of international terrorists as and when they appear on either side of the Durand Line.
A limited American engagement could not produce the sort of victory Americans are comfortable with. Its near-term results would be most unsatisfying. It would be designed to ensure that potential terrorist safehavens, which might otherwise be uncontested, would at least be contested. Americans don’t like playing for a tie. But in time, politics on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border would find its own level. The Taliban, denied the possibility of ultimate victory, would eventually find its place in Pushtun society, not as a conventional power-sharing party among parties—its absolutist leaders are not capable of or interested in such a role—but as a regulatory influence enforcing fundamentalist religious norms on the local level.
Open-ended American engagement in South-Central Asia would be well within the capabilities of a global power. But there is little point in perseverating on what will not and cannot be. The only sort of victory achievable even for a superpower in Afghanistan would require a degree of wisdom and steadfastness not seen in the United States since the end of the Cold War, and one of which the current generation of American leaders seems manifestly incapable.
It remains to be seen whether and when the United States will again be drawn into South-Central Asia. Notwithstanding our failure of recent years to meet the challenges which history has thrust upon us, we remain a global power, with global responsibilities. The forces of global jihad which Osama bin Laden did so much to inspire are stronger than ever. Now, and perhaps for some time to come, their efforts will be concentrated in the Middle East, where opportunities to advance their millennial goals abound. But in the long-term struggle for the soul and future of Islam, the battlefield will inevitably shift. The fertile ground of Islamic extremism in the Asian subcontinent may beckon them yet again. We may think we are finished with Afghanistan. But Afghanistan may not be finished with us.