In this chapter we will look at how each element of the Powell Doctrine influenced or failed to influence the planning and execution of the US intervention in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan has been in a state of continuous warfare since the Soviet Union intervened to prop up a client regime in 1979. As a former British Ambassador to Moscow Rodric Braithwaite put it:
Despite the numerous Soviet advisers attached to Afghan military and civilian organisations, despite all the economic, military, and political assistance they had given, the Soviet government in Moscow and its representatives in Kabul had been powerless to influence events in Kabul, and had been left looking impotent.1
As we shall see later on in this chapter, Braithwaite’s description of the problems facing the Soviets would in some respects be eerily familiar to the problems faced by the United States and its allies 20 years later.
The Carter Administration immediately began to provide funds to arm resistance fighters who had taken up arms against the Soviet occupation. These resistance fighters were mobilized in a variety of different ways, many of them had specific grievances against the occupying power, for example they could have lost relatives during military operations, they could have had their livelihood taken away from them. Secondly fighters could be mobilized along what could be called religious or ideological grounds, namely that the Soviet invasion represented an attack, not just on the Afghan nation but upon its values and its traditional way of life. This ideological dimension was taken one step further as the war in Afghanistan began to attract volunteers from all over the Muslim world, particularly from the Middle East. The powerful argument put forward by religious and secular leaders in the Muslim community of nations was that the Soviet invasion represented not just an attack on Afghanistan but an attack upon the entire faith of Islam which all of those capable of doing so had a religious duty to oppose. As we will see in more detail later on in this chapter, similar patterns of recruitment would be followed between 2001 and 2008.
Lack of manpower and the sheer size of Afghanistan made it impractical for the Soviets to occupy the entire country in practice. The Soviet occupation stopped at the major cities and the roads connecting them. Afghan resistance fighters operating in small groups in locations they were intimately familiar with were able to ambush Soviet resupply columns and isolated outposts. Braithwaite accurately sums up the overall Soviet strategy with the following observation:
The aim was not to take over or occupy the country. It was to secure the towns and the roads between them, and to withdraw as soon as the Afghan government and its armed forces were in a state to take over the responsibility for themselves.2
The resistance groups in various parts of the country were able to set up parallel administrations which in large parts of rural Afghanistan were effectively able to supplant the government. As we will see throughout this chapter there are both differences and similarities between the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the US war in Afghanistan and it is not to suggest that the two wars are the same but it is fair to say that certain problems and patterns of behavior did occur in both conflicts.
By 1989 an exhausted Soviet Union finally withdrew from Afghanistan although it continued right up until its final collapse to provide aid, however, once the Soviet Union ceased to exist, this aid came to an end.
Once this aid came to an end the Afghan government began to cut deals with various rebel commanders. Complicating the situation was the fact that the US covert action program to arm the Afghan resistance had been channeled through Pakistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor to the east. The immediate Pakistani objective in Afghanistan was to ensure that the Afghan government was friendly to Pakistan and would provide what Pakistani military leaders termed “strategic depth” in Pakistan’s on-going conflict with India. In short Pakistan wanted an Afghan government that would follow Pakistani direction. Oliver Roy, summed up Pakistan’s ideal of its relationship with the Afghan resistance as follows:
Throughout the war, the Pakistani policy was to maintain a permanent tutelage on the Afghan Mujahideen movement through the distribution of weapons, the right to issue refugees’ cards, the use of camps and facilities inside Pakistan.3
Fundamentally, successive Pakistani governments whether military or civilian would essentially follow the strategy of trying to co-opt Afghanistan into a broader strategic framework directed against India as we will see throughout this chapter this posed enormous challenges for western policy makers.
Having laid out the context in which Western policy makers had to frame a policy towards Afghanistan in 2001 we will look at how the Powell Doctrine influenced Western thinking. We will start by looking at the issue of how “vital national interest” in Afghanistan was perceived.
The “vital national interest” in undertaking military action in Afghanistan was clearer than any other case study examined in this book. The United States mainland had been attacked by a group that was based in Afghanistan and this group was tacitly supported by the authority that controlled most of Afghanistan. 9/11 was not only the most lethal attack directly on the United States since Pearl Harbor, it also claimed the lives of nationals from dozens of other countries and therefore it was a relatively simple task to assemble a coalition of nations who suddenly perceived their national interests in Afghanistan in similar ways. President Bush in his address to the nation on October 7 2001 spelt out what the US saw as its “vital national interest” in commencing operations against the Taliban:
On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaida terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.4
This definition of “national interest” is certainly clear, however it is incomplete because whilst it defines clearly what a broad coalition of nations could agree on in a negative sense, that is to say there was broad agreement that the threat of terrorist groups based in Afghanistan had to be removed and if necessary those who were supporting them should also be removed. However there is nothing positive in this definition, what kind of government was going to replace the Taliban?
Given the recent Soviet example of how difficult it is for outsiders to try to create a stable Afghan government there was an acute reluctance on the part of Western policy makers to get too deeply involved in trying to assemble an interim Afghan government. Essentially the process for choosing a transitional Afghan government was left to the United Nations, the idea being that the UN would assemble as many different Afghan parties as possible and help them hammer out a consensus. Again this seems reasonably in line with the definition of “national interest” President Bush gave on October 7, because it focused more on what the coalition wanted to remove than on what it wanted to foster in Afghanistan.
However because the initial military action against Afghanistan was a rapid success and because the process of choosing transitional government proved considerably less contentious than most actors were expecting the definition of “national interest” used by the US and its allies became steadily more ambitious over time. Specifically the rhetoric of Western leaders began referring to Western concepts of democracy and human rights as somehow integral to the collective Western interest in Afghanistan. In other words, over time the answer of what to replace the Taliban with came more and more to resemble a Western style state with Western style institutions: “One of the aims of the administration was to establish democracy in Afghanistan by building stable institutions and a secure human environment that would also be inhospitable to terrorist groups.”5 This is clearly a much harder task than simply removing the Taliban and replacing it with some kind of interim authority that can control Afghanistan’s national territory and prevent the re-emergence of a safe haven for terrorist groups. Afghanistan had not had a functioning government of any description for a decade. Likewise the tribal and religious leadership which had often provided local government services and played an important role in mediating disputes and had been undermined by an environment in which the threat of extreme violence was omnipresent and authority had tended to gravitate away from traditional structures towards whomever could provide security. Kimberley Marten sums up the situation:
First, trained, armed men take advantage of the disintegration of central authority to seize control over relatively small slices of territory. Second, their actions are based on self-interest, not ideology. Third, their authority is based on charisma and patronage ties to their followers. Fourth, this personalistic rule leads to the fragmentation of political and economic arrangements across the country, disrupting the free flow of trade and making commerce and investment unpredictable. Savvy actors react by limiting their economic activity to local regions.6
This description of the situation in Afghanistan carries in it a possible alternative to a state building project the Western coalition embarked upon. This alternative would have been to remove the Taliban regime, by simply backing the Taliban’s warlord opponents and then subsidizing them to make certain the Taliban did not return. As we shall see later on in this chapter there were elements of this policy that had been pursued consistently by the west and indeed this kind of support for Warlordism has seriously undercut the coalitions stated objective of state building in Afghanistan. So why did a broad coalition come to the conclusion that it was in their collective interest to try and build a conventional state in Afghanistan?
The first reason in line with the discussion of national interest in Chapter 1 was simply that there was no reason not to be ambitious in Afghanistan. The United States and its allies in Afghanistan constituted the overwhelming bulk of the international community and there were no other great powers willing or able to place constraints on the coalition’s definition of its interest. Had a similar situation to 9/11 arisen in the context of the Cold War, the US and its partners would have had to have been much more measured in their objectives because installing a friendly pro-Western state in a state like Afghanistan would almost certainly have triggered a Soviet response.
In a more positive sense the coalition’s objectives for Afghanistan tended to be given in humanitarian terms because the Afghan war began at the end of a decade that had become increasingly marked by the concept that it was not enough to force to be used simply in the interests of securing the physical security of the state and its citizens but there was an increasing perception the war had to have a humanitarian and a moral aspect to it.
Implicit in this idea is that where military action does take place it should involve a “better” outcome for the population of the country that is the subject of the intervention in terms of a more equitable distribution of political power and the implication is such a distribution of power should be along democratic lines. The problem with this line of reasoning from the point of view of the logic of the Powell Doctrine is that it is extremely nebulous how much better do you need to make the political and economic situation in order to justify your intervention in the first place?
Also, if you’re going to define national interest in humanitarian terms then there is an inherent paradox in using military force to achieve humanitarian ends. Military force, no matter how precisely targeted or judicially used, is inevitably going to maim and kill the civilian population, even leaving aside the other likely effect of military action such as the creation of refugees. In other words, trying to justify military action for humanitarian ends ultimately leaves you using evil means for good purposes.
This discussion of national interest in relation to Afghanistan underscores again the point that the logic of the Powell Doctrine is more comfortable with the definition of national interest which is defined in terms of the security of the state rather than the security of the individual.
Turning to the Powell Doctrine’s injunction that military action should only be undertaken with clear objectives in mind as we’ve already seen the initial objective in Afghanistan was extremely clear, to destroy the infrastructure Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist groups had built in the decade prior to 9/11. This infrastructure may have been rudimentary but it was extensive. This infrastructure provided Al-Qaida with a number of important opportunities
Failed states hold a number of attractions for terrorist organizations. First and foremost, they provide the opportunity to acquire territory on a scale much larger than a collection of scattered safe houses—enough to accommodate entire training complexes, arms depots, and communications facilities.7
The immediate US objective therefore was to destroy this infrastructure because US and coalition policy makers initially came to the conclusion that the Taliban and Al-Qaida were for all intents and purposes inseparable, coalition objectives became the wider destruction of the Taliban’s ability to operate and to govern. US Secretary for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, summed up how the coalition in these early days saw the relationship between Al-Qaida and the Taliban and therefore how the two entities would be treated.
The effect we hope to achieve through these raids which together with our coalition partners we have initiated today, is to create conditions for sustained anti-terrorist and humanitarian relief operations in Afghanistan. That requires that among other things we first remove the threat from air defenses and from Taliban aircraft. We also seek to raise the cost of doing business for foreign terrorists who have chosen Afghanistan from which to organize their activities and for the oppressive Taliban regime that continues to tolerate terrorist presence in those portions of Afghanistan which they control.8
In addition to air and missile strikes against Al-Qaida and Taliban infrastructure, the CIA and other intelligence agencies began to systematically arm and train Afghan militia opposed to the Taliban. This combination of air power and Afghan militia on the ground proved to be enough to defeat the Taliban and Al-Qaida’s conventional forces in a very rapid period of time. By November 2001 the immediate objective of the coalition had shifted from ensuring the defeat of the Taliban and its allies to trying to ensure that Afghanistan had an interim government to replace the Taliban, capable of at minimum providing security and basic economic development for the Afghan people and preventing the re-emergence of a permissive environment for terrorist groups in Afghanistan. As we’ve seen in the discussion of national interest, over time as the definition of Western interest grew, the number of objectives the coalition needed to meet would grow to match that definition of national interests.
As of 2004, a period by which the interim government had drawn up a constitution and was moving towards elections which would establish a permanent government, total Western forces committed to Afghanistan were 18,000 US troops plus 4,5009 NATO troops operating under a very complex command and control arrangement. This force is patently inadequate to the task of providing security for most of Afghanistan and indeed the mandate of the 18,000 US troops was geared towards killing or capturing Al-Qaida and the Taliban, not in providing security or in disarming militias. In terms of the Powell Doctrine stipulation for clear objectives we can see a clear parallel here with the situation the US created for itself in Lebanon in so far as the objectives the US set for itself might have been politically desirable but they were not realistic given the amount and nature of the military force the United States was prepared to commit to the task so a situation developed where the rhetoric of the objectives was completely divorced from the means available to achieve them.
This failure to match the resources dedicated to an objective with the rhetoric and the intent of policy is just as pronounced when we come to look at the US military’s contribution to trying to help rebuild a functioning Afghan state. The main instrument for trying to rebuild government infrastructure in the provinces of Afghanistan and to connect them to central government is the so called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs). These were mixed military and civilian teams drawn from across the US and NATO governments to help train and equip the Afghan civil administration. “The PRTs’ original mandate was to assist the Afghan government in extending its authority in order to facilitate security, security sector reform, and reconstruction.”10
However these teams were generally not large and in order to succeed they require a permissive security environment. “US-led PRTs field 60–100 personnel. US Army or Marine officers commanded the first PRTs. This was an added burden upon these overly committed services.”11
Worse in terms of defining clear objectives as per the Powell Doctrine, the concept of PRTs tended to be muddled between the longer term objective of building and sustaining an Afghan state and much more localized projects aimed at winning “the hearts and minds” of the local Afghan population. Here we can see a clear example of why formulating coherent long term objectives as defined by the Powell Doctrine is so important, because in their absence objectives tend to get defined down to the most local tactical and immediate problems facing commanders in the field. “A vague mission, vague roles, and insufficient resources created significant civil-military tensions at the PRTs, particularly over mission priorities.”12
Added to this confusion as NATO’s definition of its collective interest expanded to include modelling the Afghan state along Western lines of accountability and at the same time managing a transition to democracy attempts to rebuild the central government of Afghanistan were continually undercut by a lack of clear thinking as to what would constitute realistic and achievable objectives. In particular the coalition’s short and long term objectives tended to cut across one another.
All Western donors spoke the jargon of “building capacity” in the fledgling Afghan government. In a failed state such as Afghanistan, capacity would take years of patience and hard work to build. In the meantime, donors undermined their own efforts by funding programs that would benefit the population without consulting the relevant ministry.13
The US led coalition in Afghanistan at the outset set itself what appeared to be clear objectives to remove the Taliban and Al-Qaida from Afghanistan and to establish a government capable of securing Afghanistan’s territory. Ultimately whilst the coalition’s objectives might have been clear they were not achievable because of a failure to match ends with means there were far too few troops committed to Afghanistan to make possible the kind of disarmament process that was a precondition for reducing the power of Afghanistan’s warlords and second the coalition failed to distinguish between long term and short term objectives and so the two tended to cut across one another.
In terms of the Powell Doctrine’s insistence on having and maintaining public and Congressional support for military action the war in Afghanistan occupies a unique position in the case studies looked at in this book in that it is the only conflict we have looked at that has been triggered by a direct attack on the United States.
As such it was extremely easy to rally both public and Congressional support behind the notion that the US had to undertake military action in order to prevent a repeat of 9/11. This consensus was aided by the fact that there was almost universal condemnation of 9/11 and support for the United States from around the world. In the case of Afghanistan, public and Congressional support practically mobilized itself.14 This is in line with John Mueller’s “Rally Round the Flag” effect discussed at greater length in Chapter 5.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Congress granted the Bush Administration sweeping powers to prosecute the “war on terror.” The operative paragraph for the authorization for the use of force against Afghanistan reads as follows:
IN GENERAL.—That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.15
Interestingly it contains the kind of open-ended authority not limited by duration, location or adversary that caused the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to be criticized by Congressional liberals in the 1960s and early 1970s. However, this Resolution does depart from previous Resolutions authorizing the use of force in a novel way by talking about organizations or persons as opposed to sovereign states.
To this extent the often heard contention that the “war on terror” is a different kind of war is true and contains quite profound implications for the Powell Doctrine’s insistence on public and Congressional support in that it blurs the lines between war and law enforcement. The expiry of Congressional authority now explicitly linked to the killing or capturing of certain individuals and the dismantling of certain organizations rather than the defeat of a sovereign state. It is therefore much murkier as to when that authority ought to expire. For instance, does that authority only expire when every single member of Al-Qaida is dead or in prison, or does it merely expire at the point of which these organizations are no longer a threat to the United States and if so, how does one define “threat”? The Congressional Resolution for example authorizing the First Gulf War clearly expired when Saddam’s troops were expelled to Kuwait. This is easily quantifiable. By talking about organizations and persons, the Resolution authorizing the use of force against Afghanistan moves us into a realm where not only is the use of military force not limited by duration or scale but even the ends to which the use of military force is put is open to debate and interpretation. It is possible if not indeed probable that the authority Congress granted the Executive in the wake of 9/11 will never definitively and unarguably expire.
Moving on to look at the issue of the Powell Doctrine’s insistence that the use of force should be overwhelming and how this was applied or misapplied in the case of Afghanistan. In this discussion it is important to bear several things in mind. First, despite the long standing threat from Al-Qaida, the US military had no standing plan for military operations in Afghanistan:
CENTCOM [US Central Command] did not have a developed plan on the shelf for conventional ground operations in Afghanistan, nor did its planners have the type of detailed information required to immediately construct a detailed plan.16
Therefore during the initial stages of Western military intervention in Afghanistan the US and its allies were having to plan military operations as they went along. Related to this was the fact that neither the US nor its allies had the bases or logistical networks in place to support a major intervention in Afghanistan and therefore these needed to be constructed or improvised at the same time as military operations commenced.
Renuart [Major-General Gene Renuart Director of Operations CENTCOM] summarized the campaign plan saying, “it was taking the sophistication, the technology, and the capabilities that we had and placing them on a battlefield, which was not unlike the face of the moon, with relatively unsophisticated warriors, taking on a reasonably well equipped and reasonably sophisticated enemy.”17
Early in the planning process that was required after the September 11th attacks, the decision was made not to introduce coalition conventional forces in large numbers. This decision was influenced by a variety of factors. First, if large numbers of coalition troops had been introduced to Afghanistan, such a deployment would have taken a long time to complete due to the limited and extremely primitive transportation systems in Afghanistan’s neighbors. This would have meant that major military action against the Taliban would likely to have been pushed back to spring 2002 at the earliest and US and coalition leaders were not prepared to allow Al-Qaida continued safe-haven for that amount of time. Second there was the perception that due to the extremely mountainous terrain in which coalition forces would need to operate small numbers of special forces would find this terrain less of a challenge than large numbers of mechanized conventional troops. And third and explicitly drawing on the history of British and Soviet interventions in Afghanistan there was the perception that the Afghan people simply would not accept large numbers of foreign troops on their soil.
In the broad strokes the plan CENTCOM developed involved special forces and CIA teams marrying up with local anti-Taliban Afghan militia and providing cash, logistical support and critically acting as forward air controllers to direct coalition air and missile strikes on to Taliban infrastructure, lines of communication and supply and finally frontline Taliban units. In terms of minimalizing the logistical hurdles coalition forces had to overcome and minimizing the footprint of foreign forces in Afghanistan this plan was extremely effective but it had several very important and unintended consequences.
First the plan tended to empower the same warlords that the Taliban had originally overthrown in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s. The coalition’s infusion of cash and weapons to these groups enabled them to not only defeat the Taliban but also to lay claim to large regions of Afghanistan and to resume their role as patrons, bandits and major suppliers of drugs. These warlords were generally hated by the majority of the Afghan population.
Warlords such as Khan [Ismael Khan the Afghan warlord who dominated the city of Herat and its neighbouring provinces] had emerged as result of the civil war in the 1990s, when they [the warlords] divided up the country into fiefdoms, until being swept out of power by the advancing Taliban. Now they had defeated the Taliban, and felt stronger than ever. Empowered by, but not necessarily loyal to, the Americans and Karzai, they dominated the political landscape.18
By empowering such men, the coalition created a situation whereby it was relatively easy for the Taliban to portray themselves in certain parts of Afghanistan as representing the forces of law, order and justice against the brigands which had made life so intolerable for the Afghans in the 1990s.
Worse, from the coalition’s point of view, the so called Northern Alliance the loose umbrella group under which most of the Afghan warlords opposed to the Taliban operated was at best a fair-weather friend to Western interests and would only continue to ally themselves with US forces as long as it was in their financial interests to do so. As soon as there was any indication that the financial pipeline from the CIA might no longer be the best way to acquire wealth, most of the Afghan warlords turned to what had been the most profitable source of income in the 1990s, the production of opium: “ … when the CIA money began to run out, turned back to the drug trade. In 2002, 74,000 hectares of poppy were planted: almost ten times the amount in 2001.”19 This explosion in the drugs trade not only presented problems for Western interests in terms of their own domestic agendas around crime and public health, it also represented a cancer eating at any ability to construct a functioning Afghan state. Many parts of the Western backed Afghan police force became active players in the drugs trade and bribery became a way for all levels of the fledgling Afghan civil service to enrich themselves. As Seth Jones points out:
The cultivation of opium poppy also undermines security because insurgent groups profit from the drug trade. Indeed, the drug trade is a source of revenue for warlords, insurgents and criminal organisations in control of Afghanistan’s border regions, as well as for members of the Afghan government. This strengthens the power of non-state actors at the expense of the central government.20
This light Western footprint when relying on a combination of local warlords backed by Western airpower, cash and special forces failed in fulfilling even the most basic and fundamental purpose behind Western intervention in Afghanistan; the capture of Bin Laden and the dismantling of Al-Qaida’s infrastructure in Afghanistan. The reasons behind this failure was that Afghan warlords effectively acting as mercenaries in service to a set of interests they didn’t necessarily share were more than content to cut deals with Al-Qaida fighters and commanders who had the cash and the ability to pay bribes. During the initial coalition airstrikes in Afghanistan, Bin Laden and a number of other senior Al-Qaida figures retreated to a long established system of fortifications in the Tora Bora mountains close to Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan. Instead of using several thousand British or American troops that had been standing by specifically for the task of assaulting Al-Qaida or Taliban strong points, Lieutenant General Tommy Franks chose to rely instead on three small time Afghan warlords whose territory encroached on the Tora Bora region. What happened next remains a subject of controversy, however, it seems likely that, to quote Fergusson, “ … the Al-Qaida leader and some eight hundred Arab fighters were escorted to safety in the tribal areas of Pakistan by local Pashtun guides, who reputedly charged $1,200 per head for the service.”21 Rather than capturing its leaders and dismantling its infrastructure, what the Bush Administration managed to achieve in 2001 was to push Al-Qaida’s center of gravity from Afghanistan over the border in to Pakistan.
The US and its allies did however put together an international force to help initially secure Kabul. This force known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would come under NATO command the first time in its history the alliance had undertaken a major military operation outside Europe. Between the end of 2001 and 2003 ISAF gradually grew in size until it had a presence in all Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. However, often this presence remained no more than a handful of troops who by necessity had to work with the local warlords. In its early years ISAF remained an organization who were overwhelmingly concentrated on securing Kabul.
In terms of the Powell Doctrine’s call for overwhelming force the US and its partners certainly had that in terms of the enormous technological advantage they held over the Taliban and its allies and it shouldn’t be forgotten that the initial plan devised to remove the Taliban from power succeeded with remarkable speed and a number of troops so small as to be pretty much unique in the history of warfare. However, the US and its allies by relying on local Afghan forces placed the success or failure of the broader objectives and interests they had in fostering a stable Afghanistan in the hands of a set of local actors whose interests only extended as far as their ability to carve out local fiefdoms which they could then exploit to their own advantage.
Turning to the Powell Doctrine’s call for a pre-planned “exit strategy” from military action and how that has influenced US thinking on the war in Afghanistan, the fact of the matter is the suddenness of the 9/11 attacks and thereby the overwhelming national interest to ensure that Al-Qaida’s safe haven in Afghanistan had been removed meant that for understandable reasons in the initial planning for the war, little thought was given to how the US would eventually withdraw from Afghanistan. However, what was clear from the outset of the US involvement was that the Bush Administration attempted to limit the scope and duration of American involvement in Afghanistan whilst at the same time as we have seen pursuing an increasingly ambitious set of objectives. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made clear what he saw as the limits of US involvement in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan belongs to the Afghans. The objective is not to engage in what some call nation building. Rather it’s to try to help the Afghans so that they can build their own nation. This is an important distinction. In some nation building exercises well-intentioned foreigners arrive on the scene, look at the problems and say let’s fix it. This is well motivated to be sure, but it can really be a disservice in some instances because when foreigners come in with international solutions to local problems, if not very careful they can create a dependency.22
As already discussed when talking about the US’s objectives, the US saw its long term goal not only as the eradication of the Taliban and its allies but of the building of Afghan institutions along democratic lines and a stable Afghan state. Given the very low state of economic and political development that Afghan was starting from in 2001 both of these goals would imply an extremely long term commitment. However, the Bush Administration didn’t act as though it was interested in a long term commitment to Afghanistan. From mid-2002 onwards political attention and military resources were increasingly focused on a potential war with Iraq. Thus in terms of the Powell Doctrine’s call for an “exit strategy” the United States had an implied “exit strategy” deriving from its objectives and here again we see the relationship between the various elements of the Powell Doctrine; clear objectives mean that by implication there is a clear “exit strategy” because once you have achieved your objectives that should allow you to leave a particular military engagement. But the Bush Administration refused to focus the time or the energy or the resources on making sure that this “exit strategy” was actually followed through.
This lethargy towards making sure that the US could leave Afghanistan with its objectives fulfilled had the side effect of encouraging Afghanistan’s neighbors to doubt the commitment of the US and its allies to Afghanistan’s future. In other words the possibility existed that with NATO and the US distracted by other issues the Western alliance would simply leave Afghanistan rather than following through on an “exit strategy” as defined by the Powell Doctrine23. Pakistan in particular sought to keep its options open by maintaining a relationship with elements of the Taliban. This relationship is based on a calculation of mutual advantage. In the case of the Taliban the advantage is obvious, the Pakistani frontier provides the Taliban a relatively safe area in which to organize, train and equip itself. For Pakistan, the advantage lies in its ability to use the Taliban as a proxy in Afghan politics.
The Taliban-ISI relationship is founded on mutual benefit. The Taliban need external sanctuary, as well as military and logistical support to sustain their insurgency; the ISI believes that it needs a significant allied force in Afghanistan to maintain regional strength and ‘strategic depth’ in their rivalry with India.24
The kind of insistence seen in the Rumsfeld quote above on maintaining the lowest possible level of US involvement in Afghanistan only encouraged Pakistani belief that in the end the US and its allies simply did not have the will to meet their objectives in Afghanistan and therefore it made sense to continue a relationship with the Taliban as a form of insurance against the day when the US lost interest in Afghanistan.
The war in Iraq not only distracted political attention from Afghanistan, it also acted as a drain on resources in a military sense and just as critically from the point of view of building a viable Afghan state, the war in Iraq successfully starved any nation building effort in Afghanistan of desperately needed funds. In December 2001 at a major donor’s conference in Tokyo, the United States and indeed most of the international community pledged a grand total of $5.2billion to Afghan reconstruction. However compared to other nation building projects undertaken in the 1990s this represented an extremely low per capita level of financial aid.25
This loss of momentum was critical in preventing the US from fulfilling its optimum “exit strategy,” being able to hand over responsibility for preventing Afghanistan from becoming once again a safe haven for international terrorists to a competent Afghan government. Between 2003 and 2006 in the absence of Western funding to help the Afghan government extend its authority into all of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces the Taliban were able to reconstitute themselves and establish both a military and political infrastructure within Afghanistan.
Furthermore because the original framing of the US objectives made no distinction between the Taliban and Al-Qaida the Bush Administration found itself unable to pursue any kind of “exit strategy” premised on the idea of bringing the Taliban into the government of Afghanistan. To have done so might have constituted an “exit strategy” in the sense that it would have fulfilled the minimum US objective set on October 7 2001 of denying terrorists a safe haven in Afghanistan, but because of the subsequent tendency to treat the Taliban and Al-Qaida as essentially one phenomenon bringing the Taliban within the government of Afghanistan would implicitly have been seen as an admission that the United States couldn’t fulfil its objectives as they came to be defined over time.
However, the US and its allies by the tone of their rhetoric and the objectives they set themselves did if only by implication manage to come up with something that one could call an “exit strategy,” namely that it would hand over the task of securing Afghanistan to a competent Afghan government. However, as we’ve seen throughout this chapter the level of commitment the US was prepared to give to this project in Afghanistan was woefully inadequate when compared to the ambition of its objectives and the scale of what it perceived to be its national interests. Therefore the implied “exit strategy” of the US never really stood a chance of being fulfilled under the Bush Administration due to both inadequate resources and as we’ve seen earlier on in this chapter, a consequent reliance on those elements of Afghan society least likely to advance the US’s long-term vision for Afghanistan.
Perhaps in the way the US chose to conduct the war in Afghanistan we can see the clearest linkage between the different elements of the Powell Doctrine. The US started the war in Afghanistan with a fairly narrow definition of what its national interest was. Over time this fairly clear national interest became caught up in a narrative of improving the lives of the Afghan people thus expanding the definition of national interest in a way that as we’ve seen in Chapter 1 means that it becomes extremely difficult to place limits on the duration and scale of military intervention. At the same time the situation existed whereby Congress had knowingly granted the Executive extremely broad authority to conduct the war in Afghanistan in any way it saw fit and public opinion that at first was extremely supportive in line with what has become to be known as the “Rally Round the Flag Effect” and was then subsequently distracted by the controversy over a potential conflict with Iraq. As a consequence of the expansion of the US definition of national interest the set of objectives the US set itself in order to realize this definition of national interest had to expand as well. At the same time the US whilst it had overwhelming force in the sense of an overwhelming technological advantage, did not possess the manpower on the ground necessary to maintain the initiative and increasingly found itself in the position of having to react to the Taliban and its strategy. And finally because the US failed to commit the level of resources necessary to achieve its objective it ultimately found itself unable to fashion an “exit strategy” from Afghanistan.
1 Rodric Braithwaite, Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89, (London: Profile Books Ltd, 2011), pp.73–4.
2 Braithwaite 2011, p.123.
3 Oliver Roy, “The Taliban: A Strategic Tool for Pakistan,” in Pakistan: Nationalism Without a Nation? edited by Christophe Jaffrelot, (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2002), p.151.
4 George W. Bush. 2001. Address to the Nation Announcing Strikes Against Al Qaida Training Camps and Taliban Military Installations in Afghanistan, October 7, 2001. [Online]. Available at: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65088&st=&st1= [Accessed September 12, 2013].
5 Jenna M. Pickett, 2012, Limitations of Rhetoric: The Bush Administration and Women’s Rights in Afghanistan. [Online]. Available at: http://www.thepresidency.org/storage/documents/Pickett-_Final_Paper.pdf [Accessed November 27, 2013].
6 Kimberley Marten, “Warlordism in Comparative Perspective,” International Security, 31(3) (Winter 2006/07). [Online]. Available at http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2007.31.3.41 [Accessed 27th November 27, 2013].
7 Ray Takeyh and Nikolas Gvosdev, “Do Terrorist Networks Need a Home?” The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2002. [Online]. Available at: http://bdi.mfa.government.bg/info/Module%2004%20-%20Diplomacia%20i%20sigurnost/dopalnitelna%20literatura/do%20terorneed%20home.pdf [Accessed November 27, 2013].
8 US Department of Defense, 2001. Rumsfeld and Myers Briefing on Enduring Freedom, Sunday, October 7, 2001, 2:45 p.m. (EDT). [Online]. Available at: http://www.defense.gov/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=2011 [Accessed September 15, 2013].
9 Figures taken from Sean M. Maloney, “Afghanistan Four Years on: An Assessment,” Parameters, (Autumn 2005). [Online]. Available at: http://strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/parameters/Articles/05autumn/maloney.pdf [Accessed December 6, 2013].
10 Carter Malkasian and Gerald Meyerle, 2009. Provincial Reconstruction Teams: How do we Know They Work? US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, [online], March. Available at: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a496359.pdf [Accessed December 6, 2013].
11 Malkasian and Meyerle 2009.
12 Michael J. McNerney. “Stabilization and Reconstruction in Afghanistan: Are PRTs a Model or a Muddle?” Parameters, (Winter 2005–06). [Online]. Available at: http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA491011 [Accessed December 6, 2013].
13 Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia, (New York: Viking, 2008), p.177.
14 For a detailed discussion of the competing theories of how public opinion has formed around issues concerning the use of force and the role public opinion has or ought to have on foreign policy making see Chapter 5, this volume.
15 Richard f. Grimmett, Authorization for Use of Military Force in Response to the 9/11 Attacks (P.L. 107–40): Legislative History, [online Congressional Research Service]. Available at: http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RS22357.pdf [Accessed December 6, 2013].
16 Donald P. Wright, A Different Kind of War: The United States Army in Operation ENDURING FREEDOM October 2001–September 2005, (Fort Leavenworth, KS: Military Bookshop, 2010), p.42.
17 Wright 2010, p.48
18 Descent Into Chaos, p.127.
19 James Fergusson, Taliban: The True Story of the World’s Most Feared Guerrilla Fighters, (London: Transworld Publishers, 2010), p.150.
20 Seth G. Jones, “Averting failure in Afghanistan,” Survival, 48(1) (2006), p.115. [Online]. Available at: http://faculty.maxwell.syr.edu/rdenever/USNatSecandForeignPol/Jones,%20Averting%20Failure.pdf [Accessed December 6, 2013].
21 Taliban, p.154.
22 Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, 2003. Beyond Nation Building [Online]. Available at: http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=337 [Accessed December 6, 2013]. Remarks as delivered.
23 For a discussion of how one defines “exit strategy” see Chapter 5, this volume, pp.115–44.
24 Matt Waldman, (2010). The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents, Crises States Research Centre, Discussion Paper 18 [Online] June. Available at: http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2010/06/13/SISFINAL.pdf [Accessed December 6, 2013].
25 For precise figures on the amount of aid pledged to Afghanistan, its comparison with other nation building projects and a detailed analysis of how the funding was broken down see Peter Marsden, “Afghanistan the Reconstruction Process,” International Affairs 79(I) (2003), pp.91–105. Full text available at http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/International%20Affairs/Blanket%20File%20Import/inta297.pdf.