Argument: The United States in Afghanistan

Arguing the War in Afghanistan

ON NOVEMBER 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected the forty-fourth president of the United States of America, dawn was breaking on a cold and crisp morning under a deep blue sky in Kabul. It was easy to get caught up in the euphoria. At last, the United States would make a clean break with the calamitous inattention to Afghanistan that had so discredited the Bush administration. In his inaugural speech, Obama addressed himself directly to democracy’s most bloodthirsty enemies: “We will defeat you.”

The Kabul chapter of Americans Abroad for Obama, the largest pro-Obama group among American ex-pats anywhere in the world, was in raptures. Among Afghan democrats, women’s rights leaders, and secularists, the exuberance was contagious. The emerging reformist bloc that would go on to field Abdullah Abdullah against Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan’s 2009 presidential elections went so far as to borrow from Obama’s political lexicon, calling itself the “Hope and Change” coalition.

Not three years after that bright and sunny morning in Kabul, America’s best Afghan friends are losing all hope in the promise of peace and democracy. The Taliban is emboldened. Among democracy’s most determined enemies throughout the region, spring is in the air. This has taken some doing.

The radical turnaround has little to do with the troop drawdown Obama announced on June 22. After boosting American troop strength to about 100,000 soldiers and then going ahead with plans to scale back to 67,000 by late next year, the same number of American soldiers will be stationed in Afghanistan as before Obama beefed things up. It’s not about the numbers.

It’s not even about Obama’s fixation on 2014, by which time the Afghan National Security Forces are somehow expected to handle everything without help from American combat troops or from the 50,000-plus soldiers the forty-two other International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) countries currently have stationed in the country—even though the reconstruction of the Afghan military didn’t begin seriously until 2008.

The pall that has fallen over Afghan democrats has nothing to do with American guns or American money. What has changed are the reasons the United States is giving for having soldiers in Afghanistan in the first place, and the fire-sale price the White House is now willing to offer to pack everything in.

OBAMA’S INAUGURAL language was active and direct: “You cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.” It only took a few months for Obama to change his phrasing to the passive tense: the Taliban “must be defeated.” By his December 2009 West Point speech, Obama no longer talked about defeating the Taliban. The point was now merely to “diminish” the Taliban and deny them the ability to overthrow the government in Kabul. For good measure, Obama also let the Taliban know just how long it would take them to outlast the coming storm: eighteen months.

Along the way, the Obama administration jettisoned Afghan democracy as the point of it all. It’s no longer required; something like a functioning state of some kind will do. In his June 22 speech, Obama was clear. “The goal that we seek is achievable, and can be expressed simply: no safe-haven from which al Qaeda or its affiliates can launch attacks against our homeland, or our allies.” All well and good for America and its allies, but for Afghans? “America will join initiatives that reconcile the Afghan people, including the Taliban.”

Reconciliation with the Taliban, then, is now what victory in Afghanistan is supposed to look like. That is the lofty ideal for which the United States expects Afghans to risk their lives and tolerate all those NATO bombs accidentally falling on civilians. It’s the thing America’s NATO partners are expected to continue to send their soldiers to die for in Afghanistan.

There’s nothing like lowering your standards to make them easier to uphold. It didn’t help that in his June 22 speech, Obama cited the usual qualifiers about how talks with the Taliban should be Afghan-led, and that the Taliban should be expected to disavow al Qaeda, abandon violence, and respect the Afghan constitution. For one thing, those used to be the American pre-conditions to any talks. By last February, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated clearly that these were no longer conditions of any kind, but rather “necessary outcomes” of a deal with the Taliban. For another thing, everyone knows it’s all lipstick and high heels anyway. Before Obama’s speech, American diplomats had already met directly with Taliban emissaries at least three times, in Munich last November, in Qatar in February, and again in Munich, in May.

As for al Qaeda, it has been years since Osama bin Laden’s World Islamic Front for Jihad against Crusaders and Jews has exerted any significant influence in Afghanistan. NATO forces commander General David Petraeus concedes that al Qaeda is a “small element” of the insurgency, consisting of perhaps 100 affiliated fighters, mostly in the wilderness areas of Kunar and Nuristan. Bin Laden’s May 1 assassination in Abbottabad, celebrated at a rally of about 15,000 Afghan democrats in Kabul four days later, was a pleasant and welcome denouement to September 11, 2001, but that’s all it was.

Another reason it means nothing to insist that the Taliban break with al Qaeda’s remnants is that the White House is making that happen without the Taliban even having to lift a finger. The week before Obama’s June 22 speech, the State Department convinced the UN Security Council to bifurcate its terrorist blacklist, separating al Qaeda figures from the Taliban leadership. The Obama administration has also given its blessing to a push to allow the Taliban to open offices in Istanbul.

It is just as meaningless to assert that the Taliban should respect the Afghan constitution. President Hamid Karzai has been ignoring it himself for some long while, to no noticeable American complaint. For more than a year, Karzai has been ruling almost exclusively by decree. He has also been engaged in an unconstitutional assault on the Independent Elections Commission—which he’d already crippled—for having approved vote results that produced an insufficient number of MPs from his own Pashtun power base, a constituency he shares with the Taliban. And Karzai is now steaming ahead with preparations for a Loya Jirga (“grand assembly”) that would be empowered to circumvent parliament altogether, and if necessary amend the constitution, to plan for Obama’s post-2014 order. The Afghan parliament is trying to cobble together some sort of impeachment proceedings against him, to no likely effect. By the time the Taliban are expected to be “reconciled,” around 2014, there’s no telling what kind of Afghan constitution will be left for them to respect.

Among Afghans, the great hope of an Obama presidency was that Donald Rumsfeld’s “we don’t do nation-building” approach was finally over and done with. The Bush administration came late to the realization that its so-called light footprint was precisely what had allowed the Taliban to regroup and reassert itself throughout Afghanistan’s southern provinces. It’s why there is still a war in Afghanistan at all.

You don’t need to scour tea leaves for worrying evidence of a return to Rumsfeld’s policy in Washington. Last February, unveiling the administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan Regional Stabilization Strategy, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton was explicit: the strategy is “far from an exercise in nation-building.”

The message to Afghan democrats could not be clearer. Hope and change has come to mean despair and a recrudescence of the same old self-flattery, shortcut remedy prescription, and attention-deficit disorder that has afflicted American policy in Afghanistan since at least Bill Clinton’s time. “I am not optimistic at all,” Suraya Parlika of the Afghan Women’s Union recently told Reuters. “Women are at risk of losing everything they have regained.”

It’s not even the idea of “negotiations” that’s the problem anymore. The deep anxieties among Afghans about who would be doing the negotiations, what they’d be for, and what would be on the table—it’s gone past that now.

For the past ten years, Washington has tolerated fanciful notions that “Afghan-led” talks might actually result in some sort of acceptable peace. NATO military commanders went along with Karzai’s entreaties to his Taliban “brothers,” fully mindful that there are several Taliban chains of command and none of them can be trusted. Until Obama, the United States had been able to convince Afghans that America would be a brake on a total sell-out. You can still hear reassuring noises about women’s rights emanating from within the beltway, but the Obama administration has kept on recalibrating its bar for a negotiated settlement lower and lower. It’s gotten to the point that Washington will not only tolerate Kabul sharing power with Taliban leaders from the Quetta Shura, but will also expect the Afghan people to reconcile themselves with them. “We will not try to make Afghanistan a perfect place,” Obama now vows.

IT’S NOT just Americans and Europeans who are war-weary. By late 2009, a Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research poll found that 76 percent of Afghans would support Kabul’s attempts to negotiate if the Taliban first stopped fighting. Most Afghans supported Obama’s troop surge, too, although opinion was divided on whether its eighteen-month term was too long or not long enough, and whether the drawdown should rather depend entirely on how well the surge was working.

The Taliban have certainly not stopped fighting. With these odds, why should they? They’ve recently ramped up their campaign of assassinations and suicide attacks, and they’ve scored spectacular hits. Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s followers still regard their Islamic Emirate as a government in waiting, and Omar has been quite clear that the only thing worth negotiating are the terms of his enemies’ capitulation. Nothing has changed, except for the mounting evidence that Omar’s game plan is working.

Karzai knows that Omar will not settle for truckloads of cash for himself and his colleagues and, say, a gated community in suburban Riyadh. Karzai may be bipolar or paranoid, but he is no fool. He’s a cunning survivor. Around the time of Obama’s West Point speech, Karzai put his peace-talks agenda into high gear, admitting to a BBC interviewer in January 2010 that he would be prepared to settle for peace with the Taliban “at any cost.” Afghanistan finance minister Omar Zakhilwal stated that he would be happy to welcome Taliban leaders as fellow cabinet ministers.

This sent shockwaves rippling through Afghanistan’s pro-democracy circles. More than 200 Afghan women’s rights and civil society organizations hammered out an eight-point consensus citing objections to “any negotiation with the Taliban.” The consensus explicitly opposed power-sharing and the removal of Taliban leaders from UN terrorist lists. Obama’s White House has now taken the side opposing Afghan democrats on both these key points.

Last February, I met with Fawzia Koofi, the deputy speaker of the Afghan Parliament, in Kabul. In some circles, the peace-deal alarums had set off debates about whether an armed democratic resistance should be mounted. Koofi, who has since declared her candidacy for president in 2014—presuming that Afghanistan will still be a country that holds elections by then—was convinced that reconciliation with the Taliban would make an armed uprising a certainty. “If the Taliban are brought back, you will have people in the north and the central highlands going up into the mountains,” she told me.

A few weeks later I met with Mohaiyuddin Mahdi, a soft-spoken MP and former anti-Soviet resistance fighter who was a founding participant in the Bonn Conference that created the post-Taliban Afghan state. Mahdi is no hothead, and certainly no anti-American. He is a historian of the work of Samuel Clemens, and when we spoke he was spending his evening hours finishing a Dari translation of Baugh and Cable’s History of the English Language. Mahdi told me, “I am sorry to say that even though I am an old person, if Karzai reaches these dreams of his, I will have to say, bring the guns back.”

Fahim Dashty, a senior Afghan journalist, a confidante of the assassinated anti-Taliban guerrilla fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud, recently told a Canadian reporter that Obama’s “reconciliation” fantasy is worse than a pipe dream. The incessantly ballyhooed complexity of Afghanistan’s tribulations is actually quite straightforward: “On this side we believe in human rights, women’s rights, freedom, justice, democracy. From that side, they are fundamentally against these values…If we reconcile, one side has to sacrifice its values, either this side or their side.” According to Dashty, “Our options are either to defeat them, or lose the war. There is no third option.” For their part, the Taliban have also been clear about their intentions. Only last month, the Taliban specifically pledged jihad against the country’s secularists, “a satanic growth, a moth worm gnawing at the hearts of our proud Afghan people.”

NEVERMIND THE reputed slipperiness of Afghan loyalties and the intricacies of Afghanistan’s inscrutable ethnic and political divisions—what of America’s? What happens come 2014 if an anti-reconciliation, pro-democracy armed insurgency has emerged in Afghanistan, and Tea-Party Republicans are still scrapping with Obama’s Democrats to be the most convincing twenty-first-century version of the 1930s-era America-Firsters? Which side would the White House be on?

In Bahrain, a Sunni oligarchy continues its violent repression of the Gulf state’s democrats and minority Shia, right under the guns of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. In Syria, the White House has encouraged leaders of the uprising to reconcile with Bashir al Assad, the “reformer.”

In Libya, Obama dragged his feet on the no-fly zone the rebels were begging for, then claimed credit for leading a limited NATO effort to contain Muammar Qaddafi’s forces, when in fact the United States tagged along behind France, Britain, and Lebanon. Long after France, Canada, Germany, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates extended de facto state recognition to Libya’s rebel front, the White House continued to dither.

In Tunisia and Egypt, where the Arab Spring began, democrats and secularists are now waging a do-or-die political struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliates. In Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood is now mounting a counter-revolution that aims to crush the Committees to Protect the Revolution, the White House policy is to “reach out” to the Islamists.

As for Iran, the White House has given every appearance of offering the Khomeinists a bargain: play nice on the nuclear file, keep Hamas and Hezbollah on slightly tighter leashes, and you can carry on conspiring with Pakistan’s proxies to smother Afghan democracy in its cradle. Obama’s June 22 pledge was that “America will join initiatives” aimed at reconciliation with the Taliban. Afghans didn’t have to wait long to see the direction from which those initiatives would come. Only three days later, in Tehran, Karzai was poring over a variety of post-2014 initiatives with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari. Even the wanted war criminal Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan was on hand, along with delegates from Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and North Korea. Looking ahead to 2014, Iranian foreign minister Ali Akbar Salehi saw everything coming up roses. “I’m very optimistic about the future of the region,” he beamed, “unlike what some others would like to preach.”

Optimistic he should well be. While relations between the White House and the presidential palace in Kabul have become pathological, Karzai’s advisers have pulled him ever deeper into the orbits of Islamist autocracy. “Consistently his aides are pushing him toward Iran and Pakistan,” says Nader Nadery of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission. It should be no wonder.

Council on Foreign Relations president Leslie Gelb recently blasted Karzai for his “ingratitude,” citing an especially unhinged speech the Afghan president delivered to an audience of Afghan students. Karzai even blamed NATO for pollution: “Every time when their planes fly they make smoke.” But the big thing about Karzai’s speech was that it contained his first public acknowledgement that the Obama administration has been talking directly to the Taliban, without the Afghan government around.

Gelb took particular exception to Karzai’s declaration that NATO forces were in Afghanistan “for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they’re using our soil for that.” But is Karzai really that off-base, given the stated changes in the reasons the United States itself is giving for having its soldiers in Afghanistan?

IT’S FAIR enough that U.S. lawmakers are wringing their hands about the $18.8 billion they’ve spent on reconstruction and aid projects in Afghanistan over the past decade. But until Obama’s surge, the total NATO commitments to Afghanistan added up to only $57 per Afghan per year, compared to the contribution to Kosovo of $526 per capita, and Bosnia’s $679, during the Balkan conflicts. Another thing to keep in mind: a low-level American USAID contractor in Afghanistan will typically bill $900 a day—enough to pay half the annual salary of an Afghan schoolteacher. Before Obama’s “civilian surge” there were 531 USAID bureaucrats in Afghanistan, and today there are roughly 1,300. According to a June 8 U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee report, the average cost of each of those Americans, when you factor in their security details, is $500,000 a year.

“America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home,” Obama has declared. But assuming Americans are still capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, the work required of the United States to extricate itself from the Afghan hole it has dug for itself need be nowhere near as daunting and costly as the American troops-out lobby pretends.

For starters, it would go a long way simply to stop forcing Afghans to carry all the shame for the shambles their country’s prospects have become and admit that the United States should accept a proper share of the responsibility. Obama’s insinuations that his Republican predecessors are to blame for getting the United States into the whole mess might flatter his domestic supporters, but everybody else knows it’s a cheap dodge.

It wasn’t George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan who first came up with the bright idea of sponsoring Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan. That was President Jimmy Carter’s idea, and well before the Soviets invaded. It set in motion all the agony that besets Afghanistan to this day. Successive Republican and Democratic administrations have shovelled billions of dollars in annual subsidies into Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, the parasitic military-industrial complex that remains both the Taliban’s primary benefactor and its main symbiotic beneficiary.

In recent weeks, the U.S. State Department has made some moves that give cause to hope that the ISI’s jig is up. It remains to be seen whether this is a public relations gambit or the beginning of a renunciation of the most disastrous American policy calamity in the region. If the latter is the case, the work of actually “fixing” Afghanistan’s problems might at last be close to hand. For now, the ISI continues to drain billions from the U.S. treasury and will go on doing so even if the recently announced partial suspension of $800 million in extortion payments goes from temporary to permanent.

Flush with American cash, the ISI will go on torturing, murdering, and “disappearing” journalists and Baloch patriots, and will continue to give sanctuary and succour to Mullah Omar’s Islamic Emirate, and to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami, and to Jaish-i Mohammad, Harakat ul-Mujahidin, Lashkar-i- Taiba, and several other sociopathic Islamist groupuscules.

In Afghanistan, a counter-insurgency strategy of “clear, hold, build” simply cannot succeed, no matter how valiantly or effectively U.S.-led ISAF soldiers do the work of clearing and holding, so long as the building involves the kind of hodgepodge gangland enterprise NATO commanders financed under the tutelage of the recently assassinated Popolzai kingpin Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s half-brother, in Kandahar. The State Department’s long-disgraced shortcut strategy of subcontracting American policy to the country’s kalan nafar (big shots) appears to have only metastasized under Obama’s tenure.

As Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution points out, the early Bush White House insisted on the practically unworkable electoral system, the crippling restraints on political parties, and the khan-like presidential powers that ended up in the Afghan constitution. If 2014 is the due date of Obama’s endgame, undoing that catastrophe by allowing Afghans to build a new constitution in close collaboration with the democratic institutions of the NATO countries is the least the United States could do by way of contrition. Last year, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour put it this way: “The alternative for Afghans is constitutional change—giving power back to the people rather than centring it in Kabul—or a return to full-scale civil war.”

Another road not taken is one that has been lately revived as a key demand of Afghanistan’s democratic opposition: an Afghan version of the post-conflict “truth and reconciliation” processes the UN has assisted in Sierra Leone, Burundi, Liberia, and East Timor. In 2004, research into such “transitional justice” mechanisms undertaken by Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission revealed, among other things, that 90 per cent of Afghans wanted terrorists and criminal warlords banned from government. Instead, with the blessing of the White House, the Karzai administration granted amnesty to those same criminals. Rather than encouraging the very worst of those gargoyles to carry on with their suicide-bombing sprees until the big game of musical chairs begins in Kabul in 2014, wouldn’t it be better to assist the Afghan people in developing the rule of law in their country to the point that the prosecution of war criminals is at least conceivable?

If the White House wants to extricate itself from the mess it is now making worse in Afghanistan, actually listening to Afghans would be a good place to start. A vibrant young democratic movement and a dishevelled but dedicated progressive opposition has lately re-emerged in Afghanistan. Abdullah Abdullah, the former Afghan foreign minister whose coalition challenged Karzai in the 2009 presidential election, is just one Afghan leader worth listening to. “The international community should stand by the democratic process and its principles,” Abdullah says. “Mr. Karzai should not be able to take all the good will and sacrifices of the international community and the fate of the Afghan people as hostage.”

Obama shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it either.

Terry Glavin is a journalist and cofounder of the Canada-Afghanistan Solidarity Committee. He is the author of Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, forthcoming this October.

Michael Walzer responds:

I AM sympathetic to Terry Glavin’s arguments. Like him, I wish that the American effort to promote the development of Afghan civil society had been more consistent, more determined, more focused, and more competent. Over the years since 2001, I have complained about the refusal to provide the resources necessary for the social and economic reconstruction of Afghan society—which we had done so much to deconstruct. And I certainly join Glavin in admiring the men and women in Afghanistan who have been fighting for democracy, labor rights, and gender equality. He is right to say that we should be talking to them now, we should be talking to them every day, about how we can support their efforts.

But there are some things missing in his article, and I worry that their absence is characteristic of the political position he represents. The first thing that is missing is any tough-minded, analytical assessment of the political strength of these Afghan democrats, feminists, and unionists. How many of them are there, how well are they organized, in the cities of Afghanistan? What is their reach into the countryside? If pressed, what kinds of demonstrations could they produce? How dependent are they on foreign NGOs? How do they fit into the tribal and ethnic structure of Afghan society? How would they fare in a free and fair election? What kind of practical help do they need from the United States—and for how long will they need it? Glavin writes at length, but somehow doesn’t address these questions, which seem to me the obvious political questions that anyone with his sympathies has to answer.

The second thing that is missing is a clear account of what the United States should do in Afghanistan right now—and for all the coming tomorrows. How many fighting men and women—and how much fighting—are necessary? How much money will it cost to do what Glavin wants done? And how do we allocate the money, to which groups of Afghans, for what kinds of projects, and with what mechanisms to avoid waste and corruption? Glavin somehow avoids straight talk about what it would cost the United States to do right by Afghanistan. He writes with eloquence and passion, but at some point he needs to stop and, calmly and directly, give us a list of the things that need to be done and the price of each one.

Without an assessment of the strength of our Afghan friends and without a list of things to do, it is hard to avoid the sense, which I know is wrong, that what Glavin is really asking is that President Obama give better speeches. I am sympathetic with that wish also, but it doesn’t constitute a political position that I can commit myself to or work for.

Michael Walzer is the co-editor of Dissent.

Terry Glavin replies:

Replying to your points in the reverse order that you made them, I feel I should reassure you, even though you concede that you know it’s not what I’m asking, that I would not want or expect any commitment from Americans to a political position consisting of wishing that President Obama would make better speeches. I think we’ve all heard quite enough of his speeches. But I point this out straight away because you say you get the sense that this is what I’m asking for anyway, owing to the absence in my essay of any sort of capacity assessment of the forces you call “our Afghan friends.”

This goes to the heart of the problem my essay addresses. If by “our Afghan friends” you mean those Afghans committed to something at least resembling a sovereign and democratic republic that does not brutalize its people and is at peace with itself and its neighbors, a battery of public-opinion polling data accumulated over the past decade shows that these forces constitute the overwhelming majority of Afghans. However, if by “our Afghan friends” you mean simply America’s friends in Afghanistan, I’m afraid that this is a rapidly diminishing constituency, and Obama’s policy is shrinking that constituency to irrelevance.

A “list of things to do” is not absent from my essay. My enumeration includes: Abandon the absurdly sadistic policy of forcing Afghans into a reconciliation with their most barbaric enemies; stop shoveling billions of dollars every year into the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus that persists in fomenting Talibanism; commit to an American “end game” that removes the Bush-era constitutional provisions that have deformed Afghan democracy into the shape of a Popolzai khanate; support the broad political consensus in Afghan society for a transitional-justice regime along the lines of the UN’s truth and reconciliation commissions; and so on. Most important, I proposed that Americans might start by actually listening to Afghans for a change, so I am loathe to ask that you listen to a much lengthier to-do list from me.

I don’t know how to respond to your worries about the “political position” I represent, because you do not say what you mean. If I failed to provide a “tough-minded, analytical assessment of the political strength” of Afghan democrats, feminists, and unionists, I think I can say with some certainty here and now that such forces—except for the Afghan labor movement, which is embryonic, at best—are at least as relevant to Afghan political struggles, and I dare say far more courageous, than they are in American society.

You set out a series of questions about their level of organization, ethnic mix, tribal composition, extent of rural penetration, and so on. That’s something that would have required a lengthy dissertation all on its own, and while I touch on the vibrancy and youthfulness of Afghanistan’s democrats and reformers, this is not what I was asked to write for Dissent. Still, although some of your questions (specifically about the “tribal” aspect) are not relevant to the discussion, at least two of your questions were fair: “How would they fare in a free and fair election? What kind of practical help do they need from the United States—and for how long will they need it?”

To summarize, all the evidence suggests that already, the majority of the Afghan Wolesi Jirga consists of parliamentarians who are committed to the rule of law, the rights of women to attend school and work outside the home, the principles of representative democracy, an accountable executive branch, and so on. Already, the majority oppose corruption, Talibanism, and the way of the gun. As for the practical help the United States might begin to contribute to the nurturing of Afghan democracy, quite apart from my own few modest suggestions, the International Crisis Group, the National Democratic Institute, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and a variety of international agencies have consistently set out detailed prescriptions that the United States has largely overlooked, and the Obama administration has now given every appearance of ignoring outright. Insisting on the independence of the Elections Complaints Commission is just one kind of “practical help” the United States might provide. Another is a sharper focus on investing in the capacity of the Afghan state instead of pouring truckloads of cash into the coffers of U.S. contractors.

I did not set out to write a cost-savings proposal designed to ease Afghanistan’s burden on the U.S. Treasury, but since that appears to be a major concern of yours, it would seem that my own few suggestions would save the American taxpayer billions of dollars a year. As for “how long” Afghanistan will need international support, it might be useful to know that there are dozens of UN member states that rely on international support merely to survive, and that over the past 175 years or so, the Afghan state has always had to rely on stipends, tributes, levies, or subsidies of some sort, from somewhere, simply to exist. I confess that I have not set out any formulae that might remedy this state of affairs, nor can I offer any comfort except to concede the point that if support for the Afghan state is not forthcoming from Western democracies, you can be sure it will come from somewhere, and the result would not be a pleasant thing to behold.

To conclude, I agree that I have not set out exactly everything the United States should do in Afghanistan “right now—and for all the coming tomorrows,” nor did I set out proposals for specific troop strength levels, mechanisms to avoid waste, “the things that need to be done and the price of each one,” and so on. The combined efforts of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the United States General Accounting Office have failed to accomplish this, and the purpose of my essay was rather more modest. But if American progressives will not be ready to confront the Obama administration’s folly and side squarely with Afghan democrats until by some combination of alchemy and clairvoyance all such minutiae and arcana are ready to hand, then I’m not the one who has any explaining to do.

Image: Afghan National Army commandos (Teddy Wade, 2009, U.S. Army via Wiki. Com.)