Afghanistan: What Can We Achieve?

The U.S. war in Afghanistan started off with rousing optimism in the fall of 2001, but by the end of the decade has devolved into a quagmire for U.S. troops and potential disaster for the Afghan people. For all its twists and turns, it has had one striking constant—nearly every decision made by Western policymakers and Afghan leaders in fighting it has been the wrong one.

The litany of mistakes began in the first months of military engagement, when U.S. officials turned to Afghan militias to fight the final battle against the remnants of al Qaeda at the terrorist group’s redoubt at Tora Bora. Osama bin Laden and many of his top lieutenants were cornered at the cave complex along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, but were able to escape to safe havens in Pakistan—a failure that, according to a recent Senate report, laid “the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflame[ed] the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”

Next came the disastrous choice at the Bonn Conference in 2001 to create one of the most centralized political systems in the world for post-Taliban Afghanistan, rather than a decentralized federal system in the tradition of Afghan governance. The choice of the ineffectual and indecisive Hamid Karzai as the country’s first president compounded this error, as did the decision to exclude the Taliban from having any say in the country’s future.

NATO’s decision in 2002 to maintain foreign security forces in and around Kabul rather than disperse them throughout the country was another crucial missed opportunity that contributed to the country’s deteriorating security situation and to the later reemergence of the Taliban. Then came the calamitous U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq, which diverted time, resources, and attention from Afghanistan. Other mistakes would follow: the focus on poppy eradication, which drove countless ordinary Afghans into the arms of the Taliban; the lack of appropriate and effective aid resources for improving infrastructure and the rural economy; and the failure of U.S. policymakers—either with carrots or sticks—to push for a Pakistani crackdown on Afghan Taliban safe havens in their midst.

It is a mind-numbing tale of failure that has brought the United States and NATO to a painful decision point about the war in Afghanistan. They must realize that it is time to move beyond the U.S. military’s dreams of winning in Afghanistan and focus instead on best preparing the country for a partial drawdown of U.S. troops and a shift in mission from population-centric counter-insurgency to counter-terrorism and stabilization.

Fighting The Good War

When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, things were going to be different. The candidate who had promised during the 2008 presidential campaign to devote more resources to the “good” war in Afghanistan became a president who piled more bad decisions upon past ones.

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