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Monday 21 May 2012

Is Saving Face the Real Afghanistan Strategy?

Tuesday, 1st September 2009

Losing George Will on Afghanistan is not quite the same as losing Walter Cronkite on Vietnam. For one thing, Will's column today, calling for the United States to withdraw most of its troops from Afghanistan, can hardly be considered a surprise. Will, less fashionable in recent years than in the past, has long been suspicious of, even hostile to, anything that could be considered "nation-building".

Nonetheless, it is a moment. A minor one, but a moment nevertheless. Obama - and General Stanley McChrystal - can count on support from the neoconservative wing of the Republican party, but conservative support for the Afghan campaign can be expected to slowly ebb away.

The problem is that Obama might need support from conservatives. As Mike Allen reports today, it's liberals the White House worries about. Russ Feingold - as always a reliable bellwether on these matters - has already called for a clear timetable upon to which to base a US pull-out from Afghanistan. There's no reason to suppose that liberal discontent with the Afghan project will diminish. How long before Obama's Afghan position is as weak as Gordon Brown's? (This is a question for David Cameron too: what, apart from doing "more" is the Tories real Afghan policy? Or is that it?)

So it was interesting to read the argument made by Bruce Riedel, ex-CIA and the chap who ran the White House's Afghanistan Review earlier this year. He explained the importance of Afghanistan in these terms:

The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World.This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And, those moderates in the Islamic World who would say, no, we have to be moderate, we have to engage, would find themselves facing a real example. No, we just need to kill them, and we will drive them out. So I think the stakes are enormous.

This is not the sort of argument that is often made in public. No wonder since, effectively, it really does demand an open-ended potentially decades long commitment to Afghanistan of a sort that understandably spooks the public. It's the Mastermind school of war: We've started so we'll finish.

And, as Mike Crowley points out, it's not dissimilar to some of the arguments used by te Bush administration during the Iraq war. But there's a difference and one that makes me suspect that, unfortunately, Riedel might be right. If a western rereat from Afghanistan is accompanied by the Taliban returning to power then it's hard to portray this as anything other than a serious, even humiliating, defeat for the US-led coalition. It might not be as catastrophic a defeat as Vietnam or, in military terms, the Soviets' experience in Afghanistan, but a retreat is a retreat nonetheless. I suspect it would indeed "resonate" throughout the "Islamic world". And not in a good way.

That leaves us in the unfortunate position of fighting a war for the sake of appearances as much as anything else. Those appearances matter of course since they have real-world consequences. Or, at least the potential for real-world, calamitous consequences. But if the Afghan War has, in some sense, become a matter of saving face then you can see why you begin to have a problem selling it.

Nevertheless, my suspicion - though it's only that - is that this "Saving Face" rationale is atually a bigger, more important matter than the publicly-proclaimed need to prevent terrorists from establishing training bases in the Hindu Kush. That might, as Will suggests, be accomplished by drones and airstrikes and special forces but it might not be enough to save face...

All this, then, leaves us in an unsatisfactory place. The costs of continuining the commitment to Afghanistan are steep and clear; the costs of the alternatives murky, uncertain and potentially equally awful.

So what should we do?

Filed under: Afghanistan (339 more articles) , Obama (365 more articles)

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M Shannon

September 1st, 2009 2:16pm Report this comment

The author assumes that a substantial draw down of US forces would lead to the Taliban regaining power. That our Afghan allies who make up at least 85% of the population with billions of aid, years of training and supported by US air power and SOF could not defeat the Taliban handily again is short sighted.

A common mistake is to think that the thousands of NATO troops in Afghanistan contribute to the security of the country. This notion is false. The majority sit on bases and are simply a logistic burden.

It is time for most NATO troops to come home with a small percentage of the savings being used to improve (not expand) the Afghan forces we already have and to pay tribal forces to prevent foreign Jihadis from entering their territory.

Jask

September 1st, 2009 2:31pm Report this comment

There isn't the money or the will to succeed in the Af-pak region, therefore a continuing campaign will eventually fail - you either take the early loss of prestige now and save lives and resources or you let the thing drag on for months and years and accept the same result in a couple of years time but at a greater cost.

I want us to succeed there but for that to happen we would need to radically expand the size of the Army (and hope that our NATO partners will do the same) and station 500-600K NATO troops there. I ask you, is this likely? Surely the answer is No. Without that level of force, we cannot hope to hold the ground and keep it long enough for the Afghans to get their act together and become a unified country and people. The costs would be extortionate, it would probably require some sort of national service or conscription to get the numbers. It really doesn't seem like it is likely does it.

At some point, there is going to be a line in the sand that we cannot allow the islamists to cross - but it isn't in the arse-end of nowhere like Afghanistan.

Jask

September 1st, 2009 2:38pm Report this comment

M Shannon. The Afghan Army is a joke, the Afghan Police is a bad joke. There ability to hold anything or do anything is nearly non-existent. Most of them would defect to local warlords at the drop of a hat. There is plenty of informed comment at various sites telling us this. The most up-to-date I've seen recently is Michael Yon, read his descriptions of the Afghan Army. Also, the Defence of the Realm site for comment and links. Forces do have long logistic tails - generally 3 to 1, this doesn't mean they are unnecessary or can be removed with no consequence for operations. Also, many of those troops are involved in the training you seem to advocate.

Ben

September 1st, 2009 4:04pm Report this comment

Lose face. We (or more pertinently the Americans) should admit that the whole invasion thing was a well meaning mistake from the start.

We should just be doing what we should have been doing 8 years ago - bombing Al Qaeda targets time and again till the Afghans form some sort of governance that nullifies them without the need for bombs.

We'll still be killing some innocent civilians, but it'll be far, far cheaper, won't cost allied lives and will leave domestic Afghan problems for Afghans to try and figure out.

But, unfortunately, that's not a hubristic enough solution for Americans or possibly even Brits.

If we had done that from 2001, we'd probably still be dropping bombs today and everyone would be wringing their hands about how unsatisfactory the whole business was - unaware of how expensive and futile the alternative would have been.

Anthony

September 1st, 2009 4:47pm Report this comment

Alex,

Just a quick point. I was going to say "pedantic point", but actually it's substantive.

Even if "Saving Face" is a reasonable way or framing the Afghan conflict, it's an aim, not a strategy. Strategy is (definition ruthlessly nicked from Colin Gray)"the use that is made of force and the threat of force for the ends of policy" or (from Clausewitz), "the use of engagements for the object of war". "Saving face" isn't a strategy, it's an end. Even if we say, yes, this is reason enough to keep us in Afghanistan, it doesn't in and of itself bring us any closer to constructing the bridge between ends and means.

ndm

September 1st, 2009 5:20pm Report this comment

-- So what should we do?

We need to create a set of goals that define success on our terms.

The invasion of Afghanistan has never had any goals other than just being something we need to do. The US tried invasion on the cheap that overthrew the incumbent Government but which lacked the force size required to control the country. And then while leading a half-hearted occupation it diverted attention to an Iraqi onvasion on the cheap that overthrew the incumbent Government but which lacked the force size required to control the country. The seeds of failure were sown by an an untterly incompetent Cheney/Bush Administration.

It is not that the Cheney/Bush Administration didn't believe in nation building it is that they come from a party that does not believe in Government and which prefers to govern incompetently to prove the inherent failure of Government. It is folly to expect them to govern another country better than they govern their own. The abject failure of their policies in Afghanistan and Iraq should have convinced the US military that the Republican Party is insitutionally incapable of competent governing of the military forces at its disposal.

The failures of the invasions of Aghanistan and Iraq should have convinced the world that the US does not have the moral authority or the intellectual capacity to launch an invasion of this magnitude again. And the World, through the Security Council and other international bodies, need to hold the US responsible for its future actions. And these same failures should have convinced Americans that the Republican Party is not a responsible party of government. A lot of Democrats are pretty tired of constantly having to bail the country out for Republican failures. This is particularly true of these days when we see senior Bush Administration officials going round the contry attacking the Constituion and the laws of the country with apparent immunity from prosecution for the high crimes they committed against it.

Hugh

September 1st, 2009 11:54pm Report this comment

When we were the British Empire we used to be very good at getting face saving deals with warlike local tribes. We've done deals with the Pashtuns in the past, for instance, using the traditional Darbar court to get Pashtun tribal leaders' consent to the establishment of the North West Frontier Province in 1902. Our policies used to be about buying off tribal leaders, showing respect for their ways of doing things and getting them to deliver us their supporters. Instead, today, what we’ve blundered into by remaining in Afghanistan is fighting Pashtun nationalism rather than the Taliban per se, and we ought to be conscious of this while we decide what to do next.

There ought to be lots of ways of going about getting a face saving agreement – get together a loya jirga where we can strike a grand bargain with rebranded Taliban’s leaders as ‘Pashtun elders’; maybe we could look to reintroduce a monarchy given that it provided more stability in the past; possibly give autonomy to those provinces that don’t want to be under Pashtun rule; manipulate local rivalries etc. The primary thing that should concern us is that they don’t provide protection for Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda remnants, something that’s much more likely when we’re at war with them than if they’re onside.

But the first thing we want to do is recognise that if we want to get involved in places like Afghanistan we need to wise up, start understanding the local ways of doing things and spend a long time in the archives of the British Empire looking how we did things in the past.

Ronnie

September 2nd, 2009 8:53pm Report this comment

Perhaps we ought to read a few history books, talk to a few local people in Afghanistan and find out why they are fighting us.

We are laughably ignorant about why these people are perfectly happy to come out in the summer to have a go year on year. If you don't genuinely know your enemy and what it is that motivates him then you have a hard time working out where it will all end.

I'm sure there will be those on the ground and in the intelligence community who properly understand the situation. Our politicians' platitudes should be the first victim of any new 'strategy'.

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