Afghanistan: Not giving up
All I know about this war is what reporters tell me. I don’t have expertise, I follow the news and the blogs. And when I, an observer with only my own scepticism to resort to, double-take the terms in which more knowledgeable writers are defending the war, they disintegrate with a queasy swiftness.
Paddy Ashdown, for example, whom I quote below and according to Oliver Kamm ‘a figure of real stature’, in his column forecasts a series of baleful scenarios that British ‘failure or withdrawal’ would bring about. First, and ‘inevitably’, there’s the ‘certain fall of Pakistan’ – and perhaps a jihadi nuke. What I want to know is inevitable about the fall of a 600 000-strong army to a guerrilla group intent primarily on winning back power in the neighbouring country whence they originate? Ashdown doesn’t show his work. And he forgets the Americans, who would not in even their dovishest future allow the transfer of Pakistani nukes to Islamists of any shade. Which countries in the region itself could find this tolerable? Here is David Rothkopf on the matter of Pakistan:
Afghanistan is only relevant relative to Pakistan. Does that make Afghanistan important? Only if we can use it as a base from which we can contain the threats posed from within Pakistan. But the reality is given the terrain in the mountains on the border, we have spent eight years proving that we can’t really do that. And our friends in Kabul are running such a bogus government that it is unlikely they will prove to be a useful aid in such matters anytime in the foreseeable future. Thus, if Afghanistan is only relevant as far as it can help deal with threats in Pakistan and it can’t really help very much with those, it is actually not that important.
The second foreknown consequence of failure or withdrawal is greater vulnerability to terrorism over here. Recall this enemy, the international terrorist one, is not the other capable of toppling Pakistan, but al-Qaida, a ‘maximum’ of 100 of whom remain in the territory our soldiers die fighting for. Should we withdraw or fail, Ashdown believes, al-Qaida would again have half of Afghanistan to hatch and grow their plots unworried by western predation. This is probably wrong: the US is no more going to let new training camps operate undisturbed than it will be able to empty the extent of rural Afghanistan of all enemies. Indeed, one increasingly popular strategy would restrict the provision of security to urban foci. McChrystal’s rawest dreams would not entertain the conquering for Karzai of all Afghanistan.
Ashdown’s third prediction – failure or withdrawal would damage NATO – is fair enough, but his ‘deadly and probably mortal blow’ (not mortal and probably deadly?) is a weird overstatement, like Con Coughlin’s ‘the existential threat posed [by Islamist terrorists]’: if we withdrew unilaterally, the blow would be less to NATO than to Britain in respect of it.
The fouth and last is plausibly bizarre. Consider the phrase ‘mortal blow’. That must mean our failure in Afghanistan of a government which some attest is just as repressive (‘medieval’) as its predecessor and which is certainly fraudulent would, according to Ashdown, halt forever the modernisation of Islam. Again: the defeat of Islam’s fundamentalists, which I would have considered an intra-religious matter, is the total responsibility of the West – and militarily! They have invented a freedom bomb. Worse than an overstatement, this is a distortion. Jason Burke:
It is almost certain that any stable Afghanistan is going to be much more conservative, much more anti-western and much more authoritarian than we would like.
Ashdown’s murky speculation is not what’s really wrong with the piece. I can of course agree that, ‘These are, to put it mildly, outcomes we should seek to avoid’ (as long as Ashdown agrees we should balance this with an equal determination to avoid the deaths of more troops and foreign innocents). No, his column’s problem is its recommended fix for those dire outcomes: ‘shifting our emphasis from national institutions to local ones.’ That’s it! Read the whole thing. I don’t even know that he says we should do what Obama does (once he decides), it’s not clear, and anyway we cannot not. To recap: for Ashdown, here, occupier-sponsored local government has the power to prevent the fall of Pakistan to militants, finish al-Qaida terrorist operations from Afghan territory, and win back Islam from the fundamentalists.
(It’s odd that Nader Mousavizadeh, who in analysis wholly different to Ashdown’s argues that Afghanistan is undergoing a civil war in which the coalition has taken sides and which it cannot end, offers the same policy advice: ‘What we confront is not, in fact, an insurgency but rather a civil war — one whose resolution can only be found in a new decentralized Afghan politics based on the enduring, if ugly, realities of power there, and not through another decade of Western military intervention.’ But Mousavizadeh’s decentralisation would entail withdrawal: ‘The reality is that the War of 9/11 against al Qaeda and its backers will not be won — or lost — in Afghanistan.’)
Now this is a predicament of rhetoric: Ashdown has the ominous persuasive set-up, but no consoling smart pay-off. If he’s right then we’re stuck with local government as the ‘solution’ to terrorism and nuclear-armed Jihad. This suggests to me that avoiding his four outcomes doesn’t really depend on not withdrawing and not failing in Afghanistan, as he wants to argue. Which is because, he knows, the only eventuality that is sure to prompt withdrawal is the continuation of the loss of public support now occurring. His column is propaganda against that loss.
Malcolm Rifkind shares Ashdown’s intuition. About the political realities he is right: neither Obama nor Brown can withdraw while it looks anything like defeat or surrender. One senses this fear is the decisive reason why we’ll stay. Just listen to Coughlin:
at least he [Kim Howells] now has the distinction of being the first Labour politician of rank to put his name publicly to what could become our terms of surrender.
(We should be wary of such militarism, because if we accept it, we gift the hawks a permanently renewable justification for war, even if McChrystal fails. Is it a surrender if we lose nothing?) It seems obvious Obama will have to give McChrystal a good whack at the surge advocated for and let him show that COIN, suitably adapted from Iraq, can work in even thornier situations, or that it can’t. Brown and then Cameron will consent automatically. I don’t even not support this: my single hard policy recommendation is merely that the British government should bind itself, not necessarily publicly and rather in the style of this reported ultimatum, to troop reductions in the event after three to five years of its own timescale of COIN’s failure. But how does Rifkind make his case?
In his broadside at Howells I think were he honest he would have acknowledged the difference between saying that terrorism as domestic law enforcement (hackishly, ‘fortress Britain’) will be enough, and saying that terrorism as domestic law enforcement will be a substitute for that which our suppression of the Afghan insurgency will achieve, demonstrably. To do Howells’ thinking for him I’ll say he is where he is precisely because he doesn’t believe the Afghanistan war can get us what law enforcement, with its roster of foiled plots, has shown it can.
The sad fact is that about 80% of planned terrorist incidents in this country have originated from planning and training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. We cannot just pull out our forces without giving an unprecedented boost to al-Qaida and their allies.
(The linked story actually says ‘three quarters’.) This is deceptive in two ways: (1) it merges together Afghanistan and Pakistan – how much of the 80% / three quarters is Afghanistan’s share? The Coalition’s MQ-9s are its only troops in Pakistan (perhaps with special forces), because our engagement there is fundamentally politically limited. We can lavish them with armaments but we cannot win their war. And (2) the second sentence is a non sequitur. It is too strong a claim, for its undeclared assumption is that our forces can prevent terrorist islamists planning and training, now or in Rifkind’s desired end-state. But you can plan and train anywhere. Atta trained in Florida! To stop terrorists planning and training, you have to eliminate all terrorists; the US with its satellites and infinite cash hasn’t caught bin Laden eight years after 9/11. Yes, you can make it harder to train, as we’ve already done forcing them out of Nangarhar in 2001 – so the proper question is how much blood we want to pay for how much hindrance.
There’s less to object to in the second half. Rifkind’s ‘The reality is that such a unilateral withdrawal would not only destroy our special relationship with President Obama’ is worrying because I don’t think it’s at all clear that a Britain whose foreign policy is more independent of Washington is weaker and less respected than one that pretty much has to do everything the US wants. What’s ‘special’ about this relationship? Doesn’t it reek of timidity? Matthew Yglesias’ anonymous Chinese has the pungent comment, ‘over the past decade you’ve spent $1 trillion on Iraq and Afghanistan, we’ve spent $1 trillion building the future of China.’ I don’t think the war has gilded our reputation there (Walt agrees), and I doubt continuing it another five years would change that.
Rifkind echoes Ashdown’s point that our withdrawal would lose Pakistan’s war for it. My ignorance hobbles me here. Tell me how a force of Pashtuns resisting what they see as hostile occupation with nothing more potent than AKs, rockets and explosives could be willing or able to effect an Islamabad coup. Is the assumption they will when they take power in Kabul go officially to war?
Then comes the policy advice and an Ashdownian disappointment: ‘The proper alternative to the status quo is not unilateral British withdrawal. It is to ensure that, over the next three years, the Afghan army is trained and enlarged to enable it to take full responsibility for ensuring stability and security in their country.’ That’ll do it! A decade-young tribally-compromised army in the fitful control of a corrupt and weak administration will shut down al-Qaida’s planning and training for terrorism on the border, shield our interests and save our reputation, and win Pakistan’s assault on Lashkar-e-Islam. The set-up overshadows the pay-off. It seems if Rifkind’s dystopian outcomes are well foreseen, there’s nothing we can do that will avoid them.
I’d hazard that in the minds of these commentators and sustaining their incoherence is the fantasy of a robust Afghan state that we might given another five or ten years fight into life. Is this impossible? It is not I think but if our eight years’ experience in the country tells us anything it’s that it’s so unlikely we should not invest another eight in the hope. Our politicians’ resolve should (and does) trouble us – what if the fantasy is only a fantasy? Jeff Randall:
What has cracked, however, is enthusiasm for their task, largely because too few of us have the faintest notion of what victory looks like. The idea that, after a bloody military campaign, we can leave behind a “normalised”, democratic Afghanistan, free from the Taliban, with sufficient resources and appetite to police itself, tests credulity to destruction.
Advocates against withdrawal have the luxury of a status quo bias of unusual strength tugging their way: it can always be asked, Well what would you do? and since the alternative natural to war (recall Coughlin) is ‘surrender’, the question can brandish its implied answer like a conclusive argument. Ashdown and Rifkind in their columns assume that withdrawal means an al-Qaida flourishing without restraint and the embarrassment of defeat for Britain. But they must know there is no prospect of this, so their columns have the effect of limiting discussion to a tactically helpful duologue, with non-serious defeatists in rigged subordination to serious duty-bound warmakers. (We can’t lose if we keep going.) America, though I’d guess Obama wants an endgame rather than a functioning nation, won’t withdraw whatever we do at least until McChrystal has had his turn, so their only valid counterfactual is the disruption of NATO. (And that simplified: if Britain wanted withdrawal, it could pursue coordination through private channels, and given failure would not have to do what Canada has.) The real choice, which neither writer addresses or admits, is that between Petraeus-McChrystal counterinsurgency and a more conservative, Stewart-like mission of development and counterterrorism. I can’t see that COIN will not win politically, but in moderation (few think Obama will opt for all McChrystal’s 40 000) and in the short term, so for now pundits will have no difficulty conceiving of their opponents as cowards who want to ignore al-Qaida just until they decapitate the Queen.
52 people died on 7/7, 2005. 409 soldiers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Before they think that they are on the side that wants to win, whatever victory is to them, supporters of the war like Rifkind and Ashdown should ask themselves, looking emotionlessly to the facts, whether carrying on will not become a different and bloodier way of giving up.
Update: It’s a trend: Boris Johnson had a column this morning (9 Nov.) in which the same rhetorical moves compel the same incoherence. He argues in brief: withdrawal would mean ‘military humiliation’, ‘surrender’, hoisting ‘the white flag’. Therefore we should (1) not leave, (2) stay, (3) do what America does and (4) send more helicopters. As I say I think this kind of militaristic framing is risky. Johnson’s fumbled cheerleading flirts with the implication that anything less than his ill-defined win (an event he concedes is likely to occur in the long term – the short’s for making things winnable) would constitute a betrayal of our military dead. But Johnson is conservative. If I fear that some things cannot be done he has doctrinal grounds to. In the column it’s as though, could one say, ‘What if it’s impossible?’ and he heard, he’d reply, ‘It can’t be.’
