I am astonished that after fifteen years the editors of the New York Times have not realized the truth about Afghanistan:
One cannot help but feel horror and déjà vu as the battle over the northern Afghan city of Kunduz unfolds. On Monday, the Taliban seized the city, the first provincial capital to fall to the militants since they were routed by the United States in the war after September 2001.
On Wednesday, American warplanes were back conducting airstrikes, while Special Operations Forces were on the ground helping the Afghan government’s struggling security forces reclaim Kunduz. But Afghan troops were blocked by the Taliban from even reaching the besieged city, while the security of the nearby capital of Baghlan Province appeared under threat.
Afghanistan will never be able to defend itself. There will always be a hazard of violent radical Islamists taking over provincial capitols or the whole country for that matter. That was true in 2002 and it’s true now.
It has a GDP of about $20 billion, a population of about 30 million and, consequently, a per capita GDP of around $670. That’s half that of Pakistan, a very poor country, and 15% of that in Iran. Its border is around 3,500 miles long. With an army of 200,000 that’s about six soldier per mile. It can’t even afford the military it has let alone a larger one.
Its literacy rate is so low it can’t staff an officer corps let alone non-coms.
None of these things are new. They were true when we invaded; they’ll be true if we remain in Afghanistan for another 20 years. In 2001 our workable alternatives were:
- Let Afghanistan be Afghanistan, complete with training camps for Al Qaeda or, today, DAESH. Bomb the training camps every once in a while so they know we’re still looking.
- Invade the country and be prepared to stay indefinitely. Invading the country, replacing its government with one more to our liking, training our replacements, and then boogying out has always been a fantasy.
- Bomb the country until there’s nothing worth blowing up. If something worth blowing up shows up, bomb that, too.
Doing nothing and #3 were both politically impossible in 2001 and #2 has always been politically impossible. We only had one workable alternative and we didn’t take it. Now we’ve wasted hundreds of billions (or trillions) of dollars, thousands of lives, and 15 years.
Option #4: Pay off the local warlords to keep out the terrorists. You cannot be squeamish about the drug trade, but you might be able to stop the direct shipments to the US. If you really wanted to get creative, you could pay them extra to target getting the drugs into adversaries.
TB-They will just take the money and do nothing.
#2 may not be possible, but an attempt might be made if the GOP wins in 2016. It is what they wanted all along.
Steve
I made points much along these lines in the comments section of a post at OTB a few days ago. There is a cadre there who believe that #3 was a possibility, particularly in 2001.
It wasn’t. As early as December 2001, there were already editorials condemning GWB’s heavy-handedness in Afghanistan (2002 was an election year, after all). It would have become an avalanche. An endless stream of pictures of injured or dead kids. Such tactics are simply politically impossible in the age of Twitter and Facebook, when every phone is a camera, under our political system and in our political climate.
The main thing we fail to realize is that Afghanistan is not really a country but a collection of tribes.