Copyright © 2010 Times of India
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World leaders meeting in London recently to discuss Afghanistan’s future have dealt themselves a weak hand. The principal obstacles to success in Afghanistan have not been the adversary’s strength or any lack of support for the international mission by the Afghan public. Rather, the primary obstacles to victory have been western temporising, irresolution and planned force reductions on a timeline that better suits the Taliban’s strategic objectives than our own. The weakness of the Afghan government, a critical handicap, is itself partly a by-product of these broader strategic failures that have incentivised Afghan leaders to hedge against international abandonment in ways detrimental to state-building and development.
The litany of western strategic errors in Afghanistan spans multiple administrations of different political stripes on both sides of the Atlantic. Chief among them have been the chronic underinvestment in building up the Afghan security forces; the deployment of insufficient international forces, many with caveats constraining effective military action; the lack of an international civilian development footprint commensurate with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) military role; the failure to “Afghanise” massive aid flows in ways that have hollowed out rather than built Afghan capacity; an over-investment in relations with Afghanistan’s central government at the expense of connecting Afghans to provincial and local institutions of governance; the lack of any concerted strategy to strengthen liberal forces in neighbouring Pakistan; and the absence of Pakistani military pressure until recently on terrorist sanctuaries along the Afghan border.
US president Barack Obama and his European partners, led by Great Britain, are making welcome course corrections, from ramping up police training to expanding the size of the Afghan National Army to surging military forces with a new mission of protecting the Afghan people. India is playing a critical role, supporting the development of democratic Afghan institutions and building critical infrastructure to fuel the Afghan economy. For their part, majorities of Afghans continue to support democracy in their country, remain willing if not eager to tolerate the presence of international forces, and viscerally oppose any Taliban restoration.
Why, then, does the adversary appear to have the momentum in this conflict? Why are the Quetta shura and Pakistani intelligence already planning for the day the Karzai government falls and the Taliban assumes power in the Pashtun heartland? Why are friendly countries like India bracing themselves for a western defeat in Afghanistan? How can the combined power of the world’s democracies be insufficient to defeat a force of 25,000 insurgents lacking popular support and legitimacy?
The answers to many of these questions lie not in the Hindu Kush but in western capitals. Transatlantic leaders have failed to persuade their publics that the security of the West is at stake in Afghanistan. American and European forces are fighting and dying there to prevent it from ever again becoming a sanctuary for terrorists with global reach. Defeat in Afghanistan would embolden every violent Islamic movement that hopes to inflict mass casualties on civilians throughout the West and South Asia by exporting terror, calling into question the values and security of open societies everywhere.
Perversely, western leaders have undermined both public support for the Afghan mission and the potency of the ongoing military surge by announcing premature troop-withdrawal deadlines. Why should western publics recommit to a mission whose importance their own leaders minimise by publicly tabling exit strategies that seem more likely to produce defeat than victory? And why should the Taliban even bother to fight NATO forces when it can simply wait them out?
Transatlantic leaders have also fuelled the adversary’s esprit de corps by supporting reconciliation with elements of the Taliban, a subject of intense discussion in London. No counter-insurgency has been won without taking insurgents off the battlefield by splitting and coopting the adversary. But to be successful, such efforts must be made from a position of military strength join us and be part of our winning coalition, or we will defeat you not from the current position of weakness in which the West finds itself, with Obama’s declared deadline for the drawdown of American military forces just over a year away.
If there is one thing the allies can accomplish in the wake of the London summit, it is to signal to the Afghan Taliban and to all Afghans and neighboring powers sitting on the fence, waiting to cast their lot with the winning side that NATO is in this fight to win it. It must stay as long as necessary to help Afghans build a government, economy and security forces that will coopt, defeat or render the Taliban irrelevant to the aspirations of the Afghan people, which for reasons both moral and strategic must be safeguarded in a representative state allied to the world’s great democracies.
