Obama’s announced troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, although a cosmetic climb-down affecting only the 33,000 ‘surge’ troops he threw at the country from December 2009, has restored the Afghan War as a modish topic on the Washington talk circuit.
At a policy briefing yesterday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in D.C. – ‘Afghanistan, Pakistan: Race for Success’ – Dr. Anthony Cordesman, recently returned from a trip to Afghanistan, sketched out what remains achievable for the U.S. and her allies as the bills keep climbing and the Taliban continues to land fresh recruits and firepower.
The laudably frank Dr. Cordesman, holder of the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at CSIS and a national security analyst on ABC News, uttered a truism of counter-insurgency warfare: ‘this is a war of attrition, not a tactical conflict.’
Herein lies the trouble. The Taliban have demonstrated a staying power that few predicted. They have been helped rather than hindered by their lack of a monolithic centralized power structure, and a seemingly bottomless supply of frustrated, unemployed, radicalised young men (‘talib’ after all means ‘student’) willing to expend themselves before superior American firepower: one of the many glum developments Cordesman noted was the understandable rise in Afghan sensitivity towards civilian casualties and military activity. But it is worth reflecting further on quite how amorphous this enemy is.
The Mullah Omars of the country may wield considerable authority in certain corners, but the ‘Taliban’ – an epithet which, much like ‘al-Qaeda’, denotes a multiplicity of militant Islamic groups with often tenuous links and conflicting interests (although all ranged against the presence of allied forces) – is not, as is often portrayed, an exclusively Pashtun collective with its heartlands in the country’s south (which allied troops have more or less brought under control), but a protean entity that spills across Afghanistan’s substantial ethnic and regional divides. The existence of the northerly Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan is testament to this, alongside the more notable Haqqani network in the eastern regions which General Patraeus has identified as the new frontier of American operations, if money and troop levels allow. A regional divide and conquer strategy could never get off the ground.
Cordesman’s ‘attrition’ thesis, and the persistence and variety of the hydra-headed enemy, throws troubling light on Obama’s accelerated withdrawal timetable, with the surge troops set to leave within 15 months. This troop reduction is not comprehensive enough to address the mounting costs of the war, both human and financial – America will remain entrenched in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future – but it has enough symbolic clout to give confidence, not only to anti-war liberals and conservatives at home, but also to Taliban networks intent on holding out long enough to see America and her allies exhaust themselves (as has long been their aim). Obama, it seems, has landed the U.S. in the worst of both worlds.
One powerpoint slide in the policy briefing outlined what, in present circumstances, may constitute a victory for the allied forces. Tellingly, the word ‘winning’ was couched in nervous quotation marks, as if the very notion of ‘winning’ a war was a crass oversimplification of the complexities of contemporary warfare, fit only for the popular media. The notion that the allies are ‘losing’ would similarly be dismissed as a layman’s cheap fantasy, as would the possibility that this war is ultimately unwinnable.
The administration is happy to leave the war, and the costly institution-building deemed essential to Afghan stability, in an open-ended grey area where finality has become a semantic impossibility. The same drifting logic is at work in NATO’s war – sorry, ‘engagement’ – in Libya.
It’s about time somebody called Obama’s bluff.
