A Tale of Two Wars: Afghanistan

Saboor isn’t taking any chances. The bus conductor, 30, prepares for his twice-weekly Kabul-to-Kandahar trips by exchanging his city outfit for the filthy tunic and voluminous trousers of a poor mechanic, the better to fool potential robbers. He rubs grease and dirt on his face to conceal from possible Taliban attackers that he is clean-shaven. These precautions, Saboor says, have saved his life. Just the other day, a gang of thieves robbed his passengers at gunpoint. Two weeks ago, Taliban insurgents pulled some 50 passengers off a bus and slaughtered 27 men they falsely claimed were Afghan soldiers.

Seven years after the war to topple the Taliban regime, Afghans are starting to wonder if anything has been achieved. The highway between Kabul and Kandahar was supposed to be a success story. Completed in 2003, it has instead become a symbol of all that plagues Afghanistan: insecurity, corruption and the radical Islamic insurgency that feeds off both. If Afghanistan is ever to fulfill the promise that beckoned when the U.S. first went to war there, those trends will have to be reversed.

That won’t be easy. Monthly casualty figures for U.S. service members in Afghanistan now rival those in Iraq–though there are about a quarter the number of troops there. Insurgent groups have spread to previously peaceful regions. “We are not exactly in a stalemate, but we are still marching uphill,” says a NATO military commander in Kabul. He compares Afghanistan today with “about where we were in Iraq in 2004 to 2005”–which is just before it started to get really bad.

The U.S. intelligence community seems to share that assessment. While still a “work in progress,” the National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan, due out after the U.S. elections, portrays a country on a “downward spiral,” says a Pentagon official who was briefed about the report. The key reasons: a revitalized Taliban, inadequate U.S. and NATO forces, the funds generated for the Taliban by narcotics, and a government so consumed by corruption and inefficiency that it cannot offer a reasonable alternative to the insurgents.

There has been progress, of course. More Afghan children are in school today than at any other time in the nation’s history, and the private sector is growing. But such good news is easily undermined by the increasing insecurity and Afghanistan’s rampant corruption. Ashraf Ghani, a former Finance Minister, says his nation has reached a fork in the road. “It is not inevitable that we go to that downward spiral,” he says. “If we take the right road, we can get to the destination of a stable and eventually prosperous Afghanistan.”

So what is to be done? For most Afghans, the right road starts with better security. Eating pomegranates in a tea shop in Sarobi district, just east of Kabul, Saeed Shah says he was not fond of the Taliban when it was in power. But his once peaceful district has witnessed a wave of criminality and violence–10 French soldiers were slaughtered by insurgents in August–that has him longing for the old regime and its harsh but effective justice. “Yes, there was hardship, but there was also peace,” he says. “You could leave your shop open all night, and no one would steal a thing.” In the south and east, where the insurgency is at its strongest, there are simply not enough troops. Soldiers can clear ground, but when they return to their barracks at night, insurgents terrorize the locals for assisting the foreign and government forces. If Afghans fear that they will be killed for cooperating with the government, they won’t do it. “We’ve got to provide enough security so that the people can feel that they have a future that has some stability and peace to it,” says Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The most obvious solution–an Iraq-style surge–is unlikely to succeed. President Bush has promised to begin sending 8,000 more troops before he leaves office, and both presidential candidates have pledged at least an additional two brigades. But any troops are unlikely to arrive fast enough or in sufficient numbers. Afghanistan is a third larger than Iraq in size, and its terrain is a lot more difficult. Counterinsurgency expert John Nagl has estimated that there should be 600,000 troops–including Afghan ones–inside the country to quell the Taliban and al-Qaeda threat. Currently there are only about 65,000 coalition forces (including 33,000 U.S. troops) on the ground, in addition to some 70,000 Afghan army personnel–of whom fewer than half can fully function on their own–plus an ineffective police force. Iraq, by contrast, has some 160,000 coalition troops and a nearly 600,000-strong professional national-security force. If there is to be a surge at all, it will most likely be an Afghan one. The U.S. has pledged $20 billion to nearly double the Afghan army’s strength by 2012, but it is still short more than half the necessary military trainers to do the job. “The sheer business of training the army, equipping them, deploying them and creating the infrastructure takes time,” says the NATO commander. “And the only way to buy time is to bring in more alliance or coalition troops.”

But most NATO nations either can’t or won’t send more troops, and the U.S. armed forces are spread thin between two wars. So the next U.S. Administration may perforce have to abandon the big stick in favor of speaking more softly. Army General David McKiernan, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has made it clear that there is no purely military solution. “It’s not just a question about more soldiers,” he has said. “It’s a question about more governance, about more economic aid, about more political assistance for the government of Afghanistan.”

All that, and regional politics too. No possible solution in Afghanistan can ignore the dire state of Pakistan. The two countries share a 1,640-mile (2,640 km) border that is impossible to seal. Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas have become a sanctuary not only for the Taliban militants fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan but also for a new base for al-Qaeda. Islamabad says it wants to help. “Pakistan is now ready to take full responsibility for its side of the border and work cooperatively with the Afghan and NATO forces to make sure that that border area is not a source for attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan or around the world,” says Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani. But commanders in Afghanistan privately say they are still skeptical about Pakistan’s intentions and dismayed by its evident lack of a coherent strategy to fight the militants.

Can the U.S., NATO and the Kabul government alone sort out Afghanistan? General David Petraeus, now head of U.S. Central Command, does not think so. A key element of Petraeus’ strategy is likely to involve exploring the chances of reconciliation with more moderate members of the Taliban. Afghan President Hamid Karzai seems to be moving in the same direction; last month he appealed to Taliban leader Mullah Omar for peace and offered to talk. But negotiations will be impossible unless the Taliban renounces all ties to al-Qaeda, its key financial supporter.

Still, Petraeus has one thing going for him. The bulk of Taliban fighters are disaffected Pashtun tribesmen who have lost their traditional power bases and are disillusioned with Kabul. It is these men Petraeus plans to bring to the government’s side, but first they have to be convinced that they have a government worth fighting for. That’s hardly an easy task, for the chronic corruption and ineffectiveness of the Karzai administration have become a festering ulcer on the whole Afghan experiment. “Corruption is the greatest source of instability in this country,” says Ghani, who, while conceding that military force is essential for maintaining stability, calls for a political surge too. “Two hundred judges in the country will do the work of five divisions,” he says. “A thousand bureaucrats committed to integrity will do the work of 10 more.”

In his own way, Shah, in the tea shop, agrees. “The Taliban gave us a dictatorship of fear,” he says. “Karzai has given us a dictatorship of bribes. What we want now is a dictatorship of law.” The next U.S. Administration could do worse than focus on how to help bring that about.