Afghanistan Archive

During the last several weeks, Americans have found themselves back in the middle of a fierce debate over our continuing military effort in Afghanistan. What was Bush’s forgotten war had, until recently, seemed quite safely transformed in public opinion into Obama’s “war of necessity.” Now, because of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for significantly more troops, coming on the heels of his public declaration that the Taliban are essentially “winning,” the ruling Democrats have suddenly been thrust back into “quagmire” mode. Predictably, we are once again awash in feverish Boomer analogies to Vietnam, despite the pronounced absence in Afghanistan of any […]

Just a few followup items I thought I’d get into the habit of posting: – With regard to my observation about the lack of Iraq or Afghanistan War literature or cinema, Jonathan Bernstein makes the obvious point, which I myself had noticed on reading the post afterwards, that all the novels and films I mentioned with regard to WWII and Vietnam were published or released well after the end of those wars. He also makes a less obvious, but just as astute, observation about the relation between a war’s popularity and the kind of works of art (propaganda vs. critical) […]

James Joyner tackles one of the more irritating refrains used to argue for the need to succeed in Afghanistan — namely, the claim that NATO’s credibility will not survive failure there. I’d add that to the extent that NATO tried to reinvent itself as an alliance that would project force in out-of-theater operations, there’s a kernel of truth to the claim that Afghanistan has damaged its credibility. But it’s not so much success or failure in Afghanistan that are to blame, but rather NATO’s dismal failure to create a unified chain of command with uniform rules of engagement of the […]

Two news items from Afghanistan made quite an impact yesterday, offering a moment of clarity in what had become a largely theoretical debate over both tactics and strategy. The first is the increasing certainty that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s election victory will not withstand the taint of widespread voting fraud. The second is a riveting account from Jonathan Landay of an extended firefight between Afghan Army troops supported by embedded U.S. Marine trainers and Taliban insurgents. With regards to the election, while fraud is almost inevitable in such a context, the problem arises both from what turnout revealed about popular […]

BERLIN — The German public and many left-leaning members of parliament have expressed shock and anger over Germany’s role in an airstrike in Afghanistan last week that killed an as-yet-undetermined number of Afghan civilians. The airstrike on two hijacked gas tankers was called in by a German commander in Afghanistan’s Kunduz province, reportedly based on grainy video footage and the assurance of just one on-the-ground informant that those surrounding the trucks were all Taliban insurgents. The German people, deeply pacifist since the end of World War II, are largely opposed to the NATO mission in Afghanistan, as well as Germany’s […]

Kenneth Payne flags something I’ve noted before as well: No significant works of art have yet emerged from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. If that seems like a trivial observation, consider the impact of “All Quiet on the Western Front” or WWII-era literature (Mailer, Heller, Vonnegut) on American society and culture, or Vietnam-era cinema (Deer Hunter, The Boys of Company C, Apocalypse Now, even Platoon) and TV (MASH). Part of this has to do with structural changes in the media. Publishing is now overwhelmingly dominated by memoirs and non-fiction, both of which we’ve seen with regard to these wars. […]

The Taliban is running out of money. That was the conclusion some observers reached when the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime reported last week that Afghanistan’s poppy crop is down nearly a quarter compared to last year. But other experts caution against declaring financial victory. If anything, the behind-the-scenes campaigns to dry up Taliban funding are only now catching up to the extremist group’s sophisticated financial operations. Poppies, the basic ingredient in opium, represent Afghanistan’s biggest export — albeit an illegal one. They “fund the activities of criminals, insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere,” according to the UNODC […]

The U.S. is determined to implement a counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, and one of the most important concepts of counterinsurgency is securing the people: Insurgents and counterinsurgents alike must appeal to the people they’re fighting amongst in order to deny the other popular support. But what does it mean to “secure the people” of Afghanistan? Some of the U.S. government’s best thinkers about defense policy and counterinsurgency, many of whom cut their teeth on the urban battlefields of Iraq, have finally begun to consider this question. But although Iraq is vastly different from Afghanistan, there seems to be no end […]

Ryan Crocker’s Newsweek essay seems like a good place to start for today’s Afghanistan roundup. Using a recapitulation of the past eight years of U.S. Middle East/South Asia policy, in the context of the past 25 years of U.S. Middle East policy, Crocker comes up with not much more than the need for strategic patience in the region. Even while cautioning against expectations that what worked in Iraq will work in Afghanistan, and also while entirely ignoring some of the major errors of the past eight years that complicate the task ahead, Crocker essentially argues that we need to stay […]

Here’s a radical proposition: Withdraw from Afghanistan. That’s just what stalwart nationally syndicated columnist George Will called for on Tuesday, setting off a week of stormy debate that culminated in the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff responding to his Washington Post op-ed, titled, “Time to Leave Afghanistan.” With deliberations in Washington set to begin in earnest about a newly delivered strategy by the new commander on the ground, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Will has opened up the most fundamental question the country faces in foreign affairs today: Should the U.S. be in Afghanistan in […]

This Thomas Rid analysis of the Afghanistan strategic debate has been making the rounds, and rightly so. It gets to the heart of why both sides of the argument are so hard to defend in a way that appeals to my Gemini nature — namely, because neither side is really wrong. Terrorism is simultaneously a global threat with local manifestations, the war against al-Qaida will simultaneously damage it while helping it attract new followers, etc. At best, the only thing we can conclude with certainty is that both approaches come with uncertain benefits and more certain costs, which leads to […]

Just to clarify a bit on this previous post, the only national security interest in preventing a Taliban victory in Afghanistan is based on the premise that if they could return things to the status quo ante, they would continue to maintain a relationship with al-Qaida. I happen to agree that this is likely if they could “win” to that degree. But I’m not sure they could actually do that, especially if we maintain support to the Afghan National Army. It could also be that the al-Qaida leadership feels safer where they are now, or elsewhere, or a decentralized combination […]

In response to George Will’s call to “offshore” the Afghanistan War, Joshua Foust makes an argument that had been buzzing around in my brain, since it presents quite a challenge to those, like Will but also like myself, who argue for an end to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan: The trouble is, this describes Afghanistan, circa 1998-2004 or so. Itdidn’t work. In fact, I’ll take it a step further and say it actuallymade us worse off: relying solely on drones and cruise missiles to workfor us, we demonstrated we cannot assemble the necessary intelligencefor effective air strikes from satellites […]