Our Afghan Insanity

Oct. 30, 2015

America has been at war in Afghanistan for 14 years. Yet on October 15, President Obama informed us that he has decided to keep 9,800 American troops in the country for yet another year. He also decided to pass this failed mission onto his successor by keeping more than 5,600 troops there through 2017. Obama said, “The bottom line is, in key areas of the country, the security situation is still very fragile, and in some places there is risk of deterioration.”

No doubt about that. Even before Afghan National Army and police forces fled the northern city of Kunduz when several hundred Taliban arrived and temporarily took the city, there had been a series of suicide attacks in major cities, including Kabul. This followed a virtual takeover by the Taliban of parts of northern provinces — Helmand, Uruzgan, Badakhshan and other rural areas away from the major cities. Insurgent attacks and Afghan casualties are significantly higher this year than in 2014.

The U.S. commander warned Congress last month that we’re likely to see more Afghan cities fall to the Taliban or, worse yet, ISIS (the “Islamic State”), if we stick to our withdrawal schedule. So the specter of yet another collapse like Iraq is used to justify this extension of a war that we had been told would be entirely an Afghan affair by the end of this year.

The extension of the military mission does nothing to address the two basic problems that have plagued our Afghanistan war from the beginning: Our inability or unwillingness to confront Pakistan’s complicity in supporting and sheltering the insurgency; and our disinterest in demanding an end to Afghanistan’s endemic corruption.

With regard to Pakistan, how can it be that Osama Bin Laden spent years hiding “in plain sight” in Abbottabad without the knowledge of Pakistani officials? How is it that Pakistan was able to orchestrate “peace talks” with the Taliban yet was unable to find Taliban leader Mullah Omar had been dead for two years? When will we acknowledge that the insurgency in Afghanistan will go on so long as Pakistan wants it to? No counterinsurgency has ever succeeded when the insurgents have safe haven across a common border and adequate funding, which describes the Afghanistan insurgency in a nutshell.

The second reason why this extension of the military mission makes no sense is the endemic corruption that prevails throughout the Afghan political and security structures. It’s this critical obstacle that was the theme of a brilliant discussion by Sarah Chayes to a nearcapacity audience Oct. 15 at the City Opera House in Traverse City (she was promoting her superb new book, “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security.”).

In it, Ms. Chayes reveals how corruption turns our well-intentioned efforts around the world into an exercise in futility — not just in Afghanistan, but in failed and failing states from Nigeria to Egypt to Yemen. She draws on historical examples to show that leaders who fail to provide for the needs of their people, who live like kings amidst grinding poverty, who ignore pleas for protection from ordinary citizens; such leaders are bound to fall. Such are the leaders we support in Afghanistan, Egypt and many other countries.

She describes the Afghan state as an example of a “vertically-integrated criminal organization”.

Our U.S. taxpayer funds are going to feed the military, the construction cartels, the police, the government bureaucracy from top to bottom and the criminals who pose as “governors,” advisers and consultants.

The truly painful message in her book is that we are supporting the very same people and institutions that are exploiting and abusing the citizens of these unfortunate countries and that, by doing so, we are seen as the protectors of the same criminals that the insurgents and opposition figures are trying to discredit.

None of this should come as news to us. It’s been an unspoken secret that we support whomever claims to be promoting our security interests. Never mind that the “powers that be” might not show much concern about corruption, human rights, or democracy. But by supporting the oppressors, we are actually feeding the insurgencies we purport to fight.

In her book, Ms. Chayes recalls an anticorruption initiative that would have required the arrest of well-known, powerful personalities who were deeply immersed in the criminal structure that poses as a state in Afghanistan. But when that initiative came into conflict with our alliances, with the very powerbrokers who had gained favor with the CIA, it was quietly scuttled by White House staffers.

Ms. Chayes’ message is a tough one to swallow. We would have to abandon many leaders in developing countries whom we rely upon for permission to base our troops, our intelligence systems and our covert operations. But we would do well to heed her message.

She is quite unlike so many of the “talking heads” who base their ideas on observations made from the safe distance of Washington. Ms. Chayes spent the better part of a decade living in the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, speaks the local language and, often at great personal risk, has tried to render advice to Afghan, American and NATO military and civilian leaders.

She knows how hard it will be to wean ourselves off the comforting illusion that what we are doing in Afghanistan and numerous other countries is working. Accepting that our efforts are actually counter-productive is a bitter pill, and forces us to ask if all the blood and treasure was in vain. But once we reach the understanding that staying in Afghanistan for yet another year or two (or ten) will serve no useful purpose, we will be in a position to acknowledge that we have failed.

The president says repeatedly that there is no military solution in Afghanistan (or Syria, or Iraq, or Yemen), yet that is all that he has proposed: “Let’s do more of what we’ve been doing for the last 14 years.” Einstein defined “insanity” as repeating a failed experiment in the hopes that the result will be different this time.

It’s time to end the insanity. We should withdraw our troops from harm’s way immediately and hopefully learn from the mistakes we have made.

Jack Segal is a retired senior U.S. and NATO diplomat who made 40 trips to Afghanistan from 2002–2010. He co-chairs with his wife Karen the International Affairs Forum which will host retired Undersecretary of State Ambassador Tom Pickering Nov. 19 at Milliken Auditorium.