America’s Many Endless Battles

June 10, 2016

U.S. forces are struggling to help indigenous troops make headway against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria, while in Afghanistan, 10,000 American troops are trying to pull together an Afghan fighting force to keep at bay a growing insurgency. Wars that began over a decade ago seem to be endless. Despite a trillion dollars(!) and the loss of life for thousands of brave Americans, we seem unable to "win" any of these conflicts. Is"winning" no longer an option?

Maybe it was inevitable, but when President Obama tried to extricate the U.S. from the wars of the Bush administration, he quickly realized that good intentions don’t magically translate into an exit strategy. Afghanistan was, for President George W. Bush, an inescapable response to Al Qaida’s blatant challenge to our nation. But after U.S. troops ousted the Taliban regime, we were quickly confronted by the reality that, outside a few major cities, Afghanistan was mired socially, politically, in every imaginable way in the 14th century. We halfheartedly pressed on, even while the attention of Washington shifted to a new war, and we’re still doing so today.

The situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating to such a degree that there’s renewed pressure to increase our troop commitment there. You can see the evidence of the failings of our Afghan allies in the steady stream of Afghans seeking refugee status across Europe. Already 200,000 Afghans have fled what seems to be a hopeless struggle in their homeland. Insurgents from the Taliban, Al Qaida, the Haqqani network, Hizb-i-Islami and now ISIS control an everincreasing swath of the countryside.

With the country’s best and brightest fleeing and Afghan security forces losing soldiers to desertion faster than new ones can be trained, U.S. troops are left to try to whip the Afghan forces into good enough shape to slow the loss of territory to the insurgents. "Winning" is no longer in our playbook.

The current "unity" government of President Ashraf Ghani and "CEO" Abdullah Abdullah remains unable to create a national identity. How bad is it? When Doug Stanton and I toured the country in 2010, we met regional Governor Nur Mohammed Atta in the northern Afghan "capital" city Mazar-e-Sharif. Atta (no relation to the 9/11 attacker) was a slick, self-absorbed thug who was completely in control of his relatively wealthy region.

Two years ago, President Ghani decided that Atta was just too corrupt to keep in office, so he fired him. Atta’s response was to openly rebuff President Ghani: "They cannot remove me by force – I am with my people." To this day Atta remains the de facto governor, warlord and commander of Afghanistan’s northern region. Aside from our ongoing training of the Afghan military (which seems to have a one step forward, two steps backward nature to it), what can we do about a government that cannot enforce its authority much beyond the capital city?

I recall the sharp message I once received from a member of the Afghan Parliament. He was wearing traditional Afghan garb and was identified to me as a Taliban sympathizer. Sitting across a conference table from me, he proceeded to launch into a diatribe of the many injustices our forces had committed against the Afghan people – the night raids into people’s homes, the accidental killings, unexplained detentions.

Then he rose from his seat. I did the same. He glared into my eyes and said, "You people. You want to tell us how to run our country." He leaned closer. "You want to tell me how to live in my house"¦and you are never going to do that. Never."

I knew that most of his accusations had a basis in fact. I had heard similar, slightly more diplomatic lectures from then-President Hamid Karzai. Too often, our tactics had turned the people against us.

The complexity of the wars we are fighting is graphically and tragically revealed in a brilliant film, "Restrepo." The film profiles the experiences of one infantry unit in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. U.S. soldiers fought for years to gain support for the Afghan government from villagers whose attitudes were just like those of the Afghani who had lectured me. The Afghans wanted us to just leave them alone; we brought trouble to their primitive lives; not hope, not "democracy," not "progress." They had lived with war for decades and saw our presence as yet one more foreign intervention, fraught with danger for them and their families.

In one scene, a frustrated young U.S. Army captain laments that while his troops had "successfully" killed eight insurgents in one battle, they had also killed five children and wounded ten or so civilians. Our soldiers’ everhardening attitudes toward villagers, as more of our troops were killed and wounded, speaks volumes of the futility of our efforts there and on battlefields further afield.

As U.S. forces support and mentor fighters in yet another ongoing struggle in Iraq and Syria, it’s worth considering where all this "engagement" is taking us. As in Afghanistan, the U.S. has very little influence over the battle that counts – the battle for political legitimacy in both countries. We’re told that eventually the Iraqi Army will retake the city of Fallujah from ISIS. But who will control the Iranian-backed Shiite militias who are lurking on the edges of the advancing government troops? Who will ensure that another sectarian bloodbath like that in Fallujah in 2004 that took the lives of 122 American troops and thousands of Iraqis will not be repeated?

Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan – everywhere we look, everywhere we send our brave soldiers and diplomats, we should ask ourselves: Are we really able to tell these people how they should run their countries?

Maybe we can’t just withdraw from the whole mess – after all, Colin Powell’s "Pottery Barn Rules" apply (you broke it, you own it). But there comes a time when "we the people" have to ask whether we are making more enemies than friends with all this "engagement."

Jack Segal served on the National Security Council and as Chief Political Adviser to NATO’s operational commander in Afghanistan. He and his wife, Karen Puschel, co-chair the International Affairs Forum. The IAF’s next speaker on June 16 is Ambassador Robert Ford, who was the last U.S. Ambassador in Syria.