Political Progress in Afghanistan Is Crucial

Sending more soldiers in will help, but nation-building efforts, as in Iraq, are just as important.

By Andrew C. Schneider, Associate Editor, The Kiplinger Letter

August 11, 2008

Will sending more troops to Afghanistan ensure victory? Hardly. More troops are needed for combat missions and for training the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. It's a point on which both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain now agree. They both want to add 10,000 troops to the 33,000 U.S. and 30,000 allied soldiers already there.

It's a good bet as well that either candidate, if elected, would push ahead with Defense Secretary Robert Gates' proposal to provide $20 billion in aid to double the size of the Afghan army to more than 120,000 troops.

But it's nation building, not force, that will be the real key. That process will be even harder than it has been in Iraq. Police forces, courts, schools and other institutions are weak or nonexistent in Afghanistan. Corruption is rife, fueled by a $4 billion annual trade in opium, heroin and cannabis. Simply destroying the crops, even if it were possible, would not solve the problem without providing farmers and others involved in the trade with alternative means of earning a living. One estimate has 3.3 million people, or 10% of the population, working in the drug trade.

And the Afghan central government has little authority beyond Kabul, the Afghanistan capital. The real power rests with local governors and tribal chiefs. The U.S. and Afghan President Hamid Karzai have co-opted many such warlords with power sharing arrangements and financial assistance. But keeping such figures from taking arms against the government doesn't solve the underlying problem. "Afghan political elites are focused more on the struggle for power than governance," retired U.S. Army General Barry McCaffrey writes in a report on his July trip to Afghanistan. Unless such local and provincial leaders place a greater emphasis on fighting corruption, the country risks becoming a failed state again.

The U.S. also will have to encourage defections from the Taliban as part of its counterinsurgency efforts. "Deals will need to be forged, similar to what General [David] Petraeus did with Sunnis in Iraq," says Kamran Bokhari, senior analyst for the Middle East and South Asia at private intelligence firm Stratfor. Local tribesmen might switch sides if they can be convinced that the U.S. and the Kabul government will do more for them than the Taliban. Similarly to Iraq, though, hard-core foreign jihadists will remain to will fight on.

The prospect of making such arrangements with any Taliban fighters will sit ill with many U.S. forces that have spent nearly seven years fighting them -- not to mention both McCain and Obama. The problem is that there is little sense of Afghan nationhood -- most Afghans reserve their primary loyalty for their ethnic group or tribe. Pashtuns comprise the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, roughly 42% of the population, and the Pashtun-dominated Taliban takes full advantage of that. "There's only one communal-wide entity [in Afghanistan] that enjoys large support and has the firepower to impose itself, and that's the Taliban," says Bokhari. For this reason, any nation-building effort that excludes the Taliban is likely to prove futile.

Help from Pakistan is also vital, and that will be the biggest challenge. Pakistan has its own large and restive Pashtun population, spread out across two provinces and the Federally Administered Tribal Area along the mountainous border shared with Afghanistan. The U.S. has long pressed Pakistan to do more to seal the border and crack down on Taliban fighters using Pakistani territory as a safe haven from which to launch attacks. But Islamabad has never been able to enforce its rule totally in the borderlands. That is unlikely to change soon.

This poses a strategic problem for the U.S., and not just because of the Taliban. Al Qaeda has reconstituted its base of operations in Pakistan's mountainous west. The group lacks the freedom of movement and resources it enjoyed in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan prior to 2001, but the chances of it regaining the ability to strike at the U.S. increase the longer it can operate freely. With Pashtun tribesmen willing to fight to the death to protect al Qaeda guests, the Pakistani Army has little inclination to go after them.

Complicating matters still further, several radical Islamist groups have banded together to form a Pakistan Taliban that is waging its own insurgency against Islamabad's rule. Pakistani government forces have often come out the worse in combat with these homegrown jihadists.

Many Pakistanis know the threat Islamist militants pose to their country, particularly in the wake of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto last December. But that doesn't make them any more willing to fight what they see as the U.S.' battles. For the near future, their top priority will be dismantling the rule of President Pervez Musharraf, who now faces impeachment by the ruling coalition. U.S. ties to Musharraf's military dictatorship have left most Pakistanis deeply suspicious of American motives in the region.

For that reason, the U.S. has to be very careful in considering how to respond to cross-border incursions. Any attacks on Pakistani soil, whether or not they have cooperation from the Pakistani government, add to anti-U.S. sentiment in the country. Anything larger than a targeted strike with a missile or drone could have consequences that far outweigh the benefits. General McCaffrey asserts it would be a political disaster, undercutting the ability of Islamabad to provide any further support. "They may well stop our air and ground logistics access across Pakistan and place our entire NATO presence in severe jeopardy."

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