This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
The withdrawal of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) from Afghanistan cannot properly be described as international, an exit, or a strategy. The so-called transition to Afghan leadership by the end of 2014 is a timetable driven largely by U.S. domestic politics. When this timetable is complete, Afghanistan will still be at war.

In December 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama outlined the goal of U.S. policy in Afghanistan: “…to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future.” The most striking feature of this policy is the treatment of al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan and Afghanistan as a single and uniquely dangerous threat. This is not because it is an ungoverned space. Large areas of Somalia and Yemen also fit this description. Nor is it because the population has ideological sympathy for al Qaeda. Pockets of support for al Qaeda can be found elsewhere, including in the West. And it is also not the only staging ground for attacks on the West. Al Qaeda’s affiliates in the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa have, in recent years, proven more lethal than the core of al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

Instead, the region presents a pressing danger due to the unique confluence of radical ideology and nuclear weapons within it. Adherents to radical ideology are spread throughout the globe, and at least nine states have nuclear weapons. However, only in southern Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan are there adherents to al Qaeda’s radical ideology less than a day’s drive from the world’s least secure nuclear arsenal. Moreover, al Qaeda does not need Afghanistan to achieve its goal of acquiring one or more nuclear weapons for use against the West. Even if Afghanistan were perfectly stable, the danger of al Qaeda acquiring nuclear weapons in Pakistan would remain. Without the threat of nuclear terrorism, the insurgency in Afghanistan would be no more important to the West than are similar threats around the world.

To address this threat, the United States conducted a reassessment of its strategy in Afghanistan in 2009. The Obama Administration considered two broad strategies: a fully resourced counterinsurgency and a more limited counterterrorism strategy. The first approach was based on the tenets of counterinsurgency doctrine — protect the population, develop the capabilities of Afghan security forces, and strengthen the legitimacy of the government in Kabul by improving its capacity to provide security and other essential services to the population. This plan would have required about 140,000 ISAF troops, an increase of 40,000 over 2009 levels.

A full counterinsurgency approach might have worked in 2001, but it became politically infeasible by 2009. Consider an ideal alternative history at the outset of the war in Afghanistan. A robust U.S.-led military coalition could have toppled the Taliban, captured or killed Osama bin Laden and other key al Qaeda leaders, and provided post-conflict security to the Afghan people. A strong civilian team could have assisted in developing a legitimate Afghan government capable of providing essential services to the population. Skillful diplomacy could have convinced Pakistan that a stable Afghanistan was in its interests, while security assistance could have helped it deny sanctuary to al Qaeda and the Taliban in its northwest territories. Even in this ideal situation, rooting out extremist elements in Afghanistan and Pakistan would have taken a generation.

Instead, the United States underestimated how many troops it needed, allowing bin Laden and other key al Qaeda figures to escape to Pakistan and security within Afghanistan to deteriorate. The United States then squandered credibility at home and goodwill abroad by launching the war in Iraq. To this day, U.S. civilian assistance is unequal to the challenges of developing a legitimate Afghan government. And elements within the Pakistani government continue to foster chaos in Afghanistan.

Those advocating a program of counterinsurgency in 2009 behaved as if these events either did not happen or did not matter. But a decade’s worth of blunders and misrepresentations has exhausted the patience of the American people. For nearly ten years, U.S. officials insisted that their Afghan policy was succeeding. They did not ask the public to fight the war or to pay for it, and they failed to reveal the deterioration in security on both sides of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Revelations began to emerge around the time that the global economy collapsed in 2008. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, the economy is the top national concern. Devoting the hundreds of billions of dollars required by a counterinsurgency campaign into an open-ended conflict in Afghanistan would have been difficult even in 2001. By 2009, such a policy became impossible.

But the alternative approach, focusing on counterterrorism, was scarcely better. It called for an increased emphasis on capturing or killing key insurgent and terrorist leaders and accelerating the development of Afghan security forces, but it was more a collection of tactics to disrupt al Qaeda than a strategy to defeat it. It did not offer any means of addressing the incompetence of the government in Kabul, the explicit support for the Taliban and tacit support for al Qaeda in Islamabad, or the political conditions inside Pakistan that fuel the growth of extremist ideology.

And yet the policy that emerged from the reassessment of strategy in 2009 — increasing troop levels through the summer of 2011 and withdrawing at the end of 2014 — was worse than either of the proposed options. It failed to take into account that al Qaeda was all but gone from Afghanistan and that the overwhelming majority of those fighting ISAF in Afghanistan were locals with limited ambitions beyond the country’s borders. Increased troop levels allowed ISAF to fight the insurgency, but the time limits placed on the mission kept that fighting from producing enduring political results. The plan also did little to address the Afghan government’s corruption. And it relied on drone strikes to disrupt al Qaeda in Pakistan rather than address the toxic political conditions within Pakistan that make it a danger not only to itself and its neighbors but also to much of the world.

If the Obama administration hoped to end the war in Afghanistan and focus on domestic priorities, then it did not need to commit additional forces. If hoped to prevent the Taliban from seizing power in Kabul, then time limits on troop commitments undermine its efforts. If it sought to defeat al Qaeda, then it focused U.S. resources on the wrong country.

Over the next three years, the United States and its partners will continue to withdraw forces from Afghanistan. American domestic politics and fiscal constraints will largely drive this exit. No matter which political party prevails in the 2012 U.S. elections, the domestic political calculus will be the same: spiraling costs for entitlements and interest on the debt, deep divisions about what mix of spending cuts and tax increases will solve the problem, heavy pressure to slash defense spending and foreign aid, and little political will to continue the war in Afghanistan beyond 2014. The best-case scenario is that ISAF’s transition to Afghan leadership will occur according to the current plan. But another financial shock or further political dysfunction in Washington could accelerate that timetable.

Either way, the war in Afghanistan will rage long after 2014. Until ISAF leaves, combined security operations, drone strikes, and special operations raids will continue to take their toll on insurgent and terrorist networks. When ISAF is gone, Afghan security forces can continue to fight even without foreign combat troops, but it is uncertain how the Afghan government will pay for its army and police without substantial external assistance. Other regional actors, such as China, India, and Iran, will jockey for influence in Afghanistan while doing little to strengthen the legitimacy or capacity of the government in Kabul. And the Afghan government is unlikely to address the ineptitude and graft that makes such assistance necessary.

The future of Pakistan is more difficult to predict. It could limp along as a failing state, or suddenly fail with little warning. The West knows so little about the internal dynamics of the country that virtually any significant change will come as a surprise. Although the exact timing and extent of state failure in Pakistan is difficult to predict, the consequences of such failure are not. Partial or total state failure of a nuclear Pakistan would pose a grave threat to the United States. In such a scenario, the White House would not know who controlled Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. A nuclear-armed al Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, or other extremist group would be difficult if not impossible to deter.

ISAF’s exit from Afghanistan has much more to do with American domestic politics than with coalition strategy. American fiscal constraints and political paralysis set this course in motion long ago, and corrective measures are unlikely in the absence of a crisis. Too often, what passes for strategic thought in the United States is actually a struggle among self-interested elites seeking political, commercial, or bureaucratic advantage. Such behavior is the privilege of a country that is both rich and safe. However, a pattern of such behavior is self-correcting: no country that behaves this way will stay rich or safe for long.

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PAUL L. YINGLING is a colonel in the U.S. Army and a professor of security studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies.

Photo U.S. Army/Flickr

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
The future of Afghanistan is crucial for three reasons. First, after a Marxist coup in 1978 shattered the patient process of 50 years of state formation, it has become increasingly unclear whether the territory bounding what we think of as Afghanistan can again become a sovereign state. Second, should a stable state fail to reemerge in Afghanistan, the political and economic costs to its neighbors and much of the world are certain to rise. Third and finally, how the international community approaches Afghanistan has direct consequences for other states whose futures are similarly in doubt and whose continuing failure generates similarly troubling negative externalities.

Afghanistan exemplifies a significant dilemma of modern foreign policy. The United States must either reconsider the merits of colonialism in some form, establishing a permanent administrative and security presence in ramshackle states, or endure the escalating costs associated with these states playing host to organized criminals and terrorists, and treating their own citizens with systematic neglect and abuse.

Since 2002, U.S. policy in Afghanistan has been fundamentally flawed, and as a consequence, Afghanistan’s people, its neighbors, and the rest of the world are worse off. The initial assault that routed the Taliban should have been followed by a rapid exit of U.S. and allied forces. The political moment demanded what nineteenth-century treatises on small war referred to as a “punitive expedition,” and nothing more. What followed instead was the inescapable pull of recovery, reform, and rebuilding. Pledges of aid to rebuild Afghanistan’s economy and infrastructure were not met. Much of the aid that did arrive was subsequently either squandered or pocketed by greedy locals or private contractors. This created a habitat ideal for exploitation by insurgents and organized criminals (functionally, the Taliban are both).

Afghanistan’s prior status as a genuinely sovereign state had taken generations to engineer: The country became a state by virtue of a succession of skillful leaders dedicated to maintaining a careful balance between tradition and modernization. Their success forced the centuries-old identities of tribe and valley to yield slowly to a collective Afghan identity.

But the Marxist coup in 1978 ended all hope of maintaining this balance. Once communists gained control, they rapidly alienated most Afghans, and they intensified their governing problems by eliminating most of Afghanistan’s public servants by arresting, executing, or forcing them flee. Trying to implement a preposterous plan for organizing society without any experience governing, Afghanistan’s new leaders were compelled to rely on Soviet advisers. Afghanistan’s once unified identity devolved into a patchwork of loosely affiliated sub-identities, bounded as in ancient times by dialect, kinship ties, and topography. This balkanization of Afghan identity was accelerated by the Soviet Union’s divide-and-conquer counterinsurgency strategy that followed its military intervention in 1979.

Herein lies the root of the problem: Since 1979, Afghanistan has lacked sufficient indigenous public servants to rebuild the state, and it has proven impossible to import and maintain foreign public servants without the taint of neocolonialism. Ironically, like the Marxists before them, the Taliban who consolidated power after the Soviets withdrew in 1989 were also transnational revolutionaries who attempted to govern by a preposterous doctrine. They created no public servants of their own because they were not interested in a state but rather in a transnational caliphate.

The “public” servants that exist in Afghanistan today are merely servants of the heads of clans and tribes attached to specific provinces and valleys within Afghanistan. And President Hamid Karzai is effectively Afghanistan’s most powerful warlord. His aides, advisers, ministers, and security personnel are loyal first to him and to his clan and only after to Afghanistan as a whole.

Thus, any third party that wishes to see a functional state reemerge in Afghanistan will have to be willing to import its own administrators, including security personnel. Whether carried out with the aim of benefiting the Afghan people or preventing the security challenges bred by the Afghan government’s administrative and security deficiencies, this would amount to a form of colonialism. But colonialism — however one qualifies it — contradicts contemporary norms of legitimacy and remains unsustainable in terms of resources.

This is not to say that no real progress has been made but rather to point out that such progress has been too dearly paid for and is unlikely to survive the inevitable exit of its foreign administrators. On the other hand, once Western foreigners leave, the Taliban will again begin to look more like foreigners themselves. Either way, Afghanistan will not be a functioning state until the people of Afghanistan commit to the years of additional suffering and deprivation necessary to make it so.

The solution to the dilemma of U.S. and allied efforts in Afghanistan — both the well-intended efforts toward promoting human rights and those aimed at addressing national security concerns — is to brace for an orderly withdrawal and focus on national defense. The United States will inevitably be attacked again. But the legitimacy it gains from being the victim of veritable harm, rather than its perpetrator, will more than compensate for the damage. In today’s world, the best defense is a good defense.

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IVAN ARREGUIN-TOFT is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations, Boston University.

Photo U.S. Army/Flickr

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
In late 2001, flush with an unexpectedly easy victory over the Taliban, the United States arranged a conference in the German city of Bonn aimed at shaping postwar Afghanistan. The conference charged the United Nations, in the guise of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), with providing the country’s security. And in terms that now seem positively quaint, the conference’s Afghan and international participants looked forward to the creation of a “broad-based, gender-sensitive, multi-ethnic and fully representative government” in Kabul.

What a difference a decade makes. As international representatives gathered last week for a second conference in Bonn, ISAF troops were still caught between a grinding insurgency led by a resurgent Taliban and an ineffective Afghan government headed by a feckless president, Hamid Karzai. Gone are visions of democracy; now, the mantra is sustainability, as ISAF eyes its planned exit in 2014 with a mixture of mounting alarm and palpable relief.

The twin Bonn conferences neatly bookend a lost decade in Afghanistan. Approximately 10,000 Afghan civilians — by the most conservative estimate — have been killed since 2006 (when such information was first systematically collected), and a further 5,600 Afghan soldiers and police have died facing the Taliban in those same years. Since 2001, almost 3,000 ISAF soldiers have died in action, and the United States alone has spent some $444 billion on counterinsurgency and state building. Yet many Afghans still see their ramshackle state as illegitimate, and progress toward rebuilding and stabilizing the country remains elusive.

Judged by any yardstick — its ability to protect its officials, provide basic services, and control corruption — Afghanistan has made little or no headway since 2001. The Taliban can claim some of the credit for these failures, but much of the blame falls on the Bonn process itself.

The Bonn participants overestimated the danger of ethnic civil war and so created a hyper-centralized executive office that actually made ethnic conflict more, rather than less, likely. By concentrating the appearance of authority in one office without giving it the means to assert power, Bonn rendered the presidency a lightening rod for the many grievances that emerged once the central government proved ineffective. With no real ability to tax citizens, Karzai and his coterie of confidants played the age-old game of extracting as much revenue as possible from foreigners to placate and buy off internal opposition. But foreign aid, often proudly branded with the flag of its donor, further undermined Karzai by underscoring his reliance on outside forces.

Afghanistan now has a central government that is at once too strong on paper and too weak in practice, perched precariously atop a withered state. Constructing a functioning central state after 30 years of nearly constant war was always going to be difficult, but the United States and its allies made the situation even worse after the first conference in Bonn. They relied on provincial reconstruction teams, contractors, and foreign aid agencies that bypassed Kabul — all of which made sense in the short term, given the weakness of the state, but also undercut efforts to knit together far-flung villages and districts into a more unified political body.

As a result of these confused policies, ISAF created an Afghanistan that was neither unified nor rebuilt. A decentralized state-building strategy that accommodated the country’s regional variation might have worked but only if it had been led by Afghans themselves and not imposed by foreigners. Such a process could have created a set of local institutions with enough legitimacy to defuse simmering grievances and marginalize armed opponents.

Even notable progress in areas such as primary education and childhood immunization remains fragile. Although the United States alone has dedicated nearly $19 billion in assistance, the positive effect of the funds will likely fade as aid spending is reduced. Meanwhile, aid agencies have failed to build sustainable programs. For too long, they measured progress in terms of the amount of and speed with which money was spent rather than whether programs were actually producing their intended effects. And Afghanistan today remains hooked on foreign aid; according to the World Bank, 97 percent of the country’s domestic product is tied to the presence of ISAF and the donor community. This has bred skewed local economies, a culture of dependence among aid recipients, and sky-high levels of corruption.

Of course, if building a ship at sea is difficult, building one at sea while under fire is nearly impossible. In between the two Bonn conferences, the Taliban managed to evolve from a defeated regime into a robust insurgent organization with a substantial presence throughout much of the country. Although a good deal of attention is paid to the Taliban’s combat capabilities, their provision of services, however rudimentary, is where they really outcompete ISAF and the Afghan government.

With a fraction of ISAF’s resources, the Taliban have managed to create mobile sharia courts, adjudicate local land disputes, and collect revenue and redistribute it to the families of their killed fighters. When the lure of services has proved insufficient to win over civilians, the Taliban have taken to threatening individuals with death if they do not stop collaborating with ISAF. And the Taliban’s information campaign has been far more successful than that of ISAF. Even though the Taliban killed more than five times the number of Afghan civilians in 2010 than ISAF did, an overwhelming majority of nearly 3,000 respondents to a 2011 survey I conducted in 21 Pashtun districts believed that the organization is more careful in avoiding civilian casualties.

The Taliban have undoubtedly borne substantial losses.
Since 2008, ISAF has employed airstrikes and night raids to kill key Taliban leaders, degrade their capabilities, and deter would-be insurgents from joining their ranks. Yet this strategy has precluded a political solution to the war by complicating negotiations with the Taliban. It has broadened the gap between local Taliban commanders, who bear the brunt of the war in Afghanistan, and their senior commanders, who are often safely ensconced in Pakistan. And by taking out so many senior and middle-tier insurgents, ISAF has accelerated the rise of a younger, more radical generation of Taliban fighters. Negotiating a settlement will be a difficult challenge, especially if ISAF continues to target the same leaders with whom it hopes to broker a peace agreement.

To be sure, ISAF has adapted over the past five years. After years of neglect, ISAF has wholeheartedly embraced development aid as a counterinsurgency tool, committing nearly $1.3 billion in small-scale Commander’s Emergency Response Program projects last year alone. Trying to reconcile the sometimes contradictory demands of winning the support of local populations while conducting military operations within them, ISAF has imposed severe restrictions on its use of airpower (and deadly force more generally) in a bid to avoid civilian casualties. And in the last two years, it has scored some important, if temporary, gains in Helmand and Kandahar, which, until mid-2010, were still dominated by the Taliban.

Yet as the anticipated troop drawdown looms, major problems remain. It is unclear whether ISAF has enough resources to consolidate its gains in the south while pivoting to deal with the Taliban and the affiliated Haqqani network in the east. ISAF’s proposed solution is to expand rapidly the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the Afghan Local Police (ALP). But that carries risks. The new ANA comprises mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks, prompting fears among Pashtuns about the army’s future intentions once ISAF withdraws. And the ALP is a program recycled from the detritus of six failed previous efforts, all of which aimed at recruiting village locals to serve as a stopgap for further Taliban incursions.

Most worryingly, army and police training programs are diffusing military skills throughout the population; in some units, desertion rates are as high as 40 percent. As ISAF withdraws, deserters or new militia members could use their skills against neighbors or the state itself. They will further erode the central government’s control as the volatile mixture of new recruits, new weapons, and newfound power give rise to yet more challengers.

The second Bonn conference may have represented the last chance to craft a strategy for creating a stable, legitimate Afghan government capable of standing long after the foreign troops and funds depart. With ISAF’s withdrawal now under way, its leverage over both the Karzai administration and the Taliban is ebbing, making a push for structural changes to the political system all the more important. Without meaningful reforms, including the emergence of political parties, district-level elections, and the decentralization of political power, Kabul may witness yet another round of civil war after 2014. The window for avoiding that outcome, and preventing another lost decade in Afghanistan, is fast closing.

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JASON LYALL, Ph.D., is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

Photo U.S. Army/Flickr

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
U.S. and allied forces have made great progress in Afghanistan since the start of the counterinsurgency campaign in early 2010. But critical military tasks remain — and these can only be accomplished by a substantial deployment of U.S. troops. Last May, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he would be withdrawing 10,000 U.S. troops before the end of 2011 and the remaining 20,000 surge troops by September 2012, leaving a total of 68,000 in the country. He tabled further decisions on force levels prior to 2014, at which time Afghanistan will take full responsibility for its own security, according to the framework that NATO and Afghanistan established in Lisbon last November. The rapid dialing back of the surge is a risky strategy, though if executed correctly, and not rushed, it is workable.

Some members of the Obama administration, along with experts such as retired General David Barno and the journalist Linda Robinson, have recommended that Obama end the counterinsurgency mission next year and refocus U.S. troops on supporting the Afghan security forces. But that is a recipe for failure. Accelerating the drawdown and ending the counterinsurgency mission sooner than planned would not only squander the valuable gains made over the last two years but prevent both U.S. and Afghan forces from engaging decisively against insurgent and terrorist groups that threaten the security of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States.

Enemies determined to kill U.S. citizens and rebuild sanctuaries remain in Afghanistan. Insurgent groups closely affiliated with al Qaeda — such as the Pakistani Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Islamic Jihad Union of Uzbekistan — still have safe havens in eastern Afghanistan. Afghan security forces will not be able to eliminate those territories on their own, because they do not (and will never) have the sophisticated, high-end capabilities needed to conduct intelligence-driven, combined-arms operations in the mountainous terrain surrounding the capital and the populated areas along the roads. Even Washington’s NATO allies generally lack the capability to execute combined-arms tasks, so it is unreasonable to expect the Afghans to acquire these skills, especially on such a short timetable. If American troops do not clear these safe havens, no one will. Over time, they will permit terrorists to operate more freely in Afghanistan, threatening the United States and its allies in the region and in Europe, where a number of groups based on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border have cells.

A continued counterinsurgency campaign would allow the United States, NATO, and Afghan forces to work side by side in reducing the capacity, coherence, and reconstitution of enemy groups while bringing greater government control to populated areas. Consider the real gains made in Helmand and Kandahar provinces in southern Afghanistan. Over the last two years, U.S., allied, and Afghan troops eliminated all of the strategically significant insurgent safe havens. They cleared the traditional Taliban strongholds, including those west of Kandahar that had seen the emergence of the Taliban movement and Mullah Omar in the 1990s. Now, the troops are in the process of establishing a combination of Afghan uniformed police, national army officers, and local police to ensure that insurgents cannot regain control of cleared areas. The fighting season of 2012 will be the acid test for that effort, but the indicators so far are positive.

Now, look east. U.S. and Afghan forces have been starved for combat power in eastern Afghanistan, even during Obama’s 2009 surge; he did not fully resource General Stanley McChrystal’s requests, sending only about 75 percent of the troops the general asked for. Consequently, McChrystal concentrated the reinforcements in the south rather than dispersing them thinly throughout the entire Pashtun belt. By shortchanging requests from his commanders, Obama effectively extended the time it would take to execute a successful counterinsurgency campaign, then he backed an even shorter timetable for withdrawal.

The east remains a significant threat not only to a viable government in Kabul but also to U.S. interests as well. Insurgents in eastern Afghanistan belong to various groups — the al Qaeda-linked Haqqani network is predominant, but groups reporting directly to Mullah Omar and to the Hezb-e- Islami group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, have a significant presence. And south of Kabul, Taliban safe havens persist in both rural and populated areas close to small cities and highways with access to the capital and international airports. Neither the coalition nor the Afghan forces have ever had the resources necessary to clear such delimited and long-standing safe havens in Ghazni, Khost, Logar, Paktia, and Wardak provinces. Efforts in 2011 have eliminated or contained some — particularly near Kabul — but many still remain.

There is a workable solution to eliminate enemy safe havens while restricting counterinsurgency operations to populated areas. Konar province offers a glimpse of the balanced effort that would be required across eastern Afghanistan. A mélange of insurgent and terrorist groups retain limited and generally isolated sanctuaries among the 10,000-foot mountains. But U.S. and Afghan forces have secured only the populated major valleys while conducting targeted strikes into the hinterland to ensure that isolated safe havens there do not become operationally or strategically dangerous.

But it takes U.S. troops to get this done, especially in the areas south of Kabul that are more populated and central than Konar and thus less suited to targeted strikes. The insurgent safe havens south of Kabul are too established, dispersed, and well situated on the terrain for Afghan security forces to clear them alone. Support from sanctuaries in nearby North Waziristan is very important for these groups. Insurgents, particularly along the ring road south of Kabul, have resilient local support networks that would endure even if backing from Pakistan came to a halt. The pattern of counterinsurgency success learned in Iraq, and now in southern Afghanistan, is proven. U.S. troops clear insurgent strongholds, then Afghan forces hold them against enemy attempts to re-infiltrate them. Throughout, both U.S. special operations forces and, increasingly, their indigenous partners conduct raids and strikes against particular network leaders.

In war, as in so many things, the devil is in the details. The question facing the United States today is not whether the troops will come home but precisely when and with what consequences. Obama’s current drawdown plan risks failure by making it more difficult for both coalition and Afghan security forces to sustain gains in the south; accelerating that plan would make its problems even worse. Should Obama move too hastily, he will fail to achieve the basic objectives he laid out in his own strategy.

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FREDRICK W. KAGAN is a resident scholar and director of the Critical Threats Project at the American Enterprise Institute and KIMBERLY KAGAN is president of the Institute for the Study of War.

Photo U.S. Army/Flickr

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
Ten years after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the gains that the international coalition has made with its local partners are real but reversible. Afghanistan is no longer a global hub of terrorist activity, but a Taliban resurgence would threaten to make it one again. Reconstruction assistance has produced demonstrable progress in health, education, and economic well-being, but corruption and governance problems have undermined popular support for the government in Kabul and constrained the overall level of progress. Internationally, a coalition still backs the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) military mission. However, NATO’s will is waning; China, Russia, and India are largely free riders; and Pakistan and Iran publicly say the right things, while destabilizing Afghanistan by privately meddling to their own ends.

Political and economic realities in the United States make the current level of American engagement in Afghanistan unsustainable. But as the commitment of coalition partners fades, what Washington decides will shape the future of South Asia. Looking ahead, there are three different scenarios for American engagement in Afghanistan.

It remains to be seen exactly which route Washington will take. But it is clear that U.S. interests require a long-term commitment not only in Afghanistan but across the region. Lest it be forgotten, the consequences of ignoring the region in the 1990s were visited upon the United States on 9/11. So the most vital goals today are defeating the remnants of al Qaeda in Pakistan, preventing the reemergence of terrorist sanctuaries in Afghanistan, ensuring the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, and discouraging Pakistan’s use of extremism and terror as a policy instrument.

There are three ways forward. Each entails a different degree of involvement and carries varying risks and rewards. The first option is the riskiest.

Future #1: Immediate Departure and the Reallocation of Resources

Discontent among the U.S. public over the war is already at an all-time high. Increased political demands on the White House could lead U.S. President Barack Obama to accelerate the planned withdrawal. In turn, Congress would slash economic assistance. Reconstruction responsibilities in Afghanistan would be left largely to international institutions and the government in Kabul. Even if the European powers, Japan, and South Korea sustained modest economic assistance, they, too, would likely follow the U.S. out the door. The counterinsurgency mission would come to an end.

With a more limited involvement, the United States would still try to pursue basic counterterrorism operations. For example, it would deploy special forces and drone and air strikes, but obtaining bases of operation in the region for these forces might prove problematic, if not impossible. At Pakistan’s request, the United States is already withdrawing from the Shamsi air base, which had been used for drone operations. The Central Asian states may be reluctant to make up for the loss of bases in Pakistan; Russia and China would likely encourage them to resist U.S. requests. And Kabul would be less willing to provide base access if Washington focuses narrowly on counterterrorism objectives without a commitment to state building in Afghanistan. That would leave the future of Afghanistan to be determined principally by two factors: the durability of the Afghan government and the outcome of regional rivalries.

After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989, the communist regime in Kabul unexpectedly held power for another three years. It was not until the Soviets abruptly cut off assistance — and key internal alliances frayed — that Mohammad Najibullah’s regime in Kabul fell. The current Afghan government is more popular than Najibullah’s was, but President Hamid Karzai’s government is not without vulnerabilities and certainly would not be able to stand entirely on its own.

Consider that a sharp U.S. drawdown would make nationwide elections, scheduled for 2014, almost impossible. Instead of the Afghan people, outside powers would likely determine the fate of the central government. Pakistan would probably accelerate its support for the insurgency in an attempt to install a client regime in Kabul. China, India, Iran, Russia, and the Gulf States would pursue their interests whether elections worked or not — by funneling support either to the Karzai government or, should it suit them, to favored proxies. In all likelihood, violence would dramatically increase and Afghanistan would, once again, be home to a vicious cycle of proxy wars.

For the United States, a rapid drawdown would have mixed consequences. On the plus side, U.S. troops would no longer be in harm’s way, Congress would reallocate resources (albeit while accepting heavy losses in sunk costs), and the United States would have greater freedom of action to engage in other parts of the world.

On the negative side, terrorist sanctuaries would likely reemerge. The Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other extremists, infused with momentum, would make a renewed push for more control of the country. The United States would lose access to markets promised by the New Silk Road initiative, and it would not be able to establish enduring bases to help deal with problems in Pakistan, Iran, and the rest of a neighborhood that is, to put it mildly, dangerous.

The bottom line: After a decade’s effort in blood and treasure, Afghanistan could face the 1990s all over again.

Future #2: Phased Drawdown and Internationalization of the Effort

Assuming the U.S. public and Congress allow Obama the political breathing room to pursue his announced strategy and dedicate attention and resources to Afghanistan for a bit longer, Washington would proceed with a drawdown of forces as planned, transferring security responsibility to the Afghans by 2014. The Obama administration could add a new feature to its strategy by seeking greater engagement from outside powers to stabilize Afghanistan.

Considering the significant interests of other major powers in Afghanistan, that prospect is not far-fetched. Russia and India have been the victims of terrorist attacks by groups linked to Afghanistan and Pakistan. China’s western territories are vulnerable to Islamist extremists mixed with ethnic separatists. All stand to gain from either the economic growth from a New Silk Road plan or the vast mineral resources in the country.

With more time, Washington could work with others to reach consensus on desired outcomes and a joint vision for Afghanistan. Collaborating with regional partners, they would exercise coordinated influence over Pakistan and Iran to stem conflict and bring about some modicum of cooperation. China has major influence in Islamabad, and the combined efforts of China, India, and Russia could sway Tehran.

Regional cooperation amid a phased U.S. pullback is most likely to succeed if the UN, with U.S. support, establishes an enduring diplomatic forum, consisting initially of the major world powers, to work toward promoting Afghan peace and regional stability. Washington would use such a body as a vehicle for accommodating outside powers in the decision-making process but only if they contribute their fair share to the mission. Such a great power concert would negotiate redlines for the activities of regional powers in Afghanistan; monitor the Afghan reconciliation process; pressure the Afghan government to improve governance and the rule of law; provide long-term funding for economic development and the buildup and training of Afghan national army and police forces; and finally, construct infrastructure — roads, railroads, pipelines — to establish the new Silk Road connecting Central and South Asia into a single economic zone. The concert would enable major powers to preserve their core interests in Afghanistan while creating the conditions needed to stabilize the country.

Even with greater involvement of outside powers, however, U.S. efforts to internationalize the mission will not succeed without a sustained level of U.S. military and civilian engagement. While the UN would facilitate the concert, the United States is the sole power capable of galvanizing and incentivizing international cooperation behind economic integration and a regional settlement. Great powers are only likely to cooperate so long as they feel that free riding is no longer an option and that cooperation with a U.S.-backed regional design remains the most viable means of securing their national interests. Without a real commitment from Washington, the best plans will fail.

The perception that the United States wishes to disengage from the region is already impeding the coalition’s ability to influence key players. After all, during periods of ascendant influence, Washington was never able to persuade Pakistan to cease support for insurgents in Afghanistan. Relations with Karzai, meanwhile, have become difficult, with the coalition struggling to persuade his government to tackle corruption. Disengagement is likely to make these problems worse, as government leaders worry about their own futures.

Future #3: Sustained, Determined U.S. Engagement

A determined U.S. strategy would maintain a high level of military and civilian engagement in Afghanistan until the Kabul government is capable of policing its own territory. Washington would negotiate with the Afghan government on a long-term strategic partnership, including a sustained military presence for the foreseeable future. It could be complemented by a multilateral effort to create a great power concert to stabilize Afghanistan and the region.

U.S. engagement would need to concentrate on three goals. First, it would have to force Islamabad’s hand to shift its policy from supporting the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other insurgents to facilitating a political settlement. Washington would have to offer Pakistan a variety of inducements, while addressing legitimate Pakistani concerns — for instance, by offering a guarantee that Afghan territory is not used as a staging ground for attacks against Pakistan.

If Pakistan does not cooperate, however, Washington would escalate coercive tactics, dramatically reducing military assistance, curtailing support programs to Pakistan through international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, and increasing military operations against insurgent targets on Pakistani territory.

If this effort fails, the United States should explore a long-term effort to contain, isolate, and transform Pakistan into a more stable, moderate state. This would require a sizeable presence of residual U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan to harden the Afghan state and conduct cross-border operations on Pakistani soil. The United States would also need to enhance bilateral relations with India and strengthen Afghan security forces to the point where they can withstand Pakistan’s possible escalation of pressure. These moves would give Kabul and New Delhi sufficient leverage to negotiate a reasonable agreement with Islamabad.

Second, the United States would improve the capacity of the Afghan state. It would need to continue counterinsurgency operations, conditioning its drawdown on the ability of Afghan security forces to take over. Washington would continue to push for international assistance but would need to assume greater and even unilateral responsibility to build up and train Afghanistan’s national army and police.

On the political front, the United States would need to persuade the Afghan government to deal with corruption and the rule of law. Significant progress on governance issues should be linked to the completion of negotiations with the Afghan government on a strategic partnership agreement governing the post-2014 U.S. presence. If real progress is not made on the governance front, the same objective will need to be pursued by strengthening pro-reform forces in the country so that they can influence the results of the next presidential elections in 2014.

Third, Washington would pursue a positive vision for the region based on economic integration and the establishment of a New Silk Road. Preferably in conjunction with allies, the United States would strengthen Afghan institutions. While a certain amount of aid will be necessary during a transitional period, the objective would be Afghan self-reliance. Engagement with the private sector would help Afghanistan develop its agriculture sector and mineral resources. And proactive U.S. diplomacy would be the critical factor in commencing negotiations to reduce trade barriers and develop roads, rails, pipelines, and other infrastructure projects.

For now, sustained U.S. engagement is the strategy most likely to ensure regional security. Heavy combat operations need not continue indefinitely, but core U.S. interests would require the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan for another decade to build up and train Afghan forces, conduct counterterrorism operations, and respond to regional contingencies. By and large, the Obama administration has embraced a determined U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Now, it should explain the imperative of getting the endgame right. Cementing a long-term U.S. and NATO presence in Afghanistan would enable counterterrorism missions in the region and give Afghanistan’s national security forces enough time to reach a sufficient size and capacity to assume responsibility from the coalition. The United States would have a platform for dealing with a variety of regional contingencies, such as a Pakistani state collapse in which nuclear weapons fall into the hands of extremists.

Most important, a demonstration of U.S. willpower provides the greatest hope for preventing counterproductive hedging by Afghan political players and regional powers, leaving them no choice but to accommodate the reality of a strong and stable Afghanistan with political and military ties to the United States.

Of Any Future

Regardless of which approach, or combination of approaches, the United States ultimately pursues, Washington must plan for a wide number of contingencies.

Even in a positive scenario — in which the United States makes progress on key priorities such as counterterrorism, managing Pakistan, reconstruction, governance reforms, and a regional settlement — consolidating gains will require other forms of U.S. engagement for some time to come. The military component would be a much smaller part of the U.S. strategy, while the relative role of diplomacy and economic involvement would increase.

Since World War II, U.S. statecraft has succeeded by sending American forces to regions of critical importance and working with partners — for decades if needed — to address mutual threats, build stability, and foster progress.

This formula eliminated major power wars in Europe and East Asia for more than a half century and successfully concluded the Cold War — a historic triumph. The necessary engagement in Central and South Asia will not be nearly as difficult or expensive as those previous efforts, which involved U.S. occupation governments and a military presence large enough to counter the looming communist threat. Given the risks and the opportunities ahead, it is an investment worth making.

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ZALMAY KHALILZAD is the former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, and Permanent U.S. Representative to the U.N.

Photo US Army/Flickr

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
The range of achievable outcomes in Afghanistan is narrowing as Western effort wanes. The ambitious goals of the Bush administration were probably never attainable and are certainly not now. But even minimally democratic accountability may soon be beyond reach. If so, some form of delimited warlord rule will be the outer bound of the achievable. If a new set of bargains between Kabul and provincial powerbrokers can be reached and enforced, such a system could still be tolerable in the limited sense that it could preserve the United States’ essential security interests in Afghanistan. But it would be far from ideal. And even this option could slip away if some critical reforms are not instituted soon.

Many Americans see Afghanistan as hopeless and ungovernable — a chronically violent “graveyard of empires.” It is not. For most of the twentieth century, Afghanistan was internally stable and at peace with its neighbors — in fact, it was a tourist destination for backpacking Westerners in the 1960s. And the Taliban of today are hardly the invincible warriors or authentic vox populi some Westerners assume. A series of coalition offensives since 2009 has driven the Taliban from most of their southern strongholds in Helmand and Kandahar. Taliban counterattacks this summer failed to retake any of the districts they lost. And recent polls show declining Afghan public support for an already unpopular insurgency, as the Taliban have responded to military setbacks by striking civilian targets instead. Afghans know what Taliban government looks like, and in multiple polls over years of war, they have consistently rejected it. While the current government’s corruption is unpopular, too, the coalition enjoys the great advantage of an enemy whose ideology is unwelcome. Of course, retaking Taliban-controlled areas is time consuming and costly; the Taliban remain a significant force in the east, and their assassination campaign continues. But in areas where coalition forces have deployed enough strength to protect Afghans from Taliban violence and stayed long enough to build public confidence, it is now clear that government control can be restored and maintained.

So Afghanistan is not hopeless. But neither will it reach nirvana anytime soon. In practical terms, there are now five plausible midterm futures for Afghanistan.

One involves a still democratic but weaker and less centralized Afghan government. The original blueprint for a post-2001 Afghanistan envisioned a strong, modern, centralized, bureaucratic state built around a powerful presidency. Such a system would have had important advantages, including limiting the danger of warlordism and renewed civil war, facilitating decisive action against terrorists, and empowering a modernizing center over a more conservative rural periphery with less interest in Western human rights agendas.

But that system was a poor fit for Afghanistan, where legitimacy is mostly local and personal, rather than national and institutional, and illiberal values remain influential. The mismatch promoted official corruption, weakened popular support for the state, and enabled a still unpopular Taliban to make headway.

The most attractive practical alternative available today would be a weaker, less centralized state with power shared across a wider range of stakeholders and with a larger role for local and tribal authorities. This decentralized system would probably be less decisive, less technocratic, more open to conservative rural influences, and probably more beholden to the country’s neighbors. But it would also offer a closer match to the real distribution of political power in Afghanistan, so could be realized with less heroic exertions. And it would retain a fundamentally democratic system of government.

A less attractive possibility would be a modified version of warlord rule. In this scenario, real authority would reside chiefly with subnational powerbrokers and their associated patronage networks in a form of predatory rentier governance. As they increasingly do today, these networks would exert control by extracting cash from the governed and using it to buy off courts, police, officials, and prominent businesses. If allowed to expand unchecked, this system is unsustainable. It would eventually corrupt the army and build broader tolerance for an insurgency that, although unpopular, is nevertheless seen as honest.

The only stable version of a warlord system would thus be one with an enforceable limit on the take. This would require a renegotiation of the tacit deals between Kabul and the periphery that now allow these networks to function. Today, such arrangements generally trade the warlords’ political support of Kabul for the capital’s acquiescence in their depredations. The renegotiated ones would change the terms to exclude the most damaging forms of corruption while tolerating the rest; Kabul would look the other way for most graft but draw the line at intolerably severe predation.
Limits could be set in different ways. One strategy would be to prohibit land taking, which is perhaps the most damaging official predation in Afghanistan today. In an agrarian society, loss of one’s land threatens destitution; when corrupt officials confiscate private land for “economic development” that mostly lines officials’ pockets, they victimize groups that have little choice but to seek succor from the Taliban. By dissuading provincial powerbrokers from land grabs, the government’s long-term viability would significantly improve, even without eliminating corruption altogether or reforming government service delivery in any comprehensive way.

For this to work, the West would need to provide Kabul with carrots (through aid that Kabul could redistribute as it wants) and sticks (assisting the Afghan military in enforcing the deals’ terms). Western leverage is constrained by its willingness to pay, so the ask must be limited accordingly. If it includes positive incentives for compliance directed against a modest agenda focused on containing but not eliminating predation, then the levers available could suffice.

There are other possibilities. Afghanistan could split up — most likely with the largely Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara north and west separating from the predominantly Pashtun south and east. The country could descend into anarchy, with a collapsed central government giving way to atomized civil warfare. Today’s insurgency could simply continue, although an unreformed Afghan government’s ability to contain the Taliban after a Western withdrawal is doubtful. And in theory at least, Afghanistan could become a dictatorship, whether under the Taliban or some other force. A strongman is unlikely to succeed, however, in consolidating absolute power in a country as divided as Afghanistan; an attempt to do so would likelier devolve into civil war.

Many outcomes are thus possible; only some are acceptable. The acid test is the twofold stake Washington has long articulated: that Afghanistan does not become a base for terrorism against the West, or a haven for destabilizing its neighbors. The United States has many other worthy goals there, from prosperity to human rights and respect for the will of the governed, but the stakes for which the United States normally wages war are narrower.

By this standard, decentralized democracy is clearly acceptable. A weaker, less centralized government might be less able to police its territory than the original post-2001 model, and its local politics would periodically offend many in the West. But such a state would constitute a far smaller threat than the old Taliban regime, and its representative nature would lend it presumptive legitimacy.
Delimited warlord rule is far less appealing. But it, too, would probably pass the acid test of minimal acceptability — if it were truly delimited and those limits included a prohibition on the use of powerbrokers’ territory for cross-border violence.
The other possible outcomes fail to pass the test. Partition would tacitly concede the south and east to the Taliban, enabling terrorism in the process. Anarchy would allow militants to operate across Afghanistan’s borders. An attempted dictatorship that merely fueled civil warfare would be no better, whoever the putative dictator. All would violate both of the security interests for which the United States now fights.

If the United States is serious about decentralized democracy, it will have to push major reforms to dismantle antidemocratic patronage networks, create inclusive checks and balances, and ensure honest elections. Doing all this would be time consuming, costly, and difficult, and will pose important trade-offs with short-term security progress. To date, security has mostly taken priority, and many crucial reforms have been postponed; the looming 2014 deadline may have already put this option beyond reach. If it has not, there is no time left to lose.

If the West is unwilling to make these sacrifices, the best achievable outcome will be delimited warlord rule. This is a defensible choice if U.S. citizens are unwilling to do more; it is, after all, minimally sufficient to meet U.S. security aims. But even such a course will require systematic efforts to harness the West’s remaining resources to develop a program of conditional pressure to reshape the deals that underlie today’s powerbroker governance. And little time is left. After 2014, remaining Western leverage might suffice to maintain a modified equilibrium between Kabul and provincial bosses, but it will be far harder to create it at that point.

The worst of all results, however, would be another two years of combat without the governance reforms needed to create a sustainably acceptable outcome. Reasonable people can differ on whether a tolerable result is worth the sacrifice in Afghanistan. But no one can justify continued sacrifice for an unsustainable result.

Read more from The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy.

STEPHEN BIDDLE is the Roger Hertog Senior Fellow for Defense Policy, Council on Foreign Relations.

Photo: US Army/Flickr

This piece was published as part of The Future of Afghanistan and U.S. Foreign Policy, a collaboration between the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism and ForeignAffairs.com.
A recent trip through Kabul and Regional Command East, an area the size of Pennsylvania on the Pakistan border in eastern Afghanistan, revealed that the U.S. role in the country is on a downward slope. U.S. President Barack Obama’s decision to dial back the surge by the end of next summer, and continue reductions after that, forces one to think seriously about Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal.

In what time it has left, the United States can do more to prepare Afghans for the formidable challenge ahead. Rather than have U.S. and NATO forces clearing areas of insurgents and then handing them off to the Afghans, it is time for Afghan forces to take the lead, with the help of U.S. advisers, in clearing and holding Afghan territory. The United States will not officially leave Afghanistan until 2014. But given the rate of troop withdrawal outlined by the Obama administration, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan must begin recalibrating their strategy now.

Obama can publicly announce this shift at the NATO summit in Chicago next May, where he is already expected to announce a continuation of the drawdown in Afghanistan. Troop levels are set to fall to 90,000 by the end of this year, 68,000 by next fall, and then perhaps 45,000 by the end of 2013. During my visit, U.S. commanders made strong cases for keeping 68,000 troops in Afghanistan through 2013, but political and fiscal realities in Washington make that unlikely. Military officials expect that approximately 20,000 soldiers will remain in the country for some years after the Afghans assume control of their security in 2014.

Based on these numbers, the mission in Afghanistan will change sooner than many people anticipate. Obama’s likely decision to decrease U.S. troop levels below 68,000 will make it impossible for international troops to maintain their current focus on leading a counterinsurgency campaign; they simply will not have enough boots on the ground to secure the Afghan population. Afghan forces, which now stand at 300,000 and are on track to reach their final planned level of 352,000 within the coming year, will probably have to take the lead within the next year.

Although Afghan forces have come a long way in the past two years under the mentorship of U.S. Lieutenant General William Caldwell, they are not yet up to the task of protecting their country entirely on their own. The Afghan national army and police lack many of the skills required to succeed in modern warfare, chiefly, planning and executing air and artillery support and logistics. They are hampered by low literacy rates and years of neglect from the United States, which only began to dedicate itself to increasing the size and capabilities of Afghan forces two years ago, when Caldwell assumed responsibility for their development.

To be sure, the Afghan troops I saw at Camp Clark in Khost province were capable and strategically minded, able to understand the enemy they face and plan effective ground operations. But there is no question that they will need international help for years to come in order to ensure that medical evacuation, air support, and artillery fire are readily available when they come under attack.

To continue to assist Afghan forces beyond 2014, the United States will need to leave behind a force of some 10,000 special operations forces and enablers, such as helicopter and close air support units. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is likely to demand a similar number of U.S. advisers to assist the fledgling Afghan army and police, according to officials in the region. Without such a residual force, the United States will have trouble confronting the continued threats of al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and the Taliban, all of which would seriously jeopardize the staying power of an elected government in Kabul.

But to set Afghanistan on the right track, U.S. commanders there must adapt their strategy before U.S. troops can no longer conduct a counterinsurgency on their own. They must begin embedding U.S. and international advisory teams inside every Afghan army and police unit before American forces become so thin on the ground that they can no longer reinforce Afghan units when they come under fire. These combat advisers would train Afghan forces and allow them to lead the fight against the Taliban and Haqqani network. Afghans know their enemy. With U.S. aid, they will increasingly be able to take the lead in the fight against them.

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JOHN NAGL is President of the Center for a New American Security. A retired Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army, he served in both Iraq wars and recently returned from a visit to Afghanistan sponsored by the International Security Assistance Force.

Image: US Army/Flickr