Almost 20 years to the day after the Soviet Union ended what it had finally accepted was an unwinnable war in Afghanistan and quit its occupation, President Barack Obama has announced he is boosting US troop numbers by at least 17,000 in an effort to reverse successes by the Taleban and Al-Qaeda in the east of the country. Is this the first big mistake of the Obama administration?
Gen. Boris Gromov, the now-retired Russian commander who oversaw the final days of Moscow’s failed interference in Afghanistan has warned that NATO and the US are repeating all the misjudgments and false strategies that Moscow made two decades ago. According to Gromov, the main judgmental failure was to believe a settlement could be imposed on Afghanistan by military force. What the general did not go on to say was that the disparate groups of Mujahedeen fighters who bested the flower of the Soviet military, killing over 15,000, were very largely armed and financed by the US who channeled its support through Pakistan. Nowadays, for the Taleban and their Al-Qaeda allies, there is no major power replicating Washington’s supportive role for the Mujahedeen, yet the insurgents are acknowledged by NATO to be winning the fight. Clearly the Taleban have been funding themselves through opium, as the capture of $70 million of the drug this week by Afghan and UK troops makes clear. The Taleban, which in power dedicated itself to eradicating Afghan opium cultivation as a monstrous evil, is now clearly prepared to embrace it, in a deeply discrediting moral summersault. But the fact that the insurgents are besting the high-tech, professional armies of the US and its NATO allies suggests that there is something else going on here.
Obama’s troop boost and the key role now being played by US Gen. David Petraeus, the man behind the implementation of the Bush surge in Iraq, indicates that the White House believes the Petraeus plan worked in Iraq and the much the same plan can work in Afghanistan.
To the extent that the surge in Iraq worked, it was not because the Americans flooded the country with an extra 30,000 troops but because Iraqis themselves, especially some in the Sunni community, realized that violence was leading nowhere. And in spite of all the talk about the US not talking to “terrorists”, they “made a lot of deals with shady guys,” as Col. Michael Galloucis, the Military Police commander in Baghdad, put it. And he asks whether such deals are sustainable.
No such deals or dialogue have been initiated in Afghanistan. (The Iraqi deals followed the troop surge). A British ploy to deal directly with Taleban leaders brought a furious response from President Hamid Karzai and the expulsion of the two UK Afghan experts who had been leading the overtures. Without a political dimension, there can be no hope of a resolution, just a long and costly guerrilla war which the Americans and their allies have little or no hope of winning militarily. Meanwhile, ordinary Afghans wait in vain with growing disillusionment for internationally promised improvements to their lives.
