As the war in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, doubts increase in the US and abroad as to whether American military strategy there is on the right path. The Afghanistan Study Group has gone a step further by proposing an alternative strategy in their recent report, A New Way Forward.
Arguing that American national interests are being misinterpreted, and as a result, current efforts stand to do more harm than good, the alternative they propose draws from both realist and humanitarian concerns. By emphasizing power-sharing and reconciliation; reducing the US’s military footprint; keeping the focus on Al-Qaeda and domestic security; and promoting economic development and engaging global stakeholders, the report creates conditions for an important debate to take place with regards to what should be done next in Afghanistan.
Stephen Walt, professor of International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, alongside Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and Matt Hoh, former American Marine Corp captain and State Department appointee in Afghanistan, took the time to speak with The Majalla about the issues raised in the report.
The Majalla: Your report convincingly demonstrates that America’s security interests are linked to the dangers Al-Qaeda poses. Why do you believe that the focus of the current strategy in Afghanistan has deviated from this priority?
Clemons: There are several contributing factors. During the political campaign, Obama had to deal with this question of American military engagement, and he framed Afghanistan as the legitimate war, whereas Iraq was always the bad war. This overwhelmed the kind of national interest calculation that we try to make in this report. There is a tension that continues between more sober calculations of national interest versus the notion that America has to be very worried about the human rights conditions of others. And when we have found ourselves injected into what are very often civil wars, the mission that we’re trying to accomplish changes from beating bad guys to sometimes reforming and reshaping the societies that we find ourselves in. Human rights concerns often become the drivers of policies. You also have a Pentagon that has a very hard time stepping back, and has become very powerful and very committed to winning, so to some degree certain parts of the Pentagon have exploited this mission and this ambiguity to try to maintain the rationale for the kinds of wars we are engaged in.
Hoh: I think it’s because politics dominate. Political Science 101 teaches us that foreign policy is a reflection of domestic politics. So I think what happened was we had a narrative here in the US of Afghanistan being the place where the 9/11 attacks were launched and that Al-Qaeda attacked us from Afghanistan, and that’s very dubious. Yes, Al-Qaeda was based there; they had a relation with the Taliban. We’re not really sure what that was—if you ask 10 different experts you will get 10 different answers. But the attackers were nearly all Saudis and the attacks were planned in Germany and Pakistan, and the training took place here in the US, but the narrative was that we went into Afghanistan and defeated Al-Qaeda and the Taliban who were the ones who attacked us. And that narrative states that we have to be in Afghanistan in order to keep us safe; that if we left Afghanistan or didn’t finish the job, Al-Qaeda would go back into Afghanistan and there would be another 9/11.
But Al-Qaeda isn’t present in Afghanistan; it is not present in any location where conventional military occupation is going to have an effect on it. Its leadership is in Pakistan, but that leadership serves primarily in a guidance-only-type capacity. It is not a typical command and control structure. Al-Qaeda is a network of small cells that are loosely organized around the world. So if Al-Qaeda is a vital national security issue to the US, the way we are going about occupying Afghanistan is not having any effect on Al-Qaeda. That’s where we come from and why we say that we have to review our presence in Afghanistan, because it is not having an effect. We say let’s take a step back and look at what our vital national security interest are for the US and come up with strategies and policies from there. Because we can’t control Kandahar, we send 30,000 more troops to that area. Well, is it necessary for the US to actually control Kandahar? We did the big operation in Marja last February with about 20,000 marine soldiers and Afghan soldiers. But for the US and our interests, if we control Marja, how does that actually make the US safer; what effect does that have on Al-Qaeda; how does that stabilize Pakistan with its nuclear weapons? So we want to take a step back, look at what our national security interests actually are and then promulgate policies and strategies that go from the top down rather than practical developments on the ground.
Q: What has been the response of the military to this report?
Walt: The report has received some criticism from people who are proponents of the counter-insurgency approach, which is to be expected, because we’re suggesting a strategic alternative. But one of the main purposes of the report was to try and get that discussion going, and have people start thinking about alternatives, so that if our current approach doesn’t work, we’ll have alternatives already in place.
Clemons: We’ve been shocked by how receptive—we’ve had interest and inquiry by various folks in the White House, within the Pentagon command structure, particularly within the joint chiefs of staff, people preparing now for what they know is going to be a December strategic review process. We already know that General Petraeus is beginning to feed into a system of discussion among the joint chiefs of staff before they prepare their position documents and discussions with the White House, and so these parts of the Pentagon have already told us unofficially that our report is part of their package. We have also had a constructive exchange of ideas with the State Department, with various members of Rich Holbrooke’s interagency team and with people within the embassy in Afghanistan. We can’t say that any one of these parties have officially come out and endorsed our report, but the door has been incredibly open to discussing the findings. Informally we have been told by certain individuals that the report is being read at the highest levels and it is considered consequential. That doesn’t mean it will define policy, but it does mean that one of our objectives of getting higher quality debate has worked.
Q: A Washington Post article by Bob Woodward explains that the military deliberately portrayed the war in Afghanistan as something other than what it is to President Obama while he was making the decision to increase troops on the ground. Would you agree with that portrayal?
Hoh: I read that article and if that’s true, that’s an incredible disservice to the US and its interests. It appears as if the Pentagon went in there with a plan and only gave the president variations of that plan. “Here’s the plan Mr. President, and you can have it small, medium or large, and there are no other options,” and clearly the president was frustrated by it; it appears other members of his staff was frustrated by it. What particularly confirmed this to me was the reference to General Lute being reprimanded by Admiral Mullen for speaking his mind and providing honest advice to the president. I think it is very dangerous if we get into a situation where the president’s advisers are being intimidated by more senior officers into toeing the Pentagon line or the party line. I think that’s a very, very dangerous situation. If this is true, it was a very flawed and irresponsible decision making process last year, because the president wasn’t given the full range of options he should have been given.
Q: The US’s relationship with Pakistan is crucial to defeating Al-Qaeda. What else could be done so that Pakistan stops being a problematic variable?
Walt: Well, I think if there is a piece of good news, it is the fact that the Pakistani government appears to have been taking its own internal problems with jihadi groups somewhat more seriously in the last year or two, and therefore trying to crack down on some of the groups that operate on Pakistani soil. For various reasons, that has not included Afghan Taliban located in Pakistan. In particular, some parts of the Pakistani government have always seen them as a strategic asset. I think the American approach there needs to be continued tough love. The government has been allowing us to conduct counter-terrorism operations in Pakistan because they sense a shared interest there, and we need to keep pushing them to help us on that front. Also, we should encourage them to take the appropriate steps to maintain the legitimacy and popularity of their own government.
Hoh: It’s very difficult, and certainly Pakistan has its own interests in mind. It’s going through its own very grave concerns with multiple insurgencies and extremist groups, and its relationship with India, which has led to war multiple times over the last 50-60 years. I think the US needs to prioritize diplomacy. I look back to the Balkan campaigns in the mid-90s. Holbrooke back then was firmly in charge. I don’t think anyone had any doubt that the president had looked at ambassador Holbrooke and everyone in the room and said, “He’s in charge and everyone supports him, including the military.” We don’t have that right now. We don’t have either our ambassador in Afghanistan or Ambassador Holbrooke, who is the State Department’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I don’t think the president has clearly […] expressed that they are in charge, and that everybody is subordinate to them. Until that happens, our diplomacy is going to be under-resourced. The Pakistanis are not going to be sure who is speaking or who is the right person to talk to on the US side or whose authority is properly resourced.
Q: What kind of collaboration can you expect from Afghanistan to implement your proposed strategy?
Clemons: That’s very hard to know. I’m not one that thinks that you’re going to end up with a corruption-free government very easily, nor do I think that you’re going to end up with a government that is a renaissance administration based on enlightenment values. I think that it is possible to play a role with other stakeholders, particularly the Pakistanis, the Saudis, the Chinese and other regional stakeholders, particularly Iran, in re-forging a bond-like process that is more inclusive of the Pashtun than previously occurred. Something like Lakhdar Brahimi did, an approach that is more inclusive and that finds a different equilibrium between the points of power today. That is going to have to involve some decentralization of the centralization process that’s been begun by Karzai, and I don’t think our partners in this process are going to be completely dependable, and it’s going to have to take some fancy footwork. As Brahimi told me, there’s not going to be one set of negotiations with the Taliban or between the Taliban and Karzai which is going to settle everything. There’s probably going to be seven sets of negotiations with different players, and they need to be flexible and need to evolve, and it’s going to be complicated. Even in the reconciliation and negotiation process, to try to bring in the so-called Taliban into some kind of political equilibrium with whatever the current Afghanistan government represents.
But I think embracing Karzai and embracing the Afghan government too closely is also a mistake. We need to realize that there is going to be a different outcome down the road and it’s going to be a melting and merging of different players. One of our key participants in this report had a great concept where he said, “America has this problem where it sees problems as ones that only it can solve, but there are lots of other players that have stakes in this,” so we need to take a Tom Sawyer approach like the old fictional novel by Mark Twain where Tom Sawyer got other people to paint his fence. The US would be smarter to begin giving other nations and stakeholders some spotlight, some space and some time in this process. We just don’t do it very well.
Walt: We’ve seen now abundant evidence to suggest we can’t expect very much at all from Afghanistan. One of the key principles of counter-insurgency warfare is that you need a local partner to help you succeed; you need to be able to build effective institutions in the country where you’re trying to defeat an insurgency. The Karzai government has now been in power for seven or eight years. There have been a number of fraudulent elections, there is endemic corruption, and no amount of desk pounding seems able to correct that. And that makes it less and less likely that the United States can succeed in its stated goal of building a stable, centralized, Western-style government there. This is why the study group suggests we move in a very different direction, starting with the recognition that it is not within our capacity to re-make the central nature of Afghan society.
Q: What dynamic do the interests of other stake-holding countries have in Afghanistan, and how can those issues be resolved?
Walt: Well I think we have to recognize that there are a number of other countries that care more about what happens in Afghanistan than the US does. Countries that are in its immediate vicinity, including Pakistan obviously, but also India, Iran, places like Uzbekistan as well and even some other countries like Saudi Arabia, who’ve been actively involved there in the past, and in my view, not always in a good way. We have to understand that a long-term solution here will involve having some buy-in from most of the other countries in the region, leading to a situation where they’re not treating Afghanistan as another arena in which to engage in their own rivalries or to pursue their own agendas. I think what that ultimately means is re-establishing what was previously a well-established norm—that Afghanistan would essentially be a neutral country, would not be closely aligned to any other power, would have a relatively weak central state, and that other countries in the region therefore don’t have to worry about threats arising from that particular country. So we recommend that the United States, in collaboration with the United Nations, spearhead a much more energetic diplomatic effort to try to get other interested parties to cooperate in both neutralizing, but also stabilizing Afghanistan, and removing it as a sort of potential threat to any of its neighbors.
Q: Your report highlights three conditions that would have to be met for Al-Qaeda’s ability to attack the US from Afghanistan to increase: 1) Taliban must seize control of the country 2) Al-Qaeda must relocate there in strength 3) It must build facilities to allow it to plan more effectively. To what extent is this scenario likely?
Clemons: I am doubtful that the Taliban would bring back Al-Qaeda. Until the attacks in 2001, the Afghan Taliban classically has not shown an interest in broad deployments of international terrorism. That may be different given the situation now. We just don’t know if the Taliban has morphed into something different. What we do know, and what I fear, is that the current situation has created banding. That is what we have achieved: the consolidation of those who are fighting. It’s a remarkably bad thing and we all need to be humble about what comes out of this.
In my view, the Taliban now represents a lot of the nation but not the entire nation, and not all Pashtun are the Taliban. The Taliban that I have talked to may very well be unable to control the country—we suspect that ultimately Kabul will not be run by the Taliban, but there are other governance prospects in which the country is organized as a loose federation, some of which will be under Taliban control and some of it won’t. Under those circumstances it is not likely but it is always possible that Al-Qaeda could return, but if it did I think that the US and its allies maintain the capacity to exert very bad damage on any reestablished camps. You have to remember that these camps were enormously large.
The notion today that we have removed the threat Al-Qaeda poses the US because of the amount of force deployed is a faulty one. And we are squandering resources there. Although I think the scenarios for complete Taliban takeover are not likely, I think the Al-Qaeda return is questionable and something that can be dealt with without the large deployment of military forces, which have helped drive the recruitment of Taliban forces against us.
Q: What are the prospects of a negotiated resolution to the conflict? What could be done to promote that sort of arrangement?
Walt: We ought to encourage power sharing and inclusion within Afghanistan. One of the problems is that the creation of a more centralized government has disenfranchised certain segments of the Afghan population, primarily the Pashtuns, and the Taliban is an insurgency rooted primarily in the Pashtun areas. By encouraging the decentralization of power, by allowing greater autonomy to different regions, some of the people who are currently fighting us, and fighting the central government, can be won over since their grievances will have been settled. The new strategy we’re suggesting tries to reduce the American military role, which is one of the reasons we have seen a Taliban resurgence. And it also tries to encourage political reconciliation and decentralization within Afghanistan as a way of splitting the more moderate folks away from the more radical Taliban leaders.
Hoh: There are leadership elements of the Taliban that these multiple local groups swear allegiance to, so you have groups like the Afghan Taliban, which is led by Mullah Omar, but you also have groups like the Haqqani network. So you have different leadership elements that should be negotiated with directly, because they exert a tremendous amount of influence over the other elements of the Taliban, whether it be philosophical, financial, military, etc. But for those local groups, you have to address their grievances directly, because a lot of the reasons people support the Taliban or are supported by the Taliban are because of local political grievances, grievances which may not go beyond the borders of the community they live in. So very similar to what we did in Anbar province in Iraq in 2006-2007, we have to reach out to those who are making up the insurgency, the vast majority of which are reconcilable, and address the legitimate political grievances they have.
Q: Is there a concern that if the administration were to adopt this strategy that it would be interpreted as a “defeat?”
Walt: We are not particularly concerned about that. First of all, we’re not confident that the current strategy could succeed. So we’re going to be looking at an unsuccessful campaign regardless, in our view. Our main point is that, if you’re pursuing a set of unrealistic objectives that are unlikely to succeed, but are very costly, then you ought to be asking more fundamental questions about what our real interests are and what is the best strategy for achieving them at an acceptable cost. Putting this all in terms of words like victory, or defeat or whatever, tends to evoke the wrong sort of emotional response. What we ought to be doing is being very realistic and asking ruthless cost-benefit questions, “What are we trying to achieve?” “What’s the best way to do that at an acceptable cost to the United States?” And in our view, that leads us in a very different direction.
I think it becomes increasingly easy to get people to talk about alternatives when they see the current approach failing. And again, President Obama has been president for 20 months, and most of the news we’ve gotten out of Afghanistan has not been good. The study group would be delighted, it seems to me, if the administration’s approach were wildly successful, if the Taliban were routed, if the central government in Afghanistan was popular and legitimate and not corrupt, and if the United States could succeed quickly and come home. So we wouldn’t mind being proven wrong. But because we don’t think we’ve diagnosed this incorrectly, it’s important that we start thinking about alternatives so that we have a way to proceed if and when the current strategy fails.
Q: The claim has been made that if the US leaves Afghanistan women’s rights will be grossly endangered. How does the report deal with this issue?
Clemons: I think we do better than most. It is a very vexing problem but our report does not walk away from women’s rights and human rights in Afghanistan. We spend considerable time in the report looking at the other elements of statecraft pressure, basically benchmarking the horrific state of women there. We didn’t find the Karzai regime to be particularly enlightened on this front either. What we do is we try to decouple the notion that military deployment and the application of military force is going to yield the enhancement of women’s rights and human rights. The report does not call for disengagement from Afghanistan. It simply argues that a very large footprint of troops is neither succeeding in stabilizing the country in terms of military and security, nor is it achieving a protection of basic and civil rights, and while we also say that one has to be careful of guaranteeing those rights, it doesn’t walk away from that responsibility.
Walt: I think the status of women in Afghanistan is obviously a concern, and I don’t have much to add to the points made in the report. I mean, obviously, trying to end the fighting there is the single best thing we could do to improve the situation that women face there. I think we also have to recognize that our capacity to do large-scale social engineering in societies that are very different from our own is inherently somewhat limited. I believe the role and place of women in Afghanistan is going to change over time, it’s going to move in a direction we would regard as positive, but it’s not the kind of thing that people in the United States can wave a magic wand and cause it to happen overnight, particularly in the midst of the civil war there.
Hoh: There have been gains made for women in Afghanistan, mainly in the Northern, Western and the urban parts of the country, and those gains need to be kept. This is why it’s important to have a negotiated settlement. That’s why our first recommendation is for a political process, a negotiated settlement in order to make sure those gains are kept. Now, whilst women in urban areas and in the north and west have seen gains because of US presence in Afghanistan, the women in the east and the south where the fighting is taking place have seen their lives become much, much worse. If you’re a women in south or east Afghanistan, you are more concerned about a bomb getting dropped on your house or the fact that you can’t travel on the roads because of all the IEDs [improvised explosive device], or that your children may be caught in a gun fight than you are about your ability to leave your house without wearing a burqa. So, in south and east Afghanistan the priority needs to be to end the violence, to end the conflict. The priority is a negotiated settlement; maintain the gains made for women in the northwest and central part of the country and end the violence in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan because that’s the most pressing concern for women right now. And then, through information supplied by international organizations and NGOs, expand rights for women within the Pashtun belt. But again, that Pashtun culture is only going to change over time and it can’t be changed through the barrel of a rifle.
Interview conducted by Paula Mejia.
