If more than 7½ years of fighting in Afghanistan doesn’t qualify as a quagmire, you have to wonder what would. In Iraq (five years of war and counting), it’s at least possible to imagine an endgame that doesn’t include wholesale factional slaughter or victory by extremists, but what is the endgame in Afghanistan?
“People are willing to stay in the fight, I believe, if they think we’re making headway,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last month. “If they think we’re stalemated and having our young men and women get killed, then patience is going to run out pretty fast.”
And yet as Gates himself acknowledged in the same interview with The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. is stalemated — or even worse, losing ground again to the Taliban — which is why he believes a “perceptible shift in momentum” is essential within a year to salvage public support.
Count me among those who’ll need more than a “shift in momentum” to be convinced the slog in Afghanistan is heading toward a decent resolution. President Bush made the right call in 2001 to topple the Taliban and destroy al-Qaeda’s enclaves, but it’s not clear why that decision should commit this country to a neverending exercise in Third World nation-building.
Still, a new president should get his chance to pursue the strategy he promised during the campaign — in President Obama’s case, one of boosting troop strength in Afghanistan and giving the war there greater attention. And Colorado Sen. Mark Udall, for one, is a fan of that approach after a recent trip to the region.
“I’m optimistic because we haven’t had a strategy as broad based as this one,” Udall, a Democrat, told me. “And because Afghanistan has been an afterthought to the war in Iraq.”
Udall, who voted to invade Afghanistan but opposed the Iraq war, says a straightforward military victory is “not possible.” But he believes the counterinsurgency strategy that the U.S. is adopting, based on seizing territory from insurgents in order to “hold it and build a civil society” while focusing on development, has a greater chance at success than anything tried so far.
Yet the effort will require patience, he warns — and then recommends that I read David Kilcullen’s book, “The Accidental Guerrilla,” for perspective.
Kilcullen, who advised Gen. David Petraeus during the Iraqi surge, has written that in many insurgencies, “the enemy rides a social wave comprising genuine popular grievances and an ability to manipulate them, and that dealing with this broader social and political dynamic, while gaining time for targeted reforms to work by applying a series of tailored, full-spectrum security measures, is the most promising path to ultimately resolve the problem.”
Maybe so, but what would “full-spectrum” security look like across a nation as vast and physically daunting as Afghanistan? U.S. forces will soon have doubled in size from the end of last year, with 21,000 additional combat troops and trainers approved by Obama and others authorized by Bush at the end of his term. But are they enough?
Udall concedes still more troops might be needed. Another member of Colorado’s delegation who also returned recently from a trip to Afghanistan, Republican Rep. Mike Coffman, is much more emphatic. In a June 2 letter to Gates, Coffman declared, “It is obvious that there are not sufficient resources dedicated to winning the war in Afghanistan.” That nation “is physically larger than Iraq,” Coffman notes, and has a larger population that is just as diverse as Iraq’s. And yet far more troops were deployed for the Iraqi surge than the number expected to do the job in Afghanistan.
On the other hand, Coffman’s letter contains an arresting statement that seems to cut the other way: “Afghanistan has no history of effective governance.”
So we’re counting on a lightning strike, is that it?
Either that, it would seem, or on staying there for a very long time.
E-mail Vincent Carroll at vcarroll@denverpost.com
