Opinion The Afghan test

The idea that Afghanistan could be secured on the cheap,without a good old-fashioned blanketing of the troops on the ground,was a colossal illusion. At its core such a strategy was self-defeating thrice over. But having an adverse troop to territory ratio,the US has to rely on more air-strikes and the collateral damage simply produces more backlash. By not appearing fully in command,the US has not given Afghans an incentive to fully support it. And if it does not commit fully,it will send a message out to all its adversaries that they simply need to wait for the US to cut bait and run. In some ways the argument hopes that the act of sending the signal itself,that the US is prepared to do all that it takes,will itself help the effort. It will convince Afghans that there is only one game in town. Paradoxically,sending a signal that the US is ready to stay for as long as it takes may be the only way of ensuring that it does not have to stay long. Anything less would be regarded as a failure; it might expand the space for unsavoury political movements like the Taliban and put American security at risk.

On the other side,there are the minimalists. On this view,the idea that the US could create something like a fully functioning state and reform a whole society is a pipe-dream that risks catastrophic failure. There is no reason to suppose that such an undertaking is likely to succeed. As Rory Stewart has been arguing eloquently,it is hard to imagine that Afghanistan can be a state,much less a functioning democracy,in the sense that we understand those terms for a very long time. The social and material preconditions simply do not exist; and such little slivers of leadership that existed have been delegitimised after the last election. The analogies between the troop surge in Iraq and Afghanistan are misplaced. And even if it were possible,it is very unlikely that there will be domestic support to sustain such a strategy. The American public is already confused about and tiring of the war. Democrats are not too keen on facing an election with tens of thousands of troops still in Afghanistan. American allies have been abandoning what was considered the “good war”. Since the domestic preconditions for a sustained war effort do not exist,it would be even more self-defeating to commit to a maximalist strategy. The only option is for America to scale back its ambitions. The Taliban may be odious,but they are,in and of themselves,not a threat to the US. Concentrating a few thousand troops,well-targeted to go after well-defined and narrow targets,is more likely to be a sustainable strategy than the commitments of tens of thousands. In its search for at best a few hundred who pose a threat,the US continues to alienate more and more of the Afghan population.

Who wins this argument is going to be enormously consequential for South Asia. At the very least a more intense war is only likely to strengthen the Pakistan army’s role,not diminish it. But it is interesting to notice some features of the current argument. There is still a considerable dissociation of fact and logic in looking at justifications for a troop surge. The degree of Al-Qaeda’s association with the Afghan problem had always been greatly exaggerated; and now Pakistan has a lot more to answer for on Al-Qaeda than Afghanistan.

Second,it is interesting to ask how states come to determine which option they will take. Is it based on a compelling logic of facts on the ground? Or is it path dependent? In the US three factors predispose the argument towards the maximalist solution. First,the mere fact that a large military industrial complex exists,and is used to thinking in terms of the effectiveness of force,predisposes the argument towards using more force. Second,a superpower is often defined not by its ability to get things done,but by its ability to absorb the costs of failure. So there are fewer incentives for a cautious prudence.

Third,there is a question as old as international relations. How do strategists come to hold the dispositions they do? A fascinating new dual biography of George Kennan and Paul Nitze,by Nitze’s grandson,Nicholas Thompson,explores this question. Although the contrast can be overstated,Kennan believed that to have peace you need to wage peace; Nitze believed that if you want peace you have to prepare for war. The point is that it would be easy to pretend that the judgments of hawks and doves,or maximalists and minimalists,are based on facts. In most strategic situations,there is something of an odd combination of a prejudgment on the one hand and a leap of faith on the other. The unfolding debate on Afghanistan has,in this sense,got a déjà vu quality to it. With the exception of a few protagonists like Rory Stewart,who have worked in Afghanistan extensively,the protagonist’s decisions will not depend on the facts of the ground in Afghanistan; they will come pre-formed.

Obama’s challenge is that if he goes for the minimalist strategy,he will have to cut deeply against the framework in which the American state (including several key players like Hillary Clinton and Holbrooke) still thinks of power. If he goes for the maximalist one,he runs up against the grain of the profound schizophrenia in American democracy: the need to demonstrate success,but not at a high cost. Afghanistan is such a test because it will define the character of America’s sense of itself.

The writer is president,Centre for Policy Research,Delhiexpress@expressindia.com