March 24, 2009, 0:01 a.m.

The War Hasn’t Been Tried
Nothing will be possible in Afghanistan without a fight.

By Rich Lowry


EDITOR’S NOTE: This column is available exclusively through King Features Syndicate. For permission to reprint or excerpt this copyrighted material, please contact: kfsreprint@hearstsc.com, or phone 800-708-7311, ext 246.

Kabul — Could Afghanistan become another Iraq? A few years ago that would have been a question full of foreboding. Now, it expresses an aspiration.

The Afghan war has, as any American officer will tell you, long been “under-resourced,” a word that in a counterinsurgency war is almost always a synonym for failure. While Iraq had 15 American combat brigades before the surge and 20 during it, Afghanistan was in the low single digits and will only reach six brigades with the addition of the 17,000 American troops just ordered by Pres. Barack Obama.

An American general has a pointed formulation for the relative priority of the two wars over the last seven years: “If you needed it in Iraq, you got it; if you needed it in Afghanistan, you figured out how to do without it.” That has changed, but by how much and for how long will be defining questions for the Obama administration.

The challenges in Afghanistan bear an uncanny resemblance to those in Iraq prior to the surge — insufficient coalition force levels, making it impossible to secure the population; a population that is sitting on the fence, waiting to see whether the insurgency or the coalition has more staying power; an indigenous army that is too small and a police force plagued by incompetence and corruption; and a weak political leader at the top who is triangulating between the coalition and its enemies and too parochial in his outlook. (President Hamid Karzai is both unpopular and likely to win re-election in August.)

On top of all of this, Afghanistan is a broken country, shattered by the Soviets, who did their utmost to wipe out the traditional social structure, and then by years of civil war. It would be a poor and ramshackle nation — a complex patchwork of ethnicities and tribes — even without the serial catastrophes that have befallen it. It has the socio-economic profile of a poor African country. In the Pashtun areas of the south, where the insurgency is strongest, 25 percent of children live less than five years, the average life expectancy is 45, and half of men and more than 80 percent of women are illiterate. One police sub-station in Kandahar has 45 officers — only two or three of whom can read. The opium trade equals more than half of the GDP of Afghanistan, with as much as $500 million a year of the illegal largesse going to the insurgency. By way of comparison, the operating budget of the ministry of defense is just $58 million.

All of this calls for realism about what can be achieved here, but doesn’t justify ill-informed, all-consuming despair. Afghanistan is not about to fall to a revitalized Taliban. The capital, Kabul, can go weeks without an attack. Much has been made of the “gates of Kabul” — the approaches to the city — being threatened, but it’s not true. Even with civilian casualties up 45 percent over the last year, they are still at half the current level in post-surge Iraq, and Afghanistan has a larger population.

If Afghanistan is far from lost, it isn’t susceptible to quick fixes, either. Scaling back our commitment to focus on only counter-terrorism operations — targeted strikes against high-value targets — risks a generalized collapse that would make much of the country a safe haven for terrorists and empower the extremists across the border threatening the Pakistani government. A regional meltdown would become all too possible. Reconciling with elements of the Taliban is another fantasy, since there aren’t moderate Taliban with whom to reconcile. Less-committed local fighters can be pulled away from the insurgency, but only if the insurgency is first beaten back.

No, the only way we can succeed in Afghanistan — i.e., create a government minimally competent and decent enough to sustain itself — is by undertaking the hard work of counter-insurgency, as we did in Iraq with the surge.

It means deploying the troops necessary to protect the population and either forcing extremists to fight (and be killed or captured) or to flee. It means continuing to build the Afghan National Army, the nation’s most respected institution. It is set to grow to 140,000 by early 2012, and President Obama could authorize a buildup from there to more than 250,000. It means building governmental capacity, from the central government on down through the provinces and districts. It means giving farmers an alternative to poppy cultivation and young men sources of income other than getting paid to fire RPGs at coalition troops.

No one here underestimates the difficulty of this task, the work of years. But the implicit message from American commanders is that the Afghan war hasn’t failed — it hasn’t truly been tried. While the coalition has made painful sacrifices over the years, it hasn’t had sufficient resources to deal with an insurgency that seemed defeated in 2002-2004. American commanders are confident that the Taliban doesn’t have much inherent popular appeal (opinion surveys bear them out) and that a war-weariness in the population makes the establishment of order possible. Afghanistan isn’t the inevitably ungovernable basket-case of popular imagination. It enjoyed relative stability through much of the 20th century before its agony commenced in the late 1970s.

Nothing will be possible, though, without a fight. Already this year, with the traditional warm-weather fighting season just beginning, coalition casualties are running at twice the rate of a year ago, a product both of a mild winter and Gen. David McKiernan’s determination to keep after the enemy. The addition of American troops in areas in the south that haven’t had a coalition presence, where the Taliban is sure to resist, will mean a long summer of combat. It will give the Left and the media — who have already turned on what they had long held out as the “good war” — further occasion to declare Afghanistan the latest Vietnam.

Since the effect of this wrenching work won’t be evident until next year’s fighting season, it will obviously create a political vulnerability for President Obama. He’d do well to note a crucial element of the surge in Iraq — an American president with a stomach of steel.

— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Ellie