The Third Way: Ending the Illusions in Afghanistan - Part 1

I have recently had the honour and pleasure of corresponding with Shane Schreiber, a decorated Army officer currently serving in the CF. He has written an article outlining some of the problems and potential solutions in Afghanistan, as he sees them, and we are publishing it here at The Torch.

Personally, I believe his perspective is well worth your consideration: Schreiber has numerous overseas operational deployments, including two tours in Afghanistan - one as a Company Commander in Kandahar in 2002, and another as Chief of Joint Operations for ISAF Regional Command South Headquarters, Kandahar in 2006. He holds three post-secondary degrees, and is an award-winning author on military affairs.

Obviously, the views he expresses here are his own, and are not reflective of Government of Canada, Department of National Defence, or Canadian Forces policy or opinion.

While you may or may not agree with each point he makes, I believe we need to listen more to credible people like Schreiber before forming our own opinions. He is but one example of the thousands of men and women (civilian and military alike) in this country who, each individually, have amassed more academic and hands-on knowledge and experience in Afghanistan than any dozen journalists and pundits you care to name.

The article is a lengthy one, so I have broken it down into two parts: this is Part 1, which lays out some of the most pressing problems facing Afghanistan and those looking to help that country.

- Damian

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Know thyself, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.
Sun Tzu

The debate over the way ahead in Afghanistan rages in Washington and other Western capitols, creating a political and strategic dilemma (and drama) not seen since Vietnam – and eerily echoes that harrowing conflict. For American, Canadian, and European policy makers and advisors, Afghanistan has become a Hell of good intentions, seemingly impervious to lasting solutions or even full understanding. And while the mission in Afghanistan is replete with complex problems – an intractable and cunning enemy, difficult and unforgiving terrain, a collapsed and kleptocentric economy, and a foreign and unfriendly culture – the most invidious issue is the most basic: why are we there? What we do we want to achieve through our continued intervention. It is interesting to note that through all of the rhetoric and discussion on means to victory, there has been scant discussion or agreement on our ends in Afghanistan. We seem to have forgotten that if the ends do not justify the means, they should at least define them. Controversy to this point has swirled mostly around the strategic means, and not the aims, pitting ISAF Commander General McChrystal’s “counterinsurgency” plan that requires a change in focus from conventional “kinetic operations” and some 40,000 additional US troops to protect the Afghan people, against Vice President Biden’s “counterterrorism” plan that calls for a drawdown and relies more upon special forces and “drones” to attack largely terrorist targets.¹ Yet to oversimplify the situation as a decision between these two options is to focus on the means, and not the ends of our policy in Afghanistan. We need to think hard about what “victory” in Afghanistan looks like, to both us and the Afghans. While the adroit and properly resourced application of either, or even both counterinsurgency or counterterrorism campaigns may be necessary for success, it may not be sufficient if we do not clearly define what our intervention in Afghanistan is meant to achieve. We must overcome the illusions of our intervention in order to properly acknowledge and communicate our war aims. Moreover, we must also accept the fact that any victory we may achieve, after all of the rhetoric and resources, will likely be disappointing to anyone but the most pragmatic and practical of people.

There remain some very fundamental truths as to why Afghanistan has been such an intractable problem, not just for the West, but for the empires that have gone before. First, and perhaps most important, it must be noted that “Afghanistan” does not exist, at least not as a nation state in the classic Westphalian sense. While there is a place on the map called Afghanistan, drawing it on the map and referring to it as a nation has not made it so. Afghans do not see themselves as “Afghans” first, if at all; it is a label imposed upon them by outsiders. They are far more likely to self-identify first by their ethnicity (Pashtu, Hazara, Tadjik, Baloch, etc), and then by their religious outlook. Nor do they recognize their fellow countrymen as “Afghans,” again defaulting to the ethnic identity that has been so deeply ingrained into the fabric of their truly “national” identities. Moreover, “Afghanistan” the state was a bespoke creation built to fail - on purpose. Durand, the British colonial agent, and the Amir Khan both knew that drawing the line through the middle of such ethnic and geographic cleavages would prevent any one group from being able to gain lasting hegemony over another, and hence doomed the region to continue its’ centuries long reign of internecine violence and liliputian existence.² For the at least the last century or more, Afghanistan’s false political existence (as well as that of Pakistan, especially in the Federal Tribally Administered Areas or FATA) has served to create a “no man’s land,” and no solution yet publicly offered – not at Bonn, nor in Kabul, Kandahar, or Washington, has demonstrated the will or desire to redraw this imaginary but troublesome line. Any hoped for “victory” in the near term will be tempered by the reality that lasting peace will not result without a regional solution that involves righting the wrong decisions of the colonial past.


Fig 1. SE Asia Ethnolinguistic Breakdown and the Durand Line
(Source: CIA Factbook 1984, reproduced at http://4.bp.blogspot.com /afghanistan_ethno_1982.jpg)

Second, much has been made about the Western militaries’ inability to fully understand and therefore bridge the significant cultural and historical differences between Afghanistan and the West, and how this has hampered our ability to wage and win a counterinsurgency. This has led, quite rightly, to the wholesale cultural education of virtually every contingent of Western soldiers who deploy, in hopes that a brief insight into the culture and history of Afghanistan can somehow make up for the very real differences in worldview, education and experience that exist between the average Western soldier and the average Afghan. But apart from just trying to be culturally sensitive to the Afghan experience, Western soldiers must also accept that they will remain largely strangers in a strange land, perhaps welcomed by Afghans, but never fully trusted. This is especially true for the large part of conventional forces, who may occupy a relatively large area of operations for less than six months, and are subject to the whim of military exigencies. Well meaning tactical commanders may promise long term commitment, but the dithering in Western capitols belies all of their sincere words and hard won trust.³ The Afghans know and understand what we refuse to openly admit: we are there only for a short period of time. We need to accept and embrace that fact, and make a virtue of necessity. From the outset, Afghans should have been told that Western intervention was a “limited time offer” – act now to avoid disappointment. Instead, we have deluded ourselves (and have tried to delude the Afghans) that we could or would make some kind of long term commitment. There was never a timetable – just time. In our naïve but well intentioned plans, there were seldom deadlines or endstates, and “letting Afghans do it their way,” became a shibboleth under successive Western missions. We were sensitive and empathetic to Afghan hopes and aspirations, but our Western sense of compassion and desire to appear generous and kind allowed us to be taken advantage of by Afghans who are nothing if not ruthlessly pragmatic. This does not make Afghans bad people – it just makes them smart, pragmatic people, who have had to live on the thinnest edge of survival.

The third hard reality that is often trivialized in the West is the impact of the national psychosis created in Afghanistan by three decades of war, and three millennia of hard scrabble survival as the crossroads (or more often, speed bump) of empires. Given their recent history, it would not be hyperbole to say that as a nation and society, Afghanistan suffers from a severe case of debilitating post traumatic stress, and exhibits paranoid schizophrenic behaviour bordering on the sociopathic.⁴ This means that most, if not all Afghans look at all issues in terms of stark survival and as a “zero sum” game. Compassion and generosity are often seen as preludes to deceit and destruction, and Afghans are harsh (but all too often accurate) judges of character and intent. In my narrow experience, Afghans have an uncanny ability to sense and accept the truth, and to fabricate and exploit a deception. We need to be honest with them, if only because they know we are not being honest with ourselves about the limit and extent of our commitment. We may be able to live with our lies, but they know that they cannot.

There is the question of why we remain committed at all. There are really four reasons trumpeted for continued engagement in Afghanistan. Foremost seems to be the security imperative – we cannot allow Afghanistan to become a haven again for terrorists. But if this is our only compelling reason for being in Afghanistan, then we could achieve our security (although perhaps not Afghanistan’s) at a much smaller cost and involvement, and along the lines of the “drones and direct action” plan allegedly preferred by Vice President Biden, and recently panned by General McChrystal.⁵ A second and perhaps more compelling argument is a moral obligation – the West has removed the Taliban government, and we are now morally obliged to replace it with one that functions. It echoes the “you broke it you bought it” argument advanced about intervention in Iraq.⁶ This argument, however, founders on the fact that we did not “break” Afghanistan – it was broken long before 2001. Ask any Afghan not a member of the Taliban movement if Afghanistan today is better than it was in September of 2001, and they will likely (although perhaps grudgingly) concede that conditions are better, less perhaps the security situation in certain parts of the country. If anything, the moral imperative has been fulfilled by the herculean, if not wholly successful nation building efforts made by the West in general, and the United States specifically since 2001. The third and perhaps most compelling argument for continued or increased intervention is on humanitarian grounds. There is, however, a debate among NGO’s and developmental experts as to whether the current military campaign against the Taliban is the best method to achieve our humanitarian goals in Afghanistan; many would argue that the presence of such a large Western military force is actually hindering, not helping, humanitarian relief efforts.⁷ The final, and perhaps most instrumental reason for continued military intervention is political: having claimed that it is the “right” war, President Obama now faces a difficult choice, where it may take more moral courage and political capital to be seen to walk away rather than to stay. Generals, pundits, and others would also point to the dangers of “abandoning” Afghanistan, and the potential for a “domino effect” throughout all of South Asia, as a wave of Taliban and Al Qaida inspired movements toppled legitimate governments in the region, fomenting further chaos and despair, and seizing control of nuclear weapons stockpiles with which to menace the West.⁸ In this line of argument, the scaremongers in the West are playing into the hands of the terrorist organizations, helping to hype the spectre of nuclear armed radical Islamic terrorists. Certainly, keeping moderate, rational governments in power in both Pakistan and Afghanistan is one way to keep some nuclear weapons out of terrorists hands, but it is not a panacea for the issue of nuclear proliferation, and therefore should not be the sole reason we remain so heavily engaged militarily in Afghanistan, especially when other situations demand our attention and limited resources.

- Shane Schreiber

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Notes:
¹ There are a myriad recent articles on this debate; see, for instance, Stephen Biddle, “Is There a Middle Way, The New Republic, 20 October 2010, http://www.tnr.com/print/article/world/there-middle-way accessed on 20 Oct 2009, Max Boot, “There’s no Substitute for Boots on the Ground,” NewYork Times, 22 October 2009 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/22/opinion/22boot.html?_r=1&ref=opinion accessed on 22 October 2009.
² For a more detailed discussion on the intent, creation, and impact of the Durand Line see Meredith Runion, A History of Afghanistan. Greenwood Publishers, (Westport, CT: 2008) pp 67-107.
³ For a wonderful example of this, see Dexter Filkins, “Stanley McChrystal’s Long War, New York Times, 18 October, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/magazine/18Afghanistan-t.html?_1&pagewanted=print accessed on 19 October 2009. See also Gilles Derronsorro, “The Afghanistan Problem,” Los Angeles Times, 20 October 2009, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-dorronsoro20-2009oct20,0,2650413.story accessed on 20 Oct 2009.
⁴ This may sound harsh, but if the actions of the many in Afghanistan were viewed in an individual, the diagnosis would not be surprising; see, for example http://www.psychiatric-disorders.com/articles/schizophrenia/schizophrenia-symptoms.php accessed on 19 Oct 2009. This claim is not meant to insult anyone who suffers from these conditions, or Afghans, but merely to make a medical metaphor to explain the impact of the years of trauma Afghan society has endured.
⁵ See James Joyner, “McChrystal: Biden plan shortsighted,” The Atlanticist, 1October 2009, http://www.acus.org/new_atlanticist/mcchrystal-biden-afghanistan-plan-short-sighted, accessed on 20 Oct 2009.
⁶ This is of course a famous quote attributed to Secretary of Sate Colin Powell, for a more detailed discussion, see “Pottery Barn Rule”at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery_Barn_rule#cite_note-Woodward-3 accessed on 20 October 2009.
⁷ See, Micheal Bear, “The Development Surge In Afghanistan,” Humanitarian Relief, 28 September 2009, http://humanitarianrelief.change.org/blog/view/the_development_surge_in_afghanistan accessed on 20 Oct 2009.
⁸ See, for example, Joeseph Zumwalt, “Mullah’s Stealth War”, Washington Times 21 Oct 2009 http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/21/mullahs-stealth-war accessed on 21 Oct 2009, or “Generals Warn of Domino Effect,” Toronto Star, 18 July 2007, http://www.thestar.com/News/article/237121 accessed 20 Oct 2009.

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Part 2 of this article can be found here.