It is often said that Afghanistan was Russia’s Vietnam and this is a fair comparison: the USSR invaded a third world country in the middle of a revolution and attempted to bolster a friendly government of shared ideology in the face of fierce foreign-supported insurgent resistance, creating a long, bloody war that lost popularity at home almost immediately but was nevertheless sustained for over nine years.
But as quaint as that adage is, it is doubly bitter, because while Afghanistan was indeed Russia’s Vietnam, Afghanistan is also becoming America’s Afghanistan.
Last month, during Hilary Clinton’s confirmation hearing, Senator Kerry opened a line of discussion about Afghanistan that was more frank than that I've heard from any other delegate of prominence. In his comments, Kerry discussed his concern that the US has been on autopilot in Afghanistan and more importantly, that we have allowed our basic tactical objective to inflate into an impossible nation-building exercise:
“Our original goal was to go in there and take on Al Qaeda. It was to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. It was not to adopt the 51st state of the United States. It was not to try to impose a form of government, no matter how much we believe in it and support it…”
A recent political cartoon showed President Obama looking proudly at a portrait of Lincoln while behind him, a portrait of LBJ, physically mired in the Vietnamese mess he created, reached out of the canvas as if attempting to warn Obama. You could take the cartoon many ways, and about either of our current wars, but I took it specifically about Afghanistan- that the war is at a tenuous Vietnam-esque spot where "victory" seems impossible even while the desire to escalate is widely espoused.
If Obama begins to deepen our involvement in the war and embrace the mission-creep Kerry alluded to- or simply fails to reorient our definition of success to the original mission or new feasible goals- Afghanistan will surely become another Vietnam.
In William Malley’s well-researched book on the subject, The Afghanistan Wars, he describes the events that precipitated the Soviet invasion and the kind of war that transpired as a result. To review, a Marxist coup overthrew the revolutionary government of Mohamed Daoud Khan in 1978 and established the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, a flailing communist government that was rife with factionalism. Unable to govern effectively, besieged and relying on repression and violence to keep the capital under control, the DRA soon requested support from the Soviet military. The Soviet army deployed across its mutual border into Afghanistan in 1979, beginning a long bloody war against the resistance, commonly referred to as the Mujahideen (holy warriors or strugglers), disparate groups of various sizes, goals, tactics, and even religions (Shia vs. Sunni).
The Mujahideen found ready support from many western nations, particularly the US which supplied money and weapons and helped bring the issue to the forefront of Russian negotiations. NGO aid flowed into Afghanistan (from the ICRC, Médecins Sans Frontières, etc.) who operated in rural areas, caring for refugees and often treating Mujahideen. International opinion condemned the Soviet invasion and facilitated wide operating room for support of the resistance.
And while current Afghan president Hamid Karzai is far more popular than Babrak Karmal was at the time of the Soviet invasion (and the Taliban is also less popular now than it once was), Karzai’s regime nonetheless retains substantial patronage from the US, his mere existence as executive enabled by a foreign invasion, and his military run, in effect, by the US Central Command.
Technically, the political conditions have reversed- the Soviets were fighting to sustain a repressive socialist regime in Afghanistan while the US labors, ostensibly, to implement a self-sustaining representative democracy. But the pure concept of a foreign power invading and protecting a nascent regime, fighting a persistent local resistance in an effort to institute an ideologically preferred social and governmental system, is identical to that of the Soviet Afghan war.
Today, politicians and pundits appear constantly on our television screens declaring that we must fight extremism, militant Islam, and the forces of evil throughout the world (“to the gates of hell”). The main target is Al Qaeda and its network, to include its most recent facilitators, the Taliban. With ire and incredulity, the pols and pundits decry the ungrateful Pakistanis- on whose security we spend billions of dollars- but whose soldiers are attacking our troops across the Afghan-Pak border, and whose government, either unable or disinclined to seal that border, is allowing active support of the Taliban and Mujahideen through clandestine networks and even the ISI, the national intelligence agency, a prime asset and ally in the “war on terror”.
A rereading of recent history is helpful in placing these concerns in perspective.
In the 1980s, the United States had a policy of supporting the Mujahideen of Afghanistan, many of whom were bona fide extremist holy warriors. The US spent over $2 billion on the Mujahideen, supplying them with weapons- from classic Enfield rifles to Chinese-made AK-47s and RPG-7s and US Stinger missiles. Furthermore, the way the US moved its aid into Afghanistan was through a network it constructed with its ally, Pakistan, specifically through the ISI itself. In effect, the relationship between extremist rebels in Afghanistan and the Pakistani ISI was developed with the explicit consent and desire of the United States, so that the US could get its gift weapons into Mujahideen hands.
Today those Mujahideen, under a new name, are still fighting a regime they reject, still waging an insurgency against an invading infidel army, still operating freely in the would-be Pushtunistan, still supported unrepentantly by a fractured Pakistan and the Pakistani ISI. I argue that Afghanistan is likely to become our Afghanistan but it could easily be countered: it always was.
I often ask people what they think is the endstate for the American/NATO war in Afghanistan, and so far, no one has been able to give me an answer. Has it become, as Sen. Kerry inferred, a war to establish a functioning democracy there? Let’s think this through to a logical, even ideal conclusion: In some magical way, Afghanistan becomes a secure state, free of violence, and is able to develop a functioning democratic system. But, in their first elections as such, the people elect the Taliban to a majority position. What then? Denounce the elections? What if Afghans actually embrace Sharia law the way the British embrace secular government? The constant projection of our own philosophies onto other peoples is inefficient and damaging. How Afghans want to live should be up to Afghans to decide and our policy should react to those decisions, not manipulate them.
Before the US government sends one extra battalion to Afghanistan, or takes one home, it needs to announce to the American people what the objectives in Afghanistan are, what the feasibility of those objectives is, and what the expected timeline will be.
In 2007, Gen. Petraeus told the House Foreign Affairs Committee: "We're not after the Holy Grail in Iraq; we're not after Jeffersonian democracy. We're after conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage." This should be our goal in Afghanistan as well. Now, let’s set immediately to defining what those conditions are.
Lest we allow Afghanistan to become our Afghanistan.
Further Reading:
The Afghanistan Wars
Kerry at Clinton Confirmation via CFR
Petraeus on Iraq (Wash Post)