The Afghanistan Trap

With no end in sight in Afghanistan, Leslie H. Gelb lays out the risks ahead—and the president's options.

from The Daily Beast

The United States will be trapped in Afghanistan for many costly years to come. It is a good bet that President Obama will have most of the 105,000 U.S. troops expected there by the end of summer, still in that sorry country by the next presidential election, and probably even five years from now. By that time, whoever is president will face such public demands for withdrawal that the fiasco will end, finally—for Americans at least. It’s not at all clear whether President Obama fathoms this nightmare or is cynically sidestepping the issue through November 2012.

Sure, I want to be wrong, and I want our efforts to succeed. The Taliban and al Qaeda Muslim terrorists there are monsters, crazed and dangerous. But we face two problems that can’t be swept aside or minimized: The bad guys are far better motivated, and fight far better than the Afghans that Washington is trying to help. Our guys in Kabul—President Hamid Karzai and friends—are deeply corrupt, ineffective, and of at least two minds in both needing and hating America. However good U.S. and NATO troops become at fighting this insurgency, they won’t and can’t be good enough to overcome these two Mount Everests. This conclusion is painfully evident, but we are blocked from seeing it sharply for several reasons.

There is no significant part of the insurgency there that can be brought over to the American side by opening our arms.

First is the success of the military surge in Iraq. Remember, President George W. Bush dispatched an additional 30,000 or so U.S. troops to that war at the urging of General David Petraeus, now America’s commander for South Asia and the Gulf region.

Most defense experts blithely argue that this troop increase produced the subsequent period of quiet and stability. It certainly helped, but if you push these surge advocates, they will all admit that the key factor in turning the security tide in Iraq was much less the surge and far more America’s long-delayed alliance with the Sunnis. We treated the Sunnis in the center of Iraq as enemies, when they had the potential all along to be our principal allies. They were caught between the majority Shiites, whom they had long oppressed and who were now in power, and the Kurds, who were seeking relative autonomy often at Sunni expense. So, instead of the Sunnis being the main enemy, Washington finally permitted them to become allies—and the fighting in the center of the country subsided.