‘Nato is not winning in Afghanistan’, failure would be a catastrophe, and time is running out. That was the message of three reports published in January 2008 by the Afghan Study Group, Oxfam and the Atlantic Council.
Little wonder. ‘Winning’ in Afghanistan, says Anja Havedal, a member of the aid community in Kabul, means defeating a fascistic Taliban, corrupt warlords and narco-barons in a country that ranks 174th out of 178 in the world development index and which has known war for almost thirty years. ‘Winning’, then, demands we ‘rebuild houses and roads, bring twenty million people out of starvation and unemployment, establish the rule of law, revive a largely dead economy, wipe out corruption and crime, build hydropower plants and an electricity grid, educate generations of illiterates, and institute a capable and legitimate government able to mend and transcend ethnic rifts. All of this while fighting off a resurgent Taliban’.
The meaning of the crisis in Afghanistan is this: almost no part of the international community – international institutions, national governments, intellectuals or electorates – is prepared for that kind of effort. Left, right and centre have each failed Afghanistan in their own way.
The political left sits on its hands and sneers. Afghanistan is viewed through a ‘blame America first’ prism. The political centre vacillates. Yearning for a 911 response to 9/11, seeking human security in covenants and aid, it has turned NATO into a two-tier alliance. Germany, Spain and Italy insist their troops play only non-combat roles.
These failings of the political left and centre reflect a wider cultural problem in western electorates. After Kuwait and the Balkans, western publics thought of force as high-tech, casualty-free (for us), locally-welcomed (mostly) and over-by-Christmas. It was the ‘end of history’ – Kant’s perpetual peace beckoned. But 9/11 marked the return of history, and what military historian Victor Davis Hanson calls ‘the filth, confusion, and barbarity of the battlefield’. Many have struggled to cope with this reversal. There has been a rush to pacifism, anti-Americanism and anti-western Occidentalism.
The failure of the right is very different. The US knocked over the Taliban with daisy-cutters and the grisly Northern Alliance and then left, saying ‘we don’t do nation-building’. It’s not just that the US has launched no Marshall Plan. It does not even have a special envoy to Afghanistan. The deployment of an extra 3,200 US marines is a sign the administration has finally grasped how bad things have got.
Left, right and centre have failed to understand that we are fighting fourth-generation wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Fourth-generation wars, first defined by Mao, consist of low-tech insurgencies that deploy superior political will and dense local networks, to defeat superior military and economic firepower. It aims to raise the price of winning until the enemy loses the political will to fight. And this begins on the home front. However, while the only kind of wars the US loses are 4GW (Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia), one theorist, Colonel Thomas X Hammes, points out that ‘it has been largely absent from the debate within the US Department of Defense.’
But a progressive alternative may be emerging. You can glimpse it where David Petraeus’ successful counterinsurgency in Iraq, meets David Miliband’s celebration of ‘the global civilian surge’ (a phrase that seems to have emerged from conversations between Petreaus and Miliband).
An odd couple? Perhaps not. Petraeus’ PhD was supervised by the leftist Richard Falk. After reading the Human Security Doctrine Mary Kaldor and others prepared for Javier Solana, Petreaus responded with a hand-written note, saying ‘Spot on!’ Miliband has inherited not only the ‘doctrine of the international community’ of the late 1990s but a long anti-totalitarian Labour tradition going back to Ernest Bevin in the 1940s.