‘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 174 out of 178 in the World Development Index and which has known war for almost 30 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. As Paul Berman has lamented, ‘If I say, “Hamad Karzai is making a good effort,” the initial response will be to say, “Tsk, he only rules three blocks in Kabul!”, and leave it at that. It’s a scandal. The kind of journals that used to publish Havel, Michnik, and the dissidents of the Eastern Bloc will not have anything to do with the dissidents of the Arab world.’
Afghanistan is viewed by the left through a Blame America First prism. Typical is SOAS academic Elaheh Rostami Povey: ‘With the US invasion [of Afghanistan] came poverty, rural-to-urban migration, uprooting, crime, drug addiction, unemployment, alien culture’. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, 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. Spain secretly deals with the Taliban (one former senior Spanish official calls it ‘pre-emptive surrender’). And, as the joke goes, the Germans are present but not allowed to come out at night. Jan Techau of the German Council on Foreign Relations indicts ‘a grave foreign policy blunder’ and a ‘disastrous signal to asymmetric challengers of the likes of Al Qaeda or the Taliban’.
The failings of the political left and centre reflect a wider cultural problem in western electorates. After the first Gulf War and the Balkans, western publics thought of force as high-tech, casualty-free (for us), locally-welcomed (on the whole) and over-by-Christmas. We were at the end of history and the loose threads were being tied up from 15,000 feet. Kant’s perpetual peace beckoned, and even the German Greens were up for that. But 9/11 marked the return of history, and with it 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. As ‘Iraq’ went down, bits of undigested 60s-era ‘wisdom’ came back up. ‘Down With Us!’ said many commentators. ‘Right On!’ answered too many opportunist politicians.
The failure of the right is very different. Think of it this way. In the 1988 film Colors, a rookie cop played by Sean Penn is assigned to CRASH, the LAPD’s gang-supression unit. His head full of Rambo films, Penn thinks he will get every LA gang member before the end of his shift. But his bring-it-on attitude and fists-flying methods only make things worse. His partner, a veteran beat cop played by Robert Duvall, tells a crude joke to make him see there is an alternative way to win. ‘Two bulls look down onto a field of cows’, says Duvall. ‘One says, “Let’s run down that hill and f**k a cow”. “No, let’s walk down and f**k them all” replies the other’. Penn gets the joke, but only in the final reel, after a high price has been paid.
The right’s problem is that it wants to run down the hill. 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 warfare (4GW) was defined by Mao and has been refined over decades. It is low-tech insurgency that deploys superior political will and dense local networks to defeat superior military and economic firepower. 4GW 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 of 4GW, Colonel Thomas X. Hammes, has pointed out that ‘it has been largely absent from the debate within the US Department of Defense’.
In Afghanistan the in-country coalition leadership wants to transition to 4GW – coordinating counter-insurgency efforts along the two axes of security and development – but there is neither the physical nor human resources in theatre, nor the political will among the international community to make a real fist of counter-insurgency 4GW. And this lack of capacity reflects the deep ambivalence about the effort back at home.
But a progressive alternative may be emerging. You can glimpse it where David Petraeus’ successful counter-insurgency in Iraq – opposed and derided, its successes denied for many months – meets David Miliband’s celebration of ‘the global civilian surge’ (a phrase that seems to have emerged from conversations between Petraeus 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, Petraeus responded with a handwritten note, saying ‘Spot on!’ Miliband has inherited not only the ‘doctrine of the international community’ of the late 1990s but a long and honourable anti-totalitarian Labour tradition going back to Ernest Bevin in the 1940s.
Both men seek to project ‘smart power’ – new combinations of hard and soft power. Each ‘gets’ 4GW (Petraeus literally wrote the manual), so each accepts the interdependence of nation-building and security, force-projection, development, and civilian capacity-building. Each realises that the true ‘revolution in military affairs’ concerns social relations and political leadership, not technology. And each is for human security with teeth, so to speak, knowing that, as Roger Cohen put it, ‘If solidarity dissolves at the point of danger, the war’s lost.’
And it’s clear that it is the approach of Petraeus and Milband that can best embrace the central policy recommendations of those three recent depressing Afghanistan reports.
The US-based Afghanistan Study Group criticises the ‘lack of a common strategic vision [or] attainable goals’ and calls for a comprehensive approach to ‘involving both military and civilian aspects of the mission as equals – and in a cooperative fashion among the U.S., NATO, the UN, the EU, and the Afghan government’.
Oxfam reminds us that security and development are two sides of the same coin and calls for a joined-up and properly resourced effort to advance both.
The Afghan Study Group Report points out the inconvenient truth that ‘the United States and the international community have tried to win the struggle in Afghanistan with too few military forces and insufficient economic aid’ and urges a coordinated surge of troops and development.
And let’s not forget that combinations of hard and soft power have already produced progress, not least for women. Writing from Kabul, Anja Havedal observes:
‘In a September 2007 survey, 73 per cent of the 1,500 respondents said that conditions for women had improved since the fall of the fundamentalist Taliban regime. (…) Women constituted approximately 40 per cent of the voters in the 2004 and 2005 elections, and now occupy 68 of the 249 seats in the lower house of the National Assembly. There is a Ministry of Women’s Affairs and a female-headed Independent Human Rights Commission. Girls now make up one-third of the six million children enrolled in grades 1 through 12, though the lack of female teachers forces some older girls to drop out. In 2006, 30 per cent of pregnant women received prenatal care, up from 5 percent in 2003. Although the plight of Afghan women remains severe, in some respects they are better off today than they have been for a long time. Two million girls attend schools around the country and 1,700 of the 7,000 students at Kabul University are women. The Ministry of Public Health is universally hailed as one of the few real success stories of the reconstruction effort, with statistics on the health of women and children slowly improving and a Basic Package of Health Services now available to the majority of the population.’
What is the purpose of a 21st century ‘left’ if not to stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity with the troops and civilians, Afghan and international, who have secured these changes? What more urgent task for progressive political and social theory than to learn the lessons of their experience in order to clarify and strengthen their efforts?
In the end it comes down to your choice of comrades. Anja Havedal reports: ‘A friend of mine, a young Afghan woman, recently came back from a workshop in another Asian country. She was glowing with newfound insight: “I did not know’, she said, ‘that women are capable of so much. I did not know that women in other countries have broken free from oppression and suffering. If they can do it, so can Afghan women.” Now a self-declared feminist, she says she wants to fight for women’s rights in Afghanistan.’ We should choose that woman as our comrade and fight with her.