Afghanistan is a Vietnam that matters

Expectations are low for this week’s “regional” meeting in Turkey on Afghanistan.  Until Pakistan is convinced to reign in the Taliban, regional cooperation doesn’t mean much.

I suppose the Istanbul meeting may, as the diplomats say, set in motion a process that will eventually produce some sort of regional security and economic arrangement, but that kind of goobledy gook is unlikely to save many Pakistani, Afghan or American lives anytime soon. Afghanistan’s very real importance to the “New Silk Road” cannot be realized under current conditions.

The U.S. military is anxious to reassure us that the overall number of Taliban attacks in Afghanistan is down this year, but the insurgents seem more capable of reaching into Kabul and other formerly safe areas.  Twelve or so Americans died in an improvised explosive device attack Saturday in the capital.  That’s not the kind of mass infantry attack on American outposts of which they were capable a few years ago, but it sure as hell makes people in the capital nervous.

The problem, as the Pentagon’s latest report to Congress makes strikingly clear, has as much to do with governance inside Afghanistan as cross-border infiltration.  Under the heading Weak Afghan Government Capacity Puts Progress At Risk, the Pentagon says:

However, the capacity of the Afghan Government has been limited by a number of issues, including the political dispute in the Lower House of the Afghan Parliament, the continued absence of an International Monetary Fund program, widespread corruption, and the lack of political progress in enacting key reforms announced at the July 2010 Kabul Conference. Setbacks in governance and development continue to slow the reinforcement of security gains and threaten the legitimacy and long-term viability of the Afghan Government. The United States and the international community continue to work closely with their Afghan partners to address these challenges.

This is the polite version.  What it means is that few have confidence in the Karzai government, which appears incapable of curbing corruption or reaching workable agreements with even its peaceful political opponents.

Hillary Clinton has stopped talking about “clear, hold, build” and has started talking “fight, talk, build.”   The new mantra has the virtue of necessity.  We’ve done pretty well at fighting and clearing insurgents from parts of Afghanistan, but we don’t have enough troops to hold and the Afghans aren’t proving good at it.  So we are looking for a negotiated solution (that’s the talk part), one that would presumably bring the Taliban in from the cold and give them a slice of the governing pie, especially in the south and east.

That’s the build part, but the questsion is what can be built on a foundation as weak as the Karzai government?  This could begin looking more and more like Vietnam, where all the metrics were favorable, an agreement was negotiated, but the incapacity and illegitimacy of the government in the South eventually opened the door to the north’s military superiority once the Americans had withdrawn.  Those like John Barry who drew the analogy almost two years ago are looking prescient.

The saving grace could be this:  the Taliban are even more unpopular with Afghans than Karzai.  If the Afghan army can improve enough between now and 2014, Afghans–even Pashtuns–may be willing to defy and reject people who didn’t have much to offer last time they took over.

The big difference between Afghanistan and Vietnam is that the United States really does have national security interests in Afghanistan and especially in nuclear-armed Pakistan.  It is hard to see how the we can protect those interests if withdrawal from Afghanistan ends the way withdrawal from Vietnam did.  Afghanistan is looking like a Vietnam that matters.