Negotiating Afghanistan

Rarely have political and professional evaluations differed more than in Afghanistan today.  While Presidents Obama and Karzai are upbeat about accelerating the turnover of security responsibility to the Afghan security forces this spring, the Pentagon’s own progress report suggests lots of reasons for caution.  The difference lies in part in different definitions of what the Americans’ mission will be.  But even taking that into account, there is a big spread between the 30,000 or so some think needed after the end of 2014 and the minimum 3000 that the American commander is said to have recommended.  The President is said to be considering zero. What’s going on here?

In a word:  negotiations.  Karzai wants the Americans out faster and fewer to remain.  Obama wants the same, plus immunity for whatever troops remain.  The two presidents seem to have reached a modus vivendi:  Obama gets immunity, Karzai gets faster drawdown.  This will disappoint the thinktankers who want professional opinion to prevail.  But war is politics by other means.  It is not wrong for commanders in chief to make the ultimate decisions, so long as they are prepared to take responsibility for the consequences.

Obama has concluded that we are getting diminishing returns in Afghanistan.  Al Qaeda there is pretty well devastated.  He seems inclined to leave just enough troops to clobber them if they come back, or more likely to discourage them from returning.  He has decided not to worry about how well or badly Afghanistan is governed.  If that mattered to him, accelerating the withdrawal now, when little progress has been made on governance, would not make sense.  Besides, worrying about Al Qaeda in Afghanistan isn’t a top priority when the greater threat seems now to be in Yemen, or possibly Mali.  The President has many times expressed his preference for nation-building at home.  He intends to live by what he says.

Karzai has concluded that he too is getting diminished returns from the American presence in Afghanistan.  He worries less about Al Qaeda and more about the Taliban.  He wants them inside the political process and appears willing to turn over at least some governance in the south to their dubious talents.  He may even hope that the Taliban will support him, as a fellow Pushtun, despite their decade-long antagonism.  But to get them into the political process he has to show that he can get the Americans down to minimal troop levels focused not on them but on Al Qaeda.  That will also make him more popular with many Afghans (as well as with the Pakistanis) and benefit him in other ways:  it will reduce the salience and visibility of the corruption the foreigners complain too much about and enable him to manipulate the electoral process in 2014, when he is supposed to step aside.  He may do that, but he’ll want to be sure that whoever takes his place will not be too unfriendly to his and his family’s interests.

The problem here is that both Karzai and Obama may have under-valued the big risks:  collapse of the Afghan security forces and a return of the country either to civil war or to Taliban domination of a large part of its territory (or, eventually, both).  The latter is difficult to picture.  Most Afghans hate the Taliban more than they hate the Americans.  Kabulis are not going to welcome them with open arms.  Neither will Tajiks and Uzbeks in the north.  But a return of the country to civil war is not so hard to picture, especially now that its mineral spoils, including oil, are more apparent than they once were.

I admit to a good deal of discomfort leaving Afghanistan to whatever governance the Afghans can manage to sustain once the Americans draw down.  Even in Iraq, where we arguably did a bit better job and the state was in any event a bit stronger to begin with, withdrawal has undermined the institutions we hoped would enable something like democracy to thrive.  We’ve done a lousy job building the Afghan state.  There are a lot of brave Afghans and Americans who have sacrificed a great deal in the effort to improve the situation, but the “effect,” as the military would call it, has been minimal.  Afghanistan “good enough,” which is what the Administration calls its current state-building efforts, may be Afghanistan ripe for renewed civil war.

But the Presidents have decided that they will both gain if the effort is curtailed sooner rather than later.  Only time and consequences will tell whether the outcome of their negotiation was wise or foolish.