U.S. facing a no-win legacy in Afghanistan

By: Philip Ewing

February 18, 2014 11:29 PM EST 

As the war in Afghanistan winds to a close, the architects of the campaign face a decidedly one-sided battle with history.

At the moment, they’re losing and losing badly, as Washington is plumbing new depths of pessimism about the outlook for the nation that President George W. Bush and his team once vowed to transform.

There’s no talk of “victory,” or how the U.S. should spend its share of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, or how to use the peace dividend from a world made safe from Al Qaeda. Instead, the discussion has boiled down to a debate over whether the future will bring a quick implosion or a slow-motion collapse — and whose fault it would be.

Even former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith, who helped set the war into motion in the Bush administration, acknowledged that today’s reality has not matched some of Washington’s past aspirations for what it could accomplish in Afghanistan.

“All along, there were times when some officials would get what I consider to be a little too hopeful or a little too enthusiastic, or a little too excessive in their expectations or their rhetoric about building democracy or economic prosperity,” Feith told POLITICO.

But he defended the original need for the invasion, which he said had accomplished its aim of destroying the government that harbored Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda fighters. And he said not to lose sight of the progress he said Afghanistan has made since then.

“I think Afghanistan has been improved very substantially in a number of ways that do make a difference. It’s more promising economically and politically for the people there,” he said.

He also conceded, “It has a lot of problems. … I don’t know if we’ll be able to preserve what we created there in the way of national security, the police and the military, after we leave.”

Kabul cannot afford the Afghan National Security Forces that were formed, trained and supported largely by the U.S. Today’s biggest question isn’t whether Washington will begin to dial back its assistance to Kabul, only when. It might not happen until after President Barack Obama leaves office in 2017, or it could be as soon as next week.

National security officials and members of Congress are furious that Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai set free a cadre of insurgents who American commanders say have killed U.S. troops and Afghan civilians. And that’s only Karzai’s latest thumb in the eye, following reported false claims about American airstrikes and his refusal to sign the bilateral security agreement he negotiated with the Obama administration.

Some key American decision makers just want to write off Karzai completely and try to find a more stable negotiating partner after April’s Afghan presidential election.

“Whoever the next Afghan president is, he is likely to be more reliable than President Karzai, and his signature is likely to instill more confidence than would Karzai’s signature,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.). But Director of National Intelligence James Clapper cautions that the number of Afghan candidates, along with the likelihood of at least one runoff election, might mean that waiting for a successor could turn out to be a “prolonged process.”

For now, some members of Congress have responded to Karzai’s prisoner release by talking about cutting assistance to Kabul already, or beginning to add new preconditions. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he wants U.S. aid to end immediately and be restored only after Afghans elect a new president.

Others, including Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), want Congress to vote on whether to leave behind a force of American troops past the end of the year to train and advise the Afghan military.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel appreciates the political difficulties involved with Afghanistan in an election year, says Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby. All he can do is remind people that this remains a long game.

“Secretary Hagel completely understands that these decisions, made in Kabul by the Karzai administration, make it that much harder for many of those on the Hill, in Congress, to further support the Afghan mission,” Kirby said. “He understands that very much. He is just as frustrated as many of them over this. But again, this is a relationship that matters in a country that matters. And as frustrating as it can be at times, he also believes we need to keep working at this.”

Those kinds of exhortations have become a leitmotif in the years since terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11 . But national security scholar Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argues it’s long past time for official Washington to think very hard about how much longer it can go.

“The United States needs to address the war in far more depth, with far more honesty and transparency, and make hard decisions about the cost-benefits of staying in Afghanistan,” Cordesman wrote. “It also lacks the time to skim over it in a state of Panglossian indifference. The United States must be ready for the time almost all U.S. and allied forces leave Afghanistan at the end of 2014, and ready to deal with the economic consequences of major cuts in military spending and all forms of aid.”

U.S. spy agencies have already issued a bleak outlook for the conflict after America’s troops come home. Their classified National Intelligence Estimate even includes an annex drawing parallels with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union after its disastrous 1980 invasion, Clapper told Levin’s Senate committee. An end to assistance from Moscow helped create the conflict and instability that enabled the Taliban to come to power and eventually harbor Al Qaeda.

Unless Washington handles the final act in Afghanistan correctly, hawks and security experts warn that history could repeat itself. Feith said if the U.S. withdraws as fully from Afghanistan as it did from Iraq, it risks “losing our ability to affect the situation.”

Whatever happens, the Pentagon has vowed to continue putting one foot in front of the other. Hagel told reporters he’s planning on a post-2014 U.S. presence, although officials won’t talk publicly about how many troops would be involved. Hagel also has said he wants a signed security agreement in hand when he travels to Belgium for a NATO conference scheduled for the end of the month, but he acknowledged that as of now, he doesn’t know if that will happen.

“We are dealing with the world we’re dealing with,” he said.