AUG 12, 2014
There are several warnings that Transition in Afghanistan may fail, including the near paralysis of any effort to decide on the outcome of the Afghan presidential election, the killing of an American General, and yet another set of complaints from Afghan President Hamid Karzai on the US use of military force. The most obvious – and pressing – issue is the failure to select a new president to replace Karzai. Current tensions reveal that fallout over the presidential election risks creating new political divisions and further destabilizing Afghanistan’s leadership and governance. At best, the process of resolving the current political struggle and creating a power structure at the top may lag well into the fall of 2014, and postpone the selection of new Ministers and Provincial and District officials until the spring of 2015.
The election, however, is only part of the story. New reporting by UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provide grim evidence that the “surge” in US forces in Afghanistan never produced any of the short-term benefits brought about by the surge in Iraq. This data also demonstrates that reporting by the US and ISAF that minimizes or understates Taliban activity and other insurgent threat levels is directly contradicted by a sharp increase in civil casualties on a national and regional level. Afghan forces have so far proved unable to cope with the sharp increase in violence.
These trends and casualty data are a clear warning that President Obama’s decision to limit the size of the US advisory mission immediately after the US combat role ends in December 2014 – and then rapidly cut the US mission to zero during 2015 and 2016 – may well lead to major Afghan government defeats almost regardless of the success or failure of the current political struggles over the outcome of the 2014 election.
Similarly, new reporting by the World Bank, IMF, and SIGAR show that the problems in Afghan governance and the Afghan economy are far worse than is portrayed in reporting by the US State Department, USAID, and Department of Defense. The reporting indicates that Afghanistan will face major civil risks that equal or surpass the tactical outcome of the post-Transition fighting.
The emerging military and civil developments in Afghanistan involve a complex intermingling of civil-military affairs, but the current crisis in Iraq is a grim warning of what happens when the overall scale and complexity of such trends in a nation at war are ignored. "Good news” is generated that is misleading or dishonest in character, and attention lurches from crisis to crisis without examining the overall challenges that must be met.
The Burke Chair at CSIS has been examining the military and civil patterns in the Afghan war, using official data and metrics, for nearly a decade. It has now revised its reporting to include the latest UNAMA/UNHCR, IMF, World Bank, and SIGAR data in forms that allow direct comparison with ISAF and US official data. The end result is a grim warning that the US government may be repeating the “follies” in Vietnam. The US and its allies cannot proceed on this basis without losing the war. There are good reasons to debate whether the US should persist in the Afghan conflict and whether it should encourage its allies to do so, but it should approach such a decision openly, with an honest assessment of the real world challenges it faces and the real costs and benefits of staying the course.
The latest version of this reporting was provided to the United States Congress as part of the testimony that Anthony Cordesman gave to the U.S. House Armed Services Committee on "The Forces Shaping Transition in Afghanistan, 2014-2016". This testimony has now been corrected as a result of informal comments by US officials and updated to reflect the contents of the new quarterly report by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR) that was issued shortly after the original testimony was originally given. It is available on the CSIS website athttp://csis.org/files/publication/140729_cordesman.slide.pdf.
This reporting shows that the US – and ISAF and UNAMA – need to be far more honest in addressing the capability of the threat, the weaknesses of the Afghan government, and the critical flaws in the current US effort. As the Vietnam War and recent events in Iraq have shown all too clearly, every serious counterinsurgency campaign actually involves at least three major “threats,” including the enemy, dealing with partners and allies, and dealing with ourselves. A review of the trends in all three areas raises steadily growing questions as to whether the U.S. and its allies can carry out a successful Transition in Afghanistan without a far more robust, lasting, better planned and better integrated effort.
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