by Anatol Lieven
There is no chance of military victory over the Taliban. Nor, without a U.S. commitment to withdraw its troops and accept a major share of power for the Taliban, does there seem any serious chance of a peace settlement (the brief truce to mark a religious festival notwithstanding). Nor, with 100 percent of the Afghan security budget and around 60 percent of the civilian budget funded by the United States and other outside donors, is there any chance of the Afghan state standing on its own feet. Financially and militarily, the existing U.S. commitment is sustainable. With U.S. military actions reduced to air support for the Afghan national forces and limited interventions by U.S. special forces, casualties have been vastly reduced. Only four U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan so far this year, and seventeen in 2017, compared to 496 at the height of U.S. operations in 2010.
At around $4.94 billion in military aid to the Afghan state and $1.3 billion in civilian aid in 2017–18, the financial cost is a tiny proportion of the current U.S. military budget of almost $700 billion. There have been strong complaints from the U.S. Congress and the office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), John Sopko, about the corruption and waste in these programs. To some extent, however, this misses the point. If the intention is to prop up the existing Afghan state, rather than to perpetuate fantasies about turning that state into an economically successful democracy, then just because the U.S. money was stolen does not mean that it was wasted. It went to provide the patronage on which the Afghan state depends to keep local power brokers on their side, rather than joining the Taliban or setting up as independent warlords.
And if the U.S. goal is limited to maintaining the Afghan state at its existing very circumscribed level, then from a purely military point of view the U.S. strategy is working. As was the case with the (much better armed) mujahideen rebels during the period from the Soviet military withdrawal in March 1989 to the collapse of the USSR in 1991, Taliban guerrillas have been able to conquer large areas of the countryside (mainly, but not exclusively, those inhabited by ethnic Pashtuns).
When, however, the Taliban concentrate to try to capture defended towns, they are beaten back or forced out with heavy casualties under pressure from the overwhelming firepower of the U.S. Air Force and Afghan artillery. If the danger to Kabul were restricted to the Taliban threat on the battlefield, then despite poor training, corruption, low morale and high desertion rates in the Afghan army, this situation could persist for a very long time indeed; since it also corresponds to a pattern of most of Afghan history whereby states have controlled the towns but had only a very limited presence in the countryside.
If, however, the American people are to go on making this commitment, it is politically and morally desirable that they should be told the truth about the real interests of the United States in Afghanistan, and the dangers in that country—since both of these have been significantly (if often unconsciously) misrepresented. If there is ever to be stable and long-lasting peace in Afghanistan, the most important external actors will be not the United States and the West, but Afghanistan’s neighbours, China, Pakistan, Iran and to a lesser extent Russia. The issue of war and peace in Afghanistan therefore needs to be introduced to wider thinking on U.S. foreign and security policy, as it illustrates one of the costs that the United States suffers from a strategy of confrontation with other powers.
As to U.S. interests in Afghanistan, these have been stated as preventing the country from re-emerging as a base for international terrorism and a threat to regional stability; combating heroin production in Afghanistan; developing democracy, human rights and women’s rights in Afghanistan; and (though this is not so often publicly stated) keeping U.S. bases there as potential instruments against Iran, Russia and China. In terms of threats, these are said to be the prospect of Taliban military victory leading to the establishment of an Islamist state supportive of terrorism. All of these propositions are either partially true or altogether false.
When it comes to the international terrorist threat, it is worth remembering that, after the United States, the country that has suffered by far the worst from extremists trained in Afghanistan has been Russia. The Taliban government was the only one to recognise the independence of Chechnya in the 1990s. The international militant force led by the Saudi “Emir Khattab” (Samir Saleh Abdullah), which did so much to radicalise the Chechen fighters and inspire them to jihad against Russia, was trained in Afghanistan. So too was their ally, the Chechen commander Shamil Basayev, whose fighters carried out two of the worst terrorist actions of modern times—the attack on the Nord Ost theatre in Moscow and on the school at Beslan.
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