Is Less Really Best?

Rory Stewart, last seen in this space making some very potent criticisms of western policy in Afghanistan (basically calling it an ignorant variant of neo-colonialism), has another grand idea: limited engagement in Afghanistan. His main critique is very right:

Why are we Westerners in Afghanistan? Vice President Cheney talks terror, Britain focuses on narcotics. The European Union talks “state-building,” others gender. On a different day, the positions seem interchangeable. Five years ago, we had a clear goal. Now we seem to be pursuing a bundle of objectives, from counterinsurgency to democratization and development, which are presented as uniform but which are in fact logically distinct and sometimes contradictory.

Finance officers in Kabul and shepherds in Kandahar want to know what we did with the $10 billion we spent in the last four years. So do any number of commentators on Afghan TV and radio. And when Helmand villagers see soldiers from countries thousands of miles away carrying guns and claiming to be only building schools, they don’t believe them.

I have noticed that many Afghans now simply assume we are engaged in a grand conspiracy. Nothing else in their minds can explain the surreal gap between our language and performance.

His policy prescriptions, however, need some work.

Carl Robichaud Afghanistan Watch has admirably poked some holes in Stewart’s ideas, but even he gets some things wrong.

…[H]e argues “we should focus on large, highly visible infrastructure to which Afghans will be able to point in 50 years” such as dams and roads. I can sympathize with Stewart’s desires — a lust for roads is an understandable symptom of a trek across the country — but would succumbing to the “edifice complex” that plagued reconstruction in the 60s and 70s really win hearts and minds?

Instead we’d hear a different chorus: sure they built roads and dams, but where is my livelihood, why can’t I get medicine or schooling for my children, etc, etc. Development projects would be (rightfully) castigated for not being driven by local needs and desires. People need to see results, but they need to see results that touch their own lives; in some cases this will mean roads, in other cases schoolbooks and microloans, but there is no silver bullet. Stewart cites some excellent models (Arghand, Agha Khan) but curiously they are all of the “instrumentalist” approach he dismisses.

Well, yes. I’ve lately come to believe that conceiving of Afghanistan as a single state is a bit daft—it is more accurately a mishmash of nations, told by outsiders that they are one country, but with no sense or real tradition of civic identity since Ahmad Shah Durrani died in 1772. As such, each individual community—often down to the tribal level—has its own needs and concerns, and those are what should be paramount to the construction efforts. Simply saying, “We’re building you roads, isn’t that enough” will ring hollow when the wells are dry, or when there’s nothing to grow or sell save poppy.

Stewart is right to condemn the intersection of aid and the military (this is a constant theme in my writing on the subject), and his solution is similar to mine: bifurcation. Robichaud disagrees, saying it could “unleash a broader civil war as Pashtunistan asserts its independence, Pakistan asserts its influence over Taliban proxies, the current government tries to hold the state together, and northern militia leaders assert their right to pillage and settle scores.”

This is incomplete, I feel—a big part of the amnesty program passed by the Jirga is forgiving and attempting non-violent reconciliation, which does have precedent within at least Pashtun society. Furthermore, a de facto bifurcation of Afghanistan is not the same as a de jure bifurcation: giving the Taliban their say in many southern communities has actually been quite effective in undermining their popularity.

Ultimately, Robichaud gets the last word on governance when he says a central state in some form or another must exist. How much control it has should be up for debate, however. Moreso, I think the west has made a critical error in trying to force western political customs on Afghanistan. They have their own systems that have worked for centuries, and we should respect.

But Stewart’s primary point—that we have lost focus in Afghanistan—is too important to subsume under criticism. He rightly draws a distinction between counterterrorism, which was why we invaded in the first place, and counterinsurgency, which amounts to telling the Afghans who to put in charge. The problem is that the Taliban are why we needed a counterterrorism policy in the first place—since they showed no compunction about lying and murdering to get in charge, then lying again about whether and how they’d support and shelter Osama bin Laden (Hamid Karzai, it should not be forgotten, used to support the Taliban, many of whom came from his tribe). The sad bit is that the Taliban will probably have to be a part of a coalition government. The good bit is that, much like Turkey, folding an Islamist party into a coalition government tends to moderate its views. Suppressing the Taliban, like Algeria did to the Islamic Salvation Front in 1991, will only lead to more bloodshed.

Here is what concerns me. Both writers are keen analysts of Afghanistan. Yet, despite even the presence of the “opium” tag in Robichaud’s post, neither mentioned the word (or “poppy”) once. The drug trade has a serious, destabilizing effect on the country—funding recalcitrant warlords and the Taliban, creating increasingly pervasive corruption, and sowing the seeds of violence along the border with Tajikistan. Without a coherent opium policy—one that goes beyond simple eradication—all of Robichaud’s and Stewarts ideas will come to naught.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust

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