President Obama was right to have drawn up plans for withdrawing from Afghanistan, as reported most recently in Bob Woodward’s new book “Obama’s Wars.”
Much has been said about the fact that, according to the book, “The president avoided talk of victory as he described his objectives.”
Former UN Ambassador John Bolton said that this makes Obama unqualified to be president, and Move America Forward PAC said that, “Surrender-in-Chief Obama… Puts Troops in Danger With No Clear Goal of Victory.”
Those criticisms miss the fundamental question: How likely is it for America to achieve “victory” in Afghanistan, and is continuing the fight worth the national security and economic costs?
The fact is Afghanistan cannot be won with military actions alone. The corruption in Afghanistan’s government makes it impossible to build a functioning democracy there, and the lack of cooperation in Pakistan–where even Pakistan’s intelligence agency is aiding terrorists–puts our troops in more risk than Obama’s withdrawal plan.
Winning Afghanistan, meaning, preventing Afghanistan from becoming a shelter for terrorists, requires nation building, a long and expensive process for any nation that is even harder in a country like Afghanistan where few foreign countries have had success at nation building.
To make matters worse, Afghanistan is the second-most corrupt country in the world according to a survey by Transparency International, and America seems unwilling to push Afghan President Hamid Karzai very hard to reform. Indeed, the Obama Administration even pressured opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah to withdraw from the presidential election runoff in 2009, despite the fact that Karzai was suspected of massive election fraud.
Corruption crosses the border into Pakistan where terrorists and insurgents seek shelter and stream over the border to fight in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s government has been reluctantly cooperating with the U.S. in the war on terror (after Richard Armitage threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the stone age after 9/11), but it has been reluctant to root out the terrorists in the west and further antagonize them. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reported this summer, “The U.S. military has stopped lobbying Pakistan to help root out one of the biggest militant threats to coalition forces in Afghanistan, U.S. officials say, acknowledging that the failure to win better help from Islamabad threatens to damage a linchpin of their Afghan strategy.”
That article is illuminating in the tragic irony of the oxymoron that is the U.S.-Pakistan alliance. America has provided $18 billion in aid to Pakistan since 9/11, and for that the Pakistan government ignores the Haqqani terrorist network that controls the border region sheltering insurgents, and, U.S. officials believe, Osama bin Laden. The number of al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan is estimated around 100, but there are thousands of Haqqani fighters allied with al Qaeda and fighting America, and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, is actually helping protect them.
In fact, documents released by WikiLeaks suggest that not only does the ISI fail to aggressively pursue terrorists, it even helps train the Taliban and plans terrorists attacks alongside Al Qaeda. Our aid to Pakistan has bought cooperation like the stimulus plan created jobs.
Clearly this war cannot be won with military force alone, and, barring any success at rooting out corruption in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, there will be no progress in fighting terrorism or building a democracy. Neither the Bush Administration nor the Obama Administration has confronted this corruption.
The simple fact is that nation building is hard. It takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to build a functioning democracy in a country of 50 tribes with varying levels of ethnic mistrust. To build a functioning democracy in “The Graveyard of Nations” is another big government social engineering program and one that isn’t working.
No amount of military force can reform Afghanistan and Pakistan’s institutions. President Obama is right to pull back from a mess that he inherited that is not advancing our national security.
