Frederick Kagan: Afghanistan Is Not Vietnam
[Author Bio: Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.]
Just three months ago, Afghanistan was the "good" war. It was, according to all the conventional wisdom, the "real" central front in the war on terror, the war we had to win, the place to fight Al Qaeda, and the war we should have been focusing on all along. Nothing much has changed in Afghanistan since Barack Obama won the election, but conventional wisdom is swinging fast to the opposite viewpoint. Opinion makers on the left and the right are discovering that Afghanistan is hard to fix, that Al Qaeda is really in Pakistan, and that the "good war" might not be so good after all.
One thing that has not changed, apparently, is Obama's determination to succeed in Afghanistan. He's right to hold firm. Afghanistan is hard, and always was, but we can still succeed. It has not been the sanctuary for Al Qaeda since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, but it is still important. Afghanistan may have lost its luster as a stick with which to beat the Bush administration for invading Iraq, but it has not lost its importance to American national security. Obama is right to try to win, and he deserves the full support of the nation.
But once again the policy debate seems to be focusing on the philosophical problem of defining success rather than the practical problem of actually succeeding. It is essential, of course, to consider what American national security really requires in Afghanistan before committing to some arbitrary set of goals. And the challenges of making any real progress in Afghanistan are daunting, especially to a country exhausted not so much by the war in Iraq as by the bitter and emotionally draining debate about that war. The current economic crisis is naturally the emergency uppermost on the minds of Americans and their leaders, and "fixing" Afghanistan has come to seem like a very unpleasant distraction. The chorus of voices insisting that we redefine our aims in Afghanistan to something more readily attainable is therefore growing loud. Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, racked by civil war and foreign invasions for 30 years, riven with ethnic seams and ancient tribal enmities, and utterly unsuited to the growth of modern liberal democracy, so it is said. Our real interests in Afghanistan consist of preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens there, and we can do that, according to many, by focusing narrowly on killing terrorists rather than trying to build an Afghan state.
As in Iraq since 2006, the search is on for a middle-way strategy in Afghanistan that will achieve our minimal national-security requirements without forcing us to defeat a determined set of enemies and create a modern state. Unfortunately, as in Iraq, there is no such strategy. Attempts to use targeted attacks on key individuals to destroy a well-established terrorist network over the past decade have failed repeatedly. Limited and discriminate attacks in Afghanistan and Africa in the 1990s failed to weaken Al Qaeda seriously. "Small footprint" operations in the Horn of Africa failed to prevent Islamist terrorists from seizing most of Somalia in 2006, from making millions of dollars out of maritime piracy, or from re-emerging recently as a renewed threat to the region. Pinpoint attacks backing local armed forces in Afghanistan in 2001 did not destroy Al Qaeda—they merely disrupted the group and forced it to flee to Pakistan, where it reformed. Ongoing targeted strikes in Pakistan continue to disrupt the network, but show no signs and offer no promise of destroying it. Even when we have had large numbers of troops in a country—as in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002—targeted strikes have killed hundreds of key terrorist leaders, but could not on their own destroy enemy networks. In both countries, in fact, terrorist activities and reach grew in spite of the success of targeted attacks when such attacks were the focus of our efforts. There is simply no recent historical evidence to support the assertion that small-footprint targeted attacks against key nodes of a terrorist network will by themselves destroy that network or even seriously degrade it over time....
Read entire article at Newsweek
Just three months ago, Afghanistan was the "good" war. It was, according to all the conventional wisdom, the "real" central front in the war on terror, the war we had to win, the place to fight Al Qaeda, and the war we should have been focusing on all along. Nothing much has changed in Afghanistan since Barack Obama won the election, but conventional wisdom is swinging fast to the opposite viewpoint. Opinion makers on the left and the right are discovering that Afghanistan is hard to fix, that Al Qaeda is really in Pakistan, and that the "good war" might not be so good after all.
One thing that has not changed, apparently, is Obama's determination to succeed in Afghanistan. He's right to hold firm. Afghanistan is hard, and always was, but we can still succeed. It has not been the sanctuary for Al Qaeda since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, but it is still important. Afghanistan may have lost its luster as a stick with which to beat the Bush administration for invading Iraq, but it has not lost its importance to American national security. Obama is right to try to win, and he deserves the full support of the nation.
But once again the policy debate seems to be focusing on the philosophical problem of defining success rather than the practical problem of actually succeeding. It is essential, of course, to consider what American national security really requires in Afghanistan before committing to some arbitrary set of goals. And the challenges of making any real progress in Afghanistan are daunting, especially to a country exhausted not so much by the war in Iraq as by the bitter and emotionally draining debate about that war. The current economic crisis is naturally the emergency uppermost on the minds of Americans and their leaders, and "fixing" Afghanistan has come to seem like a very unpleasant distraction. The chorus of voices insisting that we redefine our aims in Afghanistan to something more readily attainable is therefore growing loud. Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries, racked by civil war and foreign invasions for 30 years, riven with ethnic seams and ancient tribal enmities, and utterly unsuited to the growth of modern liberal democracy, so it is said. Our real interests in Afghanistan consist of preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens there, and we can do that, according to many, by focusing narrowly on killing terrorists rather than trying to build an Afghan state.
As in Iraq since 2006, the search is on for a middle-way strategy in Afghanistan that will achieve our minimal national-security requirements without forcing us to defeat a determined set of enemies and create a modern state. Unfortunately, as in Iraq, there is no such strategy. Attempts to use targeted attacks on key individuals to destroy a well-established terrorist network over the past decade have failed repeatedly. Limited and discriminate attacks in Afghanistan and Africa in the 1990s failed to weaken Al Qaeda seriously. "Small footprint" operations in the Horn of Africa failed to prevent Islamist terrorists from seizing most of Somalia in 2006, from making millions of dollars out of maritime piracy, or from re-emerging recently as a renewed threat to the region. Pinpoint attacks backing local armed forces in Afghanistan in 2001 did not destroy Al Qaeda—they merely disrupted the group and forced it to flee to Pakistan, where it reformed. Ongoing targeted strikes in Pakistan continue to disrupt the network, but show no signs and offer no promise of destroying it. Even when we have had large numbers of troops in a country—as in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2002—targeted strikes have killed hundreds of key terrorist leaders, but could not on their own destroy enemy networks. In both countries, in fact, terrorist activities and reach grew in spite of the success of targeted attacks when such attacks were the focus of our efforts. There is simply no recent historical evidence to support the assertion that small-footprint targeted attacks against key nodes of a terrorist network will by themselves destroy that network or even seriously degrade it over time....