This was originally posted yesterday.
[Editor's Note: We're not sure where our OMG!Obama column has run off too. Perhaps ObamaNerd is embarrassed about his hero's health care bill—which appears to have abandoned the public option and half the public, namely, women.
Luckily, we're debuting a new Obama-centric opinion column today (it'll have it's own logo and all that soon enough): OMG!Sandeep by PubliCola co-founder Sandeep Kaushik.
Kaushik is the whiskey-loving liberal and Democratic political guru who recently ran the communications game for Dow Constantine’s blowout campaign (and for Mayor Greg Nickels losing—in the primary, ouch—campaign.)
Sandeep is a formidable know-it-all. His column will focus on Obama and national and international politics.
Today he comes out in favor of President Obama's Afghan surge, arguing that the British Empire's success in Afghanistan, rather than the Soviet Union's failure, is the history lesson to consider.]
It has been a few weeks now since President Barack Obama’s December 1 West Point speech, in which he articulated his reasons for supporting, in the face of Democratic resistance and public unease, a military surge—a semi-occupation, really—in Afghanistan. (Josh had some interesting stuff to say about it here.)
But after a (far too) brief burst of public attention, our deepening involvement in the cauldron of central Asia has again faded from the front pages, replaced by the travails of Tiger Woods, holiday shopping and winter weather stories, and the subversive shenanigans of conservative Democratic senators (Ben Nelson) and their crypto-Republican colleagues (Joe Lieberman – the “I” apparently stands for insurance companies) in the domestic battles over health care reform.
That’s unfortunate, because Obama’s decision to escalate the war is likely the most consequential decision he will make during his presidency. George Bush treated Afghanistan as nothing more than the little blind in his poorly played game of high-stakes Texas Hold ‘Em in Iraq, even though Afghanistan was a necessary war (or, to borrow from Obama’s Dec. 11 speech in Oslo upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, a “just war”), while Iraq was a misguided war of choice.
Even now, as the new president calls for a major military escalation—and an ambitious, fast-paced nation-building exercise—in one of the most hostile, anti-Western regions of the world, the “just war” remains largely a forgotten war.
We forget Afghanistan at our peril. In comparison, the success or failure of health care reform pales by comparison; if Obama fails to get a reasonable bill through Congress, his presidency will survive, just as Bill Clinton’s did. But if his Afghanistan surge fails, it will destroy his administration, as Iraq destroyed the Bush administration. And the geopolitical price of failure there will be more enormous still, because, an American retreat from Afghanistan will further destabilize nuclear-armed Pakistan. Afghanistan is now Obama’s war, and he better win it. And Pakistan is his problem, and he needs to solve it.
So what to make of the Obama strategy? First, he’s right not to abandon Afghanistan. We’ve tried that once before, with disastrous results. Our decision, after using the Afghans as our proxies to fight the Soviets in the last days of the Cold War, to abandon Afghanistan led to a terrible toll for the Afghan people: first a bloody, chaotic civil war among Mujahideen factions vying for power, then the rise of the Taliban and the creation of a safe haven for Osama bin Laden. As the events of 9/11 attest, it wasn’t such a great decision for us either.
Second, Obama is also correct that the current status quo is untenable. We have been there, fighting, dying and, recently, losing, for eight years, without much to show for it. More than nearly 500 coalition troops have died in Afghanistan this year. 306 Americans lost their lives—nearly double the 155 American troops that were killed there in 2008. Those aren’t Iraq-level casualty numbers, much less Vietnam, but the trend lines are worrisome. So far, we’re bleeding—and losing—in the face of a revived Taliban insurgency.
But does that mean we should double down on our bet there? At first glance, the history of Western involvement in Afghanistan is not encouraging. Actually, that is an understatement—over the centuries, the stony valleys and snow-clad peaks of Afghanistan have not been kind to presumptuous foreigners intending to subdue the tribesmen who live according to ancient codes of honor built on the twin pillars of the book (the Koran) and the gun.
Accounts of military hardships—punctuated by spectacular setbacks—litter the histories. Afghanistan is widely seen as the place where imperial ambitions come to die. Most recently, after 10 years of brutal, costly and inconclusive war in the 1980s against Mujihadeen forces armed and trained by the CIA in Pakistan, the once mighty Soviet empire collapsed soon after their ignominious retreat from Afghanistan.
The Soviets were in good historical company. Alexander the Great spent four years fighting brutal battles as he made his way across Afghanistan, exhausting his army in the process. Genghis Khan, as he swept across Asia, had more than his share of troubles conquering and holding the region.
Later, in the 19th Century, the British also learned hard lessons in Afghanistan. Vying with the Russians for supremacy in central Asia, and concerned about protecting the eastern flanks of British India, in 1839 they invaded and, for a brief period, installed a puppet on the throne in Kabul. Their success was short-lived. Three years later, the British commander in Kabul, Lord Elphinstone, called a full retreat in the face of a powerful Afghan uprising.
The ensuing events constitute a a catastrophe remembered as perhaps the greatest military defeat in the history of the British empire. In January of 1842 a British contingent of 16,000 soldiers and camp followers—the column stretched for 10 miles—abandoned Kabul. Harried by Afghan tribesmen, the retreat turned into a rout. Massacred as they fought through snowy mountain passes, only about 40 of 3,600 British soldiers survived to reach the beleaguered British garrison at Jalalabad.
But the deeper lesson of the British 19th Century experience is that Afghanistan turned out to be too important to abandon for long. The British understood that a stable ally in Kabul was the key to pacifying and defending the borders of their Indian empire, which extended to the tribal areas of what is now Pakistan. Obama too argues—rightly—that success in Afghanistan is a key to pacifying Pakistan’s tribal regions, where bin Laden and the Taliban leadership have found refuge.
There were further setbacks for the British, including the slaughter of a British contingent in Kabul during a second Anglo-Afghan war from 1878 to 1880. However, in the end they achieved their core objective of wresting control of Afghan foreign policy for nearly four more decades, until yet another war in 1919 led to Afghan independence.
President Obama should look to British PM William Gladstone
The central question for us is whether the Soviet experience, or that of the British, is the more relevant historical precedent for our current involvement. Time will tell, though I suspect it is the latter. The Soviets lost so badly because they were engaged in a conflict of competing superpowers, where we spent billions arming and training Afghan proxies (including bin Laden). There is no competing superpower now to back the Taliban, though they do enjoy the support of elements of the the Pakistani military and intelligence services; like the British in the second half of the 19th Century, we are the great power in a unipolar world.
Like the 19th Century Brits, Obama understands the catastrophic foreign policy implications in abandoning Afghanistan. Like the British, we are learning some hard lessons there. The next few years will not be neat. There will almost certainly be setbacks, perhaps some spectacular ones. If Obama intends to get this right—his determination seems real enough—we likely won’t be leaving in 2011, or soon thereafter (read the “conditions-based time line” fine print of Obama’s promise to begin drawing down our forces in 18 months).
Like the British, in order to succeed we will have to be patient, and determined, and above all realistic. Like them, we will have to be willing to settle for less than we would like. Obama’s high-minded talk of the justness of our cause and the American exceptionalist mission of spreading liberty aside—I have to admit, he’s starting to sound too much like Bush-style utopian neoconservative for my taste—we will have to make more morally ambiguous compromises of the sort we just did regarding the fraudulent reelection of Hamid Karzai. Just as the British became so adept at doing, we will have to make alliances of convenience with unsavory warlords. We may have to look the other way as the opium trade flourishes. We will likely have to buy off more moderate elements of the Taliban.
We will have to accommodate Afghan sensibilities as we leave our Western preconceptions at home. We will, as many on the left fear, sully our moral purity in the face of realities on the ground. That’s the other lesson of the British experience: The high-minded poetry of imperial good intentions necessarily diverges from the prosaic realities of how power—and the limits of it—are expressed. The British made the best of a difficult, imperfect situation, and we have it in us too. It’s when we did something similar in Iraq (cutting deals with Sunni insurgents) that our fortunes there started to turn.
Of course, Afghanistan is not Iraq. And one more thing Obama is right about: nor is it Vietnam. The truth is that Afghanistan, on the border of a highly unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan, is more geo-politically important than either of those wars of choice ever were. Afghanistan may be a just war, but as the lessons of history tell us, it won’t be a pretty—or an easy—one.
