Today, The Guardian published a twelve-page exposé of the war in Afghanistan based on the disclosure of 90,000 classified items passed to the paper by the website Wikileaks. The material is sobering. It documents numerous civilian casualties, the use of special forces teams to kill or capture Taliban commanders, and alleged links between the Taliban, the Pakistani intelligence service (the ISI) and Iran. The extent of the disclosure is surprising, and some of the details will be disturbing, especially for those unfamiliar with the campaign. Much of it is also illuminating, providing a rare level of detail.
However, the Guardian’s presumption that this material reveals the Afghan war in a new light cannot be sustained. Since 2001, it has been a matter of public knowledge that coalition forces, especially special forces, have been used on kill-or-capture missions against al Qaeda and the Taliban. The entire rationale of Operation Enduring Freedom was counter-terrorism. Indeed, commanders have repeatedly reaffirmed the importance of these missions. In July 2008, the comments of the then commander of the Helmand task force, Mark Carleton-Smith, were completely explicit. He argued that “precise surgical” strikes against Taliban leadership (including the successful assassination of Mullah Dadullah, a key commander in Helmand), had undermined the insurgency: “I can therefore judge the Taliban insurgency a failure at the moment,” he declared. “We have reached the tipping point.” Carleton-Smith did not say it, but it was well known that British and US special forces had been behind these attacks. Even in 2008, it was estimated in public that many of the 7,000 Taliban fighters killed had been the victims of special forces.
In 2009, it was clear that this strategy was continuing. General McChrystal had commanded coalition special operations in and around Baghdad between 2003 and 2008, and, as Mark Urban’s book Task Force Black records, such operations were almost exclusively strike forces going out each night on kill-or-capture missions. With McChrystal’s assumption of command in Afghanistan last June, it would have been naïve to think that the special forces were going to be employed in any other role.
The issue of civilian casualties has also been very well publicised. This has been a problem throughout the campaign and is, indeed, typical during a complex counter-insurgency mission—even with the coalition’s unprecedented ability to target with precision. Civilian casualties have been heavy in places—often in connection with special forces missions—and their necessity has been highly questionable, however regretted they might be afterwards. It is noticeable that recurrent ISAF commanders have emphasised the need to avoid civilian casualties. In 2006, General Sir David Richards had to defend one of his own senior staff officers who publicly stated that in the following year, Nato needed to kill fewer civilians; the same officer was applauded by the Afghans for his honesty. However, it was McChrystal himself who was at the forefront of campaigning about civilian casualties. He repeatedly emphasised that Nato must stop killing civilians and commanded his conventional troops, at least, to prioritise the lives of civilians, even at risk to themselves; the doctrine of “courageous restraint.” Military commanders have not divulged all of the more unfortunate details of civilian deaths, especially the ones where special forces are involved, but they have admitted they happen, and recognised the damage they do to the campaign.
Meanwhile, the revelation that the US believe that the ISI and Tehran may be supporting the Taliban cannot really be said to constitute a leak. It was common knowledge that the Taliban were financially and militarily underwritten by the Pakistan regime, and by the ISI in particular, during their ascent to power in the 1990s. It would be unusual if some links did not continue to this day, especially since what kind of regime is in place at Kabul is a question of domestic politics for Islamabad. Ahmed Rashid emphasised the connections in his book, Descent into Chaos. The Iranian links are more opaque, and complicated by the fact that narcotics trafficking across the Afghan-Iranian border is a major concern to Tehran. Indeed, what might be described as a drug war is taking place along the border between Iranian security forces and Afghan narco-traffickers, including the Taliban.
Considering they are not particularly revealing, the Guardian’s disclosure of these leaks demonstrates an underlying agenda. For the Guardian, the leaks demonstrate the folly and inevitable failure of the Afghan campaign. It is not clear that these inferences need to be drawn. The Afghan campaign is desperately difficult and there is much to criticise about it, especially the special forces operations. Politics has always taken a back seat to force, and it is easier for a Nato commander to kill a Taliban leader than to talk with him. However, none of these leaks necessarily prove the campaign will fail. Civilian casualties are a problem for the west and there is evidence that they aggrieve local Afghans. Yet the Taliban are also inflicting numerous civilian casualties, in many cases quite deliberately. The Taliban hanged a boy of seven in Sangin in June this year because he was putatively collaborating with ISAF. Numerous children, who are paid to make and plant IEDs, report to hospitals with hands and arms blown off by the devices. In many cases, locals are outraged by these quite deliberate deaths; they might usefully be the subject of a similar exposé. Finally, the very fact that the Taliban may be supported by Iran and Pakistan actually gives this mission a strategic rationale which western leaders have been at a loss to articulate.
This mission is not about counter-terrorism. It is about regional stabilisation. The mission will succeed in so far as the coalition builds a regime in Kabul which is broadly acceptable to Afghans as a whole and to the neighbouring states of Iran, Pakistan and India. The one thing the Guardian revelations usefully affirm is that this regime cannot be built just by killing people, be they genuine Taliban or civilians. It is also an unpalatable fact that just because many people have been killed, some unnecessarily, that does not mean that the campaign in the Hindu Kush will fail.
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Excellent piece, particularly the pinpointing of the seeming inability of our leaders to explain the strategic rationale for this campaign to their publics.
Bill has it right in pithy fashion, but he does overlook the fact that our leaders (both within the UK and US) have supplied far too many rationales for the war, none of them very credible upon inspection. The initial Bush operation achieved one of its two goals – pushing the Taliban out of its formal seats of power, though it had no clear and workable “replacement plan”; it did not achieve the other, the capture or death of Osama bin Laden. Both of these goals were reasonable at the time and were even diplomatically acceptable – after all, al Qaeda and bin Laden claimed responsibility for an act of war against the US on 9/11, and retaliation against him and his protectors was legitimate. (This rationale was also a spurious subtext of the reasons for going to war in Iraq, another venture with equally dim prospects.)
Then followed the long-phase of “state-building”, an activity that previously had been anathema to important figures in the Bush administration and their boosters in the press. And the state was to be “a democratic ‘free market’ society”, fairly preposterous given the history and real prospects for Afghanistan, a nation with a millennial tradition of authoritarian rule, four rival ethnic groups led by warlords, and no real economy other than the “illegal” one of opium growth and export. “Illegal” must be put in quotes because no government in that nation’s recent history has been willing or able to control the trade, and all have been, to some extent, its abettors, and for good reasons — they needed the money.
The rationale has subtly shifted to making the war a last-ditch line of defense against the spread of Taliban and al Qaeda influence into its internationally far more important neighbor, Pakistan, while all the time knowing that important players in Pakistan are their protectors. Some of this latter behavior is undertaken for domestic political reasons in Pakistan, i.e., shielding the leadership against criticism from the nascent “religious right” that the regime is anti-Islamist. For parallel reasons during his campaign for office Obama pledged himself to the present enhanced war in order to protect himself and the Democratic Party against the US political right making the charge that otherwise the Democrats would be responsible for “losing Afghanistan”, though, just like China in the 40s and Vietnam in the 60s, we never “had” them, so we couldn’t really lose them. The overseas line-of-defense argument is silly beyond belief and requires an indefinite commitment of men and money, while it corrodes plausibility. Successful defense against potential terrorist attacks in the US, UK, and Europe could be accomplished by international co-operation in police and intelligence activities, while the war abroad will always have an imperialist taint in the minds of the locals. The more we fight to “free” them, the more they’ll resent us and be open to appeals from extremists who can cloak themselves as patriots willing to take on the occupiers. By the way, we have no “moral” responsibility to repair ills and woes five and ten-thousand miles from our own shores (if we do, then we can’t pick and choose, but must be at it all the time and everywhere, ludicrous as that obviously is). Our leaders seem to have gulled themselves into actually believing some preposterous geopolitical fantasies. This happens over and over.
I’ll give a relevant historical analogy here – during the last two years of World War I, when it should have become obvious that the best Germany might hope for was a stalemate and a return to the status quo ante, the stated “war aims” of its leaders (not the Kaiser, who had become a bad joke, but Hindenburg and Ludendorff and their numerous civilian and Reichstag faction supporters) became more and more grandiose: establishment of “rule in the east” after Brest-Litovsk; a Ukrainian and perhaps a Polish satellite state; total dominance of Central European political and economic systems; abolition of permanent Belgian neutrality and recruitment of the Netherlands into a defensive alliance with Germany; retention of Alsace-Lorraine along with acquisition of some other border areas; reparations to be paid by the Allies; and expansion of colonial holdings abroad at the expense of Allied colonies. All of these aims except the last might be seen as the same shopping list that Hitler in mind. The more likely the defeat, the more fantastic the fruits of an imagined victory and the more insistent the alleged need “to stay the course”. We all know how that works out.
Terence O’Keeffe’s first two paragraphs are a useful corollary to King’s article but I part company over the ‘moral’ bit in para 3. Whatever we may think about how far Afghanistan is from what we imagine a democracy and a capitalist system to be, it has to be remembered that, in the ’70s, life in Kabul was very much better for women than it is today. Because of the ‘great powers” interference the country has been torn apart by war and we have been involved for the last nine years. I believe that the international community has a responsibility to help the country avoid a return to a sharia law-ruled country, where women can be stoned to death for adultery or less – way outside accepted norms of human rights. A necessary step is for NATO to hand over to the UN as part of a process of legitimising the presence of foreign troops in the country and switching to helping Afghans find peace rather than obsessing over ‘terrorists’ (quite the most meaningless phrase of the last twenty years).
For as long as the US and UK forces try and square the circle of fighting a cross between a military campaign, a civil war and an insurgency by using hi-tech weaponry that worked in the invasion of Iraq and thereby killing civilians there will be stalemate.
Mr. Ellis and I are in agreement on a couple of points. The “specter of international terrorism” (sounds like SMERSH from the old James Bond movies) is a flimsy bogeyman that has been set up to justify all types of dangerous adventures. And it would be wise to let the UN manage both the military and administrative tasks involved in providing security and economic improvements. But, and this is a big but, the UN has never really done this for a prolonged period in a truly tough case (in Bosnia and Kosovo it’s had the looming big stick of US air power as a tool of persuasion). UN peacekeepers have a track record of avoiding armed conflict even when it is obviously necessary — and who can blame them? What low-paid corporal in his right mind wants to lay down his life for a questionable chance to alter reality in a part of the world he may never had heard of before his assignment? As to moral obligations incurred as a result of the interventions made since the 1970s, I don’t believe that there has been any extended period in Afghanistan’s 19th and 20th century history when there was no internecine strife going on, much of it armed (though today’s weaponry makes everything nastier). Outsiders did not cause the basic problems, rather they attempted to take advantage of them for their own “geopolitical” goals. “Native unrest” is an old excuse for incursion, also known as invasion. Remember those four major ethno-linguistic groups that comprise the country’s population – each one has a nearby neighbor of similar ethnicity and possible ambitions to control the country, if not rule it directly – there is no strong, unitary “Afghan national identity”. None of those neighboring countries (they shall go unnamed here) has an admirable record regarding human rights.
As to the moral burden of assisting in changing Afghan society for the better, other dilemmas arise. Certainly the position of women should be improved, but that goal may be in conflict with establishing an actual participatory democracy. Imagine this outcome: the military situation gets stabilized enough to hold meaningful country-wide elections with a high level of participation. All of a sudden every last little patriarchal warlord and local leader urges his followers and dependents to vote in religiously conservative candidates with tendencies to push for sharia type laws, the Taliban by another name, in effect. In this case, far from fanciful, democracy comes into conflict with individual human rights, a situation that exists in many corners of the world. We can’t go to war over human rights in all of these places, and settling on this as a rationale in Afghanistan is arbitrary and a “benevolent cover story” for our real reasons for involvement. As detestable as I find the whole idea of sharia law, I do not think the US, the West, or the UN have the capacity (or the long-term means) to change cultures and old practices that are sanctioned by religious beliefs and deeply rooted authoritarian traditions. Putting it crudely, we don’t “have a dog in this fight”. Letting the locals sort it out, however harsh and undesirable the outcome from our point of view, may be the better part of wisdom.
The arguments made above by Terrence O’Keefe against the UN’s ability to take over from NATO in trying to bring peace to Afghanistan (my aim if not that of the participating countries) are valid inasmuch as they reflect the resolution in force and the mandate granted to the UN forces. My most blunt reply would involve the words, faint, heart and pig but there are a number of other layers. First off is that the UN has fought in bloody conflicts: Korea being the most notable. Next, the main problem for NATO is that, with the best will in the world, the US is not recognized as an impartial participant having fallen further and further off its moral high ground since Korea. I do not see NATO succeeding in Afghanistan because of the relatively weak international mandate (indeed the NATO mandate is weaker given our mutual dislike of the ‘terrorism’ argument) nad here is the attraction of the transfer to the UN: all sorts of legitimacies are brought into play here as all players within the country by gender or ethnic background can decide how much they wish the UN to help them, or not.
There would be much more point in condemning human rights abuses and using the ICC to investigate acts that are contrary to international law than to intervene militarily in many countries – Burma springs to mind as a country that should have invited military intervention but doesn’t have strategic value to the West (US?). However, I reiterate that we have trampled so much over Afghanistan, either in our name or in conjunction with others, that we do have a moral obligation, however messy the involvement.
Mr. Ellis and I are down to disagreeing on two fundamental points. The first is about “can it be done?” (i.e., the defeat of “terrorist” forces in Afghanistan, and its pre-existing condition of establishing a sound and worthy government). My answer is simply No – it’s beyond our abilities and our resources, which are diminishing and should be more wisely spent. I’m not sure about the meaning of the “blunt” sentence about faint-heartedness (which might be viewed as prudence) and piggishness – either who or what its target is or how they are linked; it wasn’t blunt enough. With regard to the ability of international organizations and military-political alliances being able to control the situation (or even arrive at some kind of less than perfect outcome), Korea is a bad example. It really was a US war sanctioned by the UN at a time when the US had much more clout and prestige within the UN. And it was based on a “snap decision” made by Truman and Acheson that suddenly, overnight, the peninsula had become part of the US’s defense perimeter (previously Japan fulfilled this outpost role in the minds of US political and military leaders). Great Britain,France, and lesser powers made their own contributions for their own political reasons having to do with their relations with the US. In a way it was about as successful as it could be without expanding into a third world war. There was a similar hope for a bloody stalemate in Vietnam at one time, but, in 1967-68, when Westmoreland advised LBJ that we could stabilize the situation and achieve a result comparable to the two Koreas, he said he would need 600,000 men on the ground for at least a decade or so. Did we (the US population, who bears the actual burdens – lives and money – for the decisions we “authorize” our leaders to make while our leaders are misleading us) have a moral obligation to the South Vietnamese to “stay the course” because we had also done a considerable amount of damage to their country? Of course not. Which brings us to my second disagreement with Mr. Ellis: our moral obligations.
Morality has to choose between competing claims here, e.g., Johnson’s commitment to eradicating poverty and improving social equality became an effort undermined and defunded by the expense of the war. We cannot do it all, so we must prioritize. Let’s be faint of heart when it comes to foreign adventures, especially those with vaguely-defined objectives and those we can ill afford. Another decade of warfare, with its high incidence of “collateral damage”, is hardly a moral outcome either; new sins and blunders will not redress old ones. To put it bluntly, Afghanistan really has no strategic value to anyone. The days when it was “the gateway to India” (a British and Russian fantasy of the 19th century, part of the “great game”) are long gone – now it’s the gateway to mountains, rocks, poverty and opium. Its population has to sort things out for themselves, even if this means a reinstallation of Taliban rule or something like it and all the suffering that will go along with that. Maybe ethnic warlords will achieve their own stalemate with the Taliban. The rest is fantasy, the alleged geopolitical realities of think-tanks and people who can’t bear the idea that the US cannot and should not be the world’s cop, as we stumble through our supposedly good intentions toward perdition.
Let me offer another historical analogy. In 1948 the Czech population effectively voted a Communist regime into power, and during the next decade many former liberals and social democrats co-operated with this regime because they presumed they shared some its goals. By the end of that decade they realized they had made a horrible mistake. In effect they wound up condemning themselves to 40 years of misrule, drudgery, economic stagnation, and dystopia. At no time during this long period would it have been advisable for NATO (strong on propaganda, weak on the ability to do anything practical without igniting that dreaded nuclear exchange) to enter the fray on moral grounds. This also applied to the other satellite states in which the post-war communist regimes were established by force and fraud (the closest thing to Czech and Slovak support for Gottwald’s government in 1948 was Tito’s popularity in Yugoslavia, but this was far from a uniform attitude, especially among Croats and other minorities). They all just had to “suffer through it” for four decades. A NATO intervention under the circumstances, no matter how justified the moral grounds, would have been disastrous for all concerned. You can’t have everything, and you certainly shouldn’t risk a great deal for things you don’t need. The US “need” for a “geopolitical” outpost in Afghanistan is ludicrous. And contrary to President Obama’s assertion yesterday that a widened insurgency’s success will give the Taliban and al Qaeda more “operational room” to plan terrorist assaults, that’s the one thing they don’t need it for. They can carry out their planning in a room or cave anywhere in the world. All they need are cell-phones, computers, cheap printing presses, and couriers. The world abounds in both conventional and other weapons to be used in such operations, and they are available through many markets. And of course they need bodies, suicidal volunteers. Every additional month we stay in that part of the world will yield a larger harvest of such benighted souls. The whole pretext for “global jihad” vanishes the instant we leave the area. Then they can fight it out locally in order to establish “sharia law societies” that will be doomed to failure because they are based on other fantasies (akin to those of religious fundamentalists in the US). This may sound cynical, but in the long run it may produce less damage and be reversed by the local populations themselves.