The Wrongologist

What’s Wrong Today:

More
Thanksgiving holiday reading in the Wall
Street Journal brought this unhappy
report:

“The darkest
pages of Afghan history are reserved for a traitorous king named Shah Shuja.
Enthroned by British invaders in 1839, he was ignominiously slaughtered once
the routed infidels left.

President Hamid Karzai knows this story well.
He hails from the same Pashtun sub-clan as the reviled 19th-century monarch.”

The WSJ goes on to report that the
Taliban in their leaflets, poems and
songs mock Mr. Karzai as the
modern-day Shuja, a ruler imposed by outsiders and destined to meet an
unhappy end:

“Mr. Karzai
understands that his future survival depends on proving that he is no puppet of
the Western unbelievers—no matter
how much he actually depends on their money and troops.”

This contradiction has crippled our
Counter-insurgency program (COIN) and President Obama’s surge in the Afghan war, America’s longest foreign conflict. If the
Pentagon and the White House knew about this and still went forward with both programs, the Petraeus
resignation needs to be just the first of many. 

Karzai’s
concern for his neck means we will see no progress on the ground and continuing
rifts with him as we move to bring our troops home in two years.

Had You
Heard This?

Mr. Karzai’s
deep ambivalence was visible to our military commanders during a visit to
Kandahar (the Taliban’s hometown)
in 2010. They had flown him to a meeting with elders, where Mr. Karzai was to
kick off the military offensive that
was to be the centerpiece of Mr. Obama’s troop surge. From the WSJ:

“Instead, as
stunned generals looked on, Mr. Karzai called the Taliban ‘brothers’ and told the turbaned elders that
the war wouldn’t end as long as he was seen as a ‘foreign stooge.’ He then asked the elders whether
they wanted the offensive to begin. Hearing shouts of ‘no,’ Mr. Karzai ordered a halt to the
long-planned operation to clear Afghanistan’s second-largest city.”

So, we revised our Kandahar campaign to conform to Mr. Karzai’s demands. The
military abandoned plans to ring the city with Baghdad-style checkpoints,
biometric control posts and walls to filter out insurgents, measures that Mr.
Karzai, a Kandahar native himself, thought would erode support for his
government.

If we knew this in 2010, WHY have we persisted
with the charade?

Today, the
Taliban remains a very potent force in Kandahar, carrying out assassinations
almost every week. It has never been a secure city for coalition forces. They
are powerful even at the gates of Kabul. They are active today in provinces
where they were not in 2001.

So, What’s Wrong?

We are in negotiations with Mr. Karzai on the shape of our post-2014
military presence and this disconnect has never been clearer: As the New
York Times stated:

“The planning for a
post-2014 mission has emerged as an early test for President Obama in his new
term as he tries to flesh out the strategy for transferring the responsibility
for security to the Afghans. But it is not the only challenge: After the White
House decides what sort of military presence to propose to the Afghan government
for after 2014, it must turn to the question of how quickly to reduce its troop
force before then.”

Let’s add that how we deal
with an increasingly nervous and assertive Mr. Karzai is likely to be one of Mr. Obama’s biggest
2nd term foreign-policy headaches.

It looks
like when we leave in 2014, an
undefeated Taliban insurgency will remain, along with a dysfunctional
government that is mired in corruption and is utterly dependent on
foreign aid. The Taliban, for their
part, have warned that whoever allows US bases to remain in the country will “go
down in history as a traitor and slave.”

Umm, wouldn’t
that be Mr. Karzai?
And given his ambivalence, doesn’t he own a large piece of the responsibility
for our failure to achieve many of
America’s war objectives in Afghanistan?

Mr. Karzai
has been able to do whatever he wants in his spat with Washington: This year he
forced the US to stop unilateral Special Operations night raids; he insisted on
taking custody of hundreds of insurgent suspects held by the US at the Baghran
airfield. He then released many of them in a failed effort to convince the
Taliban to open peace talks. He disbanded Western-backed private security firms
and removed cabinet ministers and provincial governors that he suspected of
being too close to the US.

In recent
weeks, Mr. Karzai ordered the ouster of international representatives from the
country’s elections watchdog agency. He
has suggested that Afghanistan may deny US troops immunity from local law after
2014, the deal-breaker in similar talks in Iraq. He has threatened to
turn to China and Russia as alternative military allies. He has intensified his
criticism of NATO forces, regularly issuing statements that condemn the US for
causing civilian casualties.

Apparently, Washington views this as just
Karzai being Karzai. But, maybe
not: The WSJ reports that Mr. Karzai
also remains suspicious of the second leg of the American war plan: The
creation of a 352,000-member Afghan army and police force. Unlike his security ministers, who eagerly backed the
American-funded ramp-up and the gravy train that came with it, Mr.
Karzai felt that a large force perpetuates Kabul’s dependence on foreigners and exposes him to the possibility of a
coup. Mr. Karzai said in an interview with the Journal:

“I don’t believe in a big army. I never
believed in a big army… I believe
in an army that is…apolitical
and one paid for by the Afghan taxpayers’ money.”

Mr. Karzai
could be overplaying his hand. It is a vicious cycle: Karzai’s statements fuel the temptation simply to
walk away from Afghanistan. Given the
Taliban’s view of
Mr. Karzai, he probably will not survive 2014 if he remains in Afghanistan. So,
his remarks calling for a diminished American role fall into the category of “Be careful of what you wish for.”

What’s Next?

Karzai’s intransigence colors our internal debate
about whether to keep US forces in Afghanistan after 2014.

A valid
issue for both sides to consider was asked by Karzai’s Chief of Staff, Mr. Khurram:

“If 150,000 foreign troops haven’t been
successful here so far, how could 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 that would stay
inside their bases after 2014 achieve any success?”

Indeed. Why
are we staying there a day longer than today? According to Anthony Cordesman of
the Center
for Strategic and International Studies, we will spend a total of $198.2
billion in Afghanistan in FY 2012 and FY 2013. He goes on to say:

“This is an
incredible amount of money to have spent with so few controls, so few plans, so
little auditing, and almost no credible measures of effectiveness.”

That money would
be much better spent helping to repair the damage from the Superstorm Sandy, rebuilding
our bridges and highways or paying our veterans the benefits they deserve.

Our troops
in Afghanistan are being injured and are dying under an ill-conceived strategy by a succession of Generals and a Commander-in-Chief
who ignored Karzai’s
motivations on the ground. We are propping up Mr. Karzai, who
apparently doesn’t share our basic goals for his country!

Our troops face the prospect of coming home understanding that we have accomplished
nothing for the blood we have shed and the US treasure that has been wasted.

Vietnam,
Iraq and now, Afghanistan. We want the Hollywood ending, because Washington writes the screenplay and we buy
the tickets.

What
continues to amaze is that we always
pick a “go to guy” like Diem, Saddam, Karzai or any other of the 50+
handpicked tin horns over the years.

We then
expect them to earn the trust of their people and deliver them to play a role in our movie, that of the grateful locals. 

Then comes
the failure and the lack of reckoning for it.

Oh and our
continuing failure to understand the limits of our supposed Exceptionalism…

Look at how shabbily we have used our soldiers
and how great is their sacrifice!