| | The Beginning of the End? The Agonist
05/26/2006
By Ian Welsh
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Let's talk about Afghanistan a bit more. Via Steve Gilliard I see reports that indicate not just an uprising by the Taliban, but that various of the tribes are also starting to attack the Coalition. There are a lot of misconceptions about Afghanistan. The US didn't defeat Afghanistan when it invaded, what it did was bribe the various tribal leaders to rise against the Taliban, and provide sufficient air support to make it impossible for the Taliban to stand against them. Without that air support, odds are the Taliban would have crushed such an uprising, they were, simply, better more coordinated soldiers than the tribes, taken as a whole. Since then the peace has been maintained through systematic bribery, letting the Warlords grow opium (something the Taliban had put a stop to - with extreme prejudice), and in general by letting the tribes and warlords do their thing without much interference. The Afghanistan "government" is a joke, and always has been. It doesn't do more than control the capital, and sometimes not even that. The route to victory in Afghanistan - a lasting victory, was economic. Roads, jobs, infrastructure in general - flooding the country with money and opportunity, so that for most people times got better... a lot better. That wasn't done, and it looks like it may now be too late for it to be done. Throughout history the Afghanis have been willing to tolerate foreign invaders for only so long. It looks like that "so long" is about up. I'm not sure what the trigger was, though I suspect it was misguided drug war policies, where idiot commanders thought they really should destroy opiuim fields rather than smile and look the other way. And so now it will begin, the death by a thousand tiny paper cuts of guerilla war in a country God made for insurgency. The Soviets couldn't win such a war, and the Coalition won't win it either. Oh, not because the Afghanis can defeat the Coalition in pitched battle, barring unutterable incompetence from Coalition military leaders, they can't, but because they can outlast them. At this point, having failed to create a civil society in Afghanistan - having thrown away the opportunity, the best remaining option is to decide what faction you want to win other than the Taliban, and without appearing to favour it, do what you can to make it win. It's not an option which is likely to succeed, but it's a better option than letting the Taliban get back in power. Under the circumstances they aren't all that likely to be particularly forgiving to the West, and having defeated it once they won't fear it again. So if they make Afghanistan into a terrorist base, other than occasional missile and bombing attacks, there won't be much we can do about it. The only good news is that bin Laden has been supersed by Omar, and Omar, being a sectarian religious fanatic, has overriden bin Laden's appeal to all Muslims and restricted it to Sunnis who are theologically compatible with him. That reduces al-Q'aedas potential significantly, and is genuinely good news. Bin Laden, famed for his ability to deal with all Muslims was much more dangerous than Omar, a very narrow man, will be. The other thing to note is that our natural ally in the matter of the Taliban is... Iran. They have no interest in having a fanatical Sunni state sponsor of terrorism on their border, and will be taking steps against the Taliban. It's unlikely, given Pakistan's support of the Taliban that Iran's efforts will be sufficient, but a smart foreign policy team would recognize that Iran's aid in Afghanistan would be potentially invaluable, and that the West and Iran have similiar enough goals in Afghanistan to work together.
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