Hey Seth, thanks for chit chatting about your new book! I figure it’s best to just jump right in: how did we go wrong? What was our biggest mistake?

Seth, Welcome to the Lake.

Joshua, Thank you for Hosting today’s Book Salon.

Sheesh, I’d hate to read your intro to a book you didn’t like! :)

Oh, there are plenty :-)

Welcome to the Lake!

I’d like to ask, if the conclusion of Charlie Wilson’s War is anywhere near accurate, how can we just walk away again?

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: if you already follow Afghanistan, you won’t learn anything new

Well, that’s the A to my first Q. Thanks.

What effect does the broader regional struggle (including China, India, Russia, etc) have on the US effort in Afghanistan? Are we essentially polishing someone else’s chess piece?

Seth is here, answering the first question.

I dunno, we have a lot of folks who think they know everything about it.

Mr. Foust,

Can you list the successful conquerers of Afghanistan so I can follow thru & learn more?

Josh, Afghanistan is a difficult place to operate in. There were several major challenges, in my view. One was to expect that the recipe for stability in Afghanistan is a strong central government capable of establishing law and order. In other words, to expect that stability could come entirely from the top down. Second was a failure to target insurgents — including Taliban insurgents — in Pakistan after the overthrow of their government. They essentially enjoyed a safehaven in Baluchistan Province, including leader Mullah Omar, which gave them an opportunity to rebuild. And a third was to turn to Iraq before Afghanistan and Pakistan had been stabilized.

It’s not knowing “everything” about it, it’s about learning something new.

Good afternoon Seth and Joshua and welcome to FDL.

Seth, I have not had an opportunity to read your book but I do have a smattering of knowledge of Afghanistan.

Can you offer a quick description/compare/contrast of the US in Afghanistan versus the Soviet Union versus the British Empire (as the three most recent empires to crash and burn there)?

Off the top of my head: the Persians, Sassavids, Khorasans, Ghaznavids, Timurids, Moghuls, and probably a few others I’m blanking on. The point I wanted to make there is, if we’re going to go all the way back to Alexander in 326 B.C. to call Afghanistan the Graveyard of Empires, then we have to account for all the times it wasn’t actually the graveyard of an empire, especially when those empires are so huge and long-lasting.

So if it was a mistake not to follow insurgents into Pakistan, then you much approve of what Obama is doing, both in terms of drone strikes (aka assassinations) and having the U.S. puppet regime in Islamabad roust 2 million refugees from Swat.

Seth, thanks. Total agreement about theater difficulty. How would you have gone after the terrorists in Pakistan? What did Bush do wrong there?

I understood your point, and even know some of the history you refer to. I just don’t know it well enough to be facile. Thanks for the list.

Hammering the US military in both Iraq and Afghanistan is one of the favorite activities here. Can you react to this statement?

Tonight on Rachel’s show she did a brief interview with Sarah Chayes. Ms Chayes first went to Afghanistan in 2002 as a reporter for NPR. She has lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan since 2002. Longer, I believe, than any other American.

She was recently asked to serve as special advisor to General McChrystal. I’m still reacting to my feeling she’s one very impressive human being.

Also, in this day and age, we most often belittle the mission having been set for our troops in Afghanistan and question the purpose or futility of such. Sarah’s statement of why she accepted the offer – because of the humanitarian work done by our wonderful military personnel over there – really moved me.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…..McChrystal

Raven, in my view, we can’t walk away. In particular, the links between al Qa’ida and Afghanistan’s two most significant insurgent groups — the Taliban and the Haqqani network — continue to be close. After just returning two weeks ago from Afghanistan, those links are even closer. Not only would walking away be a failure to understand the lessons outlined in the conclusions of Charlie Wilson’s War, but it would be a failure to learn the lessons that led to the 9/11 attacks. Another Taliban regime in Afghanistan would not only be a human rights abomination, but it would also support terrorist training camps on its soil.

Thank you

JoshMull, probably the most important regional struggle is between India and Pakistan. They continue to engage in serious security competition in the region, including in Afghanistan. After 9/11, the Indians developed a very strong relationship with the Afghan government and built roads, established consulates, helped build the Afghan parliament building, providing money to Afghan government officials, etc. (what I would call “soft power”). Pakistan’s national security establishment has generally viewed this development as strategic encirclement, and has reacted by providing some assistance to militant groups such as the Taliban and Haqqani network (what I would call “hard power”).

Which states and nonstates are supporting the reinvigorated Taliban? Is all their funding from poppy? Who is selling them weapons and how do the weapons get to them?

Aha. That answers part of my q in 23.

Seth,

So, one of the major phenomena you highlight as a driver of insecurity and the insurgency is corruption. At least in my own research, opium cultivation has driven a significant amount of government corruption. Recent reports have driven home just how tightly interwoven opium is into many local economies. Yet, I had a hard time getting a sense of how you’d address the inevitable Opium Question (namely, what to do about it). What would your plan to address opium’s distorting effect on the political-economy be?

Glad you got that out of the way, Raven. :)

Not mentioned in the intro — the topic that concerns me especially. The women of Afghanistan and their plight. The fact that the women’s groups, despite horrific treatment at the hands of Taliban, want the US OUT!!!! Is that from the civilian violence from US military not to mention their distrust of Karzai and his warlord appointees in govt? Not much security for them now. Is our military “spin” still that one of the major reasons we are there is the oppression of women, because somebody better check with them.

As I understand it, the problem with military doing humanitarian stuff is that then all humanitarian workers become targets, tarred with the same brush as the hated military enemy.

As a followup to this point, in the 1990s, India was explicitly aligned with the Norther Alliance (which occupied Kabul in 2001 against American wishes), while up until September 10, 2001, Pakistan was an official ally of the Taliban. I don’t think we can downplay how important this political dynamic still is in shaping national policy.

War rarely improves the conditions of women.

But then don’t use it as one of two major reasons for going in as Bush did.

One of the things that makes following this so hard. Groups keep switching sides, and that is rarely made explicit in news coverage when it happens. MSM makes it appear that U.S. new BFF have been the good guys all along.

Fault lies with the lefties and fems on this one. They’re the groups that made such a big deal on the plight of Afghan women (didn’t notice much attention being paid to plight of Indian women living under equally deplorable conditions, but that’s another story). All W did was use it as a war propaganda tool, like WMDs.

I don’t understand your leap from the military doing humanitarian work to humanitarian workers getting attacked?

I know, and at my own blog I hammer the mainstream media relentlessly for reporting on the country without any context or sense of history. At the same time, we don’t have any Afghan allies with clean hands, so we kind of need to draw a line and make a choice somewhere along the way. It’s not perfect, and it will leave aggrieved parties being left out, but it’s one of the only options we have.

Dakine01,

In my view, there were several major problems for the Soviets. First, they fought a “conventional” war in Afghanistan with over 100,000 forces, tanks, fixed wing aircraft etc. They failed to focus on key counterinsurgency tenets, including securing the local population. Instead, they annihilated entire villages that supported insurgents. So much for “hearts and minds.”

A second problem was the ability of insurgents to gain a sanctuary in Pakistan. Every one of the seven major mujahideen groups had its command and control headquarters in Pakistan. In addition, a range of outside states — from Pakistan to the United States and Saudi Arabia — provided significant support.

The British suffered a similar sanctuary problem, though this time from the north, since Russia balanced British efforts in Afghanistan and supporting opposition tribes. In addition, the British largely tried to “win” in Afghanistan with British forces. Outside forces have had a very difficult time clearing and holding territory in Afghanistan without significant help from Afghan national and local forces.

The U.S. faced a range of these challenges: it has been undermined by support from neighbors (including Pakistan and Iran), and has tried to establish order largely with American forces. Much of rural Afghanistan, including the tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and qawms, in Pashtun areas, have largely been ignored. But they are an important source of legitimacy and power in key parts of Afghanistan.

It’s at least an indirect reference to the work of PRTs, which do humanitarian work but are military units. Also the military has provided protection for some humanitarian groups, which can play with the “officially neutral” stance the Humanitarian community in general adopts. That blurring of the lines between humanitarian and military work is one reason why MSF left the country in 2004.

Got it. Sounds like our RFPF’s in the Nam.

To be clear, the military is not set up to do serious development and reconstruction work. The problem in violent areas of the country, however, is that few NGOs and U.S./NATO development agencies are there. In Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul, and a range of other provinces, the security environment is too dangerous for civilians (or dangerous enough that civilians don’t want to go). So the military is the predominant organization working there. It’s about time for organizations like USAID and the State Department to step up in rural parts of the west, south, and east.

Humanitarian aid becomes just another COIN tool, and therefore everyone who does it is a target to the insurgents. I heard this very early on from a humanitarian NGO worker, before the U.S. even diverted to Iraq. I haven’t read much on it since, but it made sense to me.

Kind of, yeah. The idea of PRTs didn’t spring forth, fully formed, from the ether. It’s just like how the original idea of ETTs and OMLTs came about with the Marine Corps in Vietnam (where they were one of the only consistently effective ideas).

Welcome Seth,

Could you then respond to the accusations from various human rights groups, in particular women’s groups like RAWA and the Afghan Women’s Mission as well as leaders such as Malali Joya who point out that the US has chosen some of the worst human rights abusers as allies and government figures?

And somewhat in line with that, how does one defeat corruption as you advocate when our primary allies in Afghanistan are enmeshed in that corruption?

As I understand the Soviet’s experience in Afghanistan, they’d won until the U.S.-Saudi-Paks combined to defeat them. Even then, the Soviets nearly won until U.S. provided Stingers.

So why is the U.S. having such a hard time?

The CAP program. Ended by Westmoreland in favor of attrition.

If they hadn’t had the stingers they’d still be sluggin it out on the ground probably.

Oh, perfect example, the bombing of the U.S. HQ in Iraq.

Seth, I have to disagree with you on this one. Even in very safe, permissive areas like Panjshir, the primary “humanitarian” organization is the local PRT. Non-military NGOs have a far smaller presence that you’d expect, given how everyone travels around in regular old pickup trucks.

While you’re right that other U.S. agencies need to “step up,” even USAID, which, unlike State and Agriculture, is explicitly designed to handle aid issues, has been eviscerated in budget and mandate even after 9/11. It’s not JUST bureaucratic inertia that’s holding them back — it’s also budget and legal issues as well.

Plus it takes a LONG time to institutionalize an expeditionary capacity. The military specializes in that, so they’ve been the best suited to rapidly mobilize units, even if they’re not ideal.

So without Stingers, and without 3 states sponsoring the Taliban, why can’t the U.S. just put them down?

Several people asked questions about drugs. There are several steps that can be taken, but I’ll note two.

1. Success in clearing and holding territory: It is putting the cart before the horse to advocate serious eradication, interdiction, alternative livelihoods, and other strategies if Taliban and other insurgent groups continue to hold or influence territory in southern Afghanistan, where most of the poppy is grown. So the first step is success on the counterinsurgency front. Success on this front has led to more effective counter-drug operations in such provinces as Konar, where poppy is now largely gone.

Justice: A second is using the drug court in Kabul for what it is supposed to do: try major drug-traffickers (including government officials). How can you expect drug-traffickers to live in a climate of fear if senior government officials involved in the drug trade aren’t prosecuted. We already have a court in Kabul to do this. Let’s use it!

One more question – if the justification for continued and expanded war in Afghanistan (and apparently Pakistan) is to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban, do you then support wars as well in Somalia and Yemen to deal with Qaeda’s move there … and then wars in whatever locations they move to next?

The logic of fighting full scale wars in an attempt to defeat a distributed, network of opponents who do not depend on specific state sponsorship always baffles me.

Seth, I’m wondering if we might address things from a bit of a higher level about corruption, then. A friend who couldn’t be here tonight was curious: several of Afghanistan’s neighbors—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Iran, and Pakistan are all wracked by corruption, and the last three went through some degree of civil war-iness in the last 30 years, yet if Afghanistan had the internal stability of any of those countries, we would almost certainly leave. Why say that beating corruption and introducing ‘governance’ are preconditions to success if other countries can survive (however precariously) without them?

Siun, the U.S. has worked with some human rights abusers in Afghanistan, there’s no question about it. After three decades of war, however, many people have blood on their hands. On the corruption front, there are a range of successful anti-corruption efforts outlined by such organizations as Transparency International and the World Bank. But this will be a very, very challenging and political dicey implementation effort if the U.S., UN, and other organizations actually get serious about anti-corruption.

A friend tells me that heroine is by far the best pain killer, with fewer side effects than the phancy pharma ones. Suggesting that the soln to the Afghan poppy crop is to buy it & use it in pain management, but apparently pharma begs to differ. Don’t know if the facts are accurate (haven’t read anything on the subject, just heard it from one person). Do you know?

Afghan people are culturally and language wise similar to Iranians more so than Pakistani, right? Shiites and Sunnis live side by side in Afghanistan. And Karzai was partly educated in India. Seems like some swirling coalitions there for Afghanistan in terms of US allegiances. Afghan has biggest problem with Pakistan and is no friend of Israel probably.

Pakistan intelligence and US intelligence beefed up the Afghan “freeom fighters” there during Reagan which turned into Taliban? Is that right?

Parts of Afghanistan are peaceful but along Pakistan border is where trouble is and in the south?

What about the candidates for Afghan prez? Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai the former Afghanistan Finance Minster seems like a solid citizen, but is far behind in the polls.

Seth,

What is missing in your answer is how any recognition that we have specifically allied with warlords with atrocious histories of abuse of women and others. These are not simply a few unpleasant folks but allies like Dostum, various Northern Alliance leaders, etc. There are forces within Afghanistan who have been working – under the most dangerous conditions – to fight for development and equality but we continue to support instead those who block them.

Josh, let’s get one thing straight: Afghanistan’s problem of corruption is exponentially more severe than its neighbors. It’s one thing to have general run-of-the-mill corruption, which most countries have (and which we have in the United States … a la Illinois). But if we look at World Bank data, for example, Afghanistan ranks in the bottom 1.4 percent of the world (see the World Bank Governance Indicators data set). That is at the bottom. Iran is at 28.5 percent, Pakistan at 24.6 percent, etc. It’s an important order of magnitude difference.

Short version: Brits drew the borders to split up ethnic groups, as in divide & conquer. So Pashtuns are about half & half in Pak & Af, constituting about 1/3 of Af pop, but a far smaller % of Pak pop. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Siun, core al Qa’ida (Zawahiri, Sheikh Saeed, etc.) is in the Afghanistan / Pakistan front — not in Yeman or Somalia. I’m not suggesting the answer is full-scale war, either. I wrote a study in 2008 on “How Terrorist Groups End,” which found the two most significant ways how terrorist groups ended were: (1) political settlement of (2) police / intelligence operations. But not military forces (e.g. full scale war).

Seth,

Fair enough. Then let’s get out of the weeds for a bit (your last answer gives a good segue). In your book, you say the Taliban’s return was not an inevitability. Do you think they wouldn’t have made a comeback at all had we “got it right,” or are we largely responsible for our own dilemma?

There has been no census in Afghanistan since the 1970s. But most estimates put the Pashtuns at around 50 percent, Tajiks at around 27 percent, Hazaras 9 percent, Uzbeks 9 percent, etc.

thanks. Wash (in blood), rinse (in blood), repeat.

Just saw the movie IN THE LOOP last night. Excellent movie, leaving one darkly bitter and cynical.

I think the U.S. is at least partially responsible for the current dilemma. It’s possible that if there had been a decision to put peacekeeping forces into key areas of the country (as the State Department suggested), taken seriously efforts to build a police force, made a more systematic effort to reach out to tribes (as President Karzai advocated in 2006), and targeted Taliban officials in Baluchistan Province (mostly policing / intelligence operations to capture them), stability might have been possible.

In short, the most significant forgotten lesson was that Afghanistan has had plenty of stable periods, most recently from 1933 to 1973. No one seriously bothered to look at what led to stability in the past.

Just arrived. Any talk about McChrystal’s likely move to vastly expand the afghan army and police forces? Or what the ethnic make-up of the army would be and how that would go down either with Pushtuns or everyone else? I saw corruption has already been mentioned. The police forces are very corrupt. How will increasing their size help anything? The government budget is around $800 million. Aid to keep Afghan forces up currently is around $4 billion. If force levels are doubled or more, the Afghans sure will never be able to pay for them ever. So does this mean we will indefinitely?

eCAHNomics, on the candidates, several of the candidates performed well in office, including Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah. What is less clear, however, is how much political support they have in the country (e.g. political machines). There are no serious public opinion polls in Afghanistan to provide an indication of how the candidates are viewed among Afghans. And, to be honest, it doesn’t even feel like election season. There’s been one debate, and President Karzai didn’t attend.

What is the practical difference between peacekeeping forces and occupying forces?

Well, I’m not so sure that’s the case. Zahir Shah gets an unfair rap for being peaceful and benevolent (the way he massacred the Safis of Kunar in 1945, killed most of the major elders, and scattered their families to Herat and Takhar, for example, wasn’t particularly peaceful, or the mass-killings of the Gujars in the early 1960s). Most of the rulers who have engineered largescale peace in the country—Dost Mohammed, Abdurahman Khan, even Amanullah—did so through mass slaughter and systematically persecuting non-Pashtun minorities.

If we’re taking lessons from them, then, could that have been our mistake? Initially allying ourselves with the largely Tajik Northern Alliance instead of a pro-American Pashtun militia?

Nice one. *g*

Great questions Hugh. Having competent army and police forces is important to stability, so I support McChrystal’s move there. Interesting to read a few classics on Afghan forces in such books as Nazif Shahrani and Robert Canfield’s “Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropolotical Perspectives.” However, such places as the U.S. Army and USMC Counterinsurgency Manual, as well as some work done by Jim Quinlivan and others, suggest that successful counterinsurgencies have required at least 20 forces per 1,000 local inhabitants. There’s obviously no magic number. But building up army and police forces will never reach those force levels (note that Afghanistan’s population is roughly 32 million, which would trigger a need for over 600,000 forces). The historical answer during the Zahir Shah period, for instance, is a better strategy to cooperate with local tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and qawms.

What is the practical difference between peacekeeping forces and occupying forces?

It has to do with which side of the gun barrel you are on.

Quite the contrary, the Zahir Shah regime was relatively peaceful, especially compared to the violent 1920s for Afghanistan. There were no major insurgencies that threatened the entire stability of the regime. So some violence? Of course. But insurgency? No. For a good example, see Thomas Barfield’s “Weak Links on a Rusty Chain” in the Shahrani book mentioned earlier.

There was no insurgency in 2002, so “peacekeeping” forces would simply have ensured that Afghans in key cities would have have been secure. I’m using it in the UN definition. This has been done well in Namibia, Mozambique, and a range of other countries — and has been done poorly in others.

See, it’s interesting you should say that. Shah did indeed have a collaborative relationship with tribes, and most of the “tribal rebellions” under his watch can be brought back, in various ways, to tribes feeling he had broken some sort of informal arrangement over policy (Army conscription, taxation, hosting Army units, and so on).

This brings up a few points: if you’re digging through the recent anthro work on Afghanistan, what would you make of the arguments by, say, Berndt Glatzer that tribes are no longer coherent-enough political entities to be considered as such, or even Barnett Rubin’s seminal work (”Fragmentation”) in which he argues that those very informal structures have been systematically dismantled by both the Soviets and Pakistanis? Or, for that matter, someone like Tapper writing in the 1980s that tribes really aren’t constructive ways to segregate, group, and organize Afghanistan’s rural societies?

More immediately: how would you handle situations like the Zadran of southwestern Paktya who request the U.S. (special forces mostly) end the practice of night raids and preemptive detention in return for collaboration in identifying and capturing the local Taliban militants?

No, I’m familiar with that, as I am with Barfields more recent work on agrarian revolutions. How does that address your point? Shah certainly felt threatened enough by the Safis to commit what we’d consider now a war crime to end the threat it posed to his rule (David Edwards wrote an excellent, and heartbreaking, book on the subject, which was mostly an oral history of one elder’s family as they tried to find their dad in Shah’s various prison-camps).

So is the lesson there, then, that we need to nip these things in the bud early, before they can develop into full-scale rebellions? The communists certainly didn’t do that forcefully enough in 1978 when Nuristan revolted — despite basically razing Asadabad, the rebellion never went away, it just ran into the hills.

Seth, Where do you see Afghanistan in the next five and ten years? The situation between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Will economic forces be the driving motivator or will it continue to be a battleground?

To be clear, Barney Rubin doesn’t argue in “The Fragmentation of Afghanistan” that tribes have been dismantled. In fact, he outlines the role of the Pashtuns and other tribes (see, for example, his chapter on “Social Structure.”)

Regardless, however, the tribal structure is strong in some areas of Afghanistan and weak in others. And it certainly has evolved over the course of the last 30 years of war. I just met a series of Pashtun tribal leaders in southern and eastern Afghanistan in June and July 2009. In the south, Pashtun tribes tends to be a bit more hierarchical than in the east, but certainly exist across Pashtun areas. What is difficult across the Pashtun belt is generalize about the state of the tribes. On a side note, it has been interesting to watch Taliban efforts over the past several years to coerce and coopt Pashtun tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and qawms. Omar, Berader, Zakir, and a range of other Taliban leaders have developed a fairly effective “bottom up” strategy toward the tribes.

As for ending night raids (which many Afghans, not just tribal leaders have advocated ending), I strongly agree. Houses in Afghanistan are sacred. Take, for instance, kicking down a door during a night raid in southern Afghanistan. Wood is a precious commodity, so breaking the door is not only a socio-cultural insult, it is also an economic one as well. And for those people who really understand Pashtunwali, night raids virtually automatically invoke revenge. Not a way to win local support, in my view.

Very keen point: what’s your idea of a “bottom-up” strategy to get qawms on our side? Are there examples of the military getting things right, in addition to how you catalogue them getting it wrong?

Given your comment on night raids, etc can you explain why US forces refuse to stop such actions as well as continue to use deadly air raids with resulting civilian casualties all the while promising over and over a change to ROE to avoid these? In my FDL posts we’ve catalogued incident after incident which always is followed by oh so serious talk by the US military leadership about a change to better protect civilians – followed within weeks if not days by another incident of the same.

Seth – what do you see as the reason for this refusal to actually change tactics (and in fact exacerbate them if recent reports of expanded use of drones prove true)?

Bev, there are several directions Afghanistan could go in, depending on a range of factors (outside support to the Afghan government, etc.). I will outline two options below, recognizing that a lot could come in between:

1. Creeping Talibanization: Under this scenario, a range of NATO countries would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan (such as the Canadians and Dutch), followed by the British and perhaps last, the Americans. The U.S. might ultimately take a risk that Taliban expansion wouldn’t be the end of the world, and would focus on Predator, Reaper, and US Special Operations Forces targeting al Qa’ida fighters (or other foreign fighters) in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In response, the Taliban might slowly take back larger chunks of Afghan territory, as other groups do the same (Haqqani network in the east, Hezb-i-Islami further north, etc.). This would be a human rights nightmare, since the Taliban still has stone age human rights practices.

2. Lessening Insurgency: The Afghan government and U.S./NATO forces take advantage of Afghan tribes, sub-tribes, clans, and qawms that oppose the Taliban (though are not necessarily pro-Afghan government), such as the Karotis in the east and the Noorzais, Barakzais, and Alizais in the south. This essentially leaves Afghanistan with a central government that controls key cities (such as Kabul), and non-Taliban local institutions that control much of the rural areas. Violence levels go down and major efforts to overthrow the Afghan government begin to decline.

What is the threat to me from Afghanistan… I forgot?

I see no purpose to military adventurism in Afghanistan. Let the locals solve their own problems and for those who want to leave, facilitate their relocation. It’s cheaper and less lives lost.

Siun, to at least partially answer your question: there are several processes at work, starting with the fact that the military is an enormous, millions-strong bureaucracy. Changing a tactic like that, especially when it’s been adopted as a best practice, takes a lot time. Not to excuse it, but institutionally the military changes pretty slowly.

Another problem is chain-of-command. A lot of Big Army units I met with earlier this year had changed their tactics as their tours went on. Granted, this is something every unit has to do, but it happens. A lot of Special Forces groups, however, genuinely believe they’re doing good by “getting the bad guys as they sleep,” and they’re rarely under any obligation to notify the larger command of what’s going on (or if they do so it’s after the fact). So you can have the large organization genuinely trying to do right but separate, autonomous groups doing something else, that might even cut against the grain.

But I think it’s also important to emphasize that very few guys think it’s a great idea to just kick down a compound door and start killing people. They really do think they’re working off good intel about who these people are and what they’re doing. That it’s wrong often enough to pose an enormous strategic challenge is kind of a different question to ask.

I am not convinced that AQ is a threat to the US “homeland”. There has been no evidence that AQ attacked on 911 aside from all sorts of rants from the lying intelligence community.

“They really do think they’re working off good intel about who these people are and what they’re doing.” and what would that be?

SanderO, that describes the 1990s very well. It didn’t work out too well. Lobbing cruise missiles and relying on harried resistance groups is not only ineffective, it’s borderline counterproductive.

Siun, very good questions. I can’t give you a definitive answer, except that I don’t believe U.S. and other NATO forces are as in tune with local perceptions as they could be — so they don’t understand the negative consequences. It’s a problem that is partly due to too much time on bases, and not enough time interacting with locals. However, it does appear that U.S. Marine Forces in Helmand Province have been much more reluctant to use close air support (CAS) during their recent operations, preferring to withdraw if they have to. General McChrystal has been extraordinarily blunt about this to NATO forces, but it will be interesting to see if this persists.

At the same time, however, I’d also point out that the most recent macro-level UN report on civilian casualties (at the beginning of 2009) indicated that the Taliban and other insurgent groups caused roughly 60 percent of the civilian casualties. And the recent attack that killed Afghan children while I was in Afghanistan was gruesome.

Umm, insurgent leaders, bomb makers, al Qaeda coordinators, funders, militants, weapons caches, opium processing labs, etc. Was that not clear before?

The US military and coast guard is perfectly capable of protecting our shores from AQ or the Taliban. Operations in that region are not making us safer as far as I can determine.

This is more of the failed state rogue nation BS that they harp on and on about but failed states are not a threat to the USA.

Seth, if you don’t mind let’s radically switch tracks. There’s a lot of evidence that opium underpins most of the economy, and while going after traffickers is an important part of counternarcotics, so is addressing that fundamental economic question. How do you see Afghanistan’s prospects as an agricultural society? Can they become sustainable without opium?

You don’t seem to understand where I am coming from.

I don’t think the USA should be spreading weapons around the world, having proxy wars and getting involved in local tribal conflicts AT ALL.

We should limit our foreign entanglements to humanitarian aid. END OF STORY.

None of those things has an impact on Kansas.

SanderO, neither the U.S. military nor the Coast Guard would have stopped 9/11. Then again, neither would most of the airport security regimes put into place since. I’m sure there are America-targeted solutions that would deny terrorists the ability to hijack planes, but so would denying safe haven to terrorist groups enjoying state sponsorship (which describes al Qaeda in the 1990s).

On the AQ front, I think the data is illustrative: the successful 2005 attacks in London had direct AQ involvement; the nearly-successful 2006 transatlantic plot (”Operation Overt”) with planes headed to the U.S. and Canada had direct AQ involvement; and the serious plots in 2007 and 2008 in Germany, Denmark, Spain, and France had links to militants in Pakistan (including Uzbek groups linked to al Qa’ida). Even the Obama Administration — as with the intelligence agencies in the UK, Canada, Germany, and many other European countries — have assessed that AQ and other groups in the Afghanistan-Pakistan tribal areas pose extremely serious threats to their national security.

SanderO, this is straying way off topic, but the U.S. doesn’t have a strategic interest in humanitarian problems. There are other reasons to address those, but the record is far from settled that those conflicts benefit from U.S. involvement.

Then again, Afghanistan in 2001 was one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

Frankly poppy production and it’s use in the manufacture of herione has been facilitated by the CIA and the Turkish military.

If there as no market for heroine, it wouldn’t be produced.

Seth, I’m the guy with the question about corruption in surrounding countries (sorry I’m late!) Can I have a follow-up?

Transparency Int’l gives Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan a tie-score of 166th in the world. Tajikistan scores high at 151th. Afghanistan comes in a bit lower at 176th. What’s the huge difference between these countries–again, if Afghanistan resembled post-civil-war Tajikistan, we’d pull brigades once a month, wouldn’t we?

The US military and securuty apparatus could have stopped 911 but there is evidence that they were out rehearsing for 911 type incidents and no one was watching the store.

There is little likelihood that could happen again without stand down orders and high jacking is very much a reduced possibility.

And there is debate about who was behind that event. We spent 23 million investigating Clinton’s Bjob and 1 million of 911. I don’t think we’ve turned every stone over.

Where are the films of the pentagon? Are you satisfied with that account?

Bojinka? That was foiled with police work. We need to do that, not military intervention in Afghanistan. Bojinka was from SE Asia any way.

As we come to the end of this Book Salon,

Seth Thank you for stopping by the Lake and spending the afternoon with us discussing your new book and Afghanistan.

Joshua, Thank you for Hosting this lively Book Salon.

Everyone, if you haven’t bought Seth’s detailed reference about Afghanistan, here is a link.

Thanks all.

SanderO, you’re officially done. This is not the place to babble about 9/11 conspiracies. Go argue with the birthers and be in good company.

Agreed: Seth, thanks for fielding some tough questions.

On the economic front, there is a range of research which suggests that ending war is a critical pre-condition of economic progress, not necessarily the other way around (see, for example, Dobbins, “The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-Building”). So a key pre-condition toward economic development is ending the war.

Nonetheless, there are illustrative examples from Afghanistan. I have met several times with Governor Wahidi from Konar Province, for instance, who has come to the United States and toured the midwest farm belt. He brought back a range of technological developments to implement on vegetable and fruit farms in Konar, which have been quite useful. Consequently, a range of provinces in eastern Afghanistan that used to have a poppy problem have begun to get over the hump. And they’ve replaced fruit and vegetables (including wheat) for popppy.

However, it’s difficult to see how Afghanistan’s economy will ever be self-sustaining, at least in the near- to mid-term. As Barney Rubin notes in “The Fragmentation of Afghanistan,” the country has unfortunately been a rentier state. I’m afraid it will remain one for a while.

Thank you Seth and Joshua for a lively discussion this afternoon/evening.

Thanks every one. And as of next week, I’ll be living in Kabul. So come visit!

Thanks for the discussion, it was quite enjoyable!

SanderO, not Bojinka, the transatlantic plot foiled in the UK — and directed at the US and Canada. It’s why we can’t have liquids or gels on airplanes today.

Also imc2009, those countries don’t have people plotting to kill thousands of Americans (or more). That’s a major difference.

Thanks again every one!

Seth

Ah, the nearly endless glories of US imperialism; murdering, torturing, rigging elections, overthrowing democracies, bombing… The US has been committing war crimes in its interventions in the third world for the last one hundred and eleven years. We began back in 1898, when we slaughtered some two hundred thousand residents of The Philippines, who had the unmitigated gall to resist US colonial occupation of their islands. American genocide in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are just the latest, 21st century chapters of our aggression against third-world peoples.

Sorry, I’m late to the party, and I haven’t read the next 80 comments yet.
But this comment leaves so much to be desired that it has to be peeled back several layers.

First, the book title: Afghanistan was not the graveyard of the British, Soviet and presumably American Empires. It is a country that was not too difficult to conquer, but impossible to govern. These three empires did not die because of their involvement in Afghanistan, but the involvement of all three in Afghanistan failed for similar reasons.

From this point of view, to point to the “Persians, Sassavids, Khorasans, Ghaznavids, Timurids, [and] Moghuls” as imperial success stories in Afghanistan is a shallow catalog. The issue is not how long these empires lasted, but how long their effective conquest of Afghanistan lasted, and how much of Afghanistan remained under their control. For most of these empires, control of “Afghanistan” (or whatever they called it) would only have meant
(a) the control of 1 or 2 administrative centers, and
(b) the control of the main roads to and from these administrative centers.
And even then, the important question is how long did this control last? Ten years? or a hundred years? There were many ten year wonders, and very few that lasted effectively for 100.

For most of those empires, travel to and between the administrative centers would have required a caravan armed for protection against bandits and hostile tribes. Measures of successful imperial control would include
(a) how many towns were under the control of, and paid tribute/taxes to, the empire;
(b) How often caravans traveled between the major administrative centers;
(c) what size protection force was needed by the caravans.

To bring this down to the present, Afghanistan is still pretty much a collection of feudal principalities centered at places like Herat, Kabul, and Kandahar. The central government has to negotiate with the regional principalities in order to govern, and cannot impose its will on them.

American interest in the Afghan Project will decline because it is too expensive in money and lives to sustain. We would do better to invest in hospitals, schools and jobs than in bombs, bombers and tanks.

But I guess I should really go back and read the next 80 comments and the book.

Bob in HI

I had to go off for a few hours, and now we’re really deep into EPU land, and I don’t know if anyone will see this, but…

Joshua @ 66
“If we’re taking lessons from them, then, could that have been our mistake? Initially allying ourselves with the largely Tajik Northern Alliance instead of a pro-American Pashtun militia?”
This is a very important issue, but one that is not easy to resolve. What would “allying ourselves with the pro-American Pashtun militia” mean? After all, it was the Pashtun who were sheltering Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, refusing to turn them over after our ultimatum. Apart from the Taliban, the Pashtun had no central command. What would we do? Ally ourselves with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Pashtun?

The Pashtun may be more numerous than the northern tribes, but they’re also more fragmented, and many of those fragments are and were hostile to us. The Northern armies, however, had formed a coherent command and at the time of our military intervention, the Northern Forces were clearly superior. So we basically had no alternative than to form an alliance with the Northern armies.

Between comments 66 and 101 there are some very good comments on the tribal situation. I note especially Seth’s reference @ 68 to Nazif Shahrani and Robert Canfield’s “Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthropological Perspectives.” One must be careful here, because external forces can either fragment a hierarchy, or can bring it together. For example, the 19th century American conquest of the West decided that Indian people must have “chiefs,” whether that was in their tradition or not. You had to have chiefs, because without chiefs you could not negotiate treaties with leaders who could sign on the dotted line. The Navajo, on the other hand, had no such tradition. But our government kept insisting that they put forward such “chiefs” that we could negotiate with. This helped push the Navajo into developing some kind of hierarchy where there had been no hierarchy before. Hierarchies can also be smashed by decimating the leaders who develop hierarchical authority, fragmenting a developing hierarchical society into bits and pieces. Over the millenia, both strategies have been used in Afghanistan. For example, we’re trying to make Hamid Karzai into the chief of chiefs in Afghanistan, but he has frequently been derided as nothing more than the mayor of Kabul. We undercut him by coddling leaders such as General Dostum. Compare, for example, the treatment of Dostum vs. the treatment of Serbian General Ratko Mladić.

But what is mostly missing from this discussion is the fact that unemployment in Pashtun areas is roughly 40%, resulting in “$10 Tabies” who fight against us for $10 a day because they can’t find work. If we’d just stop bombing them, and instead provide money for jobs building hospitals, schools, roads and other infrastructure, we could deprive the Taliban of much of its fighting force. Bomb-dropping drones won’t do it.

Bob in HI