Barack Obama and Afghanistan
The president is at risk of running down American forces in Afghanistan too fast
THE real question facing Barack Obama over Afghanistan is just what the United States is trying to achieve there. Plenty of Americans, weary of war and anxious about their own plight at home, think that the death of Osama bin Laden should have marked an end to the mission that took 100,000 troops to a distant and dismal part of the world. Afghanistan will cost America roughly $120 billion this year. Many Americans want this money to go towards creating jobs in Kansas rather than in Kabul.
By announcing on June 22nd that he would withdraw 10,000 troops this year, and the remaining 23,000 members of the “surge” by the end of the summer of 2012, Mr Obama tried to give everyone something. To his political strategists, worried about re-election, his message was that nation-building should start at home. To his generals, worried by any withdrawal, he can still claim that he will end his first term with many more troops in Afghanistan than were there when he began it. The middle ground is often good politics; it is less comfortable in warfare. In this case, history will probably judge that Mr Obama took out too many soldiers too early.
Afghanistan’s future turns on whether the central government appears stable, or whether it looks as if it will collapse as soon as NATO troops retreat from the field of battle. The more permanent the government, the more likely rival tribes, ethnic groups and factions will be to seek to negotiate their place in the pecking order, rather than fight for supremacy in a civil war. Crucially, that includes the Taliban.
It is true that Afghanistan looks like a failure beside the dream of 2001, when NATO invaded. It will continue to be plagued by violence and insurgency. Even with the best outcome there, women will suffer discrimination, poppies will flourish and corruption will eat away at daily life. But any hope of a decent life there depends on peace. Avoiding a full-blown civil war is crucial for Afghans.
The outside world also has a stake in its (relative) stability. A vacuum in Afghanistan threatens the entire region. Nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, an incendiary couple, risk a proxy war through the different ethnic groups they sponsor in the country. Iran, China and Russia could all be sucked in. And a lawless Afghanistan could again become al-Qaeda’s base.
In his speech this week, Mr Obama seemed too prepared to run the risk of all this happening. For the time being he is offering some help to protect the government; but the momentum of the surge will ebb. He is willing to stay long enough to train the Afghan army and police needed to protect the government. But after 2014, when that job is supposed to be complete, will he (or his successor) be willing to pay for the Afghan army and to keep some foreign troops there as a deterrent to civil war? Such doubts will make Afghans less likely to reckon on the government enduring—and hence more likely to fight it.
The pity of this is that, with help, there is every chance that government in Kabul could survive—preferably under some other leader than the erratic Hamid Karzai. After all, Mohammad Najibullah, unloved, isolated and opposed by a superpower, lasted for more than three years after being ditched by the near-bankrupt Soviet Union in 1989. Mr Obama’s decision this week does not condemn the mission to failure. But it does make it harder to realise than it need have been.
