Afghanistan

[tagryn]

Peter Bergen urges the West to go all-in in Afghanistan:

Afghanistan will not be Obama’s Vietnam, nor will it be his Iraq. Rather, the renewed and better resourced American effort in Afghanistan will, in time, produce a relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state...

I respect Bergen's experience, but in this case I think he's bending over backwards too hard to try and justify the expansion of Western commitment in Afghanistan because he really, really wants it to succeed (in part, I suspect, in order to allow a success-vs-failure/compare-and-contrast option for those who were vehemently against the Iraq effort and still view it as an ongoing catastrophe). To his credit he doesn't just ignore the skeptics points, but I think he's being way too optimistic the other way, though. I've written before about how Afghanistan is a more daunting task than Iraq because of its logistical challenges, something Bergen doesn't tackle. Also, while he's correct that the Taliban have always been a small force, historically the real domino that shifts who controls the country are the tribal and regional warlords. The Taliban didn't win control of Afghanistan until guys like Dostum shifted to what they perceived as the "winning side," and the Coalition and Northern Alliance couldn't have won against the Taliban if the warlords hadn't changed sides again once they saw staying with the Taliban as a worse option. The prevalence of the local warlords is also the reason the Coalition has had problems ramping up the Afghan armed forces, the best of Afghan fighters are more likely to be working for a warlord than the military, and the central government just isn't strong enough to make leaving the warlords a more lucrative opportunity than staying.

Frankly, his essay sounds eerily similar to some of the more rosy essays on how Iraq was going to become a beacon of democracy to the Middle East. Bergen doesn't go that far, but I think his prediction of a stable and prosperous Afghanistan anytime soon isn't reasonable, either.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

I hope that Afghanistan is Obama's "Iraq" -- Iraq was a success. It's yet to be proven that Obama is as competent a commander as was George W. Bush, and there are also the serious logistical problems in Afghanistan to consider.