Finish the Job
How the War in Afghanistan Can Be Won
Article Summary and Author Biography
Since 2001, Afghanistan's economy has grown at an impressive rate and major development indicators in the country have improved dramatically. Even security and the rule of law -- long neglected -- are now improving. Washington and its allies could still win in Afghanistan if they are given the time they need.
PAUL D. MILLER is Assistant Professor of International Security Studies at the National Defense University. He served as Director for Afghanistan in the U.S. National Security Council under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, from September 2007 to September 2009. The views expressed here are his own.
Reading List
An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on Afghan politics.
Snapshot
If the upcoming NATO summit in Chicago is to be more than an exchange of lofty speeches and question-riddled commitments about the future of Afghanistan, it is time to take a hard look at the promises the United States and others are making -- and whether they are too big to keep.
Pessimism abounds in Afghanistan. Violence, NATO casualties, corruption, drug production, and public disapproval in the United States are at record levels. Ahmed Rashid, a prominent Pakistani journalist and an expert on the region, declared the U.S. mission in Afghanistan a failure in his scathing 2008 book, Descent Into Chaos. Seth Jones, the leading U.S. scholar on the Taliban insurgency, has argued that the United States had an opening to make a difference in Afghanistan after 2001, but that it "squandered this extraordinary opportunity." U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attempted to manage expectations when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in January 2009. "If we set ourselves the objective of creating some sort of Central Asian Valhalla over there, we will lose," he argued, "because nobody in the world has that kind of time, patience, and money." U.S. policymakers and the public increasingly doubt that the war can be won. These assessments are based on real and credible concerns about the rising insurgency, the drug trade, endemic corruption, and perennial government weakness.
Yet the stabilization and reconstruction effort in Afghanistan has gone better than is widely believed. The pessimists fail to understand how badly the Afghan state had failed in 2001 and thus are blind to how much it has improved in many areas -- particularly in economic and political reconstruction. The pessimists are right to be worried about the rise of the Taliban insurgency and the weak rule of law, but they also tend to overstate the competence and scale of the insurgency.
Many analysts critical of the war effort have drawn misguided lessons from cartoonish and caricatured versions of Afghan history -- comparing ISAF to the armies of Alexander the Great, William Elphinstone, or Boris Gromov -- to conclude that the laws of history bar foreign militaries from accomplishing anything in the land of the Hindu Kush. They sound dire warnings about U.S. and NATO staying power after a nine-year-old war. But they are wrong on all counts. The insurgency did not pick up steam until late 2005, and ISAF, which started changing its posture and strategy in late 2006, arguably did not implement a coherent counterinsurgency campaign until 2009. It would be myopic and irresponsible to conclude that the international community should walk away from the mission due to a lack of adequate progress...
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