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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Jamie M. Fly — April 2012
Following the killing of American soldiers and the recent protests sparked
by the accidental burning of Korans by coalition forces, Republican
presidential candidate Newt Gingrich went so far as to suggest that the
United States should abandon Afghanistan unless the Afghans apologize,
adding that we should tell them, “figure out how to live your own miserable
life.” This is the increasingly frequent refrain of war-weary
conservatives who question President Barack Obama’s leadership in the
conflict, are tired of the war’s financial and human toll, and doubt that
it is possible, in Gingrich’s words, to “fix Afghanistan.”
They are worn out and disheartened, in part because Obama and his
administration long ago ceased making the moral case for victory in
Afghanistan. It is an American tradition for our leaders to support or
oppose America’s wars in moral terms. The moral case endows the fight with
a meaning beyond a narrow conception of the national interest or the
understandable fear of what might happen to the country’s standing in the
world should we lose the war. But the moral case is one President Obama has
barely made, even as he was lengthening and deepening the national
commitment to the fight. Now, as the administration attempts to wind down
the war in Afghanistan after more than a decade of U.S. involvement, it has
left the nation without a clear sense of why America is there—and has given
the loyal opposition no good reason to argue a case that seems to discomfit
the commander-in-chief himself.
That is not only a shame; it is a world-historical tragedy in the making.
America’s commitment to this war was never solely or even primarily about
how to “fix Afghanistan.” It was a response to the horrific September 11,
2001, attacks, plotted from the safety of the country that the Taliban had
controlled since 1996. That said, even before 9/11, prominent Americans
across the political spectrum understood the connection between America’s
moral and strategic interests in Afghanistan—a country United Nations envoy
Lakhdar Brahimi described in 1998 as “a failed state which looks like an
infected wound. You don’t even know where to start cleaning it.”
As international forces toppled the Taliban in the fall of 2001, the
coalition’s leaders emphasized that, beyond defeating al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, this was an effort to create a new future for the Afghan people.
They promised not to abandon Afghanistan once again, as the United States
had done after supporting the mujahideen in their fight to expel the Soviets
more than a decade prior.
Despite the soaring rhetoric at the war’s start, by the time President
Obama took office in 2009, many in his party and the country had lost sense
of the rationale for staying in Afghanistan and were looking for an exit
strategy. Yet, faced with the inescapable logic that such an exit strategy
would lead to a disastrous defeat and bolstered by the success of the
counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq, the president bucked his base to send
additional forces, increasing the number of U.S. troops on the ground by
more than 60,000 by 2010. In doing so, he implemented—although with far
fewer boots on the ground than were really needed—a strategy that combined
America’s moral and strategic interests. Where forces could protect the
population from the Taliban, saving lives and pushing the bad guys back,
they could inoculate the people against future radicalization and strangle
the life out of the insurgency.
With his reelection looming in November 2012, however, Obama has succumbed
to those in his administration who have counseled him to adopt more limited
goals. He appears intent on extricating the country from its longest war, in
part through a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.
The fact that a murderous, backward movement straight out of the Middle Ages
is being discussed as a legitimate negotiating partner says much about
current U.S. views of the war. The Taliban were once understood by virtually
all Americans as the quintessence of murderous barbarism. Now they are
being portrayed by senior administration officials as reasonable
interlocutors.
This pessimism about Afghanistan’s prospects on the right and the
Pollyannaish fantasy of a reformed Taliban on the left have taken root in
large measure because our leaders stopped making the moral case for the war
in Afghanistan. What we are left with is an endless, pointless struggle in
the dirt.
With support for the war dangerously close to bottoming out altogether, it’
s worth reviewing how we got to this point.
The year was 1998 and Hollywood was up in arms over a new social cause: the
plight of Afghan women under the repressive rule of the Taliban. Mavis Leno,
wife of Jay Leno and chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Campaign
to Stop Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan, told members of Congress, “The U.S
. bears some responsibility for the conditions of women in Afghanistan. For
years our country provided weapons to the mujahideen groups to fight the
Soviets.” Leno and the Feminist Majority pushed an extensive U.S. campaign
to delegitimize the Taliban until the rights of female Afghans were
recognized.
The Taliban enforced a strict morality code for both men and women, but
women and girls bore the brunt of the most brutal repression. Women were
prohibited from working outside the home except in certain fields and, in
many cases, from leaving their homes unless accompanied by a close male
relative. As the group Physicians for Human Rights noted the same year that
Leno gave her briefing, “No other regime in the world has methodically and
violently forced half of its population into virtual house arrest.” In
addition to enforcement of laws requiring women to wear a burka completely
covering their bodies, schools for girls were closed and basic health care
was often denied.
It is not surprising that such a moral wasteland came to serve as the
staging ground for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda as they planned the attacks
of 9/11. Bin Laden’s ideology and that of his Taliban hosts sprang from the
same vile swamp.
It thus made sense that Western leaders, in preparing a coordinated response
to the attacks, began to talk about the looming battle in terms of morality
. Their forebears had done much the same in framing conflicts, from the two
world wars to the interventions in the Balkans. British Prime Minister Tony
Blair, speaking of the victims’ families he had recently met in New York,
told the Labour Party conference three weeks after the terrorist attacks:
I believe their memorial can and should be greater than simply the
punishment of the guilty….To the Afghan people we make this commitment. The
conflict will not be the end. We will not walk away, as the outside world
has done so many times before.
This message was also broadcast on the other side of the Atlantic, where the
Bush administration highlighted the plight of the Afghan people. In
December 2001, upon signing the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act
introduced by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and cosponsored by a bipartisan
group of all female senators, President Bush said:
In Afghanistan, America not only fights for our security, but we fight
for values we hold dear. We strongly reject the Taliban way. We strongly
reject their brutality toward women and children. They not only violate
basic human rights, they are barbaric in their indefensible meting of
justice. It is wrong. Their attitude is wrong for any culture. Their
attitude is wrong for any religion.
This was not a partisan issue at the time. Then Senator Hillary Clinton
wrote an article for Time magazine in November 2001 rejecting the notion
that the conflict was divorced from our values. “We cannot simply drop our
bombs and depart with our best wishes, lest we find ourselves returning some
years down the road to root out another terrorist,” Clinton argued. “It
is not only the right thing to do; it is the smart thing to do.”
In August 2010, after years of both military gains and setbacks, Time ran a
cover story about an 18-year-old Afghan woman named Aisha. Her nose and ears
had been cut off by a Taliban commander for having fled abusive in-laws.
Provocatively titled “What Happens If We Leave Afghanistan,” the article
and attendant images provoked a discussion about whether the United States
was about to abandon the women and girls of Afghanistan to renewed
oppression under the Taliban.
The story received significant attention, and members of the media pushed a
number of the war’s opponents to square their opposition with the plight of
Afghan women so vividly exemplified by the photo of Aisha. Then Speaker of
the House Nancy Pelosi did her best to skirt the issue: “It’s in our
strategic national interests to be there for our own national security to
stop terrorism and increase global security,” she told ABC News, and she
added that gains in women’s education and health “can’t happen without
security.” One of the war’s harshest critics, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, told
MSNBC: “It’s just horrible how that young woman was treated. At the same
time, we need to create a world where we try to make it safe for everyone,
but America can’t do it alone. We cannot be the policemen of the world.”
The moral case for helping Afghans had become too discomfiting for Democrats
on the left. To raise the issue was to acknowledge its force, and for
politicians eager to bring the war to a close, that meant ignoring it.
Given the Obama administration’s concerns about its base’s objections to
the war, it was only a matter of time until the case against the Taliban was
scrapped as well. Sixteen months after the Aisha story was published, Vice
President Joe Biden told Leslie Gelb, of Newsweek, that the “Taliban per se
is not our enemy.” Weeks later, news leaked that the Obama administration
had been pursuing secret talks with representatives of the Taliban with the
goal of a negotiated settlement to the Afghanistan war.
An ignoble, Taliban-negotiated exit from Afghanistan was not preordained.
During his campaign for the White House in 2008, Obama famously called
Afghanistan the “good” war in comparison with Iraq. He claimed, with some
merit, that the Bush administration had not properly resourced the effort
but that, as president, he would.
Despite the hawkish campaign rhetoric, after an Afghanistan strategy review
completed in mid-2009, the Obama administration narrowed U.S. goals to make
it clear the Taliban was not the primary focus of American military efforts.
Obama announced that the aim was to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-
Qaeda and its safe havens in Pakistan, and to prevent their return to
Pakistan or Afghanistan.”
While the president acceded, in part, to his commanders’ requests for
additional forces, he coupled his surge announcement with a promise to begin
drawing down that same surge by June 2011. That announcement, which came
about before a single additional member of the military had been deployed as
part of the surge, set the effort back considerably, undermining the
confidence of our Afghan and regional allies, and emboldening the enemy.
Still, the Army soldiers and Marines who were deployed in the surge to
Afghanistan allowed the coalition to make significant gains. In previously
neglected regions in the south, troops implemented a counterinsurgency
strategy that cleared the Taliban and provided the locals with an
alternative to their repressive rule. These successes allowed local
populations, especially women and children, to enjoy the benefits that many
of their fellow Afghans in other areas of the country had already begun to
experience in the years since 2001.
It is understandable that many Americans look at Afghanistan after a decade
of war and fail to see past the violence and lawlessness that still rages.
But there is another story to this war. Over the last decade, Afghanistan
has experienced improvements in almost every area of life. By 2010,
according to the U.S. State Department, 35 percent of the 6.2 million
students enrolled in Afghan schools were girls, up from zero percent among
the fewer than 900,000 students enrolled during Taliban rule. U.S.-funded
efforts have assisted the building of schools, the incorporation of women
into Afghanistan’s police forces, and the training of female teachers,
politicians, lawyers, and judges. There are now 69 female members of the
Afghan parliament. Afghanistan has also experienced a sharp decrease in
infant and child mortality rates and significant increases in life
expectancy for both men and women.
These achievements undermine the criticism that our efforts in Afghanistan
must fail because we are attempting to change deeply held societal norms and
the inherent nature of Islam as practiced in Afghanistan’s tribal society.
Given the Taliban’s track record, and ours, it is no surprise that Afghan
women have responded to America’s obsession with Taliban negotiations by
demanding a seat at the table to ensure that women’s rights remain
protected. As a former Afghan female presidential candidate recently told
the Christian Science Monitor: “If [the Taliban] are bad, why are you
bringing them back? Once the Taliban gets power and they are assured they
will stay in power, then they will introduce their own values and there won
’t be any space for women.”
Recent Taliban rhetoric reinforces this skepticism. In a statement issued on
January 12, the group said that its willingness to talk “does not mean a
surrender from jihad, and neither is it connected to an acceptance of the
constitution of the stooge Kabul administration.” As Karl Inderfurth, who
met with Taliban officials some 20 times during the Clinton administration,
wrote recently in Foreign Policy magazine, “On a scale of one to ten on
good-faith negotiations, the Taliban proved to be a zero.”
An Afghanistan that does not protect the rights of women, children, and
minorities would be a devastating failure for the United States. As Hillary
Clinton noted back in 2001, “A post-Taliban Afghanistan where women’s
rights are respected is much less likely to harbor terrorists in the future.
Why? Because a society that values all its members, including women, is
also likely to put a higher premium on life, opportunity, and freedom—
values that run directly counter to the evil designs of the Osama bin Ladens
of the world.”
Given the Obama administration’s race to the exits, largely made
politically thinkable by the killing of Osama bin Laden, what should those
who are skeptical of the administration’s intentions do to correct this
slow-motion train wreck of an Afghanistan policy?
It is unlikely that a future president will have the fortitude of President
Bush in 2007 when he sent the surge forces into Iraq, defying public and
expert opinion claiming the war was lost. It is thus imperative that, at a
minimum, our commanders be allowed to maintain post-surge force levels
through 2013. Similarly, recent decisions to downsize the Afghan security
forces need to be reconsidered; and the administration needs to devote a
renewed sense of urgency to negotiations with the Afghan government, not the
Taliban, over a strategic partnership agreement that makes clear America’s
long-term interests in the fate of Afghanistan and its people.
American policymakers may very well decide to abandon the Afghan people, but
few seem willing to admit how dishonorable that would be. On a trip to
Afghanistan last fall, I saw young girls in Helmand province shouting “Ma-
rine, Ma-rine” as they flocked to a woman in our group. They thought she
was part of the highly successful (and popular) Marines’ female engagement
teams that provide basic medical services to locals. On a Blackhawk
helicopter on our way to Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s recently cleared
hometown in Kandahar province, an Army general told us that “when you see
the kids, you will realize we can succeed.”
In other words, the moral case for Afghanistan is not only a matter of our
being virtuous for the sake of virtue. Because we increasingly have the
heretofore neglected population on our side, we can still win. As a result
of the heroic efforts of coalition forces, al-Qaeda has largely been forced
to relocate to the tribal areas of Pakistan or outposts in Yemen and Somalia
. Still, the Afghan government’s stability is threatened as Taliban forces
struggle to retake many districts. They can be stopped. But only if our
leaders give our troops free reign to do so and avoid the temptation to give
up the fight.
Rehabilitating the Taliban or writing off a supposedly backwards country may
be attractive options for politicians eager to pacify the war-weary
American public. But doing so would undermine everything we have fought so
hard for over the last 10 years. And there is no reason to believe either
solution will lead to anything but an end far more disastrous, and morally
haunting, than we can presently imagine. On February 23, the New York Times
ran an article with a headline that, in 2002, could have appeared only in a
satirical paper such as the Onion: “Beheadings Raise Doubts That Taliban
Have Changed.” The governing force in Afghanistan in the 1990s performed
such beheadings, and bodily mutilations, and deadly stonings, in stadiums
and compelled thousands to attend and watch. They are no different today.
The moral and strategic imperatives in Afghanistan are one and the same:
Defeat the Taliban. Any other course is not only harmful to our national
interest but also dishonorable—and will do long-term damage to our national
character.
About the Author
Jamie M. Fly is executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. |
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