Afghanistan exposes chinks in US armour

Could it be that the US blew it in Afghanistan? Perish, as they say, the thought. Infighting and turf war within the government. Byzantine bickering among top national security aides. And headstrong generals seeking a more expansive military campaign. Couple that with a pervasive ignorance about Afghanistan’s history, culture and tribal society and you get a sense of why the US, despite its commitment of 100,000 troops and close to $500 billion (Dh1.83 trillion), may end up leaving the country next year looking worse than when it was invaded well over a decade ago.

It might not get any better, you say, for critics of America’s costly adventure — costly in blood as in treasure — in that far away land?

Wait, there’s more. A new book by Vali Nasr tells it like it is. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who served a two year tenure as a senior State Department policy expert and top adviser to the late Richard Holbrooke, US President Barack Obama’s first special envoy to Afghanistan, had a ringside view of the administration’s foreign policy, not just in Afghanistan and Pakistan but in Iran and Palestine as well.

Lengthy segments from the book, due for release next month, were serialised last Monday by Foreign Policy magazine, and these paint a bleak picture of Obama’s handling of foreign policy, with turf-conscious White House aides locking horns with the State Department over policymaking, in sharp contrast to the administration’s claims that its management of the Afghan war is sterling.

In all, Nasr’s book, or at least those segments from it in Foreign Policy, attest to how the White House’s hope for an honourable exit, the Pentagon’s desire for a resounding victory, and the State Department’s efforts to prevent a general decline of America’s image and influence abroad, shrivelled up on the arid plains, desolate Helmand valleys and snow-capped mountains of Afghanistan.

Relentless insurgency

What is there to say? Since the initial swift defeat of the Taliban in 2001, America has gone from victory to stalemate, and American optimism has steadily evaporated. And no one has come forward to explain why a relentless insurgency developed after the arrival of American boots and the overthrow of the Taliban regime. What everyone agrees on, however, is that Afghanistan, in time, effectively turned into a ‘war of a thousand cuts’, a war that has now become part of the national psyche rather the way Vietnam had done well over four decades ago — without, to be sure, the hype and drama of the Sixties.

Is the US destined to meet the same fate in that enigmatic land that had befallen many of the great powers before it, from the campaigns of Alexander the Great, to those of the British empire in the era of Kipling, to the more recent Soviet invasion? If so, that fate must be the consequence of a marriage between American naivete about nation-building and a pervasively corrupt central government in Kabul — a marriage not unlike that of an incompatible couple whose union slides into crisis, after the larger contradictions woven into their relationship become apparent.

Or perhaps there’s more to it than that.

Power is no longer what it used to be in the old days, and big powers, certainly since the second half of the 20th century, have found it more difficult to project muscle and thus facts on the ground. The number of independent nation-states has quadrupled since then, from roughly 50 to well over 190 (as UN membership would attest), and these notions contend for power in their own way, though the US, along with approximately 30 ‘wealthy western democracies’, remains delusional in its Orientalist perceptions about those lesser species of men and women living less secure lives around the world.

No, General Westmoreland was wrong when he declared as early as 1967 that there was “light at the end of the tunnel” and that the Vietnamese “did not value human life”. And no, former President George W. Bush pre-empted himself when he saw a “mission accomplished” soon after American troops set foot in Iraq. And no, it did not work out in Somalia and Yemen, in Lebanon and Palestine either.

The diffusion of military power by big powers no longer means authority and dictation. The world has changed. As Moises Naim, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, reminded readers in an article in the Washington Post titled ‘Why The Powerful Seem So Powerless’, that the “asymmetrical wars that broke out between 1800 and 1849, the weaker side [in terms of armaments and troops] achieved its strategic goals in only 12 per cent of cases. But in the wars between 1950 and 1998, the supposedly weaker side prevailed 55 per cent of the time ... Power players now often pay a steeper and more immediate price for their mistakes”.

Tell that to the folks who run America’s foreign policy.

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.