Peter Tomsen, who once served as the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and who published in 2011 what many consider to be the definitive book, thus far, about the war there, has a review in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs of three recent books on the same subject. The review and the books (War Comes to Garmser by Carter Malkasian, The Wrong Enemy by Carlotta Gall, and No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal) are thoughtful works by deeply informed writers, and all are worth a read.
On the way to providing some interesting proposals for future international policy in Afghanistan, Tomsen considers the question of what has gone wrong thus far. His discussion of Gopal's perpsective on this issue is particularly worthwhile.
Gopal, in Tomsen’s telling, rejects both the common argument that American inattention (due to the Bush administration’s focus on Iraq) led to the current situation, as well as recent well-documented efforts like Carlotta Gall’s to put much of the blame on malign Pakistani influence. Gopal instead pins the blame on the United States military getting involved in disputes between tribes and warlords that it did not understand:
Unlike Malkasian and Gall, Gopal does not depict Pakistan as the primary spoiler in Afghanistan. And he rejects the conventional wisdom that the Afghan war went astray only because Washington took its eye off the ball by shifting its attention to Iraq. He puts forward a different hypothesis: "Following the Taliban’s collapse, al-Qaeda had fled the country. . . . By April 2002, the group could no longer be found in Kandahar -- or anywhere else in Afghanistan. The Taliban, meanwhile, had ceased to exist. . . . The terrorists had all decamped or abandoned the cause, yet U.S. special forces were on Afghan soil with a clear political mandate: defeat terrorism."
This, Gopal claims, presented Washington with a puzzle: "How do you fight a war without an adversary?" The answer, he writes, was supplied by Afghan warlords who saw an opportunity to consolidate their power with the unwitting assistance of the Americans -- and to get rich in the process. Such men "would create enemies where there were none," feeding false intelligence to the Americans, who paid good money for it. The result was counterproductive U.S. and NATO operations that alienated and divided ordinary Afghans: ideal conditions for the Taliban and other militants to exploit after they had regrouped in Pakistan and crossed back into Afghanistan in 2005.
There is merit to Gopal’s thesis that the U.S. partnership with unpopular warlords helped open the way for the Taliban’s return. But Gopal errs in concluding that the Taliban had "ceased to exist" in Afghanistan after the group’s leaders fled back to their former Pakistani sanctuaries following the U.S.-led invasion. Thousands of Taliban foot soldiers, along with scores of midlevel leaders and commanders, had merely gravitated back to the protection of clans and tribes in Afghan villages and mountains, ready to fight another day. And although Washington’s embrace of warlords helped the Taliban win public support after regrouping, the militants would not have been able to return to Afghanistan in force without Pakistan’s assistance.
Gopal’s argument is in harmony with those critics of the conduct of the war (including Malkasian) who believe that if the United States had focused more intensively on building the Afghan state in 2002, and had rejected working with regional tribal and ethnic powerbrokers who ruthlessly pursued their own interests at the expense of good government, the Taliban would have been unable to achieve a foothold in when the insurgency kicked off again.
More attention to the Afghan state in the early years of the war would have been a good thing, but the notion that there was a solution in Afghanistan that did not incorporate the warlords is misguided. In fact, what legitimized the return of the Taliban from 2005 on was less general Afghan dissatisfaction with regional leaders than Pashtun dissatisfaction with a Kabul government that was maximalist in its claims to authority, ineffective in its ability to follow through, and was empowered by a UN-backed constitution that was—at best—fanciful in its conception of what could constitute the legitimate rule of law in Afghanistan.
Tomsen provides a rough guide for what a better political arrangement for Afghanistan could look like:
The early twentieth century offers the country’s new leaders a useful model to draw on. Before the communist era, which began in 1978, Afghanistan enjoyed four decades of stability and slow but steady modernization. The country owed its progress largely to a unique relationship between the central government and traditional tribal structures in the regions. The government in Kabul did not possess a monopoly of power in the country but shared it with moderate tribal groups and clerics in rural areas. The government provided services such as schools, clinics, and roads to the regions, whose tribal elders administered their communities according to ancient codes and customs, maintained security, and participated in parliamentary conclaves in Kabul.
The new central government will have to decide whether and how to restore that kind of equilibrium. Some Afghans advocate the creation of a more parliamentary form of government, with a prime minister at the head of a decentralized state that devolves real, if limited, authority to elected provincial and district governors. Others believe that the status quo, with power rigidly centralized in Kabul, will remain necessary as long as the insurgency continues. The parliamentary option seems more prudent, given the Karzai regime’s failure to provide either security or economic benefits to most Afghans, despite receiving many billions of dollars in foreign assistance.
The next Afghan president will also have to cope with warlords whose power usually rests more on guns and money than on tribal or religious authority. Some of them have been integrated into the government structure, but most still control territory and drug-trafficking routes and sometimes collude with the Taliban. Degrading their strength will take time and a mixture of pressure and incentives. Afghans will also be watching closely for signs that the new government intends to remove, rather than tolerate, the many corrupt officials who became a fixture of the Karzai era.
All of this, combined with a harder U.S. line on Pakistan. (Good luck!) Tomsen’s advice that a more federal, decentralized structure for Afghanistan would be better than the current arrangement is wise, but—as he points out—the problem is that the tribal elders of the middle 20th century have been replaced with a more rapacious class of local leader. But we cannot ignore that "degrading" this class of warlords will constitute, in fact, yet another attempt at regime change, inasmuch as it is these men who in fact control most of the country. They may not be legitimate in Western eyes, but any new, decentralized constitution in Afghanistan will have to initially include them if there is to be any chance of its success.
This is troubling to those, like me, with liberal sensitivities, but the alternative is a complete collapse of the Kabul regime and a return to Taliban rule. Pace Gopal, the biggest problem in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2005 was not too much involvement with the warlords, or, pace Malkasian, too little investment in the Afghan state. Rather, it was the attempt to create the wrong sort of state: a centralized, Western polity that pleased UN bureaucrats and westernized, Kabul-based Afghans, but could never achieve legitimacy in the eyes of rural Pashtuns, or be effective on its own terms. No amount of investment in an Afghan state organized along the lines of the 2001 Bonn Agreement and the 2004 constitution would have been enough to achieve the most important conditions for success: buy-in from regional power-brokers, unsavory though they may be, and legitimacy in the eyes of rural Pashtuns, whose liberal sensitivities are often overestimated.
It is a sad but unavoidable fact that a realistic and workable scheme for Afghan politics will have to involve the criminal, illiberal, and brutal ethnic and tribal leaders who hold actual power at the local level. The choice has always been between that option or Pakistani rule through the proxy of the Taliban, whose platform actually is appealing to rural Pashtuns. A liberal and Western vision of good government that rejects clientelism and patronage is something we might hope will come in time. Pursuing it too soon was part of the problem.