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from The Great Debate:
Where the Afghanistan effort broke down
This is a response to Rory Stewart's book excerpt "My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention." David Rohde's response can be read here.
By Anne-Marie Slaughter
The views expressed are her own.
This fall I am teaching a big introductory course to the first-year Masters of Public Affairs students at the Woodrow Wilson School called Politics and Public Policy. The focus of the first lecture, delivered by one of my colleagues, as the necessary intersection of good policy, good politics, and good practice. In other words, the best policy in the world doesn’t make any difference if it is not politically feasible; conversely, what is politically feasible may not be worth doing if it is not at least better policy than the status quo. And even where good policy is politically feasible, it must also be implementable – not just in theory, but in practice.
The intersection of these three circles came to mind as I read Rory Stewart’s achingly honest and thoughtful account of his experience in Afghanistan. For a long time I was convinced that the NATO intervention in Afghanistan could be successful at building a functioning Afghan government that would provide basic services to its citizens. My views were largely shaped by my regular conversations with my long-time friend Sarah Chayes, who lived in Kandahar for much of past decade running first a dairy cooperative and then a soap and fragrance business with Afghans. We were failing, in her view, because of the high NATO tolerance for the cancerous corruption that was sucking the life out of the country, starting at the top. Her book Punishment of Virtue tells the tale, describing how Afghans genuinely committed to rebuilding their country have been systematically driven out or killed by their compatriots who are profiting from the enormous in-flux of money and opportunity that inevitably accompanies large-scale Western intervention in a poor country. She thought, and I agreed, that the U.S. had had an opportunity to help rebuild a very different Afghanistan immediately after the invasion, and that it was still possible to empower the good guys if we were really willing to take on the bad guys profiting at the local, regional, and national level.
Over the past two years, I have reluctantly changed my mind. I have come to believe that where the problem is a predatory state, which the very presence of massive Western resources tends to fuel, it is essentially impossible for outsiders to spur or even effectively support a process of reform from within when we are a big part of the problem by being there in the first place. Stewart makes the argument succinctly and effectively: “the international community necessarily [lacks] the knowledge, the power, and the legitimacy to engage with politics at a local provincial level.”
from Expert Zone:
U.S. should react strongly to Pakistan’s involvement in embassy attack
(The views expressed in this column are the author’s own and do not represent those of Reuters)
Credible U.S. press reports on Friday revealed that cell phones found on the attackers in the September 13 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul were linked to Pakistani intelligence officials.
from Expert Zone:
Rabbani assassination and Pakistani defiance crush prospects for Afghan peace
(The views expressed in this column are the author's own and do not represent those of Reuters)
The assassination of former Afghan President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was in charge of the High Peace Council pursuing reconciliation talks with the Taliban, is a clarifying moment for Afghans who had hoped Rabbani’s efforts would bring peace to the war-ravaged country.
from The Great Debate:
Creating a “light, long term footprint” in Afghanistan
By David Rohde
The views expressed are his own.
This is a response to Rory Stewart's book excerpt, "My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention."
The most important phrase in Stewart’s essay is his statement that a “light, long-term footprint” should be adopted in Afghanistan. I agree but he paints a dark picture of all Western efforts in the country.
from The Great Debate:
My uphill battle against the Afghanistan intervention
By Rory Stewart
The views expressed are his own.
I returned to Afghanistan (after spending a short time at Harvard) in 2005. And when I heard that the British government was about to send three thousand soldiers into Helmand, I was confident that there would soon be a widespread insurgency. I also predicted that the military would demand more troops, and would get dragged ever deeper.
It wasn’t that I had any particular skill in predicting the future. I failed to predict that Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak would fall. I was wrong about Iraq. And my prediction for Helmand wasn’t based on any knowledge of Helmand. It was simply that I recognized the mindset and the actions of the NATO governments from Iraq. And I wasn’t alone in warning against the deployment. Many others predicted the same thing in Helmand. A military friend of mine had returned from a reconnaissance trip saying, “There isn’t an insurgency, but you can have one if you want one.” The Helmand surge continued regardless. The British government seemed to have a momentum, quite distinct from any individual politician or policy-maker. Troops were increased from two hundred U.S. Special Forces in 2005 to three thousand British soldiers in 2006.
from Photographers Blog:
Back in Afghanistan, ten years later
By Erik de Castro
Ten years ago I was part of the three-member Reuters multimedia team that went to Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. We covered the pursuit for Osama Bin Laden and his Taliban followers, who were believed to be holed up in the caves of the Tora Bora mountains, by US military special forces fighting alongside the Afghan Mujaheedin. Nobody from the press saw Osama. Instead about a dozen Taliban captured from the caves were presented to the media in Tora Bora.
As we passed the Afghan border on the road to Jalalabad following a long journey from Islamabad, Pakistan, I remember the precautions our security adviser told us: If ever we are stopped by armed men along the way, stay calm and just hand over our U.S. dollars. Weeks earlier, two Reuters colleagues (a TV cameraman and a photographer) and two other European journalists traveling with a convoy of media vehicles were killed by bandits on the same road.
from Susan Glasser:
The wars America doesn’t talk about
By Susan Glasser
The opinions expressed are her own.
Last month was the deadliest for U.S. troops in Afghanistan in the ten years of the war there, with 67 killed, nearly half of them Navy SEALs in the downing of a Chinook helicopter -- the deadliest single incident in this, the longest war in American history. More promisingly, it was also the first month since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 that not a single U.S. soldier was killed there.
And yet these startling facts received almost no notice: the president never mentioned them, Congress was silent. When it comes to these drawn-out conflicts, both American political parties are increasingly determined to say nothing at all.
from MacroScope:
Guns and butter
Long mum on the link between the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the country's economic distress, mainstream economists have started connecting the dots -- and it doesn't make for a pretty picture. A Brown University study published in June found the total cost of the two conflicts to be on the order of $4 trillion, nearly 30 percent of U.S. GDP and enough money to employ 8 million Americans at $50,000 a year for 10 years.
Now Harvard's Kennedy School is publishing its own series on the issue. In a piece discussing the 10 years that have elapsed since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Professor Linda Blimes flags America's response to the events of that day as a "major contributor" to all of the economic weakness that has plagued the country over the last decade.
from Photographers Blog:
Why they fight
Photographer Nikola Solic recently spent time with U.S. soldiers at Forward Operating Base Bostick in eastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan. In addition to capturing a selection of images of life at the base and surrounding observation posts, Solic spent time discussing with them the war on terror, the legacy of September 11th, and how these men and women define their mission ten years after the towers fell. Among them was First Leiutenant Edward Bachar from Freehold, New Jersey.
Untitled from Corinne Perkins on Vimeo.
from The Great Debate:
9/11 in history: chapter or footnote?
The opinions expressed are his own.
Historians like to break up human progress into bite-sized pieces. It’s a useful technique: segregated and labelled, historical eras offer prisms through which to view the past, making it easier to comprehend. Typically, they’re bookmarked by inventions: the wheel, the steam engine, the atom bomb. Intellectual movements fit nicely, too: the Reformation, the Enlightenment, Modernism. Each innovation provides a paradigm shift, ushering in a way of thinking previously inconceivable but, after its emergence, unignorable.
Occasionally, waypoints are provided by momentous events. A happening of sufficient magnitude (the argument goes) jars the historical process decisively, severing the connection between past and future, sweeping away the old and paving the way for the new. The Flood in Genesis, the birth of Christ, the attack on Pearl Harbor – all "watershed" moments. Bookmarking such events not only provides useful academic waypoints, it also offers another important service: reassurance. With the sweeping away of the old comes trepidation. The birth of a "new era" provides a link to the past: there have been epochal events before. Things have changed rapidly, and not always for the better. We have survived them. We will again.
