Introduction: Afghanistan as America’s Longest War
In Chapter 2 of her book, Every Man in this Village is a Liar, Megan Stack described the start of the Afghan War in 2001 and the failed attempt to capture or kill Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Bin Laden is dead now, of course, gunned down by a Navy SEAL team at his hideout in Pakistan, but the war in Afghanistan drags on despite all loss of popular support for it there or in the United States. None of the conditions Stack observed in 2001, such as the corruption of the warlords, the poverty and despair of the common people or the lack of education and opportunities for women and children have really changed much in the last ten years. Just the opposite, the situation has probably grown even worse, except for the corrupt elites who regard this endless war as a lucrative business and source of profit.
Ordinary Afghans have no real incentive to fight in this war for a corrupt government that is negligent of their needs and whose officials seem eager to escape the country with their ill-gotten gains once the foreigners are gone. In every way, the war and the entire nation-building exercise have been a complete waste and failure. Warlords, corrupt officials and well-paid foreign contractors and consultants still live in “sumptuous headquarters” while most of the common people are below subsistence level, hungry, poor and illiterate (Stack 18). Several generations of children have grown up experiencing nothing but war, just like the adolescent mujahideen she saw at Tora Bora, who did not even know their own ages, were poorly armed, fed and clothed, and lacked even the most basic medical care. They did not believe this was their war then nor do their successors believe it today. As for the Americans, they were content to remain the manipulators behind the scenes, not trusting their Afghan ‘allies’ and strongly distrusted by them. Their main concern was to kill bin Laden and the Al Qaeda Arabs and at Tora Bora they wanted them “dead immediately” (Stack 26). When this did not happen and bin Laden fled into Pakistan, they suspected that the Afghan warlords had been bribed to help them make their escape.
According to the British writer Magsie Hamilton-Little, the true situation in Afghanistan has changed very little over the last decade except for the worse. She visited the country in 2011 for the first time in six years and saw “no discernable improvement in conditions during the time I had been away” (Hamilton-Little 2011). This was has been a catastrophe for Afghanistan and a failure in every respect, as is the entire nation building project. Billions in aid money has been stolen by government officials and foreign contractors who pocket the funds for work that is never done, and the entire regime of Hamid Karzai is flagrantly corrupt from top to bottom. Eighty percent of the adult population is illiterate and half the children receive no education of any kind, while schools lack even paper and textbooks and teachers go unpaid for months. Few foreigners ever go to Afghanistan these days and the ones who do stay in high-security compounds in Kabul, but any Afghans who have the money to do so are fleeing the country in large numbers. Buildings and towns destroyed during the last thirty years were never rebuilt and foreign aid and public works projects hardly seem to exist in reality. As Stack observed in 2001, “everyone struggles in harsh conditions. They don’t care who wins the war” (Hamilton-Little 2011).
Among the most important goals of President Obama’s National Security Strategy (NSS 2010) is to defeat Al Qaida and its affiliated global terrorist networks, protect the homeland against attack, prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other WMDs, and secure cyberspace from attack by state and non-state actors. The war against Al Qaida requires a strong alliance with Muslim countries, denying safe havens to terrorists, and an “integrated campaign that judiciously applies every tool of American power—both military and civilian—as well as the concerted efforts of like-minded states and multilateral institutions” (NSS 19). This is not a global war against Islam but a specific terror network that uses certain tactics to attack the United States and its allies. To prevent attacks on the homeland, the federal government will continue to work with state and local police forces to share intelligence about suspicious activities, entrap possible terrorists, and improve information sharing and communications. It will improve screening technologies and enforce stricter travel bans, collaborating bilaterally, regionally and internationally to identify terrorists. By 2013, the government also planned to have secured all vulnerable nuclear materials to prevent them from falling into the hands of Al Qaida.
Most of Al Qaida’s leadership was still in Pakistan, so the military and CIA would intensify surveillance, drone attacks and special operations against these targets, such as the SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011. Since this area in the “epicenter” of violent Islamic extremism, another important goal will be to deny the Taliban and Al Qaida control of territorial bases from which they can attack the U.S. and its allies (NSS, p. 20). They must be blocked from establishing similar bases and safe havens in any region if the world, but first and foremost the policy has been to strengthen the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan and to improve the training and equipment of Afghan security forces.
Realists have always been skeptical of the more liberal or moralistic forms of interventionism for purposes of nation building and expanding democracy. Hans J. Morgenthau, a liberal realist and one of the most important academic writers on foreign policy in the 20th Century, did not deny that ethics and morality had a place in foreign relations, although he rejected the hubris of liberal internationalism. Only if the intervention also served the national self-interest, such as the war against Germany and Japan in 1939-45, could realists and liberals unite behind a common war effort. In other situations like Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, realists often came to question whether the wars were worth the costs or if they were really serving the national self-interest. On the other hand, liberals who had come to question the morality of the wars could and did unite with realists in demanding that they come to an end. President George W. Bush will never be remembered as an academic theorist, but like Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton he seemed to believe the central international relations tenant that democracies did not go to war with each other. He also shared the Wilsonian-Clintonian assumption, mistakenly called ‘neo-conservatism’, that the U.S. had a mission to spread democracy around the world. For most of history, this had never been the view of the Republican Party, given that it operated on nationalist and realist assumptions, but after September 11, 2001, Bush committed the U.S. government to a policy of democratic nation building in Afghanistan and the Middle East.
Liberalism: Nation Building, Democracy and Social and Economic Conditions
For liberal internationalists, the war in Afghanistan could be considered a crusade against terrorism, evil and Islamic dictatorship while for realists the main purpose of the mission has always been to combat a military threat to the United States and keep it away from our shores. From a liberal perspective, simply meeting strategic and military goals in Afghanistan-Pakistan and similar conflicts is not enough since the West needs to offer improved social, economic and political conditions to the people in those countries in order to win them away from the Islamic extremists. Linked with this effort, the U.S. and its allies will attempt to improve governance at all levels in Afghanistan, root out corruption, support human rights and economic development and create “a strong, stable, and prosperous Afghanistan” (NSS 21). The U.S. government would also work with Pakistan to strengthen democracy and economic development there, as well as providing security assistance to combat the Taliban and Al Qaida there. In addition, if Al Qaida attempts to set up safe havens in North Africa, Yemen, the Sahel or Somalia, the U.S. will exert all necessary pressure to prevent it, although obviously the recent revolutions in the Middle East have complicated these efforts and the outcome is uncertain. Use of torture against terror suspects will not be allowed, though, and if possible all terror suspects will be arrested and tried according to due process of law. In addition, the Obama administration signaled its attention to close down the detention facility at Guantanamo, although this has not happened yet.
Protection of democratic values is always uppermost, but the threats in the 21st Century will not come only from hostile states armed with weapons of mass destruction, but the environment, conflicts over natural resources, natural disasters, pandemics like AIDS and tuberculosis and threats from cyberspace. One key to success will be by promoting democracy, good government, social justice and economic development in the poorer nations. From the military viewpoint it will require strengthening alliances around the world to defeat terrorist networks, prevent attacks with WMDs and defuse regional conflicts. Al Queda is similar to communism and fascism in the past, if not in its specific ideology but in threatening the international system as whole, opposing democracy, human rights and self-determination, and exploiting crises and conflicts for its own purposes. Many countries in the 21st Century are failed states like Afghanistan, lacking the ability to police themselves and their own borders against international and regional terrorist groups. These groups are not tied to any states and exist wherever they can find safe havens. Many countries are often poorly governed or completely ungoverned, and an international effort is necessary to stabilize them and improve social, economic and political conditions. Iran is attempting to destabilize the weak governments of Iraq and Afghanistan and also attempting the proliferation of WMDs into the hands of terrorists groups.
Constructivism in the Context of the Afghan War
As the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars have demonstrated yet again, transforming authoritarian regimes into democracies is a difficult mission at best. Although the U.S. managed to assemble coalitions of the willing to carry out these operations, and sometimes even acted unilaterally, the multi-polar nature of the international system also imposes certain limits on interventionism. So does public opinion in the liberal, Western powers, especially when it becomes preoccupied with domestic problems or war-weary from seemingly endless nation building efforts. This happened with the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, and it is happening now with the Afghanistan War. As constructivists point out elites will always have their own political philosophies and worldviews that are bound to influence foreign policy, even if they do not always express them consciously and explicitly. This was true of the liberal powers like Great Britain, France and the U.S., fascist states like Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, or Communist states like the Soviet Union and its allies. These worldviews and ideologies may also prevent policymaking elites from acting of purely rational, pragmatic calculations of self-interest, as realists maintain.
Even liberal internationalists have to concede that countries like Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia, and Afghanistan are hardly promising candidates for democracy and nation building, since it remains one of the poorest countries in the world with a corrupt, unpopular government and a largely illiterate population. In the case of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the values of most of the ruling elites are more authoritarian than democratic, or even worse, simply kleptocratic and dedicated to securing their own private gains and material advantages. At the popular level, of course, the predominant values are Islamic and also tribal in the case of Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan. Transforming these societies into modern, middle class democracies like Sweden or Denmark was always an unlikely proposition at best.
Even when they call themselves realists, American policymakers often act based on underlying values and ideologies that they assume are widely shared in the world—or at least have the potential of becoming so. Since World War II, if not before, almost every American president has engaged in the public rhetoric of Wilsonian internationalism, no matter how realist their foreign policies have been behind the scenes. In the 1990s, before the September 11th attacks, the U.S. even seemed to be operating on the highly unrealistic assumption that the world had entered a unipolar phase. It did attempt to impose its political and economic model everywhere on the planet through the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and military force, intervening in Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, Iraq, Somalia and other countries. American presidents and policymakers have become accustomed to describing the United States as unique or exceptional, either as one of two superpowers or in the 1990s the only surviving superpower, but this no longer reflects reality—if it ever did. At present, though, the U.S. is one great power among many, with China, Japan, India, the European Union and perhaps Brazil as powers in their own right or rapidly-emerging ones.
Obama seems to be more inclined toward the realist approach in Afghanistan to combat Al Qaeda and the Taliban as a military threat rather than fighting a crusade against evil and terrorism or attempting to build a democracy there. He is also preoccupied with social and economic problems at home and public opinion that has turned against the war, so after the 2012 election he is most likely to drawn down U.S. troops and deescalate the war. It will still be fought on a low intensity level, with fewer U.S. troops, and will not escalate to a nuclear confrontation or a general war with Iran and Pakistan. Obama does not seem inclined to indulge in the public rhetoric of nation building and liberal internationalism very often, and seems very well aware that the masses and elites in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan have very different worldviews from the West. Public opinion alone, if not his own inclinations, will probably force him to limit American interventionism in the region, as it did in the recent intervention in Libya. Nation building and remodeling societies in Afghanistan and other Muslim countries is the completely wrong policy to pursue, when the West should be minimalizing its visible presence as much as possible. In this course, public and Congressional opposition are simply going to make these types of major interventions far more difficult in the foreseeable future.
WORKS CITED
Hamilton-Little, Magsie. Back to Afghanistan. The Daily Beast, October 6, 2011.
National Security Strategy. The White House, May 2010.
Stack, Megan K. Every Man in this Village is a Liar: An Education on War. Doubleday, 2010.
