Why we are going to win in Afghanistan

Dear Concerned Local Citizens of the United States (and many other countries, actually),

Most of you know I spent the last year overseas, nine months working in Baghdad and the remainder doing volunteer work in India, Zambia and Thailand. Returning to Hawaii for a week, I then left for a week to visit friends and family on the mainland, in SF, NYC, DC and Detroit.

The whole journey was an exercise in culture shock. Having gone from months of rocket barrages, helicopter rides, armored convoys, morning security briefings, international development bureaucrats, 120 degree heat, dust storms, hyper-efficient Singaporean subways, Mumbai slums, Indian rickshaws, Zambian skies, stupendous waterfalls, African Safaris, Thai family dinners and beach parties on Indian Ocean islands, it was quite a flip to see bong shops on the streets of Hippiedom in Haight Ashbury, watch my 4 year old nephew playing a Polar Bear in a NYC Bear Show surrounded by parents with hundreds of digital cameras, attend a surprise bachelor party with a bus and Secret Service escort, take the Chinatown Bus from NYC to DC (which is far more cramped than the $20 sleeper-bus I took from Singapore to Kuala Lumpor), visit the massive new visitor center at the US Capitol complete with a statue with of King Kamahameha, and go out drinking with my identical-twin-engineering-major-cousins who live together in good ole’ middle American Ann Arbor, Michigan, and are graduating this year from the University of Michigan (Go Blue).

And it was at U of M, that bastion of Middle American Public University Mass Education, that I had a truly cultural experience that I’d like to share with all of you.



I was hanging out with Jason Kerwin, one of my best friends growing up at Punahou (I mention future Dr. Kerwin II [his dad is also a Dr.] because he’s gonna be famous and I want you guys to know I know him…also, Barack Obama went to my high school). Jason applied to the PhD program in Economics at UofM, and was there checking out the campus and meeting the grad students. One of the grad students turned out to be a very nice young lady whose undergrad minor was Persian studies, which encompassed Iran and Afghanistan. She mentioned this minor when I said I that I was not a prospective grad student, but was only visiting my friend. I told her I had graduated from Georgetown with a major in Middle East Regional Studies and had just gotten back from a year long global tour, which included 9 months in Baghdad working for two sub-contractors, one under USAID. THAT instantaneously sparked a debate on the merits of the war in Afghanistan and an analysis of our chances to win.



Her conclusion was that we would be crushed in Afghanistan just like the Soviets were. One of her reasons was that our nation building program would undoubtedly be incapable of properly restoring services to the country. She proclaimed we’d just end up building gas pipelines through pasture lands, which would anger farmers, who would then join the Taliban, and, over time, would literally bleed us dry. We would lose, just like the Russians did.



I then launched into a speech about why we are going to win in Afghanistan.



The definition of winning is always a topic of fierce debate. Whatever it is, no one would agree that it is the situation in Afghanistan now. Winning would most likely look like a stable, democratic Afghanistan, next door to a stable, democratic Pakistan, which is at peace with India over Kashmir. It would mean peaceful and free elections in “Af” and “Pak,” the elimination

of the Taliban and Al Qaeda’s safe havens in Western Pakistan, and most likely their utter destruction, their top leadership being killed or captured.



Here is why that will happen.



1. We will win in Afghanistan because there has been a paradigm shift in policy with Obama’s election. The shift is that everybody now recognizes Afghanistan is a regional problem and must be met with a regional approach. This is a significant break from Bush and Rumsfeld, who viewed Afghanistan strictly through the lens of counter-terrorism. They funded warlords in Afghanistan to maintain stability and focused on trying to kill Al Qaeda leaders. Rumsfeld specifically said he did not want to engage in nation building in Afghanistan. The Bush administration’s focus on Al Qaeda, and later Iraq, distracted the United States’ intellectual resources from the real problems in Afghanistan: the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Agency’s support of the “Jihadists” in Pakistan.



Now we are having the correct debate, on TV, in the papers, in D.C. When both John McCain and Barack Obama say Pakistan is the problem, you know you’re on to something. The realization, by both parties at the same time, that Pakistan’s security concerns vis a vis India must be addressed in order to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and Al Qaeda is the key to our winning in Afghanistan.



What are Pakistan’s security concerns? It was Pakistan’s “Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Complex” (PMIIC) that created, and continues to maintain and protect, the Taliban. In the 1990s, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) believed they needed to create a “strategic depth” of support into Afghanistan in case the Pakistani army was ever overrun by India’s. Pakistan is 14% Pashtun, while Afghanistan is 44%. The Taliban is a largely Pashtun organization. The Pashtun people live mostly in North West Pakistan and South East Afghanistan. If the Pakistani army was overrun by the much larger Indian army, which had defeated them in virtually every war they ever fought, the Pakistani generals figured they could retreat into the arms of their Pashtun brothers in Afghanistan while they prepared a nuclear counter-attack against the Indians. In addition to that, the PMIIC also created dozens of “Jihadist” groups to battle the Indians in Kashmir. These groups are not regular Pakistani army. Without going into lengthy detail, the Pakistanis and the Indians have been fighting over the Kashmir region since both countries’ independence from Britain in 1946. Pakistan knew they could never drive the Indians out of Kashmir directly, so their long term strategy was to fund terrorist groups who would go to Kashmir and kill Indians on behalf of the Pakistani government, but under the cover that they were independent operators. The thought was that these hit and run terror operations would be so exhausting to India, they would eventually give up and leave Kashmir.



Today, the Pakistanis are still afraid of India and they still want India out of Kashmir. The Pakistani generals think that the US will leave Afghanistan soon, and then they can get right back to installing the Taliban in Afghanistan and inciting their terrorist friends to drive the Indians from Kashmir. The problem with this thinking is that Pakistan’s Taliban friends are friends of Al Qaeda’s. Al Qaeda is not primarily interested in driving the Indians

from Kashmir. They want to install a caliphate over the entire world. One of those terrorist groups is called Lashkar-e-Toiba and was responsible for the Mumbai attack. Other Kashmir Jihadist groups have also claimed responsibility for attempts on former President Musharraf’s life and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, wife of Pakistan’s current president. The Pakistani Taliban has been and continues to be responsible for murder and suicide bombings in Pakistan’s cities. Thus, the Jihadists the ISI created have moved beyond Kashmir.



The problem we have is that the ISI still supports them. They support them because they think we are going to leave. But now that the paradigm shift has happened in Washington, we can now press, from both sides of the aisle, upon Pakistan’s newly legitimate and elected government, that they must rid the PMIIC of its fundamentalist elements. We can now confidently and without partisan bickering, restrain Indian responses to Pakistani terrorist incursions (as we did after Mumbai). And we can finally focus, without insulting the Administration or the opposition in the US, on rebuilding Afghanistan, re-establishing democracy and rule-of-law in Pakistan (which we could not do before because of Bush’s unending support for Musharraf), and convincing the Pakistanis that India is not a threat to them by helping to resolve the dispute in Kashmir.



2. We will win in Afghanistan because we cannot afford to lose. Losing in Afghanistan means we pull out, the Taliban returns and Al Qaeda once again has a safe haven from which to attack us. That puts us right back to 2001, where we started. What’s the point to having a military if we concede to our sworn enemies a base from which to continue to launch attacks against us and our interests? If we withdraw from Afghanistan without resolving Pakistan’s security dilemma, the PMIIC will simply reinstall the Taliban in Afghanistan, or worse, the Taliban, in cooperation with the fundamentalist elements within the PMIIC, will take over the government of Pakistan– including its nuclear arsenal. Failure is not an option.



3. We will win in Afghanistan because there is no force on earth strong enough to drive us out. When we drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan, we spent billions of dollars buying and funneling weapons and ammunition directly to the mujahideen, with the aid of the major European powers, China, Pakistan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. While many countries say they oppose us in general, there are not enough of them with the political will to oppose us in Afghanistan. And even if they did, they do not have the resources to purchase the type and amount of weaponry needed and funnel it to the Taliban. We would certainly find out and stop them. Further, the old sponsors of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, mainly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, no longer have the money or they are our allies. Iran hates the Taliban and Al Qaeda and the Pakistani people will hate them soon enough as they keep murdering and bombing Pakistanis.



We also posses a level of legitimacy the Russians did not have, namely a UN. The Russian occupation of Afghanistan was not seen as justified, whereas our NATO operation is seen by the international community as a legitimate response to an act of aggression.



Ultimately, we will win in Afghanistan because the Afghans want us to stay and help. The Pakistani middle class wants us to stay and help. They know we are the best country on earth, the most decent country on earth, the richest and yet most generous country on earth.

They know that we are the only people who are going to help them rebuild their democracy and that we have the money to do it. The Chinese certainly will not help them build a democracy. The Russian idea of nation building is evident for all to see in what is left of Chechnya. The Europeans do not have the resources. No major power on earth has a stake in the resurgence of the Taliban. So, even if the world does not help as much as we would like, neither will they stand in our way.



Now that Washington and the country is aware of the fact that Afghanistan cannot be solved simply by bombing Al Qaeda and leaving, all minds will focus on how best to rebuild Afghanistan, stabilize Pakistan and resolve Kashmir. Expect debates on increasing troop numbers in Afghanistan, on the probable spike and then decline in casualties as we move against the Taliban and improve security. Expect disagreements about adding more NATO or UN troops, increasing funding for building schools, effective nation building programs and how best to resolve Kashmir. Expect more elections and more talking, and in about a year and a half (after the next Spring offensive) a lot less shooting.


Sam King