In the nine years since the first American troops landed in Afghanistan, a new kind of religion has sprung up, one that promises success for the Americans even as the war they have been fighting has veered dangerously close to defeat. Follow the religion’s tenets, give yourself over to it and the new faith will reward you with riches and fruits.
The new religion, of course, is counterinsurgency, or in the military’s jargon, COIN. The doctrine of counterinsurgency upends the military’s most basic notion of itself, as a group of warriors whose main task is to destroy its enemies. Under COIN, victory will be achieved first and foremost by protecting the local population and thereby rendering the insurgents irrelevant. Killing is a secondary pursuit. The main business of American soldiers is now building economies and political systems. Kill if you must, but only if you must.
At the military’s urging, President Obama has become a convert, ordering thousands of extra young men and women to that country, in the hopes of saving an endeavor that was beginning to look doomed. No one in the Obama administration uses the phrase “nation-building,” but that is, of course, precisely what they are trying to do — or some lesser version of it. Protect the Afghan people, build schools and hold elections. And the insurgents will wither away.
So what’s wrong?
Why hasn’t the new faith in Afghanistan delivered the success it promises?
In his remarkable book, “The Wrong War,” Bing West goes a long way to answering that question. “The Wrong War” amounts to a crushing and seemingly irrefutable critique of the American plan in Afghanistan. It should be read by anyone who wants to understand why the war there is so hard.
What we have created, West shows, is a vast culture of dependency: Americans are fighting and dying, while the Afghans by and large stand by and do nothing to help them. Afghanistan’s leaders, from the presidential palace in Kabul to the river valleys in the Pashtun heartland, are enriching themselves, often criminally, on America’s largesse. The Taliban, whatever else they do, fight hard and for very little reward. American soldiers, handcuffed by strict rules of engagement, have surrendered the initiative to their enemies. Most important, the Afghan people, though almost certainly opposed to a Taliban redux, are equally wary of both the Americans and their Afghan “leaders.” They will happily take the riches lavished on them by the Americans, but they will not risk their lives for either the Americans or their own government. The Afghans are waiting to see who prevails, but prevailing is impossible without their help.
Source: The New York Times, February 27, 2011
Bing West: The Wrong War: Grit, Strategy, and the Way Out of Afghanistan
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