Can We Win The War In Afghanistan? Yes! But Will Obama Allow It To Happen?

from The National Review

by Rich Lowry

March 24, 2009

The War Hasn’t Been Tried

Nothing will be possible in Afghanistan without a fight.

Kabul — Could Afghanistan become another Iraq? A few years ago that would have been a question full of foreboding. Now, it expresses an aspiration.

The Afghan war has, as any American officer will tell you, long been “under-resourced,” a word that in a counterinsurgency war is almost always a synonym for failure. While Iraq had 15 American combat brigades before the surge and 20 during it, Afghanistan was in the low single digits and will only reach six brigades with the addition of the 17,000 American troops just ordered by Pres. Barack Obama.

An American general has a pointed formulation for the relative priority of the two wars over the last seven years: “If you needed it in Iraq, you got it; if you needed it in Afghanistan, you figured out how to do without it.” That has changed, but by how much and for how long will be defining questions for the Obama administration.

The challenges in Afghanistan bear an uncanny resemblance to those in Iraq prior to the surge — insufficient coalition force levels, making it impossible to secure the population; a population that is sitting on the fence, waiting to see whether the insurgency or the coalition has more staying power; an indigenous army that is too small and a police force plagued by incompetence and corruption; and a weak political leader at the top who is triangulating between the coalition and its enemies and too parochial in his outlook. (President Hamid Karzai is both unpopular and likely to win re-election in August.)

On top of all of this, Afghanistan is a broken country, shattered by the Soviets, who did their utmost to wipe out the traditional social structure, and then by years of civil war. It would be a poor and ramshackle nation — a complex patchwork of ethnicities and tribes — even without the serial catastrophes that have befallen it. It has the socio-economic profile of a poor African country.

In the Pashtun areas of the south, where the insurgency is strongest, 25 percent of children live less than five years, the average life expectancy is 45, and half of men and more than 80 percent of women are illiterate. One police sub-station in Kandahar has 45 officers — only two or three of whom can read. The opium trade equals more than half of the GDP of Afghanistan, with as much as $500 million a year of the illegal largesse going to the insurgency. By way of comparison, the operating budget of the ministry of defense is just $58 million.

All of this calls for realism about what can be achieved here, but doesn’t justify ill-informed, all-consuming despair. Afghanistan is not about to fall to a revitalized Taliban.

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