Thoughts on Afghanistan

As President Obama and his team ponder what to do next in Afghanistan, it occurs to me that there are some facts that ought to carry some weight in the decisions:

1. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is thinly populated, with few even moderate-size cities. Securing the cities does nothing effective – the Soviets secured the cities, and it made little or no difference to their problems. The power in Afghanistan resides in the countryside, not the cities.

2. Securing the countryside is almost impossible. The population is thinly spread, much of it in rugged mountainous terrain. It would require deployment of our whole army to secure the countryside, and to what end? We certainly can’t afford to stay there forever.

3. If our objective is to hunt down Al-Qaeda, Afghanistan is the wrong place – such concentrations of Al-Qaeda as exist are in other places, like Pakistan.

4. In general, our presence in Afghanistan is the reason for our current insurgency. The urban elite would like us there, but they are a tiny minority. The vast rural majority would like everyone else out of their territory – they just want to be left alone. And when strangers enter their territory – be they Soviet troops, American troops, or even troops from the central government in Kabul, they fight them. It’s like red ants – they want to be left alone and bite when disturbed.

5. The central government is corrupt, and will remain corrupt for the foreseeable future. It’s the way things are done in that culture. Asking them to suddenly become a different culture is naïve. We can pour all the money we like into the system; most of it will disappear without visible result, just as it has been doing for the last eight years.

Given these facts, it seems to me we ought to sharply limit our involvement in Afghanistan. The costs (which are enormous, in both lives and money) simply don’t justify the possible results. It might make sense to propose the following pact to the Afghan tribes: keep Al-Qaeda out of your territory and we will leave you alone. Allow Al-Qaeda to operate in your territory and you will invite unpleasant intrusion by us. That would give them the incentive to be inhospitable to Al-Qaeda operatives, whom they don’t much like anyway.