Obama’s Afghan War, a Growing Quagmire

By Adam Schesch, AFT-W Local 4999 Retiree

On December 1, President Obama gave a speech eerily similar to President Lyndon Johnson’s spring of 1965 speech that started the troop build up in Vietnam. It laid out his goals and rationale for expanding the war in Afghanistan. However, the topics Obama left out are as important as what was included. The omissions appear deliberate. Otherwise the speech would not have made a case at all for the expanded war.

What’s the Goal?

Obama provided three basic goals for the build-up. First, the troop increase should enable the US to destroy Al Qaeda. Second, it should enable the US to eliminate the Afghan Taliban as a threat to a pro-western government in Kabul. Third, it should stabilize a weak Pakistan government and prevent Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from falling into Islamic extremists’ hands. Previously, Obama had listed three other support goals: To seal the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan to Taliban fighters and Al Qaeda operatives; to protect Afghanistan’s main population centers from the Taliban; and to drive the Taliban out of its main bases in Afghanistan’s rural villages and towns. Let’s review the omissions one by one and then see what justification is left.

What Obama Didn’t Say

First, President Obama had to omit any mention of the major ‘facts on the ground’ that will determine success or failure. Afghanistan’s physical geography makes Iraq’s terrain look like a parade ground. A mountain range in central Afghanistan makes civilian and commercial access from Kabul, the capital, to the ten other major cities possible only by traveling a 1400 mile ‘great circle’ highway around a country the size of Texas. The route must be protected at all times from constant land mining (IED) and Taliban toll outposts on the way. A second mountain range, 75+ miles wide, straddles the border with Pakistan for 500 miles protecting infiltrators and providing uncountable mountain paths for men and pack animals between friendly villages at both ends.

Afghanistan’s government is weaker in every way than the Saigon government of Vietnam War days. President Karzai has been called the “mayor of Kabul” for good reason. His regime, which just stole an election, is absent from the countryside outside of Kabul, utterly corrupt, incompetent, and submits to the same social mores that the

Taliban supports. (E.g., he recently signed a law that lets Shiite men bar their wives from outside jobs and education, and to rape them if they refuse sex). Many provincial governors are warlords and most district towns have perhaps one “administrator” and a police chief with just enough police to provide the administrator with armed guards. In territorial control, the combined pro- or anti-Karzai warlords are in second place behind the Taliban, leaving “Mayor” Karzai in third place. Government services are non-existent. In Taliban influenced or controlled areas, the male population turns to the Taliban to get primitive justice. US-funded contractors pay 20% off the top to buy Taliban protection to do minimal construction in the countryside. Outside estimates calculate that only 10% of all aid to build schools, hospitals, water systems, etc. actually reaches local people.

A People Divided

Worse yet, Afghanistan today is a virtual “Narcotics-state” – another Obama omission. It produces 95% of the world’s opium, supplying all Eurasia, provides more than 50% of Afghanistan’s Gross Domestic Product (UN figures), and is the country’s biggest employer.

President Obama conveniently skipped over Afghanistan’s ethnic/linguistic mess. Iraq’s 25 million people only have to face three great divisions – Shiite and Sunni Arabs and Kurds – and two languages. Afghanistan has 34 million people divided into nine major ethnic groups and Sunni and Shiite (10%) religious communities who speak five mutually unintelligible languages. (Its schoolbooks have to be printed in Pashto, Dari, Uzbek, Turkic, and Baluchi!) The 42% Pashtun, who consider themselves Afghanistan’s natural rulers and who provide the main support for the Taliban, are feared and loathed by most of the other 58 percent. Yet, the US bases its hopes on a national army which until recently had a 70% Uzbek officer corps ordering around a 70% Pashtun soldier force. (The Uzbeks were our anti-Taliban allies). At the same time, Afghanistan’s official boundaries make no sense. The Pashtun are cut in half with 14 million in Afghanistan and 28 million in Pakistan. The Turkmen, Uzbek, and Tajiks were arbitrarily divided by the Russian and British empires in the 19th century from their now independent co-ethnics living across three very porous borders with Afghanistan.

A Poor People

President Obama dismissed “nation building”, e.g. economic and social development, as a goal in a situation where: unemployment is over 50%, only 28% of Afghans can read and write in any language, 45% of the people are under 14 years old, and most infrastructure and industry has been wiped out in 30 years of constant warfare. Yet regular, decent pay is a major reason, along with religious fervor and Pashtun solidarity, for joining the Taliban. US counter-insurgency analysts place a 10-20-billion dollar a year price tag on just enough development aide to break Taliban attractiveness – a figure conveniently omitted by Obama.

At the same time, “nation building” is needed to gradually weaken over time the ethnic cultural behavior and tribal loyalties that fuel the Taliban. This is especially true for the Pashtun whose code of honor drives men’s treatment of women as subservient in every aspect of their lives. The Taliban are merely the ‘purifiers’ of a peculiarly local folk Islam which incorporates this code, not its creators. Without ‘nation building’ this dense tribal social fabric and culture sustains not just the Taliban but all the rural conservative forces that fought the Soviet Union with such ferocity. (Remember too, that its war in Afghanistan helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union.)

The truth about the Taliban is largely absent from Obama’s talk. He failed to discuss the role of outside money and weapons for the Taliban as well as the peculiar role the Madrassa religious schools, located in Pakistan, play in Taliban recruitment. US intelligence agencies have long stated that the four major sources of Taliban funding are Persian Gulf Arab millionaires, the Pakistan military intelligence agency (the ISI), drug profits gained from providing protection for the drug trade, and protection money from US funded contractors (and now tolls on all civilian commerce using the national highways). At the same time, no mention was made of the complete dependence of the Afghan Taliban on the Pakistan military-industrial complex, and international weapons smuggling through Pakistani ports and across the mountains to Afghanistan. There have been few efforts, since the war began, to cut these outside contributions at their source and little indication that a major turnabout will happen – because of the obvious problem it will cause with Washington’s so-called allies, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Pakistan.

Faulty Strategy

Despite Obama’s bellicose remarks on “breaking” the Taliban’s ability to fight, nothing was said about the obvious reply the Taliban will make to the Obama troop build-up. Like any competent guerrilla movement, the Taliban simply melts away from superior forces. Unless the US occupies hundreds of villages and towns for several years, it cannot stop the return of the Taliban when its forces leave a locality as they must do with so few troops. At the same time the counter-offensive of the Taliban is simple. An increase in attacks on soft targets that the US cannot protect and an increase in killing and wounding US troops and contractors through small unit hit and run attacks and a massive use of IED mines and booby traps has already begun. (Obama skipped over US intelligence estimates of the increasing competence of Taliban action – a sign of adaptability).

An Af-Pak War?

Obama’s lack of discussion of Al Qaeda and Pakistan itself was telling. Al Qaeda is located in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and in eleven other countries. The RAND Corporation’s US Air Force studies show that, after 2002, Al Qaeda decentralized its operation by setting up seventeen separate franchises in those eleven countries as well as by encouraging completely free-lance, self starter cells in many more. The hunt for Al Qaeda could be a much cheaper targeted counter-terrorism operation or, in plain English, a police action, not a trillion dollar counter-insurgency campaign that Obama proposes. Obama’s 30,000 additional troops will do almost nothing to stop Al Qaeda in 12 countries from continuing its war to re-create a theocratic, medieval Sunni Islamic Caliphate without the hated secular authoritarian Arab states and their Western Christian crusader backers. (This analysis is similar to VP Biden’s reported losing views).

As for Pakistan, Obama could not acknowledge that the rise of the Pakistan Taliban and religious extremism was a direct result of 60 years of corruption and bad government by an intertwined economic/military/political elite. Pakistan, almost twice the size of California with 176 million people, has six major ethnic groups speaking six major languages. Its lowland countryside is governed by a feudal landholding elite who will not surrender an ounce of their wealth and power; its highlands by Pashtun and Baluchi tribal based leaders. The weaknesses of secular reform movements in Pakistan have allowed the growing social unrest to find outlets in regional ethnic liberation movements (Baluchi, Pashtun, and Kashmiri) and Islamic revival movements. The rise of the religious madrassas for boys is a result of the Pakistan elite’s failure to fund a quality national public school system. For most poor parents, the religious schools are the only places where their sons can get schooling.

Numbers Don’t Add Up

Obama’s proposed troop build up must be judged by the magnitude of the problem. The US’s best counter-insurgency analysts argue that the troop to civilian ratio to achieve pacification (not nation building) is 20-25 per thousand civilians. With 34 million Afghans, this would mean a total of 680,000 US, NATO and Afghan troops.

But as of now, with the US and NATO build-ups, there will only be 100,000 US troops, 40,000 NATO troops, and only 20,000 Afghan soldiers who are fit to fight – a grand total of just 160,000. (Obama’s goal of 240,000 Afghan Army troops in 3 years is sheer fantasy!)

Even to accomplish Obama’s more modest goals (not pacification or nation building) would require 350,000 soldiers using the best military analysts’ formulas – more than double what Obama is projecting. Just remember it took 190,000+ western troops during the surge in Iraq (with only 25 million people) to restore relative quiet.

Promises, Promises

Keep in mind that past US relations with the Afghan people poisons their belief in today’s promises. First, we backed the Taliban’s political ancestors in the anti-Soviet fight (1980’s). Then we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990’s after many promises. This was followed by new promises by President George W. Bush and another subsequent abandonment to invade Iraq. And, now President Obama asks Afghanistan to “Trust me for the fourth time – this time we will get it right”.

Obama’s war must be challenged. It is either just a ploy which will cost many American and Afghan dead and wounded to say “we did all we could” and leave in 2011, OR it is the first installment on an 8-10 year war with at least 300,000 American troops and a trillion dollar tab by 2016. Remember, it costs one billion dollars a year for each 1,000 US troops, or more than $100 billion a year with the current build-up. We cannot afford the blood and money for a war without a rational purpose for the American people. We must demand an end to the Afghan war and an immediate withdrawal.

– Adam Schesch is an AFT-W Local 4999 retiree and a Ph. D. historian of guerrilla warfare and counter-insurgency.
Schesch is available to speak at union meetings to explain the case against the war.