Osama bin Laden is dead and the implications are enormous. In light of this, just how necessary is our current commitment to Afghanistan? Does this prove that what we’re doing now is working? Two Paly students offer their answers.

• Skip to staying in Afghanistan: Gregory Dunn
• Skip to withdrawing: Nassim Fedel

The United States should not abandon its commitment to the Afghan people

Especially in this economy, the idea of withdrawal is tempting — it is indisputable that our military operations require massive amounts of resources, and the benefit that the United States accesses from its operations can sometimes be unclear. But the United States is doing a net good in Afghanistan— we save lives, improve societies, and fulfill our moral obligation to use our massive military for good in the world.

There is no doubt that we are saving lives in Afghanistan. Our troops are indisputably an effective counter-terrorism force. Prior to U.S. involvement, the Taliban were able to strike at will, killing not only Western interests but anybody they believed could potentially take objection to the draconian interpretation of Shariah law that the Taliban abide by. The Taliban were also able to create a “base” through which terrorism could be planned and launched upon the world. Once our troops entered, these abuses have been halted — large amounts of Afghanistan (especially the Urban areas) are free of tension and violence. No terrorist attacks have succeeded on U.S. soil since we destroyed the “base” of Al-Qaeda. The organization that once plotted the simultaneous destruction of 12 international airliners is now reduced to smuggling defective explosives in underpants. Our mission, to destroy the organization that allowed the tragedy of 9/11 to happen, has succeeded. The only mission remaining is to stabilize the country internally.

Beyond the lives saved in Afghanistan, troops are also doing good to Afghan society. The United States has been able to secure basic human rights, such as the education of girls, that were unattainable under the the Taliban. The United States destroys many landmines that would otherwise detonate in the faces of innocent noncombatants, maiming or even killing them. The United States has provided thousands of basic materials to the Afghan people, and they are working. Eighty percent of landmines in Kandahar City are reported by locals — a clear signal that we are winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. Although we undoubtedly have a ways to go before we can succeed in entirely reforming Afghan society, it is clear that the tools are in place to create a stable and modern Afghanistan that supports the United States not out of a sense of fear, but a sense of gratitude.

The largest problem with the mindset of withdrawal is that it ignores that, as Barack Obama stated in his Nobel acceptance speech, “the plain fact is this:  the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens, and the strength of our arms.” Just because it isn’t as easy to save lives now doesn’t mean that we should suddenly abandon our commitment to peace. Although it is tempting to claim that we can get the job done with less, it is our troops on the ground that have been empirically effective in not only stopping the Taliban, but also winning over the populace. If we were to abandon any region of Afghanistan, even the notoriously hostile Pashtun region or “Pashtunistan,” we would be implicitly approving Taliban rule. We would be abandoning our very mission in Afghanistan: to deny the terrorists a base from which to plot. Most importantly, we would loose the support of the people, abandoning them to terrorist brainwashing that we were finally beginning to make inroads against over the past couple years. Although it is easy to draw conclusions from discouraging surveys, the facts are inescapable. Even in “Pashtunistan,” we are gaining ground against the Taliban. U.S. forces turned the Pashtun town of Nawa from a lawless Taliban stronghold into a place where people can begin to get back to their daily lives. We are beginning to win the war, contrary to the pessimistic assertion that counterinsurgency can never work in Afghanistan. It makes no sense to stop now.

The alternative to our current stance in Afghanistan makes no sense. A draw down would necessitate a switch in tactics merely countering outright acts of terrorism — we would no longer have the resources to support a fight against the mindset of terrorism. This strategy has empirically failed — Pakistan attempted to allow a group of Pashtuns to live independently in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Now, the FATA is the site of a war between almost one hundred thousand Pakistani troops and the Taliban. When we allow terror to fester, it prospers. Despite Pakistan’s best attempts to quell terror, once terrorists had access to the hearts and minds of the people, the FATA Taliban were almost successful in their goal to take over Pakistan, seizing key areas like the picturesque Swat Valley. We have tried leaving terrorism alone. This strategy has failed. It is unconscionable to try again.

All of these points aside, the 800-pound gorilla in the room is the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Although many of the details still remain unclear, we know that Bin Laden was eliminated with the aid of a lead from local sources. The hearts and minds we have won in the war led to the biggest success of the Afghan war. To withdraw now would be an abandonment of a strategy we now know works. To stop an effort that has just begun to yield its rewards would also signal that this war was against one man. However, as Obama made clear tonight, America is at war with the institutions that make terrorism possible, not one man or religion. Our strategy is working — to stop would be an affront to the troops who, as part as part of the counterinsurgency operations that Nassim would propose we stop, killed the most hated man in America. The operation would have been impossible if we had not won over the people who led us to Bin Laden — although the killing of a terrorist is by definition counterterrorism, it was the counterinsurgency experts who Barack Obama thanked for making this mission possible.

When we signal that we are no longer willing to try and support peace, security and freedom above all else, it would signal that US peacekeeping missions world wide could be abandoned if it is decided that maintaining order is “too hard.” This is not what America stands for. We stand for freedom. We stand for people like Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, the Dalai Lama in Tibet, the democratic protesters in the Tehran,  the Kurds, and the Bosniaks. These people would be in favor of continued United States involvement in the world, and therefore would be horrified that the United States might not support them if it gets “too hard”. In contrast, people like Kim Jong-il, Vladimir Putin and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be delighted to see the United States begin to abandon its commitment to peace and freedom. The question of withdrawal comes down to whose camp do we want to be in. I think the choice is obvious.

A resurgent Taliban. A corrupt and weak central government. $2 billion spent per week. Hundreds of U.S. deaths per year. Those are the challenges the U.S. faces in the quagmire of Afghanistan. It is clear that something about our current plan of action needs to be changed. Advocates of staying the course express, in vague rhetoric, hopes of progress toward idealistic goals, but they can never clearly demonstrate whether our current strategy can succeed and whether that success outweighs the disadvantages.

First I define terms of art. Counterinsurgency is a strategy which relies on a “clear, hold, build” tactic which attempts to clear Taliban strongholds and then prevent the Taliban from regaining them while troops engage in nationbuilding activities such as propping up governments, creating markets, and building infrastructure. Counterterrorism is a strategy which focuses solely on targeting terrorists and insurgents with surgical drone strikes and on-the-ground special forces units. Our current policy toward Afghanistan relies on both strategies throughout the country, with counterterrorism comprising roughly 15,000 out of the current 150,000 International Security Assistance Force troop commitment.

To have a chance at winning this argument, proponents of the status quo must be able to demonstrate that success is probable with our current strategy. It is not. The counterinsurgency strategy fundamentally fails in the south and east of Afghanistan for two main reasons: geographic limitations and ethnic differences. Southern and eastern Afghanistan are mountainous and rural, with Taliban strongholds hundreds of miles apart. Attempting to scale mountains with several thousand troops under fire from Taliban hit-and-run attacks is not feasible, especially considering that we don’t have adequate supply lines. Since moving troops between areas is so difficult, providing reinforcements is near impossible. This is a problem because in counterinsurgency’s “take, hold, build” strategy, we can’t even get to the “build” part because we can’t satisfy the “hold” part: the geographic limitations of the south and the east make it impossible to defend our acquisitions from siege. This is empirically proven by the besieging of Helmand and Kandahar. Thus, the only way to get around this terrain problem would be to double our troop levels to 300,000, according to accepted counterinsurgency doctrine. Doubling troop levels would be wholly impractical: we already can barely sustain our 150,000 troop commitment. Even if we can sustain a doubling of our forces, it would not be for very long, and certainly not long enough to win, as both the American public’s war weariness and the reality of the finiteness of our economic and military resources will not permit it. Thus, even if our current strategy has the potential to do good like help Afghan’s society and economy, secure women’s rights, it will not be able to because a precondition to that idealistic nation building is actually securing and holding the areas in which we intend to build a nation. It does no good to give Afghans human rights if they’re going to be killed by fighting between the U.S. and the Taliban. Moreover, those rights would be short-lived because we the Taliban can just drive us out.

The second structural barrier to the current strategy’s success in Afghanistan is related to ethnicity. Afghanistan is not an ethnically and socioeconomically homogeneous country, despite what others, such as the British who drew up Afghanistan’s borders in the 19th century and our generals, would have you believe. While the northern and western regions of Afghanistan are constituted primarily of educated and urban peoples who accept the U.S. as superior to the Taliban and have hopes for a better future free from tyranny, those peoples in southern and eastern Afghanistan are predominantly of the Pashtun ethnicity. This is significant because these people are relatively uneducated, live in more isolated rural villages, have ethnic ties to the Taliban, and have a history of vigorously opposing foreign occupation (they almost single-handedly drove out the Soviets in the 1980s). These factors combine to make the Pashtuns extremely nationalistic, categorically opposed to what they perceive as foreign occupation, and staunch supporters of the Taliban. In fact, 53 percent of Pashtuns regard the Taliban as “incorruptible” and 85 percent of them regard the Taliban as their Afghan brothers. This means that no matter what we do in the south and the east, we can never win because our counterinsurgency occupations are perceived as the heavy footprint of a foreign occupier. This fuels Taliban propaganda and drives up their recruitment levels, while also leading Pashtuns to intentionally sabotage U.S. missions. Despite all this, even if we can succeed in “take, hold”, our “build” efforts will be nullified because Pashtuns do not want our aid. It doesn’t matter how many schools or hospitals we build. They will still reject the help. One may ask, “how could anyone reject a hospital?” One must put oneself in the mindset of the Pashtun to understand this question: they do not want to accept help from what they perceive as as an imperialistic foreign occupier. Moreover, if schools and hospitals really did make the Pashtuns happy, then the ones we’ve already build should theoretically be satisfying them already, even if to a smaller extent than we would like. The fact is that they aren’t, as the aforementioned statistics show. Lastly, even if supporters of the war in Afghanistan can show that the Pashtuns have a favorable view of the U.S., they will still reject our aid because they are coerced by the Taliban — the Taliban’s already strong hold over the south and the east means that they can intimidate Pashtuns into helping the Taliban and rejecting the U.S.’s aid.

The two factors of geographic limitations and ethnicity show that we cannot hope to satisfy counterinsurgency’s “clear, hold, build” strategy in southern and eastern Afghanistan because “holding” and “building” are near impossible. It won’t do much to clear out areas if we’ll just lose them quickly anyways, and it doesn’t make much sense to clear and hold an area if the seemingly good things we do there are just rejected by the very people we want to help and actually fuel Taliban recruitment.

Even if these obvious structural barriers don’t convince you, the incontrovertible truth is that if it were really true that our current strategy has a chance at succeeding, we’d at least be seeing progress now in key hot spots that have been targeted by current strategy. The fact is that we aren’t seeing those key metrics: violence is up 124 percent in Helmand and it’s up 20 percent in Kandahar. This means that the Taliban is returning and that we’re doing an ever-worse job of protecting Afghan civilians, a key component of a strategy whose very foundation is winning the hearts and minds of the people.

Some, including our top generals such as David Petraeus, say that the current strategy’s failure has only been because we haven’t committed enough resources or troops, but that in the past two months we’ve recently implemented the new resources and that we should see progress soon. However, this argument does not hold up to even the most basic test of logic. Petraeus’ argument relies on the premise that more troops and resources means more progress. This implies that progress can be viewed as a function of military materiel, including manpower, equipment, and infrastructure, with more material leading to more progress. However, materiel has been increasing ever since the troop surge in 2009. Thus, for Petraeus’s argument to be true, we should have been seeing progress—maybe not as much progress as we’d like to see, but progress nonetheless. However, the fact of the matter is that we are not seeing progress: violence is up, the government is not more legitimate, and we are not keeping control of key strongholds in the south and the east.

Furthermore, even if you believe claims that we are making recent gains, that only could have been because the harsh Afghan winter kills vegetation, which impairs the Taliban’s guerrilla tactics. Once the Afghan spring comes in May, the Taliban will have enough cover to fully resurge.

Lastly, some will point to Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of U.S. military assets as proof that our current Afghanistan commitment is working. However, while his death is a blessing for freedom everywhere, it is not a reason why the entirety our 150,000 commitment is necessary. First, bin Laden was killed in Islamabad, Pakistan; counterinsurgency forces in Afghanistan have nothing to do with that region. Second, it was counterterrorism forces, not counterinsurgency forces, that killed bin Laden, which is further proof that we should rely on counterterrorism’s surgical strikes and special forces in the south and east of Afghanistan as opposed to counterinsurgency’s heavy ground footprint. Third, now that we have killed the mastermind behind Al Qaida — and the reason for which we first entered Afghanistan — it makes sense that we need fewer troops, especially troops that are both useless and counterproductive.

Now that it has been proven that, realistically, we have not been winning the war, we are not winning the war, and that we will not win the war, it suffices to point to only a few disadvantages to current policy to win that something must be changed.

In addition to Afghanistan’s instability due to the Taliban’s ability to use our southern and eastern counterinsurgency troop presence as a propaganda message in order to increase recruitment and gain momentum, disadvantages to current policy include the loss of dollar hegemony and the overextension of the American military.

The current countrywide counterinsurgency policy has no definite timetable. It will take another few years to even know whether we have a chance to win. Even if we determine whether we can win, there’s no telling how long it will take, especially considering how little progress we’ve made after a decade. We cannot sustain such a long and costly commitment, one that adds two billion dollars to the already thirteen trillion dollar deficit every week.

Not only does it divert resources from worthy commitments, it also hurts the U.S. dollar’s primacy over other currencies. This argument is empirical: Nixon’s taking the dollar off the gold standard is proof that astronomical defense spending has caused our currency to become less stable. This also makes sense: other countries do not want to use the dollar as the world reserve currency if we are constantly adding to our deficit. China’s rise means that the new world currency could very well be the renminbi. America could no longer be the global hegemon — either militarily or diplomatically — if it loses its power as a financial hegemon. We would no longer be able to sustain future military commitments. Other countries would perceive that and thus our threat of retaliation due to noncompliance with our diplomacy would have less and less credibility.

Additionally, our currently huge commitment to Afghanistan has caused the overextension of the American military. Our extended commitments to both Afghanistan and Iraq are causing a general eroding of public support for U.S. international engagement and a visible decrease in our military’s readiness — our ability to adequately and quickly respond to future crises — because our equipment is breaking down, we don’t have enough money, and our deployments to Afghanistan are causing troop fatigue. We’ve just spent too long in Afghanistan. If we can recognize now that nearly 70 percent of our commitment is both useless and counterproductive, we’d be able to reverse the situation and begin recuperating for a new age of American hegemony. On the other hand, if we choose to ignore our weakness rather than confront it, we risk deluding ourselves into thinking our resources and power are infinite — the same delusion that plagued us in Vietnam, except now on a much grander scale, with China and Russia vying for world dominance.

Proponents of the war in Afghanistan argue that the current policy offers us advantages. Nothing could be further from the truth. He argues that a large commitment is necessary to defeat terrorism and that we must combat the “mindset of terrorism”. However, this is done through winning the hearts and the minds of the people. It has been exhaustively proven that this is impossible, so the best we can do to confront terrorism would be to contain it, while realizing that hatred of the West is inevitable. This policy of containment is exactly what counterterrorism does, and that is the strategy I propose to leave in in the south and the east. It would be able to drone attack Taliban leaders and specific targets. Without leaders, the Taliban cannot mobilize effectively; they’d become a disorganized bunch of guerrilla fighters with no strategic purpose. Gregory also argues that the current policy does good for the Afghan society. However, due to terrain and ethnicity limitations, the current policy only does good for those Afghans in the north and west of the country because those people are not coerced by the Taliban and are willing to accept our aid. Once again, in the south and the east, our policy cannot do good because we cannot hold the areas in which we try to do good, and our aid is rejected.

The current policy thus garners us no benefits in the south and east of Afghanistan, while incurring numerous costly disadvantages. A policy proposal that is thus superior to current strategy would be to withdraw all counterinsurgency forces from the south and the east, amounting to a withdrawal of 100,000 troops, thereby reducing our overall Afghanistan troop commitment from 150,000 to approximately 50,000. Since the north and the west are prospering under our current commitment, there would be no need to change it. However, since the counterinsurgency troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan are useless because they can neither “hold” nor “build,” are counterproductive because they fuel Taliban momentum, and cause so many disadvantages, it makes sense to withdraw them.

What it comes down to is whether we’ll admit our weaknesses or ignore them. One can always point to idealistic and noble goals of being the world guarantor of peace, being the underwriter of global security, and defeating terrorism. However, we must recognize that we cannot defeat all terrorism. Furthermore, we cannot guarantee security with our current policy. What we can do is contain terrorism and guarantee our ability to ensure global security in other instances. The sooner we realize that we cannot win with our current policy and that the price of deluding ourselves for another several years is too high to realistically sustain, the sooner we can begin to stabilize Afghanistan and regain America’s credibility and respect in the world as a country that chooses strategic commitments and follows through with them to success, not as a country that intervenes irresponsibly and indiscriminately.