Bloody Day in Afghanistan, Bloodier Arguments for Staying On

Night Falls on Afghanistan: They call it Disney Road, that road a lone American soldier is walking along Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The Soviets built Bagram during their nine-year occupation in the 1980s only to find out what the Americans are finding out eight years in: Afghanistan won't be held by foreign powers. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Eight American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan on Saturday in a daylong battle in Nuristan province near the border with Pakistan's tribal areas, where the Taliban and Al-Qaeda elements are holed up. The American press is calling the Taliban's attack on an American outpost "bold" and "persistent." But there was nothing particularly unusual about it other than the unusually high, for Americans anyway, death toll. From the perspective of insurgent history it was war business as usual.

"Attackers gathered in a mosque and a nearby village, before staging the attack," The Times reports. "Mr. Badar said the attackers were Taliban fighters who had come from Pakistan, after military operations in that country pushed them out of their bases there. He said the strike was led by a Taliban commander named Dost Muhammed, whom he described as the shadow commander for the Taliban in Nuristan."

The details are significant, I think, in light of two pieces in the current issue of Time--one by Peter Bergen arguing for sending 40,000 more troops and fighting it out in Afghanistan, the other by Leslie Gelb, the old Council on Foreign Relations hand (and former New York Times columnist), who thinks presuming to fix Afghanistan is folly.

You know where I stand. Not even with Gelb, who would support an extra 15,000 troops. I'm for complete withdrawal. The Bergen piece makes my point even as it argues the opposite.

Bergen's main reason for fighting on? It's a good "countersanctuary strategy that denies safe havens to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with the overriding goal of making America and its allies safer." But the Taliban and al-Qaeda have a safe haven--in Pakistan, a nuclear power, and with Pakistan's tacit support. Pakistan's army has done well pushing the Taliban out of the Swat Valley after some fierce fighting last spring and summer, but there's an invisible red line in Pakistan that the Pakistani government abides by: the tribal areas are the Taliban's. The rest is off limits--or at least disputable. The Obama administration would like the Pakistani army to push on into the tribal areas. Pakistan won't.

The Taliban was Pakistan's creation in the 1990s, a proxy army to maintain influence in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Sooner or later foreign troops and mercenaries will leave, as they did at the end of the 1980s when the Soviets withdrew and the CIA billions spent to fight them dried up. Pakistan will want its proxy army in good shape to pick up where it left off. The Taliban will gladly oblige.

But Bergen maintains the illusion of a worthy war in Afghanistan to deny the Taliban and al-Qaeda a "haven." He's been "a frequent visitor to Afghanistan since 1993," his article's shirttail says. He must not have skipped over the border to have a look-see at what's there, though it doesn't take an eyewitness to know.

He goes on to claim that most Afghans support western troops on their soil, that Afghanistan's sense of nationhood predates that of the United States and--get this--that while "violence is on the rise, it is nothing on the scale of what occurred during the Iraq war -- or even what happened in U.S. cities as recently as 1991, when an American was statistically more likely to be killed than an Afghan civilian was last year."

That's armchair hawks' favorite analogy. They whipped it out during the Iraq war, too, to argue that the violence there wasn't worse than, say, Detroit or Chicago at its worst, as if the average American living his plush suburban life and schlepping it from Border's to Target to Starbucks to his American Beauty parlor was really as vulnerable to crime, even in 1991, as the inner-city convict imprisoned by his circumstances. There, too, it seems Peter Bergen, an otherwise fascinating writer of great courage and breadth, has traveled a few realities too few. And if the violence in Afghanistan isn't such a big deal, why isn't it the kind of place "whose towering mountains and exotic peoples [draws] tourists from around the world," as it did in the 1970s (in Bergen's words)?

Gelb isn't much better. He wants a middle way. Don't withdraw. Just don't send 40,000 extra troops. Send a few thousands more. Bribe Taliban fighters to switch sides.

He does make one good point and one recommendation (which happens to contradict his overall conclusion).

The good point: Most of the 40,000 additional troops won't make it to Afghanistan within the year, even though Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who's been beating the troops' drums, says "failure" will result in a year without a surge (contradictions shadow hawks like fugitive storms on summer days).

Gelb's good recommendation: "To contain threats, Washington needs to form alliances with neighboring states like Pakistan, India, China, Russia and even Iran, which supported us in the early days of the war." Pakistan may seem like a lost cause, but in reality, as a recipient of up to $2 billion a year in U.S. aid, most of it military, much of it ending up in Taliban hand, Pakistan can be turned into a lever tempering or controlling Taliban excesses. Iran, which reviles the Taliban (the Taliban are Pushtun Sunni, Iranians are Shiites who favor Afghanistan's ethnic Hazara) would act as a regional balance against Taliban power. And China and Russia would do their insidious best to undermine Islamist zeal.

Much of that was in fact former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's prescription for Afghanistan in the late 1980s. No one listened--not when his Soviet Union was in even worse shape than Afghanistan (the Soviet Union vanished. Afghanistan is still there.) But none of that requires an American presence in Afghanistan. To the contrary. That presence may well undermine a lasting, if untidy, solution.

But watch as the Bergens and McChrystals of the world choose strategic machismo over humbler realism. Watch as more Americans, Europeans and Afghans will die as their point is pointlessly disproven. And watch as President Obama tries once again to find a middle ground that domestically aims to please as many people as possible while ensuring the paralytic opposite while, where it matters most, more people than necessary keep dying in the most unnecessary war on the planet.

_{Roberto Hernandez was 21 when he was killed in Afghanistan.
(Getty Images)}

See Also:

• Gen. McChrystal Goes MacArthur on Obama's Afghanistan
• Should Obama Send More Troops to Afghanistan?
• Troops and Casualties in Afghanistan by the Numbers
• Obama's Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategy
• Your Chance to Advise Obama on Pakistan-Afghanistan
• Why Afghanistan Is the Wrong War