By Dr Sharifullah Dorani*
Introduction
This article essentially offers a literature review of the Afghanistan War during the George W Bush Administration by focusing on public opinion and policy debate on the Afghanistan War from late 2001 to 2008. There were several turning points, or phases, in US Afghan policy. The first two phases took place during the Bush Administration, and they are the focus of this article. So, the first section focuses on phase 1, and the second section deals with phase 2. The article ends with a short conclusion.
Phase 1: public opinion and policy debate on President Bush’s Afghan strategy
During the intervention period in 2001, what I call phase 1 of the Afghanistan War, a number of commentators wrote that Afghans did not tolerate foreign invasions. They based their claims on the experiences of numerous invaders, such as Alexander the Great, the British Empire and the Soviet Union. They warned that the US could face the same fate. While most works were contributed by newspapers,[1] works by American author and former CIA officer Milton Bearden and, to a certain extent, American diplomat and educator Peter Tomsen can be cited as examples.[2]
American political scientist Seth Jones, however, strongly opposed comparing the US with the previous empires, especially the Soviet Union, because the Red Army terrorised the population rather than trying to win support of the Afghans.[3]
Pakistani journalist and author Ahmad Rashid and Stephen Tanner, an American writer who specialises in military history, similarly asserted that conditions in the late-1970s were different in Afghanistan to conditions in 2001, and the Afghans, after decades of war, were willing for the first time to accept Western democracy, as the two years of calm period (2002-2004) was the evidence of it.[4]
Phase 2: public opinion and policy debate on President Bush’s Afghan strategy
Phase 2 of the Afghanistan War started as the situation kept deteriorating in Afghanistan post-2004, and the Bush Administration was embroiled in Iraq, a large body of work developed between 2004 and 2008, dealing with what went wrong in Afghanistan (and why), including works by Seth Jones, British academics Tim Bird and Alex Marshall, Ahmed Rashid, American expert on Afghanistan Barnett Rubin, Stephen Tanner, British writer and journalist David Lyon, Milton Bearden, Australian writer William Malay, American diplomat and author Richard Holbrooke, American foreign policy expert and author Stephen Biddle, Canadian journalist and reporter Kathy Gannon, Afghan diplomat Said T. Jawad, and Afghan activist and member of parliament Malalai Joya.[5] These works complement each other in their criticism of the Bush Administration’s strategy in post-Taliban Afghanistan, and it was almost impossible to find a scholar who praised the Bush Administration Afghan policy.
Their criticisms could be summed up as follows.
First, after decades of war, it was naive and irresponsible to assume Afghans could establish security by themselves. What post-conflict Afghanistan needed for security was not superior weaponry but more US troops, not just in Kabul but in other provinces. The Bush Administration’s counterterrorism strategy, unfit for holding and building an area after being cleared, made the job of establishing law and order impossible and eventually contributed to the collapse of the governance, especially in rural areas, and the emergence of the Taliban.
Second, refusal to provide adequate financial support to reconstruct Afghanistan created a distance between the Karzai Government and the population, which in turn made it easy for the Taliban to regroup in rural areas.
Third, since the Bush Administration did not provide sufficient troops on the ground, it utilised ‘warlords’ as proxies against the Taliban and al Qaeda, and, once the Taliban regime was toppled, they were used to keep peace on the street. Supported by large amounts of custom revenues, proceeds from illicit drugs, and CIA funding, these warlords, who had their own militias and were almost politically and fiscally autonomous, weakened the central Afghan Government by their contribution to insecurity, illicit drug trades, corruption, criminality, and the constraining of political options. Choosing this ‘bad company’ made the wall thicker among the ordinary Afghans and the Karzai Government and coalition forces.
Fourth, the administration’s failure not to develop a coherent policy for forcible drug eradication (an illicit trade with an income of several billion US dollars each year) was claimed to have made national and provincial politicians corrupt, paralysed the building of a legal economy, significantly weakened the rule of law, corrupted the police, strengthened the warlords, and funded the Taliban to pay and arm its troops.
Fifth, the invasion of Iraq made the Afghanistan War take the back seat in money, policy attention, awareness, and military and non-military aids.
Sixth, the Bush Administration’s decision to task out its responsibility to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was another cause of the deterioration of security in Afghanistan. The imposition of caveats (limitations on their mission: e.g. Germany refused to engage its forces in fighting against the Taliban) by some NATO states and the poor results produced in security sector reforms were argued to have made it much more difficult for the US to protect the Afghan population, especially in the villages. Had there been an effective Afghan national army or police, the Taliban would have not gained momentum in rural Afghanistan.
Stephen Tanner, however, defended NATO’s caveats, arguing that the US had told NATO states that they would only be involved in peacekeeping operations and reconstruction (not counterterrorism and counter-insurgency), and that was what their parliaments had given them the permission to do.[6]
These were the shortcomings which the biggest volume of literature developed by 2008 addressed. As stated, these works converged with each other on what went wrong in Afghanistan. There were, however, some scholars who diverged on some aspects of the Bush Administration Afghan policy.
An effective and strong government was not historical in Afghanistan, many claimed, as local Pashtuns historically resolved their conflicts through jirgas and shuras and never submitted to the central government. The Bush Administration (and, to a lesser extent, the Barrack Obama Administration) and NATO neglected to work closely with ‘Pashtun tribes, subtribes, and clans’ in villages in Afghanistan, especially in the east and south to keep insurgents weak, and instead, through its ‘lead nation’ approach, focused on institutional building, trying to create an effective central authority.[7]
Bird and Marshall added that it was politically and historically illiterate of the Bush Administration to assume that the lack of central government meant these rural areas were ungoverned and posed a threat, because the Code of Pashtunwali, which everyone abided by, meant they were one of the most governed societies in the world.[8]
Said T. Jawad, on the other hand, argued that building Afghan institutions such as the police and the Army was necessary and the appropriate solution. What Afghanistan needed, he implied, was a centralised government (with strong institutions) that provided security to its entire people.[9]
Barnett Rubin, however, linked the failures of rebuilding the security reforms to the local Afghan networks, as their ‘resilience undermined the establishment and functioning of stronger formal state institutions’.[10] Rubin argued that the Afghan ministries remained just buildings rather than functioning bureaucracies, and each successive owner brought its own people. The accelerated timetable of Bonn did not help either, as it created a dysfunctional system of government without effective institutions.
Bird and Marshall disagreed with Rubin, as for them it was partly the result of a failed Western model based on ‘the decentralized, and economically highly privatized, liberal peace theory agenda’.[11] Liberal peace theory emphasises ‘high-speed institution-building’ before liberalisation, and turns the government into enabler rather than provider or facilitator. It had worked for the West to decentralise the economy, but this externally dictated agenda did not work for Afghanistan. By making the state the enabler and the global private sector the facilitator of reconstruction, the state in Afghanistan was left abstract. ‘[P]olitical and economic liberalization in practice generated destabilizing side-effects in war-shattered states, which then actually perpetuated instability’.[12] In Afghanistan it encouraged the rebuilding of the wrong kind of state where warlordism and the absence of effective bureaucracy were its ‘natural by-products’.[13]
US Pakistan policy was subject to heated debate, and the contested policy area was whether the Bush and Obama Administrations should get tough towards Pakistan for its ‘two-faced’ policy. Diplomat and foreign policy expert Zalmay Khalilzad, Diplomat and professor of International Relations Stephen Krasner, Peter Tomsen, British Professes and author Robert Singh, and Seth Jones were all in favour.[14] They recommended a number of options, including a reduction in military assistance, asking financial institutions (e.g. the International Monetary Fund) to curtail their support for programmes, and using military operations within Pakistan against known terrorist targets. And if these measures still failed, the US should explore a long-term effort to contain, isolate, or even declare Pakistan a state sponsoring terrorism.
Bearden, Pakistani political and strategist analyst Shuja Nawaz, American political scientist C. Christine Fair, South Asian expert Dr Samina Ahmed, academic and author Jonah Blank, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Pakistani author (who would become National Security Advisor during the Imran Khan prime ministership) Moeed Yusuf, and many others, on the other hand, disagreed,[15] arguing against containing Pakistan, because managing threats emanating from Pakistan were only possible by a long-term relationship with Pakistan. If there was more pressure by the US, the Pakistani Government could collapse, losing control of its nuclear weapons to terrorists. Keeping some level of cooperation and the continuation of providing military and civilian assistance to Pakistan would continue to help prevent bad situations from becoming worse.
Pakistan had the ability to further undermine US efforts in Afghanistan by intensifying its support for the Taliban, giving its nuclear weapons to US enemies, or interfering with US supplies transported daily through the Khyber Pass and Spin Boldak. Jonah Blank in the same article went a step further by questioning Tomsen’s wisdom, that is, whether it was strategically wise to trade a potential disaster in Afghanistan for a potential disaster in Pakistan with a 185 million population and in possession of the world’s fifth-largest nuclear arsenal.
Both the Bush and Obama Administrations were also accused of failing to make a concrete effort to solve the territorial tensions between India and Pakistan,[16] which were seen as the solution to the Afghanistan conflict.
Numerous others, on the other hand, disagreed, claiming that, even if a solution was offered for the Kashmir problem, Pakistan would still continue to support certain, what they called, ‘terrorist’ groups’, such as Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Afghan Taliban, for other strategic and domestic purposes, including using them to fight those extreme groups that aimed their violence against the state of Pakistan.[17]
CONCLUSION
This article provided a literature review of President Bush’s Afghanistan War. In the first months of the intervention, Phase 1, the public debate centred on whether Afghanistan might turn into a graveyard for the US as it had done for the previous empires, chief among them the Soviet Union. Some said it would; others believed it would not.
As the Bush Administration got stuck in Iraq, the Afghanistan War started to go in the wrong direction and phase 2 of US involvement in Afghanistan began. Now, public opinion overwhelmingly concentrated on criticism of the Bush Administration Afghan policy. The important shortcomings the criticism addressed were forgetting the Afghanistan War (as the focus was on the Iraq War), providing insufficient resources and employing the ‘warlord strategy’.
Some aspects of the Bush Administration’s Afghan policy divided the public debate. One such aspect was the administration’s policy regarding Pakistan’s alleged support for the Taliban. Some experts wanted the Bush Administration to be strict with Pakistan; others warned against being harsher, as it could prove counterproductive.
References
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Bird, Tim and Alex Marshall. 2011. Afghanistan: how the west lost its way. New Haven: Yale University Press.
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Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ‘From Hope to Audacity; Appraising Obama’s Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2010, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65720/zbigniew-brzezinski/from-hope-to-audacity>.
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Fair, C. Christine, ‘Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Other Extremist Groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 24, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/al-qaeda-the-taliban-and-other-extremist-groups-in-afghanistan-and-pakistan>.
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Jawad, Said T., ‘Hunting Al Qaeda’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62834/said-t-jawad/hunting-al-qaeda>.
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*Dr Sharifullah has a PhD from Durham University in the UK on America’s Afghanistan War. He has authored several articles and two acclaimed books: The Lone Leopard, a novel set in Afghanistan, and America in Afghanistan, published by Bloomsbury Publishing. Sharifullah is the founder of CEPSAF and the South Asia and Middle Eastern Editor at CESRAN International.
[1] Editorial, ‘The Quagmire Issue; U.S. Should Prepare for a Long Struggle, Dallas Morning News, October 26, 2001; Dowd, Maureen ‘Liberties; Can Bush Bushkazi?’, The New York Times, October 28, 2011; Apple, R.W., ‘A Military Quagmire Remembered: Afghanistan as Vietnam’, The New York Times, October 31, 2001.
[2] Bearden, Milton, ‘Obama’s War: Redefining Victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan’, Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2009, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64925/milton-bearden/obamas-war>; Tomsen, Peter, ‘Statement on Afghanistan: In Pursuit of Security and Democracy’, The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, October 16, 2003.
[3] Jones, Seth G. 2009. In the graveyard of empires: America’s war in Afghanistan, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, pp. 131-132.
[4] Rashid, Ahmed. 2009. Descent into chaos: the world’s most unstable region and the threat to global security. London: penguin.
p. 196; Tanner, Stephen. 2009. Afghanistan: a military history from Alexander the great to the war against the Taliban. Philadelphia: Da Capo, pp. 323-324.
[5] Jones, In the graveyard of empires, pp. 12, 110-112, 115-119, 125-128, 195, 242-253; Bird, Tim and Alex Marshall. 2011. Afghanistan: how the west lost its way. New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 50, 74, 94, 104-106, 110, 114, 154, 177, 219; Rashid, Descent into chaos, pp. XLI, 125-144, 171-239, 329; Tanner, Afghanistan, pp. 323-324, 333; Maley, William. 2006. Rescuing Afghanistan, Hurst and Company, London, p. 65; Gannon, Kathy, ‘Afghanistan Unbound’, Foreign Affairs, May/June 2004, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/59891/kathy-gannon/afghanistan-unbound>; Rubin, Barnett R., ‘Saving Afghanistan’, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2007, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62270/barnett-r-rubin/saving-afghanistan>; Joya, Malalai, and Derrick O’Keefe. 2009. A woman among warlords: the extraordinary story of an afghan who dared to raise her voice. New York; scribner, pp. 233-241, 243-247; Loyn, David. 2008. Butcher and bolt. London: Hutchinson, p. 293; Holbrooke, Richard, ‘The Next President; Mastering a Daunting Agenda’, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2008, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/63563/richard-holbrooke/the-next-president>
[6] Tanner, Afghanistan, p. 333.
[7] Tanner, Afghanistan, p. 323; Jones, In the graveyard of empires, p. 202; Jones, Seth G., ‘It Takes the Villages: Bringing Change From Below in Afghanistan’, Foreign Affairs, May/June, 2010, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66350/seth-g-jones/it-takes-the-villages>; Biddle, Stephen, ‘Running out of time for Afghan Governance Reform; How Little Can We Live With?’ Foreign Affairs, 2011, December 15, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136875/stephen-biddle/running-out-of-time-for-afghan-governance-reform>; Blank, Jonah, ‘Q&A With Jonah Blank on Afghanistan; The ‘Best-Case Scenario’ for the United States’, Foreign Affairs, September 7, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/discussions/interviews/qa-with-jonah-blank-on-afghanistan>; Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan: how the west lost its way, pp. 160, 163; Saikal, Amin. 2014. Zone of crisis: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. London: I. B. Tauris & Co, pp. 8-11; Flood, Philip, ‘Book review: Zone of Crisis Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq by Amin Saikal’, The Sunday Morning Herald, October 10, 2014.
[8] Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan: how the west lost its way, pp. 160, 163.
[9] Jawad, Said T., ‘Hunting Al Qaeda’, Foreign Affairs, September/October 2007, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62834/said-t-jawad/hunting-al-qaeda>.
[10]Rubin is quoted in Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan: how the west lost its way, p. 130.
[11] Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan: how the west lost its way, p.131.
[12] Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan: how the west lost its way, p. 133.
[13] Bird and Marshall, Afghanistan: how the west lost its way, pp. 131, 161.
[14] Singh, Robert. 2012. Barrack Obama’s post-American foreign policy: the limits of engagement. London: Bloomsbury academic, pp. 84-85; Khalilzad, Zalmay, ‘The Three Futures for Afghanistan; Why the country Needs a Long-Term Commitment From the United States’, Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism, December 15, 2011, <http://cpost.uchicago.edu/blog/2011/12/15/zalmay-khalilzad-the-three-futures-for-afghanistan-why-the-country-needs-a-long-term-commitment-from-the-united-states/>; Krasner, Stephen D, ‘Talking Tough to Pakistan; How to End Islamabad’s Defiance’, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2012, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136696/stephen-d-krasner/talking-tough-to-pakistan>; Jones, ‘It Takes the Villages’ ; Peter Tomsen is quoted in Blank, Jonah, ‘Invading Afghanistan, Then and Now’, Foreign Affairs, September/October, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68214/jonah-blank/invading-afghanistan-then-and-now>
[15] Bearden, Milton, ‘Obama’s War: Redefining Victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan’, Foreign Affairs, April 9, 2009, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64925/milton-bearden/obamas-war>; Nawaz, Shuja, ‘The Pakistan dilemma; What the Military’s Recent Behavior Says About U.S.-Pakistan Ties’, Foreign Affair, May 2, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67817/shuja-nawaz/the-pakistan-dilemma>; Fair, C. Christine, ‘Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Other Extremist Groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 24, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/al-qaeda-the-taliban-and-other-extremist-groups-in-afghanistan-and-pakistan>; Ahmed, Samina, ‘Assessing U.S. Policy and Its Limit in Pakistan’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 5, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/assessing-us-policy-and-and-its-limits-in-pakistan>; Blank, Jonah, ‘Invading Afghanistan, Then and Now’, Foreign Affairs, September/October, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/68214/jonah-blank/invading-afghanistan-then-and-now>; Brzezinski, Zbigniew, ‘From Hope to Audacity; Appraising Obama’s Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, January/February, 2010, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65720/zbigniew-brzezinski/from-hope-to-audacity>; Yusuf, Moeed, ‘Assessing U.S. Policy and Its Limits in Pakistan’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 5, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/assessing-us-policy-and-its-limits-in-pakistan>; Markey, Daniel, ‘A False Choice in Pakistan’, Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/62648/daniel-markey/a-false-choice-in-pakistan>; Christophe, Jaffrelot, ‘What engagement with Pakistan Can – And Can’t – Do’, Foreign Affairs, 2011, October 12, 2011, <http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136413/christophe-jaffrelot/what-engagement-with-pakistan-can-and-cant-do>
[16] Bearden (2009), ‘Obama’s War: Redefining Victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan’; Tanner, Afghanistan, p. 345; Jones, In the graveyard of empires, p. 323.
[17] Fair, ‘Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Other Extremist Groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan’; Haass, Richard N., ‘Hearing on Afghanistan: What is an Acceptable End-State, and How Do We Get There?’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 3, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/afghanistan-what-is-an-acceptable-end-state-and-how-do-we-get-there>; Krepon, Michael, ‘Assessing U.S. Policy and Its Limits in Pakistan’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 5, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/assessing-us-policy-and-its-limits-in-pakistan>; Neumann, Ronald E., ‘Hearing on Afghanistan: What is an Acceptable End-State, and How Do We Get There?’, Hearing Before Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, May 3, 2011, <http://www.foreign.senate.gov/hearings/afghanistan-what-is-an-acceptable-end-state-and-how-do-we-get-there>; Ahmed, ‘Assessing U.S. Policy and Its Limit in Pakistan’; Christophe, ‘What engagement with Pakistan Can – And Can’t – Do’.