Policymakers see dozens of memos a day. Some might have to live a lifetime before they get what Gordon Brown and David Miliband got from Paddy Ashdown in March. This is a remarkably candid and powerful memo about the state of affairs in Afghanistan and realistic options moving forward.
The bottom line: we have “set preposterously ambitious aims, which included setting up a unitary Western style state in a handful of years, in a country which had just emerged from an ongoing civil war of 30 years and has been steeped in a deeply tribal culture, based on revenge and division for probably thirty centuries.”
His prescription: “So we have to abandon the notion that we can make Afghanistan into a well governed state, with gender aware citizens and European standard human rights. It raises expectations we cannot fulfill and wastes resources better deployed elsewhere. A better governed state is the limit of the achievable…So the realistic aim in Afghanistan, with current resources, is not victory, but containment.”
His policy prescriptions for ‘containing’ Afghanistan and ‘securing’ gains achieved are on the mark. They include correcting the disastrous lack of coordination in international aid efforts and the military campaign, empowering the new UN Ambassador Kai Eide to lead the design of an internationally accepted, country-wide, political-military strategy, engaging the Taliban, and design a regional Dayton-esque process.
The interesting point to highlight here is not just the contrast with McCaffrey’s AAR (see earlier post). It is also the contrast between “Burkian” approach to conflict/post-conflict strategies (those who generally oppose a “surge” in Afghanistan or the notion that we need to make democracy and human right a central objective) and what I would call the idealists (who are uncomfortable with Ashdown’s willingness to admit that even in the best case, Afghanistan will remain a society of “gun drugs and tribalism.”)
Rory Stewart’s approach as well as Benjamin Friedman’s – these are the ones I am inclined to support.
Incidentally, Barack Obama, though supportive of an increase in troops in Afghanistan, seems to have a sensibility about the way change happens – and that it’s not likely to happen overnight in a place like Afghanistan (and certainly not because the US demands it). Obama respects this Burkian conservatism “because it has much more to do with respect for tradition and the past and I think skepticism about being able to just take apart a society and put it back together. Because I do think that communities and nations and families aren’t subject to that kind of mechanical approach to change.”
One of the most important battles over national security should Obama win will be between the “realist” and “liberal internationalists” camp of the Democratic Party. I’m afraid that if the latter win, we will all see less “change” than we were promised.
PSW
