Book Review: In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

[laststeamtrain]

(From THE FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW)
Reviewed by Ian Chesley

In the Graveyard of Empires:

America's War in Afghanistan

by Seth G. Jones

W.W. Norton, 464 pages, $27.95



This summer, the American foreign-policy community has divided into a number of camps over the future of Western involvement in Afghanistan. In the absence of a huge increase in United States and NATO troops -- which is impossible for now, due to commitments in Iraq and European trepidation-scholars and wonks with varying degrees of expertise on Afghanistan are trying to come up with new ideas for how to best use the limited resources available.

On one side are academics who have been calling for a redefinition of the strategic goals of the American presence in Afghanistan. Rory Stewart, director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, recently published an essay that criticized the desire to use Afghanistan as a petri dish for Washington's bureaucratic fantasies. These scholars would prefer a greatly scaled-back mission, arguing that though the Taliban are a weakened force, the presence of foreign troops provokes what they are there to prevent.

On the other side there are the "counterinsurgents." The Western model of counterinsurgency believes that the war can be won, but direct force should be avoided. The epicenter of the counterinsurgency camp is the Center for New American Security, which recently published a major report by Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen. Both were recently involved in a major strategic review in Kabul, a sign of how influential their ideas of "protecting the population" and a "civilian surge" have been.

Such experts have yet to explain, though, how to protect the entire population of Afghanistan with only around 60,000 NATO soldiers. They tend to fill in the blank spots with to-be-trained Afghan National Army soldiers, but a recent mission by a Marine brigade in Helmand was accompanied by a paltry 400 Afghans. There is no indication that those numbers will improve anytime soon.

Finally, there are the actual government bureaucrats who have been administering the effort in Afghanistan. Few have as unobstructed a view of Washington as Seth Jones, an Afghanistan analyst at the RAND Corporation, lecturer at Georgetown University and author of "In the Graveyard of Empires." James Dobbins, Mr. Jones' superior at RAND, was the State Department's envoy to Afghanistan in 2001-2002. Thus, Mr. Jones's job has afforded him access to high-ranking generals and ambassador-level diplomats.

In his new book, Mr. Jones uncontroversially lays the blame for the current U.S. predicament in Afghanistan at the feet of Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush's secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006. Mr. Rumsfeld's "light footprint" concept of war, as well as his insistence that American military force should not be an instrument of nation-building, defined the first years of post-Taliban Afghanistan. The focus on "high-value targets" blinded the policy community to the insurgency that gestated for years in the Pashtun areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan and emerged in its mature form in 2006. Mr. Rumsfeld, like the counterinsurgents of today, proposed that Afghanistan would eventually be able to protect itself with its own national army and police.


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http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20090918-713082.html
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Another set of information layed out as if some of it may make sense. Eh.

At least it's not TV.

[Slyder]

1. Duh! NOBODY has ever controlled Afghanistan for long

The area we call Afghanistan has never been a stable nation. It is an artificial state. (Merely Kabuled together--groan--I couldn't help myself.)The failures here are legion and I don't know all the details. This area has often been in the Persian cultural sphere, but not always controlled by Persia or Iran. The Persians had a time with it. Alexander the Great went though but didn't hold it long. Parts of the country became Buddhist due to the Silk Road. A Greek upper class seems to have controlled the area around Kandahar for a while. Sometimes urban culture supported by irrigated agriculture stabilized parts of the country. The Mongols destroyed cities and irrigation infrastructure in the 1200s. Some areas and cities never recovered. Timur came through. The Moguls controlled it for a while. Some of the worst defeats experienced by the British during the rise of their empire occurred in Afghanistan. Toward the end of the 20th century Russia tried to dominate Afghanistan with disastrous results. "Graveyard of Empires" is right! The fierce independence of the people, the rough and geographically isolated terrain, several languages and ethnic groups, and religious factions, make permanent peace almost hopeless. It is pure hubris to assume America will have a different experience.

Nation building has been going on in Afghanistan for thousands of years. It might happen, but I kind of doubt it. I have a bad feeling about continued instability in central Asia. This will be the source of terrorism for a while. There is a lot of real estate to monitor. We will need lots of speakers of obscure Turkish dialects, such as Uighur, and several Indo-European languages, and then Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Manchu(?), and Mongol. Ural-Altaic languages too, perhaps. This will not be easy,