Ten years of war in Afghanistan and still relying on a failing strategy

On this tenth anniversary of the start of the war against Taliban rule and an al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan, the central strategy of those who started the war now comes down to mounting a force of 352,000 armed Afghans to take over all the fighting in 2014.

“Winning,” in the sense of defeating the insurgency by military means, has long been off the table. Although reconciliation and political accommodation are rhetorically embraced by the Government of Afghanistan and some of the international combatants, serious peace-making has yet to gain the political will and resources needed.^[i]
So the choice of expedience has come down to an effort to shift the burden of the fighting fully to the Afghans.

Canada is helping to train the new recruits for Afghan police and military forces in the service of this strategy, but there are key questions that training won’t answer. Who will pay the Afghan forces, year in and year out? How will Afghan forces vanquish an insurgency that has steadily strengthened in response to the combined operations of Afghan and international forces?

It will cost $6 billion a year to sustain a force 0f 350,000 plus Afghan police and soldiers.[ii] Since Afghanistan’s GDP is only $15 billion, a $6 billion security burden is, to say
the very least, rather daunting. The Government of Afghanistan can now raise only
a total of $3 billion per year in revenues, ^[iii] meaning that Afghanistan could itself realistically sustain only a force of less than 0ne-tenth of the size projected (consuming about 20 percent of total revenue). In other words, nine-tenths will have to be covered by the international community indefinitely.

The primary funder, the United States, is currently spending about $12 billion per year to build up the Afghan forces to the proposed level, and Washington has already begun to focus on finding ways to radically reduce its obligation.[iv] It is safe to say that the international community won’t long be pouring $6 billion a year into Afghanistan’s security forces – an amount that rivals the international community’s annual aid and reconstruction contributions to Afghanistan.[v]

The plan to mount an absurdly large security force in one of the world’s poorest countries is at best unrealistic for the long term, but the plan to do this in support of a strategy that is manifestly failing is downright irrational. Afghan forces are being asked to take over a counterinsurgency war that has seen the unrelenting growth of the insurgency. The combined Afghan and international forces now number well over 400,000, and they are presiding over a situation of steadily increasing insecurity. Indeed from 2005 through
2011 every report of the Secretary-General on the security situation in Afghanistan opens with the sombre assessment that during the previous year there has been a substantial deterioration in security. ^[vi]

That doesn’t mean there haven’t been important improvements in some areas. Many urban Afghans have seen huge improvements in their social and economic conditions, but overall the decline in security is persistent and unrelenting, and 2011 is on track to being the deadliest year yet for civilians in Afghanistan.[vii]

Ten years after starting a regime change war that lacked any credible plan for ending the decades of violent division in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies in the International Security Assistance Force have now tired of the fighting, but they still lack any credible plan for ending the war and the violent divisions that have now claimed another decade. The Afghan Analysts Network’s Thomas Ruttig,[viii] sensibly calls for a major strategic shift that privileges the pursuit of a political solution over the pursuit of an unaffordable and ineffective military-centered strategy. He calls it a shift from the current strategy of “shooting and talking” to one of “talking instead of shooting.”

eregehr@uwaterloo.ca

Notes