October 21, 2009

Shouldn’t the Afghans fight their own war?

By: AF Editors

This isn’t one of my original five questions, but it’s important enough to be number six.

In the end, the stability of Afghanistan depends on Afghan forces standing up to the Taliban. So doesn’t it make more sense to focus on training them instead of sending our own combat forces?

Option 1: Yes, train more Afghans. Carl Levin:

The surge that really worked–that will work in Afghanistan will be a surge of Afghan troops. And that’s not me speaking, that’s a captain, Marine captain down in Helmand province who says the Achilles’ heel in Afghanistan is the shortage of Afghan troops. Our own commandant of the Marines, General Conway, says if he could change one thing in southern Afghanistan it would be to have more Afghan troops. As far as the Iraqi surge is concerned, it took place after the strategy was changed to try and, successfully, to get to get 100,000 Iraqis who were attacking us to switch sides.

Option 2: We need more Americans now if we want more Afghans later. Lindsey Graham:

The Afghan national police are getting slaughtered. It’s hard to train people, send them off to fight when they get killed at their first duty station. So without better security, the training element will fail. That’s exactly what happened in Afghanistan. So we need more combat power. General McChrystal says 40,000, in that neighborhood; I would go with the general.

Option 3: More Americans will be worse. Fewer, better. Robert Pape:

In 2005, the United States and NATO began to systematically extend their military presence across Afghanistan. The goals were to defeat the tiny insurgency that did exist at the time, eradicate poppy crops and encourage local support for the central government. Western forces were deployed in all major regions, including the Pashtun areas in the south and east, and today have ballooned to more than 100,000 troops.

As Western occupation grew, the use of the two most worrisome forms of terrorism in Afghanistan — suicide attacks and homemade bombs — escalated in parallel…

The picture is clear: the more Western troops we have sent to Afghanistan, the more the local residents have viewed themselves as under foreign occupation, leading to a rise in suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks. (We see this pattern pretty much any time an “outside” armed force has tried to pacify a region, from the West Bank to Kashmir to Sri Lanka.)