Kevin Green
The US military is a can-do institution by nature. As a joint force composed of the best and brightest warfighters the world has to offer, we are taught that there is no threat on the planet that America’s men and women in uniform can’t extinguish.
Afghanistan has severely challenged our confidence in this principle. Nearly 18 years since US military operations commenced against al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the war continues at an intense pace. Afghanistan’s politics have only gotten more divisive as Afghan officials and politicians spend as much time undermining one another as they do in meeting the demands of their constituents.
There is no sector in the Afghan economy that isn’t hampered by corruption — a cancer that over time can wilt the strongest institutions. The illicit narcotic trade accounted for as much as 30% of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product last year.
Our leadership in Washington convinced itself that with enough willpower and financial resources, the United States could address all of these problems. Obscene sums of taxpayer money have been poured into Afghanistan with very little return. The amount of cash that has been wasted on noble but ill-thought out projects — billions of dollars on highway building; nearly $9 billion on counter-narcotics programs — would make the most irresponsible shopper blush.
While it would be easy to blame all of this on the bean-counters in Washington, it’s deeper than that. Indeed, US strategy in Afghanistan is the culmination of our foreign policy leaders’ inability to prioritize which objectives are absolutely necessary for US national security and which should be downgraded or cut entirely. The United States has gotten comfortable jumping into every problem in search for quick solutions.
All of this sounds charitable until you wake up, 18 years later, staring at a big mess. This is where the United States finds itself today in Afghanistan — and it could get much worse if Washington doesn’t take a new approach.
If Afghanistan has taught us any lessons at all, it’s that military solutions to political challenges are a dead-end. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if the strategy is poorly conceived excessively ambitious.
US national interests in Afghanistan are limited. The first, ensuring the American people are protected from the transnational terrorism that brought the United States into the country in the first place, is non-negotiable. The Trump administration must be crystal clear during talks with the Taliban that it will not accept Afghanistan deteriorating into what it was prior to 2001.
A second but equally important objective is working with regional stakeholders to prevent the possibility of terrorists acquiring weapons of mass destruction. South and Central Asia consists of two nuclear-armed rivals in India and Pakistan and two others in Russia and China that are on the periphery.
All of these countries, regardless of broader geopolitical ambitions, have a vested interest in keeping these materials out of dangerous hands.
Third and finally, the US has an interest in helping the Afghans help themselves. This means expecting Afghan leaders to take ownership of their problems and supporting the Afghan government as long as fundamental political, social and civil rights are safeguarded.
Washington-imposed solutions don’t work in the villages along the Helmand River or in the Kabul suburbs. The sooner our leaders accept this reality, the sooner the United States can save itself from engaging in an endless morass of nation-building.
If these goals sound marginal, that’s only because US strategy in Afghanistan was unfocused for so long. If US officials want to avoid another two decades of cyclical military deployments and financial giveaways, they must get far more realistic and focused in what they want to accomplish.
