In the Graveyard of Empires

It didn’t take long after the American invasion of Iraq for the literary output inspired by the war to start hitting the bookshelves. In 2005 alone, influential books like George Packer’s The Assassins' Gate, Anthony Shadid’s Night Draws Near, Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City, and Bing West’s No True Glory were released, followed closely by in 2006 by Tom Ricks’ widely-praised Fiasco. All of these books captured the public’s imagination in some way (No True Glory, in fact, is currently being made into a movie starring Harrison Ford, if that’s any indication), and spurred debate over the conduct of the war and the cracked edifice of ideology, blind assumption, stunning incompetence, and misdirection that led to it.  

Afghanistan, with its much smaller American footprint—and having been mistakenly considered “won” for far too long—hasn’t fared quite as well between the covers. The only book about the war (other than the fantastic Ghost Wars by Steve Coll, which is actually about the CIA in Afghanistan in the 1980s and 90s) to have caught the public’s eye is Sean Naylor’s Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda, which came out in 2005. But finally, with Seth Jones’ In The Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan, the war is finally getting its due, eight years after American combat troops first confronted Taliban forces. While Jones’ title might lead one to believe that he sees the effort in Afghanistan as futile, he takes a far more nuanced approach. A RAND analyst who has long focused on Afghanistan, Jones is hardly hopeful about the prospects for success—whatever that might be defined as—but does a rigorous job of outlining where mistakes have been made. Chief among the problems, he points out to devastating effect, has been the uneven international commitment to security and stability in Afghanistan. While NATO allies like Canada, the U.K., and the Dutch have acquitted themselves honorably and have seen the blood of several hundred of their countrymen spilled on the dusty Afghan ground, others, the Germans and Italians especially, have failed to live up to the task of police training and building a justice system that they assured their allies they would spearhead. 

Jones quotes Dov Zakheim, who then-secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld tasked with coordinating civilian programs in Afghanistan, describing his efforts to drum up commitments from allies for nonmilitary equipment as being “like pulling teeth…Allies simply weren’t providing a lot of support.” But don’t just blame the allies—U.S. assistance was also low, Zakheim points out. The biggest culprit according to him was the Office of Management and Budget, which refused to provide much funding in the early years of the war, thus limiting the effectiveness of the Kabul government to expand its mandate across the countryside, and giving the Taliban time to reconstitute itself both in Pakistan, and in remote corners of the Pashtun belts in the south and east of the country—precisely where American, British and Canadian troops are fighting it out today. Likewise, due to the limited manpower and funding available to commanders in Afghanistan, the training of the Afghan army and police have lagged behind what we’ve seen in Iraq, limiting “clear, hold, and build” operations to the “clear” phase,” since there have not been enough troops to hold the gains they’ve made.

In the end, these failures to provide basic security to the people are what continue to cause the Afghan government, and the western International Security Assistance Force, problems. Echoing David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerilla, Jones writes that “local Afghans were generally not motivated by religion to support insurgent groups and oppose the Afghan government. Rather, they were motivated by poor or nonexistent governance.”

(pic: W.W. Norton)

Comments

[David M]

The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the blog post From the Front: 07/15/2009 News and Personal dispatches from the front and the home front.

[generic viagra]

Blood, Misery, Hunger, Disease, DEATH!!!!!!
That's the really best friends of war, hand by hand, shoulder to shoulder, it's a very sad thing to see, to live, to die for...
The soldiers never think in the kids, in the women, in the old people, they only care about ''winning'' an others cause, they there not by own means, they have no word, no will, just a puppet...
That's my personal way of think, my intention is not to offend anyone, in fact, i feel sorry for the people who had a familiar in that field, God be with you...