U.S. engame hindered by impatience and insolence

By Harrison     9/16/10 7:00pm

While you are most likely stressing about your first round of exams coming up, there is something more crucial to worry about: Afghanistan.Talk of "reconciliation" with the Taliban has been steadily gaining support in the West in the last few months, and it seems likely that sometime soon a power-sharing deal of some sort will be proposed. Meanwhile, some experts are predicting that Afghanistan is heading for civil war after the withdrawal of American forces, and interested parties in the region seem to be moving ahead as if that will be the case.

Through all of this, the professional anti-war crowd has continued nagging for an end to the American commitment in Afghanistan at the earliest opportunity, and the Obama administration has insisted that it will stick to its ludicrous drawdown schedule. As America looks forward to its endgame in Afghanistan, it must not forget the failures of its closures of past campaigns against authoritarians in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During the 1980s, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the U.S. successfully armed and trained the mujahedeen resistance to force a Soviet withdrawal. Following the Soviet defeat, though, American involvement petered out and no substantial effort was made to ensure that a democratic government would replace Afghanistan's then-communist regime when it finally collapsed in 1992. Nor was any serious effort made to help rebuild the country &mdash which was in a state of ruin even before the Soviet invasion &mdash or generate goodwill for the U.S.

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Instead, having accomplished its goal of defeating the Soviets and eager to be done with the matter, the U.S. left Afghanistan to the warlords of the former mujahedeen, who turned on each other and were eventually subsumed by the Taliban. The resulting Taliban emirate was among the most vicious violators of human rights in the world, and the chance to replace the Soviet puppet state with a democracy was missed.

In 1991, after Saddam Hussein's forces occupied Kuwait, a U.S.-led coalition moved in and expelled the Iraqis with devastating force. Instead of removing Hussein when he was at his weakest and the force arrayed against him was at its strongest, the coalition left him to continue sucking the country dry for fear of having to make a substantial commitment to the rebuilding of Iraq.

To make matters worse, after neglecting to overthrow Hussein, the coalition governments applied sanctions to Iraq which did nothing to remove him from power and everything to ensure that the country would be in even worse shape once his regime fell from power. The result was that the country festered to such a degree that it took several years after Hussein's eventual overthrow for the inter-group conflict to settle down.

Given the decades of dictatorship and cruelty to which Iraq had been subjected, there was always bound to be a painful period of upheaval after Hussein?s downfall, but that period would likely have been much easier to bear &mdash both for Iraqis and the liberating force &mdash had the country not been left to decay for another 12 years.

Now the U.S. endgame is once again threatened by the desire to be finished, and once again the U.S. is at risk of ending its involvement without solving the problem. Talk of reconciliation with the Taliban &mdash which, as it's being discussed now, simply means ceding some degree of power to the Taliban in exchange for a ceasefire so the U.S. can make a politically expedient exit &mdash means leaving the malignant authoritarians in power once more in order to avoid committing further American time and effort to opposing them.

"Reconciliation" of this sort is the surest way to guarantee that Afghanistan will once again find itself under the rule of savage religious reactionaries with no regard for women and no respect for individual rights. Can any serious person believe that, having survived the American effort to shut them down, the Taliban will simply drop their weapons and join with their enemies of the last two decades? The suggestion is ludicrous. If the U.S. goes ahead with the plan to leave Afghanistan beginning next year, there can be little doubt that Afghanistan will again descend into civil war ? and since the main obstacle to Taliban victory is the American military, there's a good chance it won't be the pro-democracy faction that wins the day in post-U.S. Afghanistan.

This plan cannot be allowed to happen. Reconciliation will only be possible with lesser members of the Taliban, and only when it is clear that they can neither defeat nor outlast the American force in Afghanistan and must abandon the idea of reestablishing a reactionary authoritarian regime. It can't be said when this real reconciliation will occur, but it can be said that it won't occur based on whatever schedule is most convenient for American politicians and that it won't occur at all if America continues to focus on getting out instead of getting it right.

Don't let yourselves give in to the fatigue which makes this possible, and don't let yourselves be swayed by those who claim that not fighting the Taliban is the same thing as peace. Most of all, don't forget the lessons of the failed American endgames in previous struggles against authoritarianism and barbarism. There is a chance here to avoid the mistakes made after the first liberation of Afghanistan and the liberation of Kuwait, but only if the laziness, impatience and stupidity that led to those disasters do not prevail once again.

Eric Harrison is a Wiess College senior.

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