The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat

by Vali Nasr

  “You can pay to end this war,” he began. Then he moved to the edge of his seat and raised his index finger in the air and said, “One billion dollars. It will cost you one billion dollars, no fighting needed.” He put out the number as if he were giving us his best discount price!

  Then, as if he were talking to someone who clearly had little to no understanding of the dynamics in the region, he told us we were fighting the wrong war. “You should talk to the Taliban, not fight them. That will help you with Iran.” Then he gave us a big, knowing smile. Since the Iraq war, Persian Gulf countries have been worried about the rise of Iran’s influence in the region, and are especially worried about its steady march toward nuclear capability. They wanted America to focus on Iran—even if it meant playing nice with the Taliban.

  King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia couldn’t have agreed more. “You have to look to the root of the Taliban problem,” he told Holbrooke. And what did the king think was the source of our problems in Afghanistan? Iran, of course.

  Holbrooke was correct when he referred to the ghosts of Iraq diminishing our credibility in the region. As far as the leaders of the Middle East were concerned, we didn’t understand the difference between defeating an opponent on the battlefield (which we did quickly enough) and psychologically breaking his will to resist. We’d been flummoxed by—and totally unprepared for—what came after military victory in Iraq, a long-simmering but predictable outbreak of Sunni-Shia violence. What our allies understood—even if we couldn’t admit it to ourselves—is that after ten years of war, Iraq was a country broken into dozens of pieces held together by a few pieces of Scotch tape. The tape started to come off the moment we left. Should it really have come as a surprise to us that there was no more confidence in our wisdom regarding Afghanistan than in the delusions that got us into Iraq?

  When the week was over and we returned to Washington, Holbrooke dutifully reported what our allies thought of our plans for war. He did so carefully, in terms that would not make it seem as if he were scoring points. For his part, Holbrooke was concerned enough to caution against doubling down on war. But his counsel was dismissed as overblown and outdated. “When I talk about counterinsurgency and Vietnam at the White House,” he once said, “those guys roll their eyes as if I am from another planet.”

  Six weeks later, on December 1, 2009, with no further discussion of the clear reservations on the part of the allies in the region whose cooperation we needed to make our plans work, President Obama announced his much-anticipated decision about the war in Afghanistan. It was reported that he spent hours and hours, indeed months, considering all the relevant information before sending another 33,000 American troops to continue the fighting there. The world held its breath for a new vision, one that would not be a mere reiteration of the familiar impulse to turn to the generals to fix a vexing foreign policy problem. But Obama did just that. There would be no attempt to restore diplomacy to primacy in foreign policy. To the American people it seemed that Obama had shown resolve, telling the world that America would fight the war to victory. But those whom America had to work hardest to convince of its wisdom were unimpressed. They did not think our strategy would work, and at any rate, they did not believe we would stick with it for long.

  The drumbeat of skepticism continued. Almost a year later, in October 2010, during a visit to the White House, Pakistan’s army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, gave President Obama a thirteen-page white paper he had written to explain his views on the outstanding strategic issues between Pakistan and the United States. Kayani 3.0, as the paper was dubbed (since it was the third paper Pakistanis gave the White House on the subject), could be summarized as follows: You are not going to win the war, and you are not going to transform Afghanistan. This place has devoured empires before you; it will defy you as well. Stop your grandiose plans and let’s get practical, sit down, and discuss how you will leave and what is an end state we can both live with.

  Kayani expressed the same doubt time and again in meetings. We would try to convince him (as we did other regional leaders) that we were committed to the region and had a solution for Afghanistan’s problems: we would first beat the Taliban and then build a security force to hold the place together after we left. He, like many others, thought the idea of an Afghan military was foolish and that we were better off negotiating an exit with the Taliban.

  In one small meeting around a narrow table, Kayani listened carefully and took notes as we went through our list of issues. I cannot forget Kayani’s reaction when we enthusiastically explained our plan to build up Afghan forces to 400,000 by 2014. His answer was swift and unequivocal: Please don’t try to build that Afghan army. “You will fail,” he said. “Then you will leave and that half-trained army will break into militias that will be a problem for Pakistan.” We tried to stand our ground, but he would have none of it. He continued, “I don’t believe that the Congress is going to pay nine billion dollars a year for this four-hundred-thousand-man force.” He was sure it would eventually collapse and the fragments of the broken army would resort to crime and terrorism to earn their keep. That after all was pretty much what happened when the Soviet Union stopped paying for the Afghan army it had built—sixty days after Soviet cash dried up the Afghan army melted away and Kabul fell to the insurgents. Memories in the region run long, much longer than ours.

  Kayani’s counsel was basically “if you want to leave, just leave—we didn’t believe you were going to stay anyway—but don’t do any more damage on your way out.” This seemed to be a ubiquitous sentiment across the region. No one bought our argument for sending more troops into Afghanistan, and no one was buying our arguments for leaving. It seemed everyone was getting used to a directionless America. The best they could do was to protect themselves against our sudden shifts and turns.

  Bill Clinton famously called America the “indispensable nation,” the world’s leader by default, destined to solve problems large or small the world over.2 Americans like this image of themselves.3 That is why Obama harkened back to Clinton’s famous phrase, telling the American people in his January 2012 State of the Union address, “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs—and as long as I am President, I intend to keep it that way.” America—dragged by Europeans into ending butchery in Libya, abandoning Afghanistan to an uncertain future, resisting a leadership role in ending the massacre of civilians in Syria, and then rolling back its commitments to the region to “pivot” to Asia—hardly looks indispensable.

  In the cocoon of our public debate Obama gets high marks on foreign policy. That is because his policies’ principal aim is not to make strategic decisions but to satisfy public opinion—he has done more of the things that people want and fewer of the things we have to do that may be unpopular. To our allies, however, our constant tactical maneuvers don’t add up to a coherent strategy or a vision of global leadership. Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead in the world. In its place there is the image of a superpower tired of the world and in retreat, most visibly from the one area of the world where it has been most intensely engaged. That impression serves neither America’s long-run interests nor stability around the world.

  In late 2011, fighting in Afghanistan and frozen relations with Pakistan were endangering the president’s plans to wrap up the Afghan war. The administration decided that it could use China’s help. After all, the Chinese should want a stable Afghanistan, and should be worried about Pakistan, too. Beijing had made fresh investments in Afghanistan’s mining sector, which appeared set for massive growth after the 2010 discovery of vast new mineral riches.1 And China had long and deep economic ties with Pakistan. So the administration asked a veteran diplomat, an old China hand, to reach out to the Chinese leadership. The diplomat made the rounds in Beijing, meeting with the Chinese president, premier, foreign minister, and a host of other political players. Their answer was clear and unequivocal: “This is your problem. You made this mess. In Afghanistan more war has made t
hings much worse, and in Pakistan things were not so bad before you started poking around. We have interests in this area, but they do not include pulling your chestnuts out of the fire. We will look after our own interests in our own way.” In short, “You made your own bed, now lie in it.” Once they were done pushing back, they invariably asked, “What is your strategy there, anyway?”

  Afghanistan is the “good war.” That was what Barack Obama said on the campaign trail. It was a war of necessity that we had to wage in order to defeat al-Qaeda and ensure that Afghanistan never harbored terrorists again.2 Obama took up promoting the Afghan war at least in part as an election-year tactic, to protect himself against perennial accusations that Democrats are soft on national security issues. Branding Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” gave him cover to denounce the Iraq war as a “war of choice” that must be brought to an end.

  Obama’s stance was widely understood at home and abroad to mean that America would do all it could in Afghanistan—commit more money and send more troops—to finish off the Taliban and build a strong democratic state capable of standing up to terrorism.

  Four years later, President Obama is no longer making the case for the “good war.” Instead, he is fast washing his hands of it. It is a popular position at home, where many Americans, including many who voted for Obama in 2008, want nothing more to do with war. They are disillusioned by the ongoing instability in Iraq and Afghanistan and tired of eleven years of fighting on two fronts. They do not believe that war was the right solution to terrorism and have stopped putting stock in the fear-mongering that the Bush administration used to fuel its foreign policy. There is a growing sense that America has no interests in Afghanistan vital enough to justify a major ground presence.

  It was to court public opinion that Obama first embraced the war in Afghanistan. And when public opinion changed, he was quick to declare victory and call the troops back home. His actions from start to finish were guided by politics and they played well at home. But abroad, the stories we tell to justify our on-again, off-again approach to this war do not ring true to friend or foe. They know the truth: that we are leaving Afghanistan to its own fate. Leaving even as the demons of regional chaos that first beckoned us there are once again rising to threaten our security.

  When President Obama took office, the Afghan war was already eight years old. America went to Afghanistan in October 2001, less than a month after 9/11, to eliminate al-Qaeda. A quick victory made it possible to imagine a hopeful future there after more than two decades of civil war.

  With international help, Afghanistan got a new constitution, a new government, and a new president whom the West celebrated as an enlightened partner in the effort to rebuild the country. President Hamid Karzai cut a dashing figure, debonair and progressive, the avatar of America’s goal to free the Muslim world from the clutches of extremism. Even the designer Tom Ford had something to contribute, anointing Karzai “the chicest man on the planet today.”3

  Meanwhile, the Taliban and al-Qaeda had retreated to Pakistan,4 seeking refuge in the country’s northwesternmost region: the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), an uncertainly governed and ruggedly mountainous region the size of Massachusetts that is home to about 4 million Pashtun tribespeople. Consequently, while Washington was looking to build a new democratic and forward-looking Afghanistan to act as a bulwark against terrorism, it also relied on a close relationship with Pakistan to hound al-Qaeda in its FATA lair. Billions of dollars went into Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Bush presidency, supporting not only counterterrorism efforts but also democracy promotion, schooling for women and girls, and rural development.

  But the investment failed to pay the hoped-for dividends. Long before President Obama took office, things had begun to change. By 2006 the Afghan government’s stride had slowed, and there was little doubt that war and instability had returned. In that year the number of attacks by returning Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters rose 400 percent and the number of those killed in such attacks was up by 800 percent.5 In June 2006 more international troops died in Afghanistan than in the Iraq conflict, more than in any other month since the war started.6 The Taliban were making a ferocious comeback against what they saw as an American occupation and a vulnerable puppet government in Kabul.

  By 2008 the fighting had morphed into a full-blown insurgency. The United Nations used to issue security maps for aid workers on which green marked safe areas and yellow those areas with some security problems, and red was used for dangerous areas under insurgent control. By 2008 large areas of the maps were in red. Many Afghans thought that the Taliban looked poised for victory, and when it comes to insurgencies, what the locals think often dictates the outcome. One Western observer back from Kabul in mid-2008 said every shopkeeper in the city (the most well-protected part of Afghanistan) thought that Taliban fighters would be in the capital by the year’s end. Afghanistan was fast slipping into chaos.

  Everything about Afghanistan was a challenge—its rugged geography, its convoluted ethnic makeup, labyrinthine social structure, and jealous tribalisms, its byzantine politics, and the bitter legacy of decades consumed by war and occupation. But the biggest problem lay across the border: Pakistan.

  The Taliban operated out of the FATA, but its leadership had set up shop farther south in Quetta. They used the Pakistani city’s relative safety to regroup and orchestrate the insurgency in Afghanistan. Taliban commanders recruited foot soldiers from seminaries across Pakistan’s Pashtun areas and ran training camps, hospitals, and bomb-making factories in towns and villages a stone’s throw from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

  Moreover, since the Taliban’s formation in 1994 the insurgent organization has maintained close ties with Pakistan’s intelligence agency and received financial and military support from Islamabad. Pakistani support sustained Taliban military offensives throughout the 1990s, and even after the U.S. offensive broke the Taliban’s hold on Afghanistan that relationship continued.

  Pakistan has viewed the Taliban as a strategic asset that could keep India out of Afghanistan and under Pakistan’s control. That makes the Afghan insurgency a regional problem. It is hard enough to fight an insurgency, but one that has a safe haven to retreat to within a sympathetic population and can rely on the financial, intelligence, and military support of a neighboring country is a tougher challenge still, by orders of magnitude. The Taliban and al-Qaeda would fight in Afghanistan, and when things got too hot, they would hasten south across the border to tend their wounds, recruit and train fresh fighters, and plan for more war. Indeed, the collective leadership of the Taliban became popularly known as the Quetta Shura, after the city where it met. The Afghanistan fight was starting to eerily resemble Vietnam, with Pakistan acting roughly like Laos, Cambodia, and Maoist China all rolled into one. The war was taking on a new, expensive shape, one that needed urgent attention.

  By the time President Obama moved into the Oval Office, the Taliban juggernaut looked unstoppable. They had adopted a flexible, decentralized structure that reported to the leadership in Pakistan, but organized locally. There was a national political infrastructure in place too, with shadow governors and district leaders for much of the country. In some cases, this Taliban presence was nominal—the Taliban are almost exclusively a Pashtun phenomenon and do not reach into every corner of multiethnic Afghanistan—but elsewhere the Taliban were in control.

  The Taliban had a strength that belied their numbers. The U.S. government estimated that in 2009 the Taliban were no more than 35,000 strong. Of these, only a core of at most 2,000 were battle-hardened veterans of Afghanistan’s earlier wars. A larger number, maybe 5,000 to 10,000, were in the fight to avenge government abuse or the death of kith and kin in U.S. raids and aerial bombings. The largest number of fighters, 20,000 or more, were mercenaries, in it for a few dollars a day.

  The Taliban had become politically more savvy and militarily more lethal.7 Gone was their objection to pictures and music, and in came the us
e of both in their recruiting videos. In their statements, the new Taliban claimed to be open to women going to school. Talk of chopping off hands and lopping off heads in public was put aside.

  Other beliefs, more ominously, were put aside as well. Steve Coll, the journalist and longtime observer of Afghanistan, writes that in the 1980s, when Afghan warriors were battling Soviet occupation, the CIA was desperately seeking someone to set off a massive vehicle bomb inside the 1.6-mile-long Salang Tunnel. The tunnel is a crucial north-south link running beneath a difficult pass in the towering Hindu Kush mountain range, and blowing it up would have cut the main Soviet supply route. In order to be effective, the bomb would need to go off mid-tunnel, meaning certain death for its operator. In effect, the CIA was looking for an Afghan suicide bomber.8 No one volunteered. Suicide, said the Afghans, was a grievous sin, and quite against their religion. And yet, fast-forward to 2009, and there had been more than 180 suicide bomb attacks in Afghanistan.9 The Taliban had evolved to make Afghanistan an even more dangerous place.

  Shortly after he took office, President Obama appointed Richard Holbrooke as his point man on Afghanistan—his special representative—to help him quickly gauge the situation in that country and come up with a strategy to deal with it. At the time the military was urgently lobbying the new president for more troops, needed to hold the line against the Taliban while Washington thought through the problem. Obama asked for a quick strategy review—a quick read of the situation—and tapped former CIA and Clinton White House Pakistan point man Bruce Riedel to lead the effort.10 The review took sixty days, and its findings (popularly known as the Riedel Report) argued for beefing up American troop presence in Afghanistan, “fully resourcing” counterinsurgency operations there, and getting tough with Pakistan. Holbrooke, who served on Riedel’s commission, disagreed. He did not favor committing America to fully resourced counterinsurgency and thought America would get more out of Pakistan through engagement.