by Eric Martin
Back in 2006, a wise man said this:
It's time to admit that no amount of American lives can resolve the political disagreement that lies at the heart of someone else's civil war.
And yet, three years and a rather precipitous political ascent later, that same person – now President Barack Obama – is contemplating just how many more troops to add to Afghanistan's roiling civil war – that would be on top of the 21,000 additional troops already deployed by Obama. Nader Mousavizadeh (via) is right about the nature of the conflict in Afghanistan, and our ability to impose a solution through enduring military occupation:
Two conclusions are inescapable from the fiasco of Afghanistan's presidential elections and the McChrystal assessment: There is no electoral solution to Afghan government's crisis of legitimacy, and there is no military solution to the challenge of the Taliban. And when observing the current Afghan conflict not from the perspective of America's post-9/11 intervention, but from Afghanistan's own quarter-century of warfare, a third conclusion becomes still more apparent: What we confront is not, in fact, an insurgency but rather a civil war — one whose resolution can only be found in a new decentralized Afghan politics based on the enduring, if ugly, realities of power there, and not through another decade of Western military intervention.
If there is one lesson to be drawn from the withdrawal of Hamid Karzai's main rival from the second round of the elections — and his own subsequent appointment as president for another term — it is that the ability of outsiders to influence the existing politics of Afghanistan is now near zero, even when the object of our entreaties is a politician whose very existence has long depended entirely on Western support and funding. Like a patient rising from a hospital bed after a near-death experience only to rob his doctor blind on the way out the door, Karzai has conclusively demonstrated that his utility to Western interests — as well as to the Afghan people whom he's grossly robbed of a chance for representative government — is over.
As previously discussed on this Site, while much of the US-based discourse on Afghanistan frames the discussion in terms of defending the "Afghan people" and "Afghan nation" from the Taliban, in truth, the Taliban are a multifaceted, multi-ethnic coalition of cobbled together factions that are, by most accounts, almost entirely comprised of Afghans. In fact, the term "Taliban" has become a euphemism for any and all groups opposed to the Karzai government and NATO forces. The euphemism has been so liberally applied that the current compilation of opposition fighters commonly referred to as "Taliban" in government and media reports is, in actuality, almost entirely non-Taliban.
Nearly all of the insurgents battling US and NATO troops in Afghanistan are not religiously motivated Taliban and Al Qaeda warriors, but a new generation of tribal fighters vying for control of territory, mineral wealth, and smuggling routes, according to summaries of new US intelligence reports.
Some of the major insurgent groups, including one responsible for a spate of recent American casualties, actually opposed the Taliban’s harsh Islamic government in Afghanistan during the 1990s, according to the reports, described by US officials under the condition they not be identified.
“Ninety percent is a tribal, localized insurgency,’’ said one US intelligence official in Washington who helped draft the assessments. “Ten percent are hardcore ideologues fighting for the Taliban.’’
US commanders and politicians often loosely refer to the enemy as the Taliban or Al Qaeda, giving rise to the image of holy warriors seeking to spread a fundamentalist form of Islam. But the mostly ethnic Pashtun fighters are often deeply connected by family and social ties to the valleys and mountains where they are fighting, and they see themselves as opposing the United States be cause it is an occupying power, the officials and analysts said.
In other words, the conflict in Afghanistan is a civil war. The civil war has ethnically tinged roots that reach past to the days preceding the US invasion. Robert Naiman had an informative piece on the subject which, itself, paraphrased some recent Times articles: