Potentially Losing the Peace Times 2: Now Afghanistan

Pentagon report on Afghanistan criticizes war strategy: report

A retired army colonel commissioned by the Pentagon to examine the war in Afghanistan concluded the conflict created conditions that have given “warlordism, banditry and opium production a new lease on life.”

Retired Army Colonel Hy Rothstein, who served in the Army Special Forces for more than 20 years, wrote in a military analysis he gave to the Pentagon in January that the US failed to adapt to new conditions created by the Taliban’s collapse, The New Yorker magazine reported.

“The failure to adjust US operations in line with the post-Taliban change in theater conditions cost the United States some of the fruits of victory and imposed additional, avoidable humanitarian and stability costs on Afghanistan,” Rothstein wrote in the report.

“Indeed, the war’s inadvertent effects may be more significant than we think.”

From the New Yorker article:

A new report by the United Nations Development Program, made public on the eve of last week’s international conference, in Berlin, on aid to Afghanistan, stated that the nation is in danger of once again becoming a “terrorist breeding ground” unless there is a significant increase in development aid.

and again, re Rothstein:

As part of his research, Rothstein travelled to Afghanistan and interviewed many senior military officers, in both Special Forces and regular units. He also talked to dozens of junior Special Forces officers and enlisted men who fought there. His report was a devastating critique of the Administration’s strategy. He wrote that the bombing campaign was not the best way to hunt down Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Al Qaeda leadership, and that there was a failure to translate early tactical successes into strategic victory. In fact, he wrote, the victory in Afghanistan was not, in the long run, a victory at all.

And then there’s the response we’ve come to expect toward any criticism of this Administration:

Rothstein delivered his report in January. It was returned to him, with the message that he had to cut it drastically and soften his conclusions. He has heard nothing further. “It’s a threatening paper,” one military consultant told me. The Pentagon, asked for comment, confirmed that Rothstein was told “we did not support all of his conclusions,” and said that he would soon be sent notes. In addition, Joseph Collins told me, “There may be a kernel of truth in there, but our experts found the study rambling and not terribly informative.” In interviews, however, a number of past and present Bush Administration officials have endorsed Rothstein’s key assertions. “It wasn’t like he made it up,” a former senior intelligence officer said. “The reason they’re petrified is that it’s true, and they didn’t want to see it in writing.”

But, really, how bad is it? Isn’t Afghanistan a Bush success story?

A leading scholar on Afghanistan, Barnett R. Rubin, wrote, in this month’s Current History, that Afghanistan today “does not have functioning state institutions. It has no genuine army or effective police. Its ramshackle provincial administration is barely in contact with, let alone obedient to, the central government. Most of the country’s meager tax revenue has been illegally taken over by local officials who are little more than warlords with official titles.”

You have to subscribe to read the Current History article, but here’s the main point:

“Unlike Iraq, in Afghanistan an international consensus supports common goals for the entire operation, providing a test of whether the ‘international community’ is capable of effective joint action to make societies secure, even when their insecurity threatens the whole world. So far the results indicate that governments and international institutions are not up to the job.”

As Kerry asserted, and I believe:

…whatever we thought of the Bush Administration’s decisions and mistakes – especially in Iraq – we now have a solemn obligation to complete the mission, in that country and in Afghanistan

You can be both against the Iraq invasion and for the reconstruction efforts. In fact the reconstruction is more important in my book….not only morally, but in the long-term war on terror. Two war fronts may not have seemed impossible a year ago, but two reconstruction efforts should have struck someone in DC as perhaps beyond our capabilities.