Former US President Lyndon B. Johnson once confided his dilemma about Vietnam: “I can’t get out. I can’t finish it with what I have got. So what the hell can I do?“
President Barack Obama is facing a greater dilemma. He would complete two terms in the White House without extricating the United States from either Iraq or Afghanistan. Of this, Afghanistan poses the greatest challenge to him. After all, this was the “good” war as opposed to the “dump” Iraq war he opposed.
Obama is never tired of saying that he wants all American troops out of Afghanistan by the end of 2016. But even before the Kunduz attack, he was considering various options to extend the 2016 deadline. So nobody was surprised when he decided, this month, to expand America’s involvement with more airstrikes against Taleban insurgents, giving the US military wider latitude to support Afghan forces, both in the air and on the ground.
Meanwhile, Afghan military’s losses are mounting. Warm-weather offensive has shown how bold and better organized Taleban insurgents are. They hold more territory now than at any time since 2001, when their regime was overthrown by the US-led invasion. What is more, the militants are extending their reach to previously peaceful areas, notably the northern provinces bordering the Central Asian states, and escalating the war in their southern heartland provinces.
Some 5,500 Afghan security forces were killed in 2015. This is far more than the NATO loss in a decade of war. According to a UN assessment, 2015 was the worst year yet for civilian casualties. More than 3,500 civilians died last year and 7,457 were injured, exceeding the 2014 total. A quarter of the civilian dead and wounded were children.
There is no dramatic change in the security landscape, though it is where most of the US reconstruction funding has gone — about 61 percent of the $113 billion Congress has appropriated since fiscal year 2002. Insurgents can attack any target any time of their choosing. There is no central government whose writ runs throughout the country.
What went wrong? In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, a US-led coalition went to Afghanistan to incapacitate Al-Qaeda responsible for the attacks and punish the Taleban who harbored Al-Qaeda. The US seemed to have accomplished this limited goal, but later developments proved that Taleban’s was a tactical retreat. In the meanwhile, America widened its war aims to include nation-building including promotion of democracy and improving human rights. Laudable as these objectives were, the US failed to realize that in the absence of an effective Afghan state, there is very little even a superpower could accomplish. The US also failed to realize that its and neighboring Pakistan’s objectives in Afghanistan could never be reconciled. The result is the present stalemate. The US can’t bring peace and stability to Afghanistan and Taleban can’t defeat the US military. But they don’t have to beat the US on the battlefield. All they have to do is survive until Americans run out of patience. America’s overtures to Taleban show that this has already happened.
So the only way out of this impasse is talks with Taleban. New Taleban leader Haibatullah Akhundzada has also expressed opposition to talks with the Afghan government while foreign troops still remained in the country. But this should be treated as a bargaining chip. As a first step, the US should work for lifting UN sanctions that ban Taleban leaders from flying internationally and tie up their financial assets.
Washington also needs to consider the release of Taleban prisoners and cessation of what Taleban terms “poisoning propaganda” against them. Taleban should realize that the US or Western powers will not announce a date for withdrawal of their troops before negotiations start. They should be more concerned with ending the agony of their people which began with the Soviet invasion of their country in 1978.
