History shows that after the war comes the real battle The US must look to the past to determine Afghanistan's future
Martin Woollacott Friday March 8, 2002 The Guardian [UK] It is usually supposed that victory crowns a military campaign. In Afghanistan it seems to be working out the other way round. The nasty skirmishes between rival bosses in the regions, the violence that took the life of a member of the interim authority in Kabul, the very limited reach of the small international force in the capital, and now the genuine battles going on with Taliban and al-Qaida forces near Gardez all suggest that much remains to be done. Hamid Karzai, the chairman of the authority, may say that the fighters in the Shahkot mountains are the "last isolated base of terrorism" in his country, but such sentiments have been heard before and in any case the Taliban and al-Qaida are far from being the country's only problems. Afghanistan always surprises, old hands say. But historically the pattern of victories followed by hard campaigning has actually been the norm. Just as in Vietnam, the Americans should have looked at history but on the whole did not, so they - and other countries - should consult the same lesson book in Afghanistan. This is not so much a matter of the now rather too often retold stories of Afghan resistance to invaders as of looking at the general nature of colonial war. When the French landed near Algiers in 1830, for example, they were tackling a problem, the Barbary pirates, not wholly unlike that represented by al-Qaida. They overwhelmed the dey of Algiers within a month, and pirates of the maritime kind soon afterwards. Then the hard part began as the French moved inland. As one French soldier wrote, this time of Indochina, "The pirate" - meaning the rebel of any kind - "is a plant which grows only on certain grounds". The land must be enclosed "and then sow it with good grain which is the only means to make it unsuitable to the tares". The French identified two phases in colonial war, that "of the winning of apparently decisive victories, followed by that of insurrection". Later, out of difficult experience in north Africa and Indochina, outstanding commanders such as Louis Hubert Lyautey focused on a third phase, in which the prime function of their forces was not to fight battles, although this was sometimes necessary, but to be, in his phrase, "an organisation on the march". French arms were to be exerted to create markets, expand trade, and build schools, and to reinforce certain strengths of the indigenous society. In Morocco, Lyautey believed that the opening of department stores in Casablanca and the holding of a great agricultural fair there in 1915 were achievements on a par with any of his military successes. Of course much of the civilising mission was dross, concealing barbarities, land theft, and a ruthless attitude to the values of the conquered. But the part that was genuine, in this soldier's version, was the recognition that if military operations are not part of a comprehensive approach to a society, they lead nowhere, even if they are technically successful. The distinction the American government makes between fighting a war and nation building is the antithesis of this approach. The point that was apparent to Lyautey and to successful imperial commanders of other nations, if in a deeply distorted way, was that the two are indivisible. The debate over the place of outside military force in Afghanistan revolves around questions Lyautey would have recognised. Do you make extensive use of auxiliaries because they know the ground and spare you casualties? The Americans did at Tora Bora, only to find their offers topped, according to plausible reports, by the Taliban, who paid handsomely to escape the trap. Do you take the risks of a country-wide occupation of both a military and civilian kind or do you depend on what the French would have called "columns", heavily armed expeditions dispatched here and there in response to emergencies, like the coalition forces now in the Shahkot range? What is now being reluctantly considered by Britain and other countries, and has been asked for by Hamid Karzai, is, after all, a dilute form of occupation. The talk is apparently of doubling the size of the international security assistance force to 9,000 and deploying it to some but not all of the regions. Some who have studied the problem think a body with a minimum strength of 20,000, deployed everywhere, and with ironclad guarantees of American military support, would be barely sufficient for the task. Mr Karzai, however, may be more interested in the uses of such a force in the north, the base area of most of his fellow members of the interim authority, than in the south and east. That is perhaps because the politics of the north are in a way more fractious. The fundamental question raised by the international presence in Afghanistan, political and military, is to what extent it is either realistic or proper to try to "change" Afghanistan. At one end of the spectrum is a limited patching up that accepts warlord power, religious conservatism and reaction, including the survival of the Taliban in some form, and does not do much to increase the strength of a weak central government. All that is required is that there be no room for al-Qaida and no new civil war. At the other end is a programme designed to diminish the warlords, alter religious attitudes, change relations between the sexes, transform the economy, and build up the centre. There are dangers in either direction. The minimal programme leaves in place people who in other coun tries would be in jail for violations of human rights, and does not tackle problems of injustice and ignorance. The maximal programme risks being just the latest version of the attempts at modernisation, under the monarchy and then under the communists, that have had such mixed and dangerous results. Either way, there is the possibility of creating a situation in which the "tares" could once again flourish. However, it may be that this is too black and white a picture. Three things in the near future will alter Afghanistan, according to Michael Griffin, the author of one of the best recent books on the country. One is money. The funds promised by the international community, although they have not yet really started to flow, do have a certain unifying effect on very diverse actors, since nobody wants to jeopardise their chance of a share. Then there is the return of the king, which may strengthen the sense of Afghans that they are one nation. The third is the coming Loya Jirga, which will pit the different forces against each other but, with luck and management, could turn out to be an exercise in rough democracy. What is evident, as far as the outsiders are concerned, is that an old colonial lesson still applies. Early victories are much less important than nurturing a realistic social project, and military means alone are insufficient to realise such a project. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
