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Old Thursday, March 08, 2012
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Default Fantasy and reality in Afghanistan

Fantasy and reality in Afghanistan

By Fareed Zakaria

The controversy over the desecration of copies of the Koran in Afghanistan and the murder of Americans that followed is, on one level, one moment in a long war. But it also highlights the difficult and ultimately unsustainable aspect of America’s Afghan policy. President Obama wants to draw down troops, but his strategy remains to transition power and authority to an Afghan national army and police force as well as to the government in Kabul, which would run the country and its economy. This is a fantasy. We must recognize that and pursue a more realistic alternative.

The United States tends to enter wars in developing countries with a simple idea — modernize the country, and you will solve the national security problem. An articulation of that American approach came from none other than Newt Gingrich during a 2010 speech at the American Enterprise Institute. We are failing in Afghanistan, Gingrich argued, because “we have not flooded the country with highways, we haven’t guaranteed that every Afghan has a cellphone, we haven’t undertaken the logical steps towards fundamentally modernizing their society, we haven’t developed a program to help farmers get off of growing drugs.”

Now, assuming that every Afghan got a cellphone and could travel on great highways, here is what would not change: The Afghan national government does not have the support of a large segment of its population, the Pashtuns. The national army is regarded as an army of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras — the old Northern Alliance that battled the Pashtuns throughout the 1990s.

And, simply put, Afghanistan’s economy cannot support a large national government with a huge army. (The budget for Afghan security forces is around $12 billion. That is eight times the amount of the government’s annual revenue.)


As America has discovered in countless places over the past five decades, there are problems with the nation-building approach.

First, it is extremely difficult to modernize a country in a few years.

Second, even if this were possible, the fundamental characteristics of that society — ethnicity, religion, and national and geopolitical orientation — would persist.


In Iraq, the United States believed it had an opportunity to remake the country into a model pro-Western democracy. It went in with grand ambitions and an unlimited budget. Today, Iraq has become a Shiite-dominated state that has systematically excluded Sunnis, driven out almost all of its Christians, and tilted its foreign policy toward Iran and Syria. The Kurds have effectively seceded, creating their own one-party statelets in the north. Iraq is much, much better off than it was under Saddam Hussein’s rule, but the country has developed along the lines of its history, ethnicity and geopolitics — not American ideological hopes.

We need to come to terms with Afghanistan’s realities rather than attempting to impose our fantasies on it. That means recognizing that the Afghan government will not magically become effective and legitimate — no matter how many cellphones we buy or power lines we install. Because they represent many Pashtuns, the Taliban will inevitably hold some sway in southern and eastern Afghanistan. More crucially, we will not be able to stop Pakistan’s government from maintaining sanctuaries for Taliban militants. And no guerrilla movement that has had a set of sanctuaries — let alone the active help of a powerful military like Pakistan’s — has ever been eliminated.

Accepting reality in Afghanistan would not leave America without options. Even with a smaller troop presence, we can pursue robust counterterrorism operations. We will be able to prevent the Taliban from again taking over the country. The north and east — populated by Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras — will stay staunchly opposed to the Taliban. We should support those groups and, more crucially, ally with the neighboring countries that support them. The natural, and historic, allies of the Northern Alliance are India, Iran and Russia; they have permanent interests that will keep them involved in the region. We should try to align our strategy with those countries’ strategies (obviously, the alignment will be tacit with Iran).


The United States could, of course, maintain its current approach, which is to bet on the success of not one but two large nation-building projects. We have to create an effective national government in Kabul that is loved and respected by all Afghans, whatever their ethnicity, and expand the Afghan economy so that a large national army and police force are sustainable for the long term. To succeed, we would also have to alter Pakistan’s character to create a civilian-dominated state that could shift the strategic orientation of the Islamabad government so that it shuts down the Taliban sanctuaries and starts fighting the very groups it has created and supported for at least three decades. Does anyone really think this will happen?

WP: Fareed Zakaria
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ANOTHER WAR IN THE MIDDLE EAST?
By Fareed Zakaria

President Obama has been trying to cool down the war fever that suddenly gripped Washington early this month. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit and the flurry of statements surrounding it have created a dangerous dynamic. It is easy to see how things move toward war. It is difficult to see how they don’t.

The pressure is building on Iran, but there are no serious discussions of negotiated outcomes. Israel has been ever more explicit in saying it may launch an attack by summer. Obama has amped up his threats of military strikes too, limiting his room to maneuver. And Republican presidential candidates will instantly denounce any negotiated solution—no matter how comprehensive the inspections it requires—as a sellout.

So either Iran suddenly and completely surrenders—and when have countries done that under foreign pressure?—or Israel will strike. And the Israeli government knows that the window presented by the U.S. political season is closing. If it were to strike between now and November, it would be assured of unqualified support from Washington. After November, the American response becomes less predictable. The clock is ticking.

Before we set out on a path to another Middle East war, let’s remember some facts. First, Iran does not have nuclear weapons. And the evidence is ambiguous as to whether it has decided to make them. The U.S. intelligence community has twice concluded that there is no evidence that Iran has made a decision to build a nuclear weapon. London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies released a report in February that concurred. On the other hand, the International Atomic Energy Agency recently suggested that Iran could be working on some military aspects of a program.

What if Iran does manage to develop a couple of crude nukes in several years? Obama says a nuclear Iran would set off an arms race in the Middle East. But a nuclear North Korea has not led the two countries directly threatened by its weapons—South Korea and Japan—to go nuclear. Saudi Arabia and Egypt did not go nuclear in response to Israel’s developing a large and robust arsenal of nuclear weapons. After all, Egypt has gone to war with Israel three times. By contrast, it has not been in a conflict with Iran. Were the U.S. to provide security guarantees to Iran’s neighbors, as Hillary Clinton has proposed, it is highly unlikely that any of them would go nuclear.

Obama has explained that a nuclear Iran would be a problem like India and Pakistan with their nuclear weapons. But India and Pakistan went to war three times in 30 years before they had nuclear weapons. Since they went nuclear, they have been restrained and have not fought a war in 40 years. That case shows the stabilizing, not destabilizing, effects of deterrence. If Israel genuinely believes that deterrence doesn’t work in the Middle East, why does it have a large nuclear arsenal if not to deter its enemies?

Iran’s weapons could fall into the hands of terrorists, says the President. But would a country that has labored for decades to pursue a nuclear program and suffered huge sanctions and costs to do so then turn around and give the fruits of its efforts to a gang of militants? This kind of reasoning is part of the view that the Iranians are mad, messianic people bent on committing mass suicide. When General Martin Dempsey explained on my CNN program last month that he viewed Iran as a “rational actor,” he drew howls of protest.

Dempsey was making a good point. A rational actor is not necessarily a reasonable actor or one who has the same goals or values that you or I do. A rational actor is someone who is concerned about his survival. Compared with radical revolutionary regimes like Mao’s China—which spoke of sacrificing half of China’s population in a nuclear war to promote global communism—the Iranian regime has been rational and calculating in its actions. In an essay in the Washington Monthly, former senior U.S. intelligence official Paul Pillar writes, “More than three decades of history demonstrate that the Islamic Republic’s rulers, like most rulers elsewhere, are overwhelmingly concerned with preserving their regime and their power—in this life, not some future one.”

In fact, the entire punitive strategy against Iran is premised on the notion that Iran is calculating the costs of these pressures and will change its policies as a result. The question right now is not whether Iran can be rational but whether the U.S. and Israel can carefully evaluate the consequences of a preventive war—inside Iran and beyond—and weigh them against its limited and temporary benefits
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