What will our expedition to Afghanistan teach us?

[TheCurmudgeon]

Democracy to this end does not create legitimacy because it idealises freedom, but because it creates a mechanism for the people to hold the government to account for failed promises.

Not really, that is a common misconception. Democracies are designed to allow the general population the ability to have input in the political process, but it really does not hold anyone responsible for anything. It is too slow. In the American Federal system people are elected for two to six years. Once elected, it is very difficult to get someone out. If it was really designed to hold people accountable it would have a recall process that would be on a regular basis. I can only think of one recent instance of that happening, and it was a state governor, not a federal Senator, Representative, or President.

[jcustis]

Gents,

Talk of democracy, legitimacy, chicken and eggs, is fascinating and deep stuff, but I am going to prune it off into its own thread shortly.

Please take a tactical time out and reserve this thread for discussions of more concrete Afghanistan issues.

[mustardobardo]

Not really, that is a common misconception. Democracies are designed to allow the general population the ability to have input in the political process, but it really does not hold anyone responsible for anything. It is too slow. In the American Federal system people are elected for two to six years. Once elected, it is very difficult to get someone out. If it was really designed to hold people accountable it would have a recall process that would be on a regular basis. I can only think of one recent instance of that happening, and it was a state governor, not a federal Senator, Representative, or President.

Before we get canned - you are confusing practice and theory. First, two to six years is very regular in political terms. Moreover, democracy is 100% designed to allow the general population to hold politicians to account - do individuals find ways to subvert that mechanism, absolutely. And it is to the detriment of our systems that we have not updated them over the years to iron out these kinks. When that happens though the system is no longer democratic. However, because that happens so often in practice it does not take away from the fact that democracy's principle purpose is to create a responsive and accountable government.

In terms of Afghanistan I think this is a fundamental question. In Afghanistan we were too quick to equate democracy/elections with good governance, and that led to rushing through a poorly designed constitution that did not in anyway reflect the structure of society in Afghanistan. This led to 'democracy' being coopted by vicious powerbrokers rather than having a pacifiying effect on them as we would hope, essentially making the government as undemocratic as ever. Good governance is the absolute key to defeating an insurgency through the methods we espouse. If you make improvements in that area everything else falls into place because you create a bottom-up pressure on the insurgency to use political means to support those it claims to represent. The biggest lesson we need to learn is that you cannot take short cuts on making sure that the system of government reflects and mitigates potential cleavages in society. We have suffered every minute of this campaign and are still suffering today from our failure to do this in 2002, and one way or another the highly centralised formal system of government we currently see in Afghanistan cannot last.

[Bob's World]

In the most fundamental terms, free from the spin of any institutional or nationally promoted definitions of any of these terms, I think it is important to never lose sight of the fact that "Insurgency" - "Democracy" - "Tyranny" are all stops on the same line, separated only by ""Legality."

Democracy allows for legal, internal, populace-based, challenges to governance. When the legality of such effective challenge is denied to some part or whole of the affected populace one has illegal challenge. That is insurgency. When the incumbent acts illegally to stay in power one has tyranny.

So, even in the United States where we have a form of democracy, if a political challenger resorts to illegal means to attempt to gain office, it is insurgency. If an incumbent politician violates the law in an effort to stay in office it is tyranny. Sadly we often have a good bit of both.

These are not absolutes, where there can only be insurgency or democracy or tyranny - these conditions typically co-exist, separated by shades of grey and weighted based upon the dynamics of any particular point in time.

Now take that to Afghanistan: Democracy dedicated to the formal exclusion of the Taliban is Tryanny. Democracy that allows no legal vehicle to challenge the Northern Alliance-based GIRoA established by the US and NATO provokes insurgency. When we set out by design to create a "Democracy" that foments both Tyranny and Insurgency, it is not really democracy at all.

It is popular to believe one can resolve such things from "the bottom up." I have yet to see where that has been true, and frankly struggle to visualize how one could make it work. But certainly one can create these problems from "the top down" - after all, that is what we did in Afghanistan.

[KenWats]

Not really, that is a common misconception. Democracies are designed to allow the general population the ability to have input in the political process, but it really does not hold anyone responsible for anything. It is too slow. In the American Federal system people are elected for two to six years. Once elected, it is very difficult to get someone out. If it was really designed to hold people accountable it would have a recall process that would be on a regular basis. I can only think of one recent instance of that happening, and it was a state governor, not a federal Senator, Representative, or President.

I would disagree with you, to a point. Gross abuses (like say, former representative Weiner, former Governor Spitzer, etc- I'm offering these examples because they're on my mind and somewhat familiar to me) can be called to account in a representative system by putting pressure on their associates who are up for reelection soon. If Elliot Spitzer was Saddam Hussein's brother in law, I have no doubt he would have been left in his position.

[ganulv]

I was looking over the Afghanistan-related articles on my laptop and found an article from 2000 which seems to have aged well. The concluding paragraph:

The disintegration of the state paradoxically opens such possibilities, though the criminalized economy has created interests that will resist it. Peacemaking also has dangers: attempts to exercise economic pressure on Pakistan risk precipitating a worse crisis there. Attempts to weaken or replace the Taliban could easily lead to the return of anarchy and predation and a yet more bloody civil war. But unless peacemaking can transform powerful economic actors into agents of peace, it will be limited at best to halting fighting in one place before social and economic forces provoke it once again elsewhere in this dangerous region. Without such an effort, spread of both conflict and the regional war economy remain the most likely prospect.

[davidbfpo]

There are no new lessons here, only one rather important old precept: before you engage in a war, understand the environment you are going into, precisely and realistically what it is you are trying to achieve and will it be worth the cost? In other words have a strategy.

A pithy comment by a former UK civil & military veteran of recent conflicts, Frank Ledwidge, whose views are not "on message" for officialdom. It comes from pre-publication publicity for his new book - so a fuller post on The UK in Afg thread.

Link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013...tain-37bn-book

[omarali50]

Why the doom and gloom? it was an unnecessary, costly, mismanaged boondoggle, but its not like the US has lost the war. In fact, NATO is on the verge of victory.
From an American citizen's perspective, the war (and other expensive adventures undertaken in the name of the war on terror) are/were loaded with incompetence, corruption, honest mistakes, dishonest mistakes etc. But that does not necessarily mean its ended in historic defeat (it could, but it doesnt NECESSARILY mean that). In this case, NATO may yet "win".
It wont be pretty, but it wont be the straightforward defeat that, say, Vietnam was.
Overoptimistic?

[Madhu]

Why the doom and gloom? it was an unnecessary, costly, mismanaged boondoggle, but its not like the US has lost the war. In fact, NATO is on the verge of victory.
From an American citizen's perspective, the war (and other expensive adventures undertaken in the name of the war on terror) are/were loaded with incompetence, corruption, honest mistakes, dishonest mistakes etc. But that does not necessarily mean its ended in historic defeat (it could, but it doesnt NECESSARILY mean that). In this case, NATO may yet "win".
It wont be pretty, but it wont be the straightforward defeat that, say, Vietnam was.
Overoptimistic?

Human beings are not toys so it's hard to contemplate words like costly and boondoggle without thinking of them.

At any rate, we are not returning to the 90's, no matter what anyone says, so you have a point.

To answer your question further, because NATO envisioned a vastly different sort of victory, there is worry that it will all fall apart after the elections (who are the candidates even?) and if that is the case was another plan viable all along, less costly in blood and treasure? NATO and the US at the outset didn't think it would be like this and there will always be the wonder, "did it have to be this way?" Plus there is the sneaking suspicion that others benefited at the strategic level when all is said and done (the complaints about others getting the lucrative contracts while we provided the security, all that other geostrategic stuff about who's up and who's down....)

A lot of this thread isn't doom and gloom but a kind of after action report. Come on, you are a physician, you know how that goes, you examine a problematic "case" to see what you learned from it and not to make a mistake in the future

Human nature being what it is, though, if the American and Western economies recover some of their mojo and violence stemming from the region is negligible in the future, the national security apparatus will call it a messy victory of sorts. What those that physically secured it think is another story.

[Fuchs]

There is no way how the mess could still turn out to have a favourable cost/benefit ratio. It may turn out to be no defeat, but it will certainly be inappropriate to claim the war was won.

I suppose that -as usual- only a few hundred or few thousand people in the world will turn out to be "winners" in this war. This is going top include some who make a quick career out of it and some who are war profiteers.


There is a potential point that some females in Afghanistan may be winners, too - but I see no guarantee that the Taliban would have stayed in power for so long without intervention.