The Four Keys to Success in Afghanistan

by Fareed Zakaria

The war in Afghanistan is not going well; almost all trends are moving in the wrong direction. But we still have time to focus, improve our strategy, calibrate our means. It will help immeasurably if we keep in mind the basic objective of U.S. policy: "Our primary goal is to prevent Afghanistan from being used as a base for terrorists and extremists to attack the United States and its allies," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week. That is an admirably clear statement.

It is not that we don’t have other goals — education, female literacy, centralized control of government services, drug eradication, liberal democracy. But Afghanistan is one of the world’s poorest and most war-torn countries. At best, many of these objectives will be realized partially, over very long periods, and they should not be measured as part of military campaigns or political cycles. They are also goals not best achieved by military force. The U.S. Army is being asked to do enough in Afghanistan. Helping it to stay focused on a core mission is neither cramped nor defeatist but realistic. Such a plan for success would have four steps, each more complicated than the last.

Do counterinsurgency right. Despite David Petraeus’s demonstrable success in Iraq, U.S. forces in Afghanistan have, to this point, largely relied on more old-fashioned tactics — raids, search-and-destroy missions, air attacks. The needed number of additional U.S. troops is not large.

Afghanistan is predominantly rural, with a limited number of large population centers and roads requiring protection. And Gen. David McKiernan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, has already begun to focus on this approach. Between the addition of two to four U.S. brigades and a ramp-up of the Afghan army, there should be enough troops to execute a modified version of the new counterinsurgency strategy.

Make the Afghan government credible. The central government is widely seen as weak, dysfunctional and utterly corrupt. Unfortunately, many of its most corrupt elements are allies of the West and have thus gained a kind of immunity.

The most immediate way to enhance the legitimacy of the Afghan government would be to ensure that presidential and local elections take place this year without disruption and that viable alternative candidates are free to campaign. But elections are only one form of political legitimacy. There should be a much broader effort to reach out to tribal leaders, hold local councils an d build a more diverse base of support. The goal should not be a strong central government — Afghanistan is by nature decentralized — but a legitimate government with credibility and allies throughout the country.

Talk to the Taliban. The United States is properly and unalterably opposed to al-Qaeda. We have significant differences with the Taliban on many issues — democracy and the treatment of women being the most serious. But we do not wage war on other Islamist groups with which we similarly disagree (the Saudi monarchy, for example). Were elements of the Taliban to abandon al-Qaeda, we would not have a pressing national security interest in waging war against them.

In fact, there is a powerful military advantage to moving in this direction. Al-Qaeda is a stateless organization that controls no territory of its own; it can survive and thrive only with a host community. Our objective should be to cut off al-Qaeda from its allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Deprived of local support, al-Qaeda would be a much diminished threat. It is true, of course, that some elements of the Taliban might be closely wedded to al-Qaeda. But others are not.

Although the United States is in its seventh year of war in Afghanistan, not one Afghan was involved at any significant level in the Sept.11 attacks. All the plots that have been traced back to the region lead not to Afghanistan but Pakistan.

Solve Pakistan. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, it did not defeat al-Qaeda and its supporters among the Taliban. They simply fled to Pakistan, their original home. Pakistan has long viewed the various Islamic militias it created and helped fund — including the Taliban — as useful
weapons in its arsenal, low-cost ways to keep its historic foes, India and Afghanistan, off balance. For Islamabad to genuinely renounce these groups would require a fundamental strategic rethinking within the Pakistani military.

The civilian government in Pakistan, although weak and ineffective, is allied with the international community on these issues. It, too, wants a Pakistani military that knows its boundaries, does not run militant groups and conceives of the country’s national interests in less-confrontational terms. I don’t want to make this sound easy. It won’t be. Of all the tasks facing Petraeus, as head of U.S. Central Command, and newly appointed U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, this is the hardest. Yet if the problem with Pakistan cannot be solved, the war in Afghanistan cannot be won.

The writer is editor of Newsweek International and co-host of PostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address is [email protected].