Book explores what to do about Afghanistan

By Michael Francis
Special to the Chronicle
“Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battlefield” by Jonathan Steele (London, Portobello Books 2011) 450 pages, $26.

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During the next three years, probably the most important foreign policy decision facing any U.S. president is what to do about Afghanistan. President Obama has promised to bring troops out by the end of 2014, but it is not clear how he is going to do it. With the exception of Ron Paul, the Republican candidates decry this commitment because, they say, we have not “won” the war and Afghanistan would fall again under the control of the Islamic extremist Taliban.

The author of this book has been a global affairs reporter for the British newspaper the Manchester Guardian and traveled to Afghanistan often since the Russian intervention 35 years ago and then witnessed the U.S. move into the area.

Most of us have a poor recollection of the actual chain of events that led the Russians to go into Afghanistan in 1979.  Moscow acted because:

1. It feared that Islamic extremism in that country would spread discontent in regions of Russia with large Islamic majorities.

2. It worried about the growing influence of Iran on a country bordering both Russia and Iran.

3. It believed that the flow of oil from the Middle East would be interrupted.

4. And, they naively hoped it could help to help combat the extreme backwardness of a country that ranks as the poorest, worst educated country in the world.

This decision to send in the troops was made by the aging Rus­-sian leadership. To their credit, the Russians introduced the idea of educating women, of building westernized educational systems, and tried to thwart the growth of Islamic extremism. (Sound familiar?) But this experiment soon turned sour as the mujahedin, a loosely organized group of Islamic fundamentalists, war lords, and various ethnic groups, began waging a guerrilla war against the Russian occupation. The CIA helped the mujahedin because we feared allowing Russian power in the oil-rich Middle East.

Despite the government-controlled media, the war became increasingly unpopular in Russia. When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, he recognized that this was a losing cause and began trying to negotiate his way out. In 1989 the last Soviet troops left.  Most Afghans felt the Russians had treated them harshly and used tactics that killed many innocent Afghans while destroying towns and villages.

With the Russians gone, the loosely organized mujahedin fell apart as they attempted to rule the country. Eventually one particular group, the Taliban, won the military struggle to control the central government in Kabul. This group called for throwing out the foreigners and advocated an extreme Islamic fundamentalism that made neighboring Islamic countries uneasy. The author has an interesting perspective on the Taliban. He points out that many of the most widely circulated and gruesome stories of mistreatment of women were killings or mutilations that came out of the centuries-old concepts of honor which actually were contrary to Taliban religious teachings. 

No country sought to topple the Taliban until 9/11. Osama bin Laden — an outcast from most Islamic states — had been offered refuge there. The Taliban refused to give up bin Laden to America. With the cooperation of some allied troops — mainly British — and with the support of war lords who had opposed the Taliban, the United States military drove the Taliban from power.  Bin Laden, the reason the U.S. sent in troops, managed to escape to Pakistan.

So now the United States had control of the country and President Bush decided to build up a functioning democratic government. But in the process of taking over the country, and then trying to form a broadly-based new government, the U.S. came to be seen as occupiers who destroy towns and villages and called it pacification with collateral damage. We have propped up a government that is widely known as corrupt.

This book, which is by far the best volume I’ve read on the situation, has four basic themes.

+ First, it is almost impossible for a high-tech army to fight in a backward country without causing collateral damage that angers the native population.

+ Secondly, there is little loyalty to the central government in Kabul. Afghans are loyal to local clan leaders and war lords.

+ Thirdly, the United States is replicating what the Russians did (hence the “ghosts” reference although they lost 15,000 and we have “only” lost 1,500.

+ Finally, to form a central government, a lot of groups are going to have to be convinced that cooperation is a better solution than continued violence, and this is something they have to work out — Washington can’t dictate the basis of the peace settlement.

But if the situation is this bad, how does Washington get out gracefully?

On this point, author Steele has an interesting perspective. Washington has advocated a settlement that includes all the political actors (except the Taliban). Steele believes that no stable group can be set without including the Taliban. He argues that the group has largely realized that its religious extremism went too far. He argues that the current Taliban leadership has as its sole goal the exit of the United States. In support of this, he claims most Taliban now know educating women is important.

This long book gives a valuable and unique perspective on the Afghanistan issue. Whether, or how, we can disentangle ourselves from Afghanistan is going to be an increasingly controversial issue in the United States in the upcoming presidential election contest.

Michael Francis is a Sugarmill Woods resident who taught international politics and U.S. foreign policy at the University of Notre Dame for 39 years prior to retiring.