Rory Stewart: “nonsense” policy in Afghanistan
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Rory Stewart in professorial mode
The Kipling-esque adventurer and writer Rory Stewart – the man who walked alone across Afghanistan and made a best-seller of The Places In Between — was quoted by Nicholas Kristoff in the Times the other day dismissing the Obama rationale for escalating the war as “nonsense.”
In our second annual conversation yesterday, in Boston, Rory Stewart expanded on the theme. He teaches now at Harvard’s Kennedy School when he’s not running a model redevelopment project in the heart of old Kabul. I am listening respectfully here to a man who said recently in an FT interview, “I’m a bit rougher and tougher” than T. E. Lawrence! He sounds to me, through his careful Eton and Oxford delivery, like a recovering imperialist.
Short form: It’s a “mistaken” hope and theory that heavy doses of American money and military power can build a legitimate state in Afghanistan or defeat the Taliban.
Rory Stewart in seven-league boots
These are worthy objectives but they’re tasks that really can only be performed by Afghans, not by foreigners, and which are probably very long-term goals — a question of maybe years, or much more, decades. I think that in so far as Obama’s aim is simply to prevent Al Qaeda from becoming stronger, it’s not necessary for him to defeat the Taliban, or build a legitimate, effective, stable state. The Taliban is not very strong. The Taliban is not in a position to take a major city. It’s not the Taliban of ‘94. And even were they in the very unlikely event to take a city, it’s extremely unlikely that they’d invite Al Qaeda back… In fact the lesson of the last seven years is that Osama Bin Laden prefers to be in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, in part because Pakistan is a more established state and because Pakistani state sovereignty prevents US Special Forces from operating freely in their territory. A very fragmentary failed state of the sort the Taliban would be participating in if they were to increase their position in Afghanistan is not likely to provide much protection for Al Qaeda, and probably therefore unlikely to pose a considerably increased danger to the United States…
What worries me most about the troop increases is that they’re likely to precipitate … withdrawal. We tend to lurch from engagement to isolation, and from increases to withdrawal. My dream has always been to define a very limited ‘light footprint,’ because I believe a light footprint is a more sustainable footprint. What Afghanistan needs with the international community is a long-term, patient, tolerant relationship; not electroshock therapy, huge amounts of cash, huge numbers of troops, in an attempt to turn it around on a ninepin…
The international community is now in a bind… The United States has said ‘I can’t affort to fail in Afghanistan; this is the Number One threat to the world,’ and therefore it doesn’t really have much leverage over an Afghan administration. They can’t really threaten to reduce troops or leave Karzai to the Taliban so long as they say this is our front line on the War on Terror… It’s very dangerous in any relationship or situation to say failure is not an option, because it effectively renders you impotent. In order to deal with Afghanistan or Pakistan we need to be able to say our interests are not identical with yours. We don’t need to be here… The current situation, suggesting we have no alternative other than the current strategy, simply exposes us to being perpetually exploited. One way of putting is: if the Afghan administration has, as I believe, caught on to the fact that the reason we’re pumping so much money into their country is because they’re perceived to have the Taliban and Terrorists and Drugs, and that if they didn’t have those things we would treat them like Nepal, what possible incentive do they have to get rid of those things? …
I think the entire political culture suffers from an inability to be passionate about a moderate solution. The political culture finds it almost impossible to envisage anything other than increases or total withdrawal. Stuck in that binary opposition and taking into account both our obligations to the Afghan people and the risks posed by Afghanistan, you can see why the president is going for increases. Personally, though, I think he’s wrong. I think the light footprint we had in 2002 – 2003, when we were taking few casualties, when we weren’t pretending to be involved in nation building, when our troops didn’t go much outside the capital, and when at the same time Afghanistan was relatively secure and prospering, was the correct posture. And that we have been misled by our ambitions. We’ve bitten off more than we can chew. We’ve provided fuel for the Taliban insurgency by allowing them to present themselves as fighting for Afghanistan against foreign military occupation. And that our current policy is going to make all of those things worse.
Rory Stewart with Chris Lydon at Harvard, September 15, 2009.
The much longer form was delivered to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee today. The still longer text is at the London Review of Books.
September 19th, 2009 at 2:41 am
To sustain our economy they tell us we must we keep spending…
So, would not the appropriate analogy be (considering the overwhelming portion of our economy is defense) we must keep warring?
Afghanistan is the perfect setting to conduct war games…it is so disparate that we can project a lack of feeling…the lack of a cohesive resistance tempers our guilt.
To rationalize the continued spending on missiles, we must create a demand for missiles, and thus we must find a place to spend the missiles we currently have. Afghanistan is delightful in its non-confrontationality.
September 19th, 2009 at 8:58 am
Rory Stewart almost hypnotically articulate and incisive — also precociously world-weary and depressed. I would be too. The wonderful writer Patrick Marnham wrote in the 60s about various militias in Afghanistan milling about with tall rifles, the fate of whose original owners — i.e. the Brits — he declined to contemplate…I’ve been reading for rather too long a fascinating book bearing slightly on the, subject The Shape of Ancient Thought, by Thomas McEvilley, 20 years in the making:
http://www.amazon.com/Shape-Ancient-Thought-Comparative-Philosophies/dp/1581152035/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1253364032&sr=1-1
…Which explores the relations between Eastern and Western thought. (A good subject for an interview.) Never the twain shall meet, but they do, have. A polite distance free of bombs perhaps the best way of going about things.
September 20th, 2009 at 10:49 am
this conversation touches on those impossible post-imperial questions that the u.s. will have to face (but will try to erase) about Afghanistan and Iraq for a long, long time. the discussion about an American footprint in Afghanistan, “we tend to lurch from engagement to isolation, from troop increases to withdrawal,” captures this coming crisis of a post-imperial space, in the sense that neither ‘engagement’ or ‘isolation’ will solve the critical question over sovereignty: who will ‘legitimately’ govern Afghanistan or Iraq? I propose, this is an unsolvable crisis without some major revisions to our thinking about the ‘international’ system, that currently relies on ’state sovereignty’ as the key form of legitimation. All I can say is that I’ll be interested to see what the diplomats and legislators come up with.
In the meantime, if the u.s. admitted these wars were wrong, and that its state-building efforts are, as Rory Stewart believes, a lost cause… a flood of new questions arise: what responsibility do we have to repay for the enormous destruction and literally countless deaths we’ve done to the people in Iraq and Afghanistan (in some material, ethical way, and on someone else’s terms), rather than rebuild the ’states’ “our” way, according to ‘our’ designs? It’s great to hear someone at the Carr Center criticize the ‘counterinsurgency’ (Rory is a much needed counterbalance to Sarah Sewell in that way), but when it fails, the u.s. should be very careful to resist blaming the Afghan and Iraqi people for the mess it finds itself in, until ‘we’ in the u.s. face the contradictions and outright crimes of “our” history that is now forever entangled in Afghanistan and Iraq.
September 22nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
Here is another opinion rendered in March of this year that of Sarah Chayes former NPR reporter,who lives in Kandahar where she set up a cooperative (Arghand) several years ago, one that makes soap and beauty products from natural ingredients. ( In fact- full disclosure- I have a basket on display of these wonderful soaps which come wrapped in Afghan newspaper).
She writes more on her website and blog: http://www.sarahchayes.net/
She recently spoke about the elections being totally corrupt… as she foresaw in July in this interview, which I recommend, with Rachel Maddow about why she has become an advisor to McChrystal and ISAF:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWFMGv7-wyE
and here on 9/16/09 about the corruption “sham” of the recent election. It sounds like it should have led to a run-off with Abdullah Abdullah. At the moment, she says this ( illegitimacy) puts the whole US/int’l strategy in question.
I am comparing what I hear from Sarah Chayes with Rory Stewart’s with Chris (and previously here) and, the other day, interviews with George Packer, Wilkerson Daniel Ellsberg ( yes he of the Pentagon Papers)…. where they intersect, where they differ.I totally appreciate all of this discussion.
This is a big issue for us, for Obama’s presidency, and not the least at all for the Afghanistani people. And, I don’t think it is so easy as being about “empire”- which I don’t believe really can be in this globalized world.
So thank you for Rory Stewart’s very well articulated nuanced view.
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:53 pm
http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=431
September 29th, 2009 at 6:49 am
The more I hear about Afghanistan, the more I am drawn to a position that rather shocks me. What is wrong with letting the Karzai government fall to the Taliban?
The Taliban swept to power a year after first organizing its efforts. Why? Because the “victors” in the anti-Soviet campaign were viciously corrupt warlords.
The Taliban are resurgent, despite being clobbered by the US and etc. Why? In largest part, it is a replay of 1994; the Karzai government is dominated by viciously corrupt warlords, and many of them the same individuals.
Do they (Dostum, Farhim, Ismael Khan, etc) have no shame from their earlier defeat?
Can we not see that this is the binary choice facing the country? Despite billions in aid, this is where the country is irresistibly drawn, a choice between murderous kleptocracy and theocratic despotism.
I conclude by saying that, as bad as the Taliban are, they are preferable to Dostum, Farhim and their ilk.