Getting Afghanistan Right

Memo to President-Elect Obama:

^{"Now it is folly to go against men who could not be kept under even if conquered, while failure would leave us in a very different position from that which we occupied before the enterprise."}

^{Thucydides, VI, 11.}

Wise words from the ancients, Mr. President-elect. I should expect with your education and curiosity of the world you would have read Thucydides at some point. If not, allow me to explain the context of this comment and how it pertains to your apparent plans for Afghanistan.

By the 16th year of the Peloponnesian War the Athenians had gained the upper hand against the Lacedaemonians. They were just then recovering from the plague and the raids by the Spartan soldiers of their fields and farms. They had a golden opportunity to end the war then and there. Alas, they chose to invade Sicily and it was their downfall. It broke the treasury, wrecked their navy and led to the dismantlement of the Athenian long walls. The Athenian empire dead on the shoals of Sicily and around the walls of Syracuse--a place their nation had no material interests in, a place strategically unimportant. All this because of hurbis--they chose to open a new front in a far away land and it ruined them.

Does any of this sound familiar? Sure, the analogy is not perfect, but history's lessons seldom are so cut and dried. But it is a similar state of affairs we find ourselves in Afghanistan. Except that we are not recovering economically, but sinking deeper into a desperate cycle of deflation. The time for 'fixing' Afghanistan, if ever there was one, has long since passed.

The time for pacifying Afghanistan was when the Taliban fled into the hills or went to ground after our 2001 invasion and conquest of the country. Two precious years were lost by your predecessor. Two years when the entire world could have been brought on board with us to help create a more moderate, stable nation--although one far from perfection. Perfection is not for us humans, it is the province of the gods.

That time was pissed away. But for a paltry $30billion we could have lifted Afghanistan out of its misery, restored hope, moderated it politics and broken the feudal warlords with the full force of the world behind us. And in its place a government for and by all the Afghans, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and Pashtuns. But we failed. Even worse: we didn't even try.

So, today we are faced with a nation riven by ethnic tensions and international rivalries. Iranians meddle in the West, Indians support the Northern Alliance, or what is left of it and Pakistan is enmeshed in a war of its own on the joint Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

The Petraeus template will not work in Afghanistan. Afghanistan cannot be won. All we can do is ameliorate the effects of the defeat, as we have done in Iraq--although that is still a dirty little secret the media won't report. But you sir, with your high level briefings and personal intelligence know the truth of the matter. And yet, you persist in the fantasy that Afghanistan can be won? How? We are a bankrupt nation, reeling from a housing, credit and general economic crisis the likes of which we have not seen in 70 years. How can a great power in this kind of shape, think Athens again but at the height of the plague, a nation that cannot even prevent piracy around the Horn Of Africa, expect to win a war 10,000 miles away? All this while trying to reform and rebuild at home? Just ask Lyndon Johnson how well that worked. Is this the legacy you want? Or would you prefer a Dr. Brydon moment?

The lesson of Afghanistan is clear: it is easy to conquer but impossible to hold.

Doubling down is not an option.