Last Chance in Bamyan

In 1979, in what promised to be an easy military operation, the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan.

Six years later, with his forces bogged down in a costly and open-ended guerilla war, Mikhail Gorbachev gave his generals a year to win, with whatever means they needed to succeed. They failed, and the Soviet government spent the following three years extricating its forces. The Afghan failure was a major factor in the collapse of the USSR.

The Soviets had been in Afghanistan for seven years when they gave up and decided to withdraw. By now the US has been there almost a year more.

There is no intention here to establish a moral equivalence between the US and Soviet campaigns. The Red Army was brutal and ruthless, killing up to 15 percent of the Afghan population, and driving half of the remainder out of the country.

By contrast, the US went into Afghanistan to get the man who had gratuitously murdered nearly three thousands American citizens. The Afghans fought on our side against the hated Taliban. We were welcome.

Yet, from the military point of view, we have done no better than the Soviets. After nearly eight years we face a growing insurgency that is established in nearly half of the country, and reaching into the other half. We need to understand why.

Clausewitz defined war as the pursuit of policy by other means.

The means here are our military forces. They are professional, well trained, extremely well armed, and they have fought honorably and well. They cannot be blamed.

If the fault is not with the means, then the policy must be wrong. We started out with all the advantages on our side and won a quick victory. It was downhill from there. Why?

Let us go back to the Afghans for a while. They are not a nation, but a confederation of ethnic and tribal groups. They are poor. They practice various forms of Islam, which in the West are mostly considered retrograde.

Nevertheless they are a proud people and they can fight. In the 19th century they took on the British Empire and kept it out of Afghanistan. They fought the Soviets and chased then out. They fought with us against the Taliban and won. Then we somehow lost them, and now the Taliban is back.

The reason is very simple: by our own choice, we changed from liberators to occupiers. Instead of giving Afghanistan back to its people we decided to keep and remold it to our own liking.

In a country that begs for a federal system, we set up an artificial central government with no popular support or power base. We disbanded the militias that fought for us and removed their leaders from power, and then proceeded to create our own Afghan army from scratch. We ran the place and still run it as if it belonged to us.

In other words, we left very little to the Afghans that they could call their own. We gave them freedom and democracy, but on our terms, not theirs. They don't own it, and people will not fight to keep what they do not own.

We do, however, have one opportunity, which may well be our last chance.

The local government we so laboriously created and propped up has disqualified itself by rigging an election. This gives us a brief window to change tack, rework our policies and possibly start again.

There are still places in Afghanistan that the Taliban has not penetrated, like Bamyan province. This is where we should focus first and foremost; provide whatever economic aid is needed; arm, train and support the locals, so they can defend what they have; promote local leaders and let them run their show. All in all, we must show that we will promote Afghan interests as they see them, rather than according to our own concepts.

Whenever this approach has been tried, as in Khost province for a while, it worked. If we applied it across the board, we could start pulling out our troops within a year or two.

It will require us to admit our mistakes and give up some cherished, if questionable, myths. But that is a small price to pay for a real victory.

Jacek Popiel was born in Poland and educated in Africa, Canada, and the US. His career spanned military service and international business development. He is currently a writer and his first book Viable Energy Now is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. For more articles and information: http://www.viableenergynow.com