Endstate

"And mortgag'd States their Grandsires' Wreaths regret
From Age to Age in everlasting Debt;
Wreaths which at last the dear-bought Right convey
To rust on Medals, or on Stones decay."
-Dr. Johnson, Vanity of Human Wishes, 1749



June 2, 2007, Paktika Province, Lwara District, near FOB Tillman, Afghanistan - "Hafiz, ask him what the fuck he's so upset about. [...] The school? Yeah, someone put a bomb outside it, that's why we're here. [...] No shit. You're telling me that someone in the village blew it up? For what? [...] Because he didn't get the contract to build it in the first place? Seriously? What a war."

Nine years, two months, and twenty-one days ago, the United States embarked on OEF-A, our military's term for our nation's longest sustained active conflict: the war in Afghanistan. Our general mission was two-fold: first, to bring the perpetrators of the September 11th terrorist attacks to justice, and second, to restore some measure of stability to what is arguably the most devastated, war-torn, depleted country on the face of the Earth. Rounding the corner on OEF's 10th anniversary, it is difficult to tell how our results have measured up to our initial expectations. Quantifying those results is far from a mere academic exercise. As our country continues to pour billions of dollars and millions of man-hours (to say nothing of the lives, limbs, eyesight, and sanity lost by so many of our young soldiers) into Afghanistan, we must remove ourselves from our national pride and re-examine our national purpose.

In order to get a good sense of how we're doing, it's important to take a close look at what we're doing. The US military is involved in a variety of interconnected campaigns in Afghanistan, run through several different joint commands and encompassing a vast array of tactics, techniques, and procedures. The Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines are engaged in an ever-shifting mixture of nation-building, tactical-level diplomacy, civil engineering, and high-altitude guerrilla warfare. To characterize Afghanistan as a shooting war first and foremost misses the point, especially in recent years. Kinetic operations (shooting people) have given way to non-kinetic operations (building things for people, giving money / crops / hope to people, asking people questions, etc.) and the war has taken on an entirely different character. In doing so, we have shifted our focus from a mission based on holding accountable those who attacked us to a mission based on building a better life for the Afghan people.

The important question is why we have shifted focus. This is not meant to be rhetorical. In large part, many of the high-value targets we sought in Afghanistan and elsewhere were killed or captured during the earliest stages of the war. Of note, of course, is Osama Bin Laden, alleged mastermind of the September 11th attacks and the public face of Al Qaeda, who escaped into Pakistan during the war's early months. While we still routinely kill and capture commanders of various local Taliban forces, it is safe to assert that the high-value-target phase of the war is all but finished; the Taliban is now commanded from Pakistan's tribal regions by men who do not expose themselves to the tender caresses of guided bombs. Bin Laden has escaped; Pakistan has no intention of turning him over even if they were able to find him. This leaves us with the second general objective: restoring stability to a region ravaged by practically every kind of degradation, violence, and disease imaginable.

When I was a young 2nd Lieutenant serving in OEF VI, I rode along on a patrol to the village of Margah, about twenty kilometers north of FOB Bermel, Paktika. As a Fire Support Officer, I took on the secondary role of Company Intelligence Officer, and in this particular case was tasked with gathering a list of necessary medical supplies which would enable the village's resident doctor to better care for his charges. I met the man at his house, and sat down for tea with him and his attendant. We carefully inventoried his remaining supplies, and he made suggestions for what would help him take care of the village. After this was complete, I inquired as to the common health problems he faced. He discussed the question with my interpreter, who turned to me and said "Sir, he says there are many health problems here, but the ones he sees most frequently and is most concerned about are malaria, tuberculosis, and scarlet fever." This conversation has stayed with me throughout the years because of what it indicates about the general state of human existence in rural Afghanistan. There is no question: rural Afghan society currently exists at a standard of living unknown to the vast, overwhelming majority of the human population. Disease and famine routinely kill villages at a time, the country has been embroiled in a variety of military conflicts longer than most living Afghans can remember, and it is not uncommon for families to lack every possible civil service outside rudimentary subsistence agriculture and a polluted source of drinking water.

It is this level of isolation and lack of support that presents such an incredibly difficult problem to our nation-building efforts. Afghanistan has a government; one may even endeavor to argue that they have a legitimate, democratically elected government, although my own suspicions tend to counter this position. What they do not have is a government presence. The government is utterly and completely disconnected from the preponderance of Afghan civilians, and while this persists the war is, for all intents and purposes, un-winnable. Many of the Afghans I encountered during OEF VIII, my second tour, lived near enough to the border that they had no concept of national identity whatsoever. Their ethnic identity had replaced it fully; they believed themselves to be citizens of Waziristan. We sought to convince them that they were in fact Afghans, but I cannot say that I blame them for their skepticism.

It is truly difficult to conceive of this level of isolation from a Western perspective. A great many Afghan civilians never venture outside their home valley, or if they do, their travel is limited to extremely similar villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The border is generally thought of as more of a nuisance than anything; in most cases tribal and ethnic groups extend across it and family ties are in every case far more important than any national feeling. The government simply has next to no presence in many rural areas. When it does, it frequently takes the form of Afghan National Police (ANP) who are usually under-paid due to corruption in the higher ranks, badly armed, far from home, and utterly uneducated. In contrast, the rebel fighters commonly known as the Taliban generally operate in the area in which they grew up, they are well-armed and supplied, and are in many cases familiar to the locals. The ANP have gotten a (sometimes deserved) reputation for committing the crimes they are intended to stop, which makes exploitation of the gulf between civilians and the ANP even easier for the Taliban.

Let me pause to explain what I mean by "the Taliban." Contrary to the typical assumption, many if not most of the attacks carried out against Coalition forces in Afghanistan are supported in large part by what we would call "amateurs." Hard-line, fundamentalist, do-or-die Taliban are relatively few and far between, although they do exist and are extremely dangerous. Many attacks are planned by the Taliban, financed by the Taliban, and carried out by local dirt farmers for $30. Afghanistan is a land without hope for the future. The people have spent so long without education and civil services, without employment opportunities or a chance to learn new skills that they have oftentimes abandoned hope of ever attaining these things. The Afghan (Pashtun) conception of honor is centered around defense of a thriving family; having heirs to carry on one's name is of paramount importance. Heirs require marriage(s), which requires money. No money, and therefore, no honor is to be had as a dirt farmer. This is a serious problem to your average Afghan male. The offer of a few dollars to fire a rocket at the Americans or spot for an IED team is very difficult to turn down if you are living in the kind of poverty that causes large percentages of your village to starve and die if the rains are worse than usual. Killing these people in droves is not effective. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. There is little to do in rural Afghanistan for recreation, so sex is a frequent go-to cure for boredom when one has run out of hashish. Families are enormous. Every rocket-firing dirt-farmer who eats a missile for his trouble has ten brothers, all ten of whom are now willing to fight to the death to restore the family's honor.

Allow me a recap: here we are, nine years and change sunk into a country with a sub-30% literacy rate, a war that can't be won by killing the other team, and the greatest nation-building challenge on Earth in our shaking hands. My question is "How do we win?" We need an endstate, and I cannot conceive of what such a thing would look like. Make no mistake, the Taliban are religious only because it suits their methods. Like America's extreme Christian Right, they desire only power, and are willing to use faith or any other convenient tool to derive it from the citizens of their country. If we left today, the Taliban would be back tomorrow, the banners of their proclaimed faith held high in triumph. We have partially succeeded and partially failed in our first objective, and for our second objective, we have set up a Sisyphean task. Any progress we make in terms of infrastructure will eventually come to benefit the Taliban when we leave and they return.

We speak at length of "getting the population on our side" and "connecting population with government" but there is simply no hope that we will convince the rural folk of Afghanistan to set aside literally thousands of years of tradition and ethnic pride and oppose the Taliban who many of them see as the lesser of two evils if not outright good. They are oppressive, they are brutal, but they are the True Believers in the eyes of the populace, and that carries weight no government can compare to. Our temporary measures have no long-term goal. The amount of time and money required to achieve such an enormous transformation as would be required to truly oppose the Taliban is far more than any sane nation would commit. We can win every single battle, but we cannot win this war, because it cannot be won over the long, long term. There is no "win" to be had. The sooner we accept this and act accordingly, the more American time, money, and lives can be saved.

We have not lost the war in Afghanistan. I can't imagine how such a thing would even be possible, unless perhaps we had been militarily defeated by the Taliban in the war's opening days. We have been winning the shooting war up and down, left and right, for years running. Do not make the mistake of considering a call for withdrawal to be defeatist in any way. There is simply nothing to gain. Consider the best of all possible outcomes. In the best possible scenario, Afghan society will undergo a transformation by our actions there and reject religious fundamentalism and its adherents in order to adopt representative democracy. I agree, it seems unlikely. Now consider what that will gain us:

- Afghanistan would no longer be used as a training ground for terrorists. Pardon me if I don't flail my arms with barely-contained joy. The only thing we gain by pushing extremists out of Afghanistan is pushing them into a different country (in this case Pakistan, or about half of Africa.)

- The Afghan people would enjoy a higher standard of living. This would be good for them, but we do not invade nations in order to drag their people, kicking and screaming, into the fourteenth century. Perhaps this is merely a sign of my cold-hearted cynicism, but I do not think several trillion dollars and thousands of lives is a fair trade for bringing running water to the people of tribal Afghanistan.

There is simply no point in continuing. There would not be much of a point in continuing if the war was completely free and did not risk American soldiers. As it stands, it is utterly absurd to commit troops to a war that we cannot win and would not benefit from winning if we could. Our government's reluctance to be perceived as weak is costing us human lives on a daily basis.