On the other front

Five years after the Taliban's guests launched the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, how could we be failing in Afghanistan? Elisabeth Rubin writes in the Times Magazine,

The final draft of the U.S. military’s latest counterinsurgency manual, written under the direction of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, emphasizes that if you skimp on resources, endurance and meeting the population’s security requirements, you lose. Yet for the past five years, the Pashtun provinces have been plagued by a lack of troops and resources. James Dobbins, President George W. Bush’s former special envoy to Afghanistan, blames the White House, which he said had a predisposition against nation-building and international peacekeeping. The Bush administration rejected Afghan and State Department appeals to deploy a peacekeeping force in the provinces, dismissed European offers of troops and had already begun shifting military resources to Iraq, Dobbins told me, while U.S. troops in Afghanistan were to be limited to counterterrorism. “In manpower and money,” he added, “this was the least resourced American nation-building effort in our history.” In Afghanistan, the White House spent 25 times less per capita than in Bosnia and deployed one-fiftieth the troops. Much of the money that was pledged didn’t show up for years. “The main lesson of Afghanistan is low input, low output,” Dobbins said. “If you commit low levels of military manpower and economic assistance, what you get are low levels of security and economic growth.”

And why are we cutting and running in a place where our military can still succeed?

The next afternoon, we flew by helicopter to Andar, a nearby village. I sat in the fields with a former teacher named Anwarjan. The governor had appointed him district chief for all of Day Chopan, but Anwarjan could barely travel. The entire province, he said, was Taliban. Still, he was busy with Shields getting hundreds of kids to school in the central town. He had convinced the parents that Pakistan wants their children to stay wild and uneducated. “I have 300 students now,” he said. “They’re changed. They are polite, greet people, treat their mothers well. One man can change a generation.”

But his efforts, he said, were being undermined by the constant incursions of Taliiban from Pakistan. “The leader of Day Chopan, Mullah Kahar, lives in Quetta,” in Pakistan, Anwarjan said. “All the heads are there. So why don’t you do anything?”

U.S. intelligence knows the same thing. As Seth Jones, an analyst with Rand, told The New York Times earlier this year, Pakistani intelligence agents are advising the Taliban about coalition plans and tactical operations and provide housing, support and security for Taliban leaders. Sturek told me that the U.S. is well aware that the Taliban heads are in Quetta. On one side, he said, most U.S. policy makers argue that the Pakistanis are our friends. On the other side are those, including some in the military, who say, “Let’s just drive into Quetta.”

I often received updates from Charlie Company soldiers after leaving Afghanistan. One of their platoon was killed heading up to an observation post in Day Chopan. After they pulled out of Day Chopan, one of the soldiers told me, they heard that things weren’t going so well and that the Taliban were using the fact that the Romanians had taken over to claim the Russians were back. And another soldier wrote: “Our platoon got sent to a National Guard unit to help them out. They’ve lost like six people in the last week, but none of them were from our platoon.We were in Kandahar for a little while to get resupplied, and you’re notkidding about the Canadians going down.We kept having to go to the big ceremonies for their bodies to get loaded on the plane.It seemed like they were getting messed up pretty bad. I definitely don’t get the whole ‘success story’ thing.”