Things to Watch Out for While Exiting Afghanistan By Beau Friedlander ― On Oct. 7, 2001, the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan with the goal of routing al-Qaeda and the repressive Taliban regime in response to the 9/11 attacks. Victory appeared to come quickly and easily, and the Bush Administration's attention turned to Iraq. Then the Taliban regrouped. Ten years later, there are more than 100,000 American troops in the so-called graveyard of empires fighting a resilient Taliban and its allies, victory remains elusive and undefined, and the costs — in dollars and lives — keep rising. What are the lessons of Afghanistan and how should the U.S. play out the endgame as it prepares to withdraw its troops by the end of 2014?

A Costly Evolution By Richard Haass — Ten years ago, American intelligence and military personnel went to war in Afghanistan to remove a government that refused to hand over terrorists who had successfully attacked the United States. The U.S. action was not simply one of retaliation; it was largely motivated by a desire to ensure that such attacks would not be repeated.

The goals of ousting the Taliban regime and ridding Afghanistan of most of the terrorists involved in the 9/11 hijackings were accomplished in short order. Nevertheless, American troops not only remained in Afghanistan but increased in number, ultimately reaching 100,000 under President Obama. The mission also expanded. U.S. soldiers fought not just the few terrorists they encountered but also the many Taliban who moved into and out of Afghanistan from bases in Pakistan. What began as a narrow, modest war of necessity evolved into a broad, ambitious war of choice.

It was a costly evolution. The Afghan war has claimed nearly 1,800 American lives and caused an additional 14,000 casualties. Direct costs are in the range of $400 billion and are increasing at the rate of $2 billion every week. It is only a matter of time before Afghanistan overtakes Vietnam as the longest war in modern American history.

The aim of U.S. policy is to create a competent Afghan government backed by capable army and police forces who can prevail over the Taliban or persuade them to give up. Alas, neither goal is likely to be achieved, given Afghanistan's ethnic divisions, its tradition of a weak center and Pakistan's provision of a sanctuary to the Taliban, many of whom are determined to fight on.

A more realistic policy would seek to make sure Afghanistan does not again become a base for global terrorists. This could mostly be done with drones and a much smaller troop presence that does some advising and training and conducts raids along the lines of the recent operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The U.S. is on course to put such a policy in place by the end of 2014; it could do so much sooner without jeopardizing the final outcome.

What should we learn from this decade? Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was on to something when he stated that any of his successors who advise the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined. It is not just that it promises to be too costly; it is also that the prospects for success are too small. Local realities matter. Nothing is more difficult than remaking another society. Except in the rarest cases, we should confine nation building to here at home, where it is sorely needed.

Haass is president of the Council on Foreign Relations

Karzai, a Corrupt Partner By Peter Galbraith — The U.S. cannot win in Afghanistan because there is no Afghan partner. With 140,000 U.S. and allied troops on the ground, NATO has taken territory from the Taliban. But sooner or later the Afghans will have to fill in with an Afghan army to provide security, a police force to ensure law and order and a government to provide honest administration and thereby win over the local population. These elements do not exist and cannot be created by the current Afghan regime.

President Hamid Karzai runs a country that Transparency International ranks as the second most corrupt in the world. One Karzai brother helped engineer the sweetheart deals that precipitated the collapse of Afghanistan's largest bank, and another, since assassinated, was reportedly involved in the drug trade and possible deals with the Taliban. Inside Afghanistan, Karzai is derided as being little more than the mayor of Kabul, while the outside world sees him as an increasingly erratic leader. Just before a scheduled visit with President Obama last year, Karzai accused the U.S. and the U.N. (and me personally) of rigging the elections that secured his second term. He then threatened to join the Taliban. Thanks to obvious fraud in those elections, many Afghans rightly see Karzai as an illegitimate President.

The U.S. has spent tens of millions of dollars on anticorruption programs, with no visible improvement to an Afghan government that U.S. officials privately compare to a criminal syndicate. In the contested southern provinces, local power brokers prey on civilians, abetted by a U.S.- and European-trained police force that is most effective at shakedowns. Successful counterinsurgency depends on a local partner. The Obama Administration should stop pretending that Karzai is that partner. They should stop spending money and lives on a strategy that, by its own logic, won't work.

Galbraith was deputy U.N. envoy to Afghanistan in 2009

A Crisis of Credibility By Anthony Cordesman — The U.S. is now in the 10th year of a war for which it seems to have no clear plan and no clear strategic goal. The new strategy that President Obama outlined in 2009 is in tatters. There are no clear prospects for stable relations with Pakistan or for getting more Pakistani support. The Karzai government barely functions. New elections must come in 2014, but the U.S. combat forces needed to support those elections are scheduled to withdraw that same year.

Already, U.S. and allied troop numbers are dropping to critical levels. No one knows what presence — if any — would remain after 2014. There has been some progress in creating an Afghan army, but far less is being done to build up the Afghan police force and justice system. Massive aid to Afghanistan has produced far too few tangible results, and the Afghan economy may go into a depression in 2014 in the face of the massive aid and spending cuts that would accompany a withdrawal.

It is time the Obama Administration faced these issues credibly and in depth. We need either a transition plan that provides a credible way to stay — with a clear accounting of the costs and the prospects for victory — or an exit plan that does not merely abandon the nearly 30 million Afghans or forfeit our future role in the region. We need a plan that Congress, the media, area experts and the American people can debate and commit themselves to support. If President Obama cannot provide such a plan within months and win the support necessary to implement it, then he will lose the war and fail as a President.

Cordesman holds the Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

In Defense Of Dialogue With the Taliban By James Fergusson — History teaches us that every insurgency ends, eventually, with dialogue, negotiation and political compromise — a lesson we British relearned the hard way during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Why is Afghanistan different? Even the Pentagon acknowledges that there can be no purely military solution to the impasse. The Taliban, for whom the ejection of the infidel invader is a religious obligation, have made it clear that they will not stop fighting until our troops leave.

There are those who believe the Taliban will never renounce al-Qaeda, which is the West's real enemy in the region and the only justification for our continued military presence there. Yet Abdul Salam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan — and ex-Guantánamo inmate — told me Mullah Omar would "set in stone" a promise to keep al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan should the Taliban return to the political fold. It must be in our interests to at least explore this possibility.

We often forget that the Taliban leadership incorporates a wide spectrum of opinions, from hard-liners to relative moderates. Our task is to reach out and engage with the latter and do all we can to ensure they win their internal debate about Afghanistan's future. Many moderate Taliban acknowledge the mistakes of the past. In particular, they may be readier now to share power with the non-Pashtun minorities — essential if the postwar peace is to be sustained. In the end, the only alternative to dialogue is ever more violence — and you cannot put out a fire with gasoline.

Fergusson is the author of Taliban: The Unknown Enemy
 

Security from The Bottom Up By Seth G. Jones — With the 2014 transition looming, some U.S. policymakers have developed lofty expectations that the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police can defeat the Taliban on their own. The stark reality is that Afghan national-security forces have never been capable of stabilizing the country by themselves.

Afghanistan is not a Western country. Security has always required a delicate balance between the central government and tribes, subtribes and clans. After seizing control in 1929, Nadir Shah remarked, "I will not be the King but the servant of the tribes and the country." It was a wise approach: his reign marked the beginning of the country's last stable period, from 1929 to 1978.

The balance between urban and rural power centers, which has been critical to past periods of peace in Afghanistan, suggests that the success of the national army and police will hinge, in part, on their ability to reach out to local communities.

One of the most effective shifts in U.S. strategy over the past year has gone virtually unreported: the creation of the Village Stability Operations program. It involves the deployment of U.S. and Afghan special-operations forces to help key villages establish local police, enhance formal and informal governance and improve development. Senior Taliban leaders have expressed growing alarm at the program, which has undermined their control of territory and denied them uncontested access to rural populations. Unlike in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan is a rural one. If the Afghan government is to have a chance of defeating the Taliban, its national-security forces must successfully leverage the country's many competing factions, village by village. They cannot succeed on their own.

Jones, a senior political scientist at the Rand Corp., is the author of In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan

Pakistan in Afghanistan: Friend or Foe? By C. Christine Fair — Ten years into the war on terrorism, Washington has at last embraced the real limits of U.S.-Pakistan coordination. That is, the U.S. understands that Pakistan will continue to support militants in India and Afghanistan as a means of accomplishing its foreign policy goals, and there's little the U.S. can do about it.

This sober appraisal was not always accepted. Early in the war, Pakistan was praised for its indispensable assistance — likely because the cooperation centered on a common foe: al-Qaeda. But as Pakistan watched the U.S. grow closer to India — not just passing the U.S.-India civilian nuclear deal but also encouraging India's presence in Afghanistan — it concluded that its interests and those of the U.S. were on a collision course.

In part because of that realization, Pakistan supported the Taliban's newly invigorated insurgency in Afghanistan. The Americans, however, resisted putting pressure on Pakistan for fear of compromising cooperation against al-Qaeda. Thus an ironic equilibrium was established: Pakistan received increasing financial "rewards" for its support of the global war on terrorism while it subsidized the very groups killing thousands of Americans and allies in Afghanistan.

With the American endgame in Afghanistan looming, U.S. officials can no longer ignore this duplicity. Pakistan's influence over the Afghan Taliban and other allies like the Haqqani network is a key obstacle to Afghans' being able to secure their country themselves. What is becoming increasingly clear is that a strategic relationship is not possible when strategic interests diverge so starkly. Observers on both sides are quietly asking whether the other is a problematic partner, an outright foe or both.

Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University's security-studies program