The Mark
There are no military solutions to Afghanistan’s complex problems of bad governance and severe underdevelopment.
Month: September 2010
War and Diplomacy – Part II: A Way Out of Afghanistan?
Afghanistan is a crossroads of civilizations and an almost bewilderingly complicated place.
Over the past few centuries, however, it has more often than not been treated as a pawn in the “great game”. The country has also developed a reputation as the “graveyard of empires”, not least because outsiders’ forces have never succeeded in pacifying the place. Internal stability, such as it has ever existed, has been predicated typically upon de-centralized, and frequently shifting political arrangements between a weak centre and roiling periphery.
Reeling from the shock of 9/11 and in the absence of adequate reflection, in late 2001 NATO in effect took sides in a complex ethnic, tribal, sectarian, and geographically rooted civil war. Nine years later, the coalition not only has failed to prevail, but the continuing presence of foreign forces, viewed widely as occupiers by the population, has exacerbated the conflict. The Russians learned the same lesson not long ago, and at great expense.
Such is the burden of history. Yet today – if it ever was – Afghanistan is no longer the epicentre of transnational terrorism. That pretext for contemporary Western involvement no longer exists, and indeed, was achieved by early 2002. Al-Qaeda camps had been dismantled and the membership dispersed . The Taliban, for their part, had and still have mainly national goals with neither the capability nor the intent to threaten international security. The two organizations should never have been conflated.
The Lesson of Iraq
The Mark
One hundred years after “the war to end all wars,” diplomacy remains in the margins of international policy. Will Iraq help us see our error?
War and Diplomacy – Part I
The media has been littered over the past week with reports concerning the departure from Iraq of the last US combat troops. On the margins of that coverage, and to a greater extent in the think tank press, questions have been posed about the conduct of the war, its costs, what may have been achieved, whether or not it is really over, and what lies ahead.
More remarkable, however, is the speed and extent to which the Iraq war, like a bad dream the morning after, has faded from public consciousness.
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While doing the research for Guerrilla Diplomacy, I came across an especially poignant quotation attributed to the Roman senator and historian Tacitus. He wrote:
They created devastation, and called it peace.
Much the same could be said about Iraq in September 2010. By the time the shock and awe campaign began in the spring of 2003, it had become clear that in the USA, foreign policy had in large part become an instrument of war, rather than vice versa.