Unanswered, as ever: How long a war?
Thursday, February 18, 2010
A FAMILIAR FRISSON has thrilled through the nerves of America’s media since Operation Mashtarak (meaning “together”) opened up – the by now long–awaited offensive against southern Afghanistan's Taliban.
Reporters as “embeds” … interactive electronic maps as studio eye-candy … armchair generals as pundits again -- the whole presentational caboodle inescapably recalling the heady earliest days of being a nation at war in the 21st century.
Excitement peaked even further with a John Le Carre-style touch - the CIA’s seizure (aided by unaccustomed cooperation from Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency) of the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, swiftly followed by accounts Mullah Abdul Salam, "shadow governor" for the Taliban in Kunduz province, being grabbed as well.
For me the news of Baradar's capture - broken by The New York Times, after a delay requested by the White House - arrived with some added piquancy because I’d just happened to screen an Israeli movie highlighting Mossad’s established mastery in this kind of covert operation. That fictional thriller (director Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water from 2004) was then overtaken by a true, and also Israel-related event, when an alleged Mossad team targeted Palestine's Hamas movement, and in particular its arms-procurer and strategist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh who was staying in a Dubai hotel.
Each of these strikes, both the imaginary and the real, displayed a frequent Mossad hallmark – the agents simply exterminated the man they wanted. (There’s an oddity, though, in that the real-world attack in Dubai had an un-Mossadish sloppiness to it, like the killers being recorded by security cameras, and carrying passports that used stolen identities from uninvolved, and later very angry, Israelis with European origins.)
The CIA, very differently, ensured that their targets stayed alive and available for questioning – and a torrent of media speculation has flowed over how much damage may now be wreaked upon the Taliban as a result of Baradar's capture especially – in terms of operational intelligence and the presumed blow to the militants' morale.
For its part, the Mashtarak surge through Afghanistan’s southern heroin-processing town of Marjar, and ultimately the securing of the horseshoe-shaped route, through the Helmand River Valley, to and from Pakistan’s unruly wild-west tribal territories, should also (so the strategy’s spokespersons and media cheerleaders say) deal a powerful and lasting blow against the Taliban.
But – and this the more fully engaged media are, to their credit, recognizing and debating – that optimistic notion depends entirely on what follows the military action. How effective will be, for instance, General Stanley McChrystal’s so-called “government-in-a-box”? That infelicitous phrase of his - now probably a fixture in the lexicon of Afghan analysis – represents the ready-made civil society apparatus that is supposed, following this military exercise, to create and cement stability and peace (plus of course no reconstituted refuges for al-Qaeda) in the Afghanistan of the future.
Success of this order should also, it’s argued, enable the US withdrawal to begin, in a substantial and not just nominal fashion, by President Barack Obama’s projected, and increasingly quoted, target-date of July 2011.
But even with a good immediate outcome, and for all the media-spinning that will accompany it, it has to be said that nobody will seriously expect comfortable onward progress. Not the least obstacle is that the Afghan civilian police, even as they are expanded in number and trained by US and Nato officers, are still held in complete contempt by ordinary Afghans throughout the country.
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BRIAN KATUILIS, A SENIOR FELLOW at the Center for American Progress who focuses on the Middle East and South Asia, has best summarized the issue at hand:
“The real test of this Marja operation will come in the days, weeks, months, and yes even years after this – whether Afghan institutions can hold the area and provide functioning governance.”
If they can’t (and the jury will remain out on that question) then the “years after this” that Katulis and other analysts anticipate will inevitably stretch far into the coming decade and maybe even longer.
The definition of success on the ground that will allow the US to fully depart is still very cloudy. Katulis, in his many media appearances, has been repeating to all who will listen an important exchange that his boss at American Progress, John Podesta had with a former Clinton Administration colleague, Richard Holbrooke, now of course Obama’s point-man for Afghanistan/Pakistan. The two political warhorses were sparring about exactly what conditions would demonstrate that US war aims had been accomplished and disengagement might then be possible, when Holbrooke finally said:
“It’s really hard for me to address in specific terms. But I would say this about defining success in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the simplest sense ... we’ll know it when we see it.”
Any guesses, anyone, for just when that eventuality - which could be counted on a par with a unicorn-sighting - will actually happen?
I notice that the Marja fighting has brought back onto The New York Times’ front pages another pair of warhorses – the paper’s veteran duo from the earliest war coverage in both Afghanistan and Iraq, reporters Dexter Filkins and C J Chivers. It’s instructive that Filkins veers away from this phrase in daily news coverage, but for his fuller reflection in the form of a powerful 2008 book he chose the very telling title “The Forever War”.
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