The Campaign: The Shunned War

PRESIDENT OBAMA BOLDLY HAILED AFGHANISTAN as “the necessary war” in 2009.[i] Based on his recent comments, or lack of them, it now appears Afghanistan is the shunned war—an elision followed by Republican challenger Mitt Romney and other U.S. political leaders.

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, President Obama’s acceptance speech was notable for his fleeting reference to the still-raging war in Afghanistan: “We’ve blunted the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan, and in 2014, our longest war will be over.”[ii] One can only imagine the late-night speechwriting sessions that eventually yielded that tortured, far from candid sentence. With 77,000 U.S. troops and tens of thousands of American contractors still in harm’s way in Afghanistan, President Obama chose to cite the example of a young amputee sailor bravely recovering from an Iraqi grenade attack as his military “hope.”

However sparse Obama’s convention comments on Afghanistan, he outdid Mitt Romney, who became the first Republican nominee since 1952 to not mention war during his convention speech. When pressed by reporters about the remarkable silence, a Romney advisor argued that the nominee had just addressed the Afghanistan issue in a major speech to the American Legion. During Romney’s sixteen-minute American Legion address, his entire commentary on the decade-long Afghanistan War was fifteen seconds long: “Of course, we are still at war in Afghanistan. We still have uniformed men and women in conflict, risking their lives just as you once did. How deeply we appreciate their sacrifice. We salute them. We honor them. We respect and love them.”[iii]

It’s clear that with U.S. popular support for military action in Afghanistan plummeting, politicians of both parties are distancing themselves from the failing counterinsurgency. The war that had to be won has become the subject to be avoided.

As I learned in my embeds with American troops, U.S. policy-makers’ poll-driven contortions bear little relation to the ground truth in Afghanistan. While U.S. politicians put a gag rule on the Afghanistan War, American soldiers continue to die and sustain horrific wounds, both physical and psychic. Military families bear the brunt of multiple rotations. Afghan innocents continue to suffer in an unending war. Economically stressed American taxpayers continue to pay billions of dollars each month for deeply flawed military and development operations in Afghanistan, where a toxic network of U.S. careerists, private corporations, corrupt Afghan insiders and the insurgents are all in on the take.

The Washington debate between proponents of development-heavy counterinsurgency and counterterrorism with its drones and Spec Ops teams seems more about lobbyist-driven budgeting battles than a strategy to improve American security. At this point, both options seem futile in Afghanistan.

In the post-Petraeus era, the “nation-building” counterinsurgency doctrine has fallen from favor. The more than $90 billion spent in Afghanistan on U.S. development programs to win hearts and minds (WHAM in the inevitable military acronym) have been scandalously mismanaged. With abysmal oversight, the programs became little more than money troughs for corporations and corrupt officials, with little meaningful development getting to the Afghan people. Despite the billions spent on aid in southern Afghanistan, a recent UN study noted that almost one-third of the children there are malnourished.[iv]

The $30 billion spent on the Afghan national security forces since 2002 has yielded an army and police that are woefully unprepared to take over security in 2014. The $4.1 billion needed annually to keep the Afghan army going is simply not sustainable, either economically by the penniless Afghans, or politically by U.S. policymakers dealing with a war-weary American electorate.

Counterterrorism is likewise fraught with potential for a bad outcome. Counterterrorism’s highly touted drone attacks and hunter-killer raids have proven to enflame the notoriously vengeful Pashtuns and nationalistic Pakistanis. The anticipated long-term deployment of thousands of Special Ops troops in Afghanistan has the potential for complications beyond Afghan resentment toward foreign troops. Entangled with the Tajik-, Uzbek- and Hazara-dominated Afghan army that is pitted against the overwhelmingly Pashtun-led insurgency, American operatives could become pawns (or bishops) in an ethnically based civil war that many think will follow the major U.S. drawdown.

Frontline soldiers and development officials tell me it’s time for U.S. leaders to come clean with the American public about Afghanistan. Both presidential candidates need to honestly discuss the failures of American policy in Afghanistan and the tragic outcomes. U.S. policymakers need to stop pouring American blood and treasure into the sandpit of Afghanistan.