He pledged to work with other nations to make the country stable once the battle was won. He suggested the United Nations could play a vital role by taking over “the so-called nation-building” after the war. “I would call it the stabilization of a future government,” he told reporters at a White House press conference. He even promised to “stay the course” to win the wider war against terror.
That was October 2001 and the country in question was Afghanistan. Almost two years later, it’s worth looking back at the first battleground in the war on terror if you want to look forward to figure out the future of Iraq.
Two years is hardly staying the course, but even in that short period, the White House–along with its allies–has largely failed to live up to its rhetoric in Afghanistan. Take the Bush administration’s current focus, for instance. In place of effective nation-building, the White House is concentrating on road-building. In particular, it wants to complete the road from Kabul to Kandahar by the end of this year to give Afghanistan some appearance of being a single country. To that end, the White House issued a joint statement with the Saudis and Japanese declaring their commitment to building the road “to international standards.”
That statement was made in September of last year. Today, the 300 miles from Kabul to Kandahar remains plagued by potholes–and militants linked to the old Taliban regime. And the road is still short of money, in spite of the international promises to help pay for the project. Aid workers complain that the new road is being built so quickly now–to meet the end-of-year deadline–that it will rapidly fall apart. Administration officials insist such criticism of the road construction is misplaced. “Are you going to finish a road that is useful or half-finish a road that is perfect?” asked one.
However, supporters of President Bush’s foreign policy team believe the road project faces an even more fundamental problem than the depth of its asphalt. Republican senators who recently returned from the region concluded that the road will remain half-finished without adequate security to protect those driving along it. “You’ve still got a security vacuum in the south,” says one Senate aide. “The big question is: if you increase traffic along this road, aren’t you going to create a soft target for bandits, looters, thugs and the Taliban?”
Two years on, security remains the biggest challenge for Afghanistan, even as the U.S. tries to patch up its crumbling infrastructure. Iraq may prove no different. As the U.S. tries to patch up its crumbling electricity network, the project may well be frustrated by a lack of cash and an even greater lack of security. Yet the Bush White House shows no sign of learning the lessons of Afghanistan. Speaking alongside the new Afghan leader Hamid Karzai in January 2002, President Bush declared his faith in self-help. “We’ll help the new Afghan government provide the security that is the foundation for peace,” he said. “We will also support programs to train new police officers, and to help establish and train an Afghanistan national military.” That is also the medium-term goal for Iraq–a retrained Iraqi police force and army will do most of the dangerous peacekeeping work.
The only problem is that it takes a very long time for such forces to train up and to establish security on the ground. Some senior administration officials concede that the lack of security in Afghanistan remains a huge obstacle to the government of President Karzai, which has yet to establish its hold on power outside the capital. Yet they also believe the recent spate of bloody clashes with Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters is the direct result of Afghan forces beginning to assert themselves. “The good news is the Afghan army is coming into its own in ways that it can deal with some of these situations,” says one senior White House aide. “It’s very sad that they lost people in the latest raid. But it was Afghans who were involved in that, trying to take back their own country from these people. Last year, the Americans were the principal forces against the Taliban resurgents.”
That does not convince those who were part of the policy process inside the White House. One former national security council official says the Afghan army project suffered from a clear lack of commitment. “The issue of the army was kicked down the road,” the former aide says. “There was quibbling over where the money was going to come from. The Pentagon had to beg for money to keep it going and it was nothing they could realistically plan for. We even begged and borrowed weapons from former Soviet countries.”
The same half-hearted version of “staying the course” applies to other challenges in Afghanistan: bringing the regional warlords into line, and tackling the huge drug trade that flourished after the Taliban fell. The White House is still struggling to find an extra $1 billion for Afghanistan from existing budgets at the Defense and State departments this year. The hope is that the international community will come close to matching that cash. But the bigger problem is one of commitment. “The question is why did they let Afghanistan go for a year and a half,” says the Senate aide. “The Taliban is reconstituting itself and the situation on the ground is not pleasant at all. It’s obvious when you go there that the place is in slow motion. One good shot at Karzai would turn the whole thing around.”
Things may be changing inside the White House, not least because President Bush himself has shifted part of his focus back to Afghanistan. Before departing for his Texas ranch on vacation, Bush told Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, that he now had two foreign policy priorities: Iraq and Afghanistan. That helps explain the new role of Robert Blackwill, formerly U.S. ambassador to India and now Rice’s strategic planner on Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. “Bob Blackwill is the inside guy, the guy who works the bureaucracy to get the Afghanistan reconstruction on track,” says one senior White House official.
Newsweek has learned that the White House is shifting its policy in another direction on security and reconstruction. For months the Bush administration has opposed the notion of expanding the international peacekeeping force in Kabul to the rest of Afghanistan. But now that the international force is under German control within NATO, the White House is changing its tune, suggesting other countries could help rebuild the Afghan provinces. “We are looking to expand this,” says one senior administration official. “There could be changes in the way the international presence deploys.”
Two years is not enough to reverse three decades of civil war, foreign meddling and lawlessness in Afghanistan. But it’s plenty of time to make a big difference in a country with so little.
In Iraq, there’s no such luxury of time. Neither the Iraqi nor the American public wants to see a long-term occupation. And neither the Iraqi nor the American public wants to suffer such a slow pace of progress. It’s easy to say you want to stay the course. It takes far more commitment–in money and manpower–to rebuild the course in Afghanistan and Iraq.
