http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/1626bc36-748b-11de-8ad5-00144feabdc0.html
July 19 2009 Financial Times
Book Review by James Blitz
of
In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan By Seth G. Jones
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Gauging whether the US and its allies can succeed in Afghanistan is only part of what Jones's excellent book is about. His principal interest is how the US started to fail in Afghanistan in the first place. Think back to the final days of 2001. The US-led invasion of that winter was one of the most remarkable in recent military history. A Taliban army of 60,000 was defeated in three months, with almost no US casualties.
The Afghan government that took power in 2002 contained many experienced, western-educated policymakers. By 2004, there were successful elections and millions of girls in school. How, then, did the US reach the point where, by 2006, the Taliban was defying western strategists to lead a successful onslaught against Hamid Karzai's government?
Jones says three things went wrong. First, the US military presence in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban was far too small. The Bush administration's obsession with winning in Iraq was one of the reasons it kept just 8,000 troops in the Afghan theatre in 2002. This was far too weak an international presence given the security challenges the country still faced.
Jones makes a striking comparison between the size of the stabilisation force in Afghanistan and those deployed after other conflicts. After the fall of Hitler in 1945, the international military presence in Germany was 89.3 troops per 1,000 population. In postwar Kosovo in 1999, it was 19.3. In Afghanistan in 2002, it was 1.6.
The second problem was the collapse of effective governance. After 2001, US officials in Kabul imagined that the writ of the Karzai administration ran across the country. It did not. In rural areas and large parts of the south, the national government had no representation at all. By 2005, only 6 per cent of the Afghan population had access to electricity. Meanwhile, key institutions such as the Afghan police withered away. Jones notes that, after the 2001 invasion, Germany was given responsibility for training this force, a critical security requirement. By 2003, Berlin had dispatched a grand total of 17 German police officers to carry out the task.
Finally, there was the Taliban itself. After the 2001 invasion, Mullah Omar and his allies were not defeated, merely displaced to the Pakistani tribal areas. There they established the major base for the insurgency they have today. Essential support, of course, came from the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI, which, like the CIA, had worked closely with the Mujahideen to repel the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. By 2007, the US was becoming frustrated by the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban. Pakistan denies the link. But, according to Jones, US satellite images have shown that leading insurgents and Pakistani officers operate in the tribal areas side by side.
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