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institutional memory, as well as the
question of how well “quick-impact
projects” fit into the framework of the
Afghan National Development Strategy
of 2006 and the broader Millennium
Developments Goals.
The ongoing insurgency in southern
Afghanistan has taxed the will of a
number of NATO members. This is
especially the case in parliamentary
systems where force deployments
may enjoy the support of, at best, a
fickle and fragile majority. Some of
this opposition amounts to no more than knee-jerk anti-
Americanism, but in other cases it reflects a genuine conviction
that military force cannot resolve the problems of
Afghanistan. Others believe that the war is unwinnable
because Afghan nationalism will always lead to successful
popular mobilization against foreign forces. These convictions
may be ill-grounded, but they are nonetheless
part of the political environment with which the U.S. and
its NATO allies must deal.
The conflict in Iraq has complicated this problem.
Deeply unpopular with European publics, it has the
potential to drain support from the Afghan theater of
operations, as well. In July 2007, White House Homeland
Security Adviser Frances F. Townsend described the
struggles in Iraq and Afghanistan as “clearly a single conflict
by a single determined enemy who is looking for safe
haven.” To European publics this is not a claim calculated
to boost support for operations in Afghanistan; the
most recent Transatlantic Trends survey, conducted by
the German Marshall Fund of the United States in 2007,
found that only 30 percent of European respondents supported
combat operations against the Taliban in
Afghanistan. A delinking of the two situations would help
to make the case for sustaining the commitment more
marketable.
In a Feb. 8 interview, Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates offered a nuanced defence of involvement in Afghanistan,
noting that lingering anger in Europe over the
U.S. invasion of Iraq explained why some allies were reluctant
to heed U.S. calls for more combat troops in Afghanistan.
It remains, however, to be seen how much the allies
will deliver in response to the call for greater assistance to
Afghanistan that was contained in the declaration of
NATO members at the April 2008 Bucharest Summit.
38 FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL/JULY-AUGUST 2008
F OCUS
The ongoing
insurgency in
southern Afghanistan
has taxed the will
of a number of
NATO members.
Through Afghans’ Eyes
NATO’s involvement is controversial
not only in Europe, but in
Afghanistan as well. Civilian casualties
are one key problem. The arrival
of international forces was celebrated
in Afghanistan, where the Taliban
remain deeply unloved. But any foreign
force can outstay its welcome if it
loses sight of the local population and
its needs. Here, the problem of “collateral
damage” is extremely serious.
Every civilian casualty has the potential
to create new enemies, and great care needs to be
taken to avoid them if at all possible.
Another weighty problem relates to the cultivation of
opium poppies, an industry in which over two million
Afghans are now entangled, many as poor wage-laborers.
For the wider world, the temptation to deal with
this problem through simple eradication may be considerable.
But fear that this will happen is becoming a
major recruiting tool for the Taliban, probably of
greater significance to their insurgency than the cash
that they may be able to derive from the drug trade.
The issue of eradication has also become a point of
friction between various NATO members and the government
of Afghanistan. To some, the opium poppy is
a curse which helps fund Taliban operations and should
be eliminated with maximum expedition. To the Kabul
government, this is profoundly naïve, given the number
of poor Afghans who are dependent on some income
from opium in order to eke out a meager living, and for
whom “alternative livelihoods policies” remain a remote
chimera. What has been largely lost in the dust surrounding
this dispute is the complexity of the narcotics
problem in Afghanistan, which is underpinned by
diverse incentive structures, has multiple local variants,
and is also significantly transnational in character.
Dwarfing these issues, however, is the threat posed
by the Taliban’s external sanctuaries. As a threat to
Afghanistan’s stability, this is vastly more serious than
the occasional cache of arms of Iranian origin. In
August 2007, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf
made a very candid statement about this problem while
addressing a so-called “Peace Jirga” in Kabul: “There is
no doubt Afghan militants are supported from Pakistani
soil. The problem that you have in your region is