America Needs More Realistic Aspirations in Afghanistan

Benjamin Friedman says we don’t need more troops in Afghanistan, we need a different set of goals:

Pundits tend to assume that counterinsurgency and state-building are identical — foreigners enforce the state’s claim to a monopoly on violence to gain it support and crowd out alternative authority structures. But there is another counterinsurgency strategy out there, which is to allow the insurgency local power, to appease it as part of a bargain. The key tactic that brought lowered violence in the Sunni part of Iraq – bribing insurgent militia leaders to cooperate with us — undermines the Iraqi state, sacrificing our stated goal for a simpler one.

I think that’s right, though I also think this is largely irrelevant to the issue of how many soldiers it’s worth putting into play in Afghanistan in order to execute such a strategy. But the more I think about it, the more the real strategic genius of “the surge” looks like an extremely clever way to basically rebrand a dramatic de-escalation of U.S. war aims as “victory.” Unfortunately, exactly as surge skeptics predicted at the time, dallying two extra years in Iraq has wound up dramatically undermining our position in Afghanistan. Consequently, we’re in a position where we really do need to try to take the formula that “worked” in Iraq and bring it to Afghanistan—lowering our horizons.