Obama and Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War.

If President-elect Obama makes good on his campaign promise to withdraw troops from Iraq, it would be a serious mistake to ship them to Afghanistan. The situation there requires a more comprehensive approach that emphasizes politics and diplomacy. Mr. Obama could do worse than to draw some lessons from the Soviet effort to find a political solution in the late 1980s.

In its own entanglement, Moscow was supporting a quasi-communist government and fighting a counterinsurgency financed and supplied by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and a number of others, primarily through Pakistan. Soviet diplomats, military officers, and security officials worked tirelessly to find an international agreement as well as to win over mujahadeen leaders and convince them to join a coalition government.

The Soviets faced formidable challenges: the party they were supporting was internally divided, the opposition was well supplied for a variety of sources, and the U.S. drove a hard bargain by refusing to stop sending weapons until the Kabul government stepped down. While Moscow wanted to end the war that was a drain on resources, men, and morale, it had to so without leaving a vacuum or a hostile government on its southern border.

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan it did not expect to create a communist state there. Rather, the goal was to create a stable and friendly government in Kabul. The thousands of party advisors sent to assist in spreading government authority, however, often ignored local traditions; by 1986 Moscow realized they were doing more harm than good. Moscow ultimately concluded that even the generous amount of technical and political assistance it was providing would not end the civil war there if major opposition leaders could not be brought into the government.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to strike at the heart of Al-Qaeda; once there, it engaged in a massive democratization program. The results of its efforts have been mixed, but it is clear that the country is becoming less stable, and the distinctly anti-democratic Taliban are gaining the upper hand. Given the circumstances, it is time to recognize that the U.S. should devote its energies primarily to creating a potentially undemocratic but nevertheless stable Afghanistan, something Mr. Obama is reportedly considering.

Even this more limited goal will prove difficult to achieve. However, the Soviet experience suggests the following steps will be necessary. First, finding a strong leader who can unite enough of Afghanistan’s various forces to keep the country from spinning out of control. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in part to remove the erratic and bloody-minded Hafizullah Amin, then spent six years trying to prop up the ineffectual Babrak Karmal before overseeing his replacement with Mohammed Najibullah. For all his faults (and he had many) the new leader proved strong enough to hold his own party together while using his clan links to open dialogue with some opposition leaders.

Second, it will mean taking an active role in bringing former enemies into the fold. Moscow got into this game a little too late, and its efforts were hampered by internal divisions about which mujahadeen leaders would be acceptable partners for the the Kabul government. In this sense the U.S. is somewhat better positioned – it already has similar experience in Iraq, where General David Petraeus was able to reach out to Sunni leaders in the Anbar province.

Third, it will mean forging a regional consensus on Afghanistan which includes Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the Central Asian States. In general the U.S. has been able to cooperate with each of these countries to a greater or lesser degree from the start of the NATO operation there in 2001. However, the Bush administration’s failure to constructively engage Iran and Russia, as well as its miscalculations in Pakistan, have created a murky picture in the region. (Needless to say, improving relations with Iran is doubly important if Obama is serious about withdrawing from Iraq.)

The Harvard realist Stephen Walt argues that going through with a planned expansion of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan may not be the best idea because of the relative costs involved. I would add that it is unlikely the U.S. or its NATO allies will commit the numbers necessary to pacify all the regions where the Taliban is active. If NATO were to take a more active role on the Pakistani side of the Pushtun tribal belt, which serves as a refuge for Taliban fighters, it would likely do more harm than good. It is useful to remember that Moscow also experimented with increasing troop numbers even as it was looking for a way out of the conflict in 1985, but ultimately Soviet leaders saw that the “surge” was only deepening their involvement, not leading to a resolution. It is safe to say that Afghanistan will only become stable once enough Taliban are co-opted to make a central government viable and the Afghan military (and tribal militias) are able to fight the remainder with U.S. supplies.

Soviet leaders were aiming for a similar scenario as they sought a way to withdraw their troops between 1986 and 1991. Almost all of the former participants (both people on the ground and at the center of decision-making in Moscow) I have spoken with believe they came close to succeeding. When the Geneva Accords were signed in April 1988, it was far from clear whether the Soviet backed government in Kabul would last more than a few months after the withdrawal. Yet after February 1989 the Afghan army, which rarely took a leading role in battles while Soviet troops were there, proved able to face down mujahadeen offensives on its own. Not only did the Kabul government hold most of the territory previously held primarily by Soviet forces, but the regime actually outlasted the USSR by four months!

Many Soviet officers realized early in the war that the task of creating a stable Afghanistan could never be fulfilled through military means. Eventually their superiors in Moscow came to believe the same thing and began pursuing both international diplomacy and internal reconciliation. When I spoke to Nikolai Kozyrev, the chief Soviet negotiator at the Geneva Accords and a specialist on the region, he highlighted this as the main lesson to draw from the Soviet experience. “Diplomacy allowed us to withdraw our troops,” he said, and pointed out that talks with the Taliban were absolutely necessary. In the end, the reconciliation would be up to by the Afghans themselves.

Further Reading:
For the current situation in Afghanistan and how it developed, I highly recommend the work of Dr. Antonio Giustozzi at the Crisis States Research Centre, including this paper. The veteran journalist Ahmed Rashid recently released a useful book on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, pessimistically entitled Descent into Chaos. A number of useful reports are available from the International Crisis Group. Finally, there was an interesting discussion on Iraq and Afghanistan this weekend in the New York Times.

US-Russian Relations: Some Historical Parallels

Much has been made of the recent Russian decision to place short-range iskander missiles in Kaliningrad. Artemy Kalinovsky rightly pointed out in his latest post that the western media has been implying that the Russians are somehow acting in an aggressive or militarist way. However, if the situation is turned on its head and one ponders what the US response would be if the Russians were to (and we need to suspend reality here for a moment for the sake of the argument) place a radar system in Canada; it becomes clear that the Russian response is not out of order. It should be expected.

Indeed, history has provided us with a parallel to the situation in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis. While the US reasoning in the current situation makes it clear that the radar and interceptors are not meant for Russian missiles, the two events share striking similarities insofar as they threaten to upset the nuclear status quo. What Washington and the US media fails to acknowledge, and Moscow knows too well, is that the missile interceptors would be useful in stopping Russian launched missiles as well. This is not often heard in the media. Washington has made it clear that it is not their intended purpose, but it does not change the reality to the Russians.

The issue of US radar and missile interceptors based in Poland and the Czech Republic speaks to the broader issue of the failure of the Bush Administration to respect Russian regional security concerns. No doubt this has been influenced by the legacy of the Cold War. Key players in the Administration: Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Perle, were all advocates of hard-line approaches to US-Soviet relations under Nixon, Ford and Reagan. They seem to have failed to grasp that their policy of acting tough towards the Soviet Union was not key in hastening the end of the Cold War. They still feel that such an aggressive act is the correct path to increase US security and power. However, there are dozens of instances in the past 50 years that contradict such a sentiment. Every instance of belligerent behaviour towards the Russians has ended up with heightened tensions and a concurrent decrease in US security. According to the supporters of the Bush Administration, the installation of missiles is not aggressive. It is meant only to increase US security. Indeed, the Administration would contend that they have offered to share the radar with the Russians. Clearly someone needs to brief the Bush cabal on the concept of a ‘security dilemma.’ (Somewhat comically, one can only be reminded of Reagan’s assertion to Gorbachev that the US would share SDI technology, only to have an exasperated Gorbachev point out that the US would not even share milking machines.)

The recent Russian military resurgence is claimed to be a result of increased oil and gas revenues. But this is true only insofar as the Russians have someone to flex their rediscovered muscles towards and the US and West have provided that in the form of NATO expansion. If the expansion was intended to provoke a Russian response in order to justify the continued existence of NATO, then it has worked. However, past that, one has to wonder what the US hopes to get out of it. No less a Cold Warrior than George Kennan has stated that the eastward expansion of NATO is the biggest geo-strategic mistake since the end of the Cold War (he was speaking prior to 2003.)

Indeed, there are several parallels with prior pact expansions hurting US security. Eisenhower’s “Pactomania” ended up constraining more than it freed US resources or improved security. Both CENTO and SEATO are examples of this. In fact the pact expansion of the 1950’s and early 1960’s primarily increased the Soviet feeling of encirclement. It was such actions that in part motivated Khrushchev to expand the Cold War to the Third World. It must be asked, therefore, how the expansion of NATO to former Easter Bloc countries will increase US security? It is highly unlikely the world could expect a full military response to Russian aggression towards Romania or Bulgaria. NATO expansion has simply aggravated long standing Russian security concerns. It is not a complicated concept, which is what makes the US failure to pay heed to it all the more incredible.

This does not mean that the US should cosy up to the Russians or acquiesce to their demands. The US should most definitely protect what it sees as its interests on the Russian periphery. However, protection of interests and dialogue are not mutually exclusive. US-Russian relations through the Cold War have shown that the both sides have come out ahead when dialogue has been at its highest.

Perhaps what is most amazing is that the Bush Administration has still yet to learn the diplomatic lessons of the Cold War (this is all the more dumbfounding since all of the key policymakers were active participants.) President Medvedev’s recent speech was not nearly as hostile as it has been made to seem. Gregori Zhdanov spoke of the “outstretched hand under the clenched fist” regarding the creation of the Cominform. This same idea permeated relations between the two powers through the Cold War, and it remains today. President-Elect Obama has demonstrated that he understands subtleties better than Bush. Hopefully he will see what Bush failed to: the outstretched hand.

Obama and Medvedev - Improving US-Russian Relations

Moscow, Russia

After Dmitry Medvedev delivered his message to the Federation Council here last week, news outlets in the U.S. and Britain jumped on the Russian president’s seemingly hostile rhetoric regarding the planned missile defense system to be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic. Russia, Medvedev said, would respond by planting a system in Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea. The New York Times, which accompanied its coverage with a photo of troops on parade in Red Square, focused on his harsh words as well as the fact that that he did not congratulate Barack Obama on his election victory.

Yet these reports miss a number of essential points. Indeed, people I’ve spoken to here, some of them experienced watchers of Kremlin politics as well as US-Russian relations, thought the speech could prove to be an important marker in terms of a change in direction of domestic and foreign policy and the emergence of a distinct “Medvedev” policy that has not been evident since his inauguration in May.

Undeniably, the most notable elements of Medvedev’s speech had to do with domestic, not foreign, policy. He spoke about the importance of individual rights, battling with corruption, and economic freedom. His predecessors paid lip service to these principles, but what was striking was Medvedev’s tone and the fact that his words seemed to be directed at his own mentor and many of his supporters. (You can read the text for yourself here – try to ignore the slightly awkward translation).

What about Medvedev’s foreign policy?

Medvedev began the speech with a number of references to the summer’s events in Georgia and its two breakaway regions, Southern Ossetia and Abkhazia. He did not shy away from blaming Georgia for the conflict and insisting that NATO had overstepped its bounds. Most of the speech, however, avoided foreign policy. The message was “our priority is getting our own house in order.” And while critical of US policy in Georgia and on the missile-defense issue, it clearly left the door open for an improvement in relations: “I would stress that we have no issue with the American people, we do not have inherent anti-Americanism. And we hope that our partners, the new administration of the United States of America, will make a choice in favor of full-fledged relations with Russia.”

What would it take for the new administration to create a long standing, stable relationship with Russia?

First and foremost, it means being willing to accept limits. This includes limits on NATO expansion, and it may include abandoning the missile shield the Bush administration has worked to place in the Czech Republic and Poland. Why? Because Russia may come to terms with not being a global superpower, but it certainly will not abandon its status as a regional power. It demands respect and will lash out when its sphere of interest is violated. Contrary to the thinking of the outgoing administration and its intellectual supporters at AEI and the Project for a New American Century, not every region is equally important to the U.S. (Not surprisingly, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister called Obama's staff last Friday and said that Russia would not go ahead with the Kaliningrad deployment if the U.S. refrains from its plans in Poland. Apparently Mr. Obama has already signalled the door is open for discussion on this question, which I view as a positive development and John Bolton does not.)

Second, the Obama administration should do what both Clinton and George W. Bush failed to do – treat Russia as a partner not only in words but deeds. The word partner is now only seen between quotation marks in Russia, because it is associated with a campaign, almost two decades old, to weaken Russia at the expense of its formal rivals. Making someone accept a reality they are powerless to change, which was the case with expansion of NATO in the 1990s, is not the same as partnership. Similarly, it was disappointing that US officials did not even seriously consider the Russian counterproposal to the missile shield. The Obama administration needs to involve Moscow in a real dialog on all such security issues, and be willing to cede ground at least some of the time.

Third, the administration needs to have a frank conversation with its counterparts about what each others’ limits are. It may not like everything it hears, but Moscow is much more likely to cooperate on issues important to the US – including Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq, if it sees the US as willing to respect its influence in other areas, like Ukraine or Georgia. This may sound naïve, but it is these sort of conversations that have made cooperation between great powers (including the US and USSR) possible historically.

Finally, the new administration could take a number of steps to ease the mutual climate of suspicion, including permanently removing Russia from the Jackson-Vanik Ammendment and easing travel restrictions for Russians traveling to the US. Both the amendment, which links trade with Russia to freedom of emigration, and the costly and difficult visa process are seen as demeaning by many people here. Citizen’s from America’s other partners, like the EU states, don’t need a visa at all. Russia’s economic migrants are much more likely to head for Moscow or St. Petersburg rather than for the distant US; while a full visa-waiver program may be premature, the current regulations need to be relaxed. (US citizens who travel to Russia will also appreciate the reciprocal easing of the process that would follow on Moscow’s part.)

Would any or all of these measures create the kind of stable, peaceful relationship the US and Russia need? It is impossible to say for certain – Medvedev is still weaker internally than Putin, and the global economic crisis has left many things up in the air. Nevertheless, if Mr. Obama is serious about changing the way the US is seen in the world, Russia would be a perfect place to start.