Derek Thompson

Former NJIA editor and current staff editor at The Atlantic reflects on what to do in Afghanistan.

I wade into the Afghanistan debate with trepidation. I’m going to begin with something that’s customarily antithetical to American foreign policy: A dash of humility.

I have never published an Afghanistan paper in Foreign Affairs. I have never sat with an Afghanistan military general. I have never stepped on Afghanistan soil, much less spilled my blood on it. Being a part of one of those groups might grant me greater authority on the subject, but it wouldn’t necessarily grant me greater certainty about what we should do. After all, within each of these groups – the academics, the frontline reporters, the soldiers – there is a wide variety of opinion about the proper course in Afghanistan. Reasonable people, as they say, can disagree. But at least in the Washington tradition, their disagreement divides into two camps. They are the counterinsurgency camp and counterterrorism camp.

The counterinsurgency camp – sometimes called COIN – holds that the United States needs up to 40,000 additional troops to help defeat the terrorists and build a stable government, quell the rogue parts of Afghanistan and construct a civil society. The counterterrorism camp has more limited goals. It sees nation-building in Afghanistan as a pipe dream and instead seeks to limit America’s “footprint” in a land we’ve been trying to nation-build for the better part of this decade.

At least some of the momentum behind COIN comes from the perceived success of The Surge in Iraq. The Surge worked, I think, but not simply because we increased our troop levels. It worked because the United States found a partner against terrorism in the Sunnis. It won because the military spent its prodigious sums bribing tribal leaders. Some military strategists call the Afghanistan war an investment. But each year for the past seven years, we’ve spent between two and three times the GDP of Afghanistan for the purpose of saving it. As Nicholas Kristof wrote, Afghani nationalists have good reason to mistake that kind of “investment” for a hostile takeover.

Our financial advantage in Afghanistan has not brought military victory but we can use it to buy civic order. While maintaining a light footprint and relying on unmanned drones to patrol terrorist  hot spots, we should start buying the support of tribal leaders outside of Kabul to do what the corrupt and incompetent Karzai government cannot: Incentivize cooperation against the terrorist fringe of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. It will not be wholly moral. We will deal with horrific people. Progress will be slow. There will be set-backs and risks to creating an alliance whose glue is American money. But this represents our best and most realistic chance to salvage our mission in Afghanistan.

We don’t know what we’re going to get from a massive build-up of troops. We don’t know what we’re going to get from pursuing a status quo strategy, or a strategy of bribery. Here’s what we know. A build up is going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars we cannot afford. It will require partnering with a regional ally we do not have. It will risk thousands of American and Afghani lives for a war Americans don’t believe in and Afghans don’t want.

A final note about the flurry of op-eds you’ll read from experts much wiser than me arguing for a more ambitious strategy: When you’re reading these pretty polemics, ask yourself what the author means by “victory” in Afghanistan. Ask whether he uses the phrase “America must” because the ends are self-evidently crucial or because his argument requires the crutch of alarmism. Ask whether a country that can hardly afford medicine for its citizens can afford to build a nation in Asia. Ask what this war is for in the first place. As for me, my response to the elegant and ambitious arguments of the other side is simply this: Your words are too easy, and this war is too hard.