More on what if we fail in Afghanistan?

By Steve Coll I have a new post up on my New Yorker blog. In the comments on Thomas Ricks’s blog at Foreign Policy, I came across a well-informed dissent to my straw-man forecast about what failure in Afghanistan would bring. Here is the writer’s alternative take on my failure scenarios one and two: On ...

By Steve Coll

November 18, 2009, 6:21 PM

By Steve Coll

I have a new post up on my New Yorker blog.

In the comments on Thomas Ricks’s blog at Foreign Policy, I came across a well-informed dissent to my straw-man forecast about what failure in Afghanistan would bring. Here is the writer’s alternative take on my failure scenarios one and two:

On a 90s-style Afghan Civil War:

There already IS a civil war. It’s just that we’re fighting it on behalf of the Northern Alliance at the moment. We’d have to turn it over to them to fight. Also, one key difference between the 90s War and the new one would be that we would be backing one of the sides with arms, money and diplomatic cover. As would the rest of the world. So all the nasty things that our Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara brethren would be doing to the Pashtuns would be looked over by virtually every major player on the International scene.

On momentum for a Taliban revolution in Pakistan:

I usually agree with Steve Coll about AfPak but the logic behind this scenario is murky, at best. The ISI, as a rule, still backs the ‘Afghan Taliban.’ The loose coalition of militants that exists in FATA and NWFP that are known as the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ have distinct ambitions from the ‘Afghan Taliban.’ They attack ISI and Pak military targets, and the leaders have supposedly said they would target NATO convoys once they’re ‘finished’ with the Pak Army. No one yet knows what the future of the two Talibans is going to be. Steve’s assumption seems to be the ‘worst case scenario.’ And even then it doesn’t address the fact that the ‘Afghan Taliban,’ in helping the ‘Pakistani Taliban,’ would be biting the hand that helped create them (ISI), sustain them, protect them, and brought them back to power again….

Just a couple of thoughts. I take the point that the international community already engaged in an Afghan civil war; that’s well said. But it is for the moment clearly a war that is not yet producing the kinds of ethnic schisms and civilian deaths familiar from the recent past. Note the Oxfam poll of Afghan civilians, for example, as evidence about skeptical Afghan attitudes toward the Taliban, despite the stresses and failures of the Karzai government.

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Steve Coll is the president of the New America Foundation and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Steve Coll is president of the New America Foundation and the author of Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens. This article is adapted from his recent testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives and posted here with permission.