Bob Woodward’s missing Afghan perspective

Bob Woodward’s new book is crucial for understanding Afghanistan’s future — yet it has hardly an Afghan voice in it.  

In one way, this omission is natural enough in a book about Americans making policy in Washington. In another way, though, it may demonstrate a case of Maslow’s hammer — the idea that when your only tool is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail. 

To win against the Taliban, some Afghans will need to be prepared to risk death to stand up to them; what will persuade them to do so is inspirational leadership, not guns and bombs. Those Afghans must include Pashtuns — the group whose recruitment to the Afghan army is in almost constant decline, who are reporting fewer and fewer Improvised Explosive Devices (IED’s), and whose participation in elections for the Afghan government has been greatly reduced since 2004. 

"Merely adding additional foreign forces," wrote COIN expert David Kilcullen last year in his book The Accidental Guerrilla, "cannot compensate for lack of local popular support." Yet in Woodward’s book the question that preoccupies its protagonists appears exactly to be the question of how many additional forces to add. Even the CIA is referenced principally within the context of its paramilitary forces, and their mission to kill terrorists.  

Deciding the number of troops to send to Afghanistan has certainly been the most obvious and the most immediate choice that the Obama administration had to make after taking office — and it was a choice that could be made in Washington.  Changing the way that Afghans feel about their government would be by contrast a piece of complex and risky re-engineering, to be carried out in Kabul by remote control. But without it, reducing U.S. forces will remain as risky next year, or in five or ten years’ time, as it would be today.

Washington’s top policymakers, featured in the book, did not fail to see this broader issue. On the contrary, as I read Woodward’s book I was struck by how intelligent their questions were, and how much attention the president gave the Afghanistan question (personally drafting a six-page memo on it, for instance). Current ISAF commander Gen. David Petraeus saw that questions of motivation were critical in Afghanistan, and set up an intelligence team to look into them. The team’s finding: "the Karzai government was despised… someone would have to get really tough, but that wasn’t happening" (page 348). The president’s own memorandum is almost equally explicit.  

The problem is clear and the solutions vague. This may explain the pessimism that infuses the book, which Woodward wrote on page 282 that he considered calling "No Exit." One particularly striking passage contrasts the views of Gen. Petraeus and Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the "war czar" for Presidents Bush and Obama. As Woodward writes, confronted with the formidable impediments that Lute saw facing the mission (Pakistani safe havens, bad government in Afghanistan, the poor state of the Afghan security forces and declining international support for the military mission), Petraeus argued that battlefield success would buy more time for the military to extend the surge. Lute on the other hand is said to have concluded that "Obama had to do this 18-month surge just to demonstrate, in effect, that it couldn’t be done" (page 338). Neither of them, then, appears to believe that the mission can in fact be achieved in its defined timescale.  

Nor do special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke ("it can’t work"), or ambassador to Kabul Karl Eikenberry ("we’re screwed") or perhaps even Defense Secretary Robert Gates ("we’re not ever leaving at all").  The assessment criteria set out in the President’s memorandum — merit-based appointments in Afghan ministries, increased Afghan civilian capacity, an effective Afghan reconciliation program with the Taliban — are bound to turn out negative in the administration’s upcoming review scheduled for December, and very probably the same will happen in a further review halfway through next year. The question is only whether this will again lead to an extension of the mission, or instead to the victory of the strategy’s skeptics.  

When that showdown between these clashing viewpoints comes, perhaps someone in the room should bring out Antonio Giustozzi’s Empires of Mud.  If Woodward’s book is the view from Washington, then Giustozzi’s is the opposite — based on four years’ worth of research on Afghan leadership and psychology. Without even looking so much at the war-torn south and east of Afghanistan, Giustozzi concludes that in our attempts to help, the international community has actually become a hindrance to the emergence of the leadership that Afghanistan needs.  In one blunt sentence he concludes on his final page: "The author of this book doubts that strong national leadership will emerge in a context of external intervention in Afghanistan."

If this assessment is correct, then it means that genuine progress in Afghanistan won’t be catalyzed by foreign troops fighting on the ground — but by their withdrawal, and the adoption of a longer-term, more sustainable and less intrusive form of support for the Afghan government.

Gerard Russell was in charge of the British government’s outreach to the Muslim world from 2001 to 2003. He is now an Afghanistan/Pakistan fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights.