Afghanistan: Why we fight

President Barack Obama and his advisors formulated their Afghan policy almost exclusively to achieve one goal: deny safe haven to al Qaeda, according to Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars. Counterterrorism is an important goal, but the administration seems to believe it is the only goal. This is a seriously myopic vision of U.S. national security interests. We have a much broader range of interests at stake in Afghanistan and South Asia. The administration’s failure to understand them goes a long way to explain why it settled on a half-hearted strategy in Afghanistan.

So why are we fighting?

• Deny safe haven permanently. If al Qaeda returns the day or the year after we leave, we lose. Our effort in Afghanistan has to be about more than an endless holding pattern or a temporary band-aid. It actually has to enable Afghans to continue denying safe haven after the last U.S. soldier has left. That is the main problem with the scaled-down counterterrorism-only plan: it presents no realistic scenario for the United States ever to leave.
• Prevent instability in Pakistan. Chaos in Afghanistan will bleed over into Pakistan. Woodward’s book records only a few brief mentions of this danger by administration officials, yet state failure in Pakistan is probably a much greater long-term danger to U.S. security than al Qaeda regaining another safe haven.
• Prevent Iranian, Russian, or Chinese regional hegemony. Part of our grand strategy has always included working to prevent rivals from amassing enough power to threaten our way of life. South and Central Asia — with energy reserves, potential pipeline routes, and a strategic location between Asia’s great powers — is a perennial (albeit secondary) prize in the contest for power, influence, and money. Stability in Afghanistan means denying Tehran, Beijing, and Moscow a client in Kabul.
• Preserve NATO’s credibility. Every president since Harry S. Truman has agreed that NATO is a pillar of U.S. national security. In Afghanistan NATO has struggled to field effective fighting forces, make tough decisions, share the fighting burden, or organize a campaign. If I were a Russian official, I would conclude that if NATO cannot do those things, it cannot defend Europe. A decent outcome in Afghanistan is vital to salvaging what’s left of the Alliance’s credibility and preserving its usefulness to U.S. security.
• Combat the global drug trade. Armed, wealthy, non-state actors are a major threat in a globalized world. The most dangerous armed non-state actors in Afghanistan are not terrorists, but drug lords. Should the United States care? Drug trafficking subverts law and order across huge swaths of Asia while drug consumption is a blight across Europe. Worse, in the quest for growing more product and developing more markets, the heroin kingpins will almost certainly try to export Afghanistan’s weak governance and lawlessness to Pakistan, where the South Asian trade was centered in the 1980s. Imagine the FATA as a narco-terrorist failed state with al Qaeda reaping the profits. Yes, we should care.
• Spread democracy. As I have argued before, spreading democracy is not a starry-eyed, idealistic act of charity. It is a matter of cold, realist calculation because the democratic peace theory is true. Spreading democracy means spreading peace, which is always good for U.S. interests.

Only the first interest triggered the war, but once started wars always involve other, broader interests. While the counterterrorism mission is at the heart of the reason the United States is in Afghanistan, we would be remiss if we ignored the rest.

If al Qaeda really were our only interest in Afghanistan, it is not at all clear why the administration opted to prosecute even a partial counterinsurgency campaign or continue rebuilding the country, neither of which is required to fight al Qaeda. In Woodward’s book Doug Lute, the NSC’s Special Coordinator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, reflects on the AfPak strategy review and the resulting deployment of 30,000 more U.S. troops and comments, "The review doesn’t add up to the decision." No kidding.

But now that the administration has publicly committed itself to a policy premised on preventing safe haven as our single goal, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the large amount of troops, dollars, and time we are pouring into the country. Oddly, the administration has stumbled into the very fault usually ascribed to the Bush administration: centering foreign policy overmuch on counterterrorism to the exclusion of other considerations. As it approaches its review of progress in Afghanistan, the administration should take the opportunity to look at Afghanistan, and U.S. efforts there, in a broader light.