Editor’s note: Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown is currently on the ground in Afghanistan and sent over a dispatch on what she’s seeing.

President Barack Obama is about to make crucial decisions about the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2016 and possibly after. His decision will be a vital signal to other U.S. allies in Afghanistan and its neighbors. Recent events in Afghanistan, particularly the Taliban's capture of Kunduz, show how too large a reduction in US military and economic support can hollow out the state-building effort and strengthen the Taliban and many other terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, including those labeling themselves daesh. In such a case, collapse of the government and indeed a collapse of the entire political order the United States has sought to build since 2001 are high. Maintaining support at something close to the current level of effort does not guarantee military or political success or that peace negotiations with the Taliban will eventually produce any satisfactory peace. But it buys us time. On the cusp of a dire situation, Afghan politicians equally need to put aside their self-interested hoarding, plotting, and back-stabbing, which are once again running high, and being put ahead of the national interest.

The Taliban’s recent victory in Kunduz is both highly impactful and different from the previous military efforts and victories of the Taliban over the past several years. For the first time since 2001, the Taliban managed to conquer an entire province and for several days hold its capital. The psychological effect in Afghanistan has been tremendous. For a few days, it looked like the entire provinces of Badakshan, Takhar, and Baghlan would also fall. Many Afghans in those provinces started getting ready to leave or began moving south. If all these northern provinces fell, the chances were high, with whispers and blatant loud talk of political coups intensifying for a number of days, that the Afghan government might fall, and perhaps the entire political system collapse., In short, the dangerous and deleterious political and psychological effects are far bigger than those from the Taliban's push in Musa Qala this year or last year. Particularly detrimental and disheartening was the fact that many Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) units, led by weak or corrupt commanders, did not fight, and threw down their arms and ran away. Conversely, the boost of morale to the Taliban and the strengthening of its new leader Mullah Akbar Mansour were great. However, the Taliban also discredited itself with its brutality in Kunduz City.

The Taliban operation to take Kuduz was very well-planned and put together over a period of months, perhaps years. Foreign fighters from Central Asia, China, and Pakistan featured prominently among the mix of some 1,000 fighters, adding much heft to local militias that the Taliban mobilized against the militias of the dominant powerbrokers and the United States, as well as the government-sponsored Afghan Local Police. The support of Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence for the Taliban, which the country has not been able to sever despite a decade of pressure from the United States and more recent engagement from China, significantly augmented the Taliban's capacities.

Kunduz is vital strategic province, with major access roads to various other parts of Afghanistan's north. Those who control the roads—still now the Taliban—also get major revenue from taxing travelers, which is significant along these opium-smuggling routes. It will take time for the Afghan forces to reduce Taliban control and influence along the roads, and large rural areas will be left in the hands of the Taliban for a while. Both in the rural areas and in Kunduz City itself, the Taliban is anchored among local population groups alienated by years of pernicious exclusionary and rapacious politics, which has only intensified since March of this year. Equally, however, many of the local population groups hate the Taliban, have engaged in revenge killings and abuses this week, and are spoiling for more revenge.

Despite the intense drama of the past week, however, Afghanistan has not fallen off the cliff. Takhar and Baghlan have not fallen, nor has all of Badakhshan. The political atmosphere in Kabul is still poisonous, but the various anti-government plots and scheming are dissipating in their intensity and immediacy. On Wednesday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reached out to some of those dissatisfied powerbrokers, who have been salivating for a change in political dispensation. The crisis is not over, neither on the battlefield in Kunduz and many other parts of Afghanistan, nor in the Afghan political system. But it is much easier to exhale on Thursday, October 8th.

United States air support was essential in retaking Kunduz and avoiding more of Badakhshan falling into the hands of the Taliban, precipitating a military domino effect in the north and inflaming the political crisis. Despite the terrible and tragic mistake of the U.S. bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital, maintaining and expanding U.S. air support for the Afghan forces, and allowing for U.S. support beyond in extremis, such as in preventing a similar Taliban offensive, is vital. It is equally important to augment intelligence- assets support. Significant reductions in U.S. assistance, whether that be troops, intelligence, or air support, will greatly increase the chances that another major Taliban success—like that of Kunduz, and perhaps possibly again in Kunduz—will happen again. It would also be accompanied by intensely dangerous political instability.

Equally imperative is that Afghan politicians put aside their self-interested scheming and rally behind the country to enable the government to function, or they will push Afghanistan over the brink into paralysis, intensified insurgency, and outright civil war. In addition to restraining their political and monetary ambitions and their many powerplays in Kabul, they need to recognize that years of abusive, discriminatory, exclusionary governance; extensive corruption; and individual and ethnic patronage and nepotism were the crucial roots of the crisis in Kunduz and elsewhere. These have corroded the Afghan Army and permeate the Afghan Police and anti-Taliban militias. Beyond blaming Pakistan, Afghan politicians and powerbrokers need to take a hard look at their behavior over the recent days and over many years and realize they have much to do to clean their own house to avoid disastrous outcomes for Afghanistan. To satisfy these politicians, many from the north of the country and prominent long-term powerbrokers, President Ghani decided over the past few days to include them more in consultations and power-sharing. Many Afghan people welcome such more inclusive politics, arguing that while the very survival of the country might be at stake, grand governance and anti-corruption ambitions need to be shelved. That may be a necessary bargain, but it is a Faustian one. Not all corruption or nepotism can or will disappear. But unless outright rapacious, exclusionary, and deeply predatory governance is mitigated, the root causes of the insurgency will remain unaddressed and the state-building project will have disappeared into fiefdoms and lasting conflict. At that point, even negotiations with the Taliban will not bring peace.

      

The loss of the Afghan provincial capital Kunduz was a psychological shock to the Afghan people, a strategic and tactical defeat for both Afghanistan and the United States, and a tragedy for those at the Doctors Without Borders hospital there. Yet the shock may prompt essential changes. It is important to examine both Afghan and U.S. responsibility for the disaster, what is happening now and what needs to be done. President Obama’s decision Thursday to maintain existing U.S. force levels into next year was absolutely correct to achieve the goal he stated of “sustainable Afghan capacity and self-sufficiency.”

Kunduz, which has since been recaptured by Afghan forces, was more than just the first provincial capital to be taken by the Taliban; its fall was highly symbolic because it was the site of the Taliban’s last stand in 2001. The poor initial performance of Afghan security forces and the tragic bombing of a nongovernmental organization hospital in the midst of a chaotic response to the attack sparked national disappointment in Afghanistan and international concern. All this came on the back of a dismal year in which many more Afghan civilians died than did so while international forces fought the Taliban, and the national unity government, which came into office on a wave of hope a year ago, stalled on filling essential positions and reforming governance.

The United States and its allies share responsibility for the military losses. We built security forces that depend on air power and need continued intelligence and advisory support. But instead of ensuring that these capabilities are available, we have severely limited air support, transferred key intelligence enablers to Iraq and created a patchwork system that left key areas, including Kunduz, without effective advisers. Our withdrawals from these vital functions based on politically driven timetables ignored reality on the ground, including Taliban capabilities and the embrace of the Islamic State by some militants.

But Afghans need to understand that U.S. support is not, and should not, be a blank check. Both the government and the opposition need to work to improve their military, political and governance performance, and come together instead of pulling the country apart.

The Kunduz setback does not mean the war is lost. Elite Afghan commandos delivered by recapturing critical areas. Whereas Mosul in Iraq remains in enemy hands a year after it fell, Kunduz has returned to government control. President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah appear to be heeding the call to action. During our recent 10-day visit to Afghanistan, each told us that they have agreed to an accelerated appointment process. Five new governors have been named, including three to critical provinces; further appointments and the long-delayed replacement of numerous senior officers is promised and must happen quickly. Appointments must involve effective individuals and cannot be merely political payoffs. Ghani has created a commission to investigate Kunduz, with a mandate to recommend action, that is led by opposition voices, including a former head of intelligence, though it sadly lacks female members.

If government performance takes off, public confidence could begin to be restored. More remains to be done. Afghan power brokers, intent on advancing personal agendas, seek to replace the government. They need to be pressed to stand down. The effort to reduce predatory governance in the provinces and Kabul cannot be shoved aside. Ghani and Abdullah must work effectively together despite the rapacious desires of their supporters and opponents. Broader consultation with the Afghan people is needed.

The United States needs to continue to step up to its own responsibilities, as well. Ground combat troops are not needed, but advisers and air power must be kept in place and not reduced on some blind, years-old timetable. Air power must be available to preempt attacks and not confined, as it is now, to desperate defense after attacks have begun. Afghan and foreign officials we spoke to foresee a crescendo of Taliban attacks as international forces withdraw. An even bigger Taliban offensive next year is likely to stretch battered Afghan forces further. We have not ended a war, only left it to the Afghans too soon.

The United States should maintain its current forces and funding levels, which are less than 10 percent of expenditures a few years ago, and focus on effectively advising Afghan forces. A reduction of the U.S. effort to a “pure” counterterrorism effort, still foreshadowed by the president’s hope of getting to about half the current force level sometime next year, would be disturbingly similar to what President George W. Bush tried a decade ago. Such a premature drawdown would abandon Afghan forces before they are ready, increasing the risk that a renewed terrorist haven will emerge.

Asking our allies to do jobs they are not equipped to do raises the risk of more reversals such as Kunduz and tragedies like the hospital bombing. Obama’s decision to maintain forces properly avoids preempting his successor’s choices about a difficult and evolving situation. That focus, and not a predetermined timetable, should continue to guide decisions throughout the remainder of this administration. The president’s public determination to maintain our current training and advising effort until Afghan forces do not need such help will provide a needed boost to both Afghans and our NATO allies — some of whom have been ahead of us in urging that we stay. And it is the right thing to do for our national interests.

This piece was originally published by The Washington Post.

       

The gruesome theatrics of the Islamic State (IS) captivate the world’s attention, instilling fear in the public from Los Angeles to Paris to Beirut. Yet while arrests are made in Europe and airstrikes continue in Raqqa, Americans ignore developments on another worn-out battlefield: Afghanistan.

Afghanistan faces numerous crises in 2016 that could rock the country and threaten U.S. security investments. The United States still has 10,000 troops stationed in the country. It must take decisive action not to supply vast numbers of troops or massively increase spending, but instead abandon inadequate policies before something catastrophic occurs. These must be more than incremental policy changes that merely stave off disaster for the interim, as this would compound the seriousness of each crisis. After traveling to Afghanistan in October 2015, we have identified key security risks and steps the United States can take to forestall disaster.

In 2015, Taliban violence resulted in more Afghan civilian, police, and military casualties than in any year since U.S. and NATO forces began fighting in Afghanistan. More fighters, better weapons, and new tactics made the 2015 Taliban offensive their most effective yet, with a recent attack in Parwan province that killed six U.S. soldiers serving as a terrible reminder of this grim reality. Next year, the Taliban will aim to take provincial cities, pounce on Kandahar, and spread fear through spectacular attacks. A major Taliban offensive following this year’s fierce assault is almost certain. Indeed, as a recent Department of Defense report describes, the security situation in Afghanistan has grown more precarious over the last year.

The Afghan army has done its best to counter the Taliban assault. Afghan forces retook Kunduz and pushed back serious Taliban offensives in other cities, including Ghazni. While attrition is high due to soldiers overstaying leaves, desertion, and Taliban threats to soldiers’ families, recruitment of new forces has exceeded losses. Yet, strong ground forces cannot compensate for inadequate air support, modern intelligence capabilities, well-functioning logistics (to maintain vehicles and keep essential supplies available), and higher-order assistance for Afghanistan’s still-nascent security institutions. The United States must help fill these critical gaps while maintaining its promises to complete these critical, but unfinished, programs. The United States must also amend the very restrictive rules of engagement that currently limit air support capabilities, and restore intelligence assets that have been withdrawn. Stronger battlefield intelligence capabilities are essential, as we learned after the tragic bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) hospital in Kunduz. More effective air attacks and improved intelligence could seriously disrupt Taliban operations in Afghanistan.

But the Taliban is no longer the only threat to stability in Afghanistan. The influence of the Islamic State is growing, as it recruits more extremist Taliban members and brings in fighters from non-Afghan communities, including Uzbeks and Pakistanis. These IS-inspired groups challenge the new Taliban leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour, who seeks to cement his leadership after the years-long deception over the death of his predecessor, Mullah Omar. The Taliban fragmentation and competition from IS, especially prominent in the provinces of Zabul and Nangarhar, have led to increased violence, including the recent beheadings of minority Hazaras. The renewed violence reduces already slim hopes for a negotiated peace in Afghanistan.

The United States and NATO must intensify actions against IS in Afghanistan. Like al Qaeda, the group must be a priority target for air and counter terrorist missions. Now is the time to destroy it. At a minimum, coalition forces must restrain the growth of this hostile force before it becomes a significantly larger threat.

Afghanistan is undertaking a unique experiment in elected government. Nearly 70 percent of the electorate voted in 2014, despite threats from the Taliban to kill or mutilate anyone who did so. However, the results were clouded by accusations of widespread fraud. After an extended political impasse, the United States brokered a peaceful settlement and a power-sharing agreement between the two contenders in the run off. The National Unity Government (NUG) was formed with Ashraf Ghani serving as president and his chief rival, Abdullah Abdullah, as chief executive officer.

Military solutions alone cannot solve all of the country’s woes, as the electorate’s participation and the elected officials’ ability to govern are as critical to a stable state as a strong security apparatus. Now, at a time when insurgent attacks need a strong response and the government needs to stop its internal wrangling and start delivering services to civilians, the NUG finds itself politically distracted. Ex-president Hamid Karzai and mujahedeen leaders continue to undermine the government in an attempt to spur its collapse. These attempts are little more than a naked power grab that, if successful, would usher in months of political paralysis while the victors squabble over the spoils of power. This would be disastrous, at a time when insurgent attacks need a strong response and the government needs to start delivering services. The United States and other coalition nations must voice strong opposition to all efforts to change the constitution through a Loya Jirga or the scheduling of early elections. Without first reforming the electoral system, another massively fraudulent election will surely follow. Quiet opposition will be taken as willingness to see the NUG undone.

Despite some positive developments, the Afghan government is losing popular support. More and more Afghans believe that the country is heading in the wrong direction. Thousands of Afghans are fleeing the country, and along with them goes the potential for economic growth. Crime and insecurity in the cities contribute to this brain and asset drain. Stakeholders in Afghanistan must demand governance improvements from the NUG – including opposition to vicious ethnic discrimination and power abuse, which the Taliban exploited in Kunduz – that the Afghan people crave. The government should focus on increasing effective anti-criminal and anti-corruption policing in the major cities, such as Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad. This would require significant government action against some major power brokers. Additionally, a concerted foreign advisory effort with the police is needed to improve civilian security. These actions require vigorous U.S. and international backing.

Doubts are growing about the United States’ and NATO’s commitment to long-term support for Afghanistan. While President Barack Obama’s decision to retain major security hubs in Afghanistan was a step in the right direction, this progress was undercut by the planned force reductions at the end of 2016. In a worsening security environment, Afghans fear being abandoned by their international partners. To rebuild confidence, a U.S.-led NATO review of conditions on the ground and a demonstrated willingness to fill major gaps, such as air support, would counteract this sense of abandonment.

Not all is gloom. Unlike Karzai, who blamed the United States for most of Afghanistan’s problems and refused to move against massive corruption, Ghani remains committed to reform. There is progress in revenue collection, enforcement action against fraud in Kabul Bank, and some members of the new cabinet are making progress in less visible but important reforms like speeding business licensing and settling land titles. Unlike in Syria and Iraq, militias do not yet dominate either politics or the battlefield. Actions are still available to minimize the looming crises. But planning and decisions are needed now, not after the crises explode.

This piece was originally published by Foreign Policy. 

       

2016 is shaping up to be a potentially critical year for Afghanistan. ISIS is rising there, the Taliban is gaining ground, the stability of the Afghan government is deteriorating by the day, and national elections are coming in October. The US, China, Pakistan, and the Afghan government are currently holding talks aimed at bringing the Taliban to the table to try negotiate an end to the war.

Of those countries, it's Pakistan that is the most significant. Pakistan has probably the most influence of anyone over whether those talks will succeed in getting the Taliban to agree to sit down and negotiate a peace agreement with the Afghan government. But there's a lot more going on with the peace talks that are perhaps the country's best or only remaining hope.

To understand how this works and why it matters, I spoke to Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow in the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence at the Brookings Institution and an expert on Afghanistan. What follows is a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Jennifer Williams: Could you start by just explaining how Pakistan has been involved in the conflict between the Taliban and Afghanistan historically?

Vanda Felbab-Brown: That goes back to the creation of independent Pakistan, with issues having to do with the Pashtun minority in Pakistan, which is also the majority population of Afghanistan, and irredentist claims by Afghan Pashtun politicians, as well as the Cold War rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States, who at different times supported either Pakistan or Afghanistan and played the two against each other.

Then you have the Taliban emerging in the 1990s, and Pakistan fully supports the Taliban: They help equip it, they provide intelligence, advisers, and during the Taliban era when they ruled country, Pakistan is one of only three countries that recognize the Taliban regime.

They continued supporting the Taliban throughout the past decade, and US-Pakistan relations became very fraught and complicated. It's never been easy. Pakistanis sometimes use the expression that the United States treats Pakistan like a condom: uses it when they need it then discards it when they are finished with it. It's a fairly common saying in Pakistan, especially in the military. So there is a sense of betrayal on the part of the United States, untrustworthiness, that it's an exploitative relationship on the part of the US toward Pakistan.

I should also say that Pakistan has long supported many Islamic extremist groups as part of its asymmetric policy toward India, and some of these groups have now mutated, or they slipped Pakistan's full control.

Even with respect to the Afghan Taliban, there is a lot of support from the Pakistani state intelligence services and military to the Afghan Taliban. At the same time, Pakistan has been under enormous US and international pressure to act against them, and so they will take the occasional action against the Afghan Taliban as well. But those actions are mostly seen as halfhearted, incomplete window dressing.

JW: So what role is Pakistan playing today? I know that they just had the four-party talks and that Pakistan has been insisting that these talks take place in Pakistan. Are they trying to speak for the Taliban?

VFB: I'm not sure that it's a fair characterization that they are speaking for the Taliban. Certainly the Afghan government, including in the latest talks, often insinuates or alleges that Pakistan speaks for the Taliban. But they clearly do not.

The relationship between the Taliban and Pakistan is hardly smooth and perfect. Many members of the Afghan Taliban deeply resent the level of Pakistani interference, even as the group has been supported by Pakistan. There is a lot of Afghan Pashtun nationalism also among the Taliban that deeply resents the influence and attempts at control by the Pakistani state.

Part of the key issue in the relationship is that although Pakistan supports the Afghan Taliban, and although it has historically supported other extremist groups, it does not have perfect control. And arguably, its control is diminishing. And so they posture, they do their double game. They want to appear strong, and so they posture that they have much greater control than they have, but at the same time they deny that they have any nefarious role.

In reality, they are playing both sides against the middle, and they often have much less capacity to control and rein in the extremist groups, including the Afghan Taliban, than many assume. The widespread criticism of Pakistan is one of its duplicity and its nefarious activity and its lack of willingness to act against the Afghan Taliban. Those are true, but they are also coupled with limits to their capacity. They are riding a tiger that they cannot control fully.

So they have been hosting these four-way talks that involve them, the US government, the Afghan government, and the Chinese government. The Afghan government is desperate to achieve some sort of negotiated deal with the Taliban. It feels under tremendous pressure, the military is taking a pounding from the Taliban, and the government lacks legitimacy.

The US has similar views on the notion that the way out of the predicament in Afghanistan is a negotiated deal. The Chinese also like the idea. They have their own influence in Pakistan. China would very much like to say that they finally achieved what the US failed to do over the past decade, that they will bring peace to Afghanistan, and that they will do it by enabling the negotiations.

Pakistan is responsive to China. Their relationship with China is much stronger than their relationship with the United States. They often tell the US that China is their old friend, that China is the country that hasn't betrayed them, unlike the United States. China has promised massive economic development in Pakistan at $40 billion. The Pakistanis often say to the US that the Pakistan-China relationship is "greater than the Himalayas and deeper than the ocean." Very flowery.

JW: What's the relationship like between the Afghan government and Pakistan today?

VFB: The crucial man there really is the Pakistani chief of the army staff Raheel Sharif; no relation to [Prime Minister] Nawaz Sharif. I think that there is sort of goodwill and motivation right now, even on the army staff — but that is juxtaposed with, again, the limits of control even the chief has. With almost clockwork regularity you have a round of negotiations in Pakistan or you have a meeting between Raheel Sharif and [Afghan President Ashraf] Ghani, and the next day a bomb goes off in Kabul and people die, or the Indian consulate is attacked.

All those ploys are meant to destroy any beginning of a more positive relationship and have been very effective in subverting the process. The same goes on between Pakistan and India. Meanwhile, Ghani is taking an enormously risky strategy with respect to the negotiations. It's vastly unpopular in Afghanistan, and many, many Afghans hate Pakistan and blame it for all of their troubles.

They use Pakistan as the explanation of everything that ever goes wrong in Afghanistan. And the Pakistanis are responsible for a lot, but there's much, much blame and responsibility that lies on Afghan politicians and Afghan people.

So Ghani's outreach and engagement with Pakistan is extremely unpopular. He's spending an extreme amount of political capital, and does not have support from his partner in the government, Abdullah Abdullah, and the northern Tajik factions that hate Pakistan with great vitriol. So the more Pakistan is unable to deliver things like the Haqqani network, reducing or stopping its attacks in Kabul, the more politically impossible for Ghani the process will be.

JW: So what does that mean in terms of the stability of Afghanistan's unity government?

VFB: The unity government is extremely strained. "Unity" it isn't. The Pakistani negotiation angle is just too big for the strain. It might be strategically important. It might be a very significant element in getting any negotiation going, but it's also extremely politically costly, and the longer it doesn't produce anything, the more politically costly and unsustainable it will be.

In October, there are supposed to be parliamentary elections and district elections in Afghanistan, and, more important, this loya jirga [a national assembly of Afghan elders]. And unless there is some sort of major breakthrough by the summer, a lot of the negotiations and political process with both the Taliban and Pakistan will be put on ice, because it will just be politically impossible in the context of the loya jirga and the elections.

So they really have until the summer to make some sort of breakthrough, and then you will have months of morass and extreme political instability in Afghanistan, but it will also not be conducive in any way to improving either the relationship with Pakistan or the negotiations.

JW: How does Pakistan fit into the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan? What's the relationship there? And how might this affect the peace negotiations?

VFB: The rise of ISIS-Khorasan is one of the most interesting developments. It complicates the negotiations for the Taliban. They oppose the negotiations, and they're a big problem for Mullah Mansour and those who want to negotiate. They enable defections, make them easy, and make them costly.

At the same time, it is interesting because ISIS does not have the same linkages to Pakistan that the Afghan Taliban had, even though ISIS includes many defectors from the Taliban. They quite specifically reject what they call the "yoke" that Pakistan has put on the Afghan Taliban, and they call the Afghan Taliban leadership traitors because of the close relationship with Pakistan.

Moreover, ISIS-Khorasan also has quite a few members of various Pakistani extremist groups like Lashkar-e Taiba and members of TTP [Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan]. So there is also a lot of resentment and hostility toward Pakistan.

I think the rise of ISIS might make Pakistan be cooperative to some extent, but on the other hand, I think it will also reinforce in the mind of many Pakistan security controllers that it's important to cultivate the Afghan Taliban as friends against the bigger danger of ISIS.

JW: Now that ISIS-Khorasan has directly targeted Pakistan, the consulate in Jalalabad, do you think Pakistan will take action?

VFB: I think they'll take action against ISIS and groups like Tehrik-e Taliban. I don't think it will produce more resolve to go after the Afghan Taliban. That's my view. Others are hoping that they will finally accept the realities and really believe that they have to fight all of the insurgents, all of the terrorists, and that they cannot differentiate among them. I am not persuaded that that will, in fact, happen.

JW: So what does this all mean for the prospects for peace? Are you hopeful at all?

VFB: I think the peace negotiations are important, but I am skeptical that anything will happen quickly.

I think that if by summer the Taliban has been willing to join the negotiating table, that will be an important breakthrough, but nothing will be agreed. The summer will be very bloody, and then there will be the political [wrangling] associated with the loya jirga and the elections.

In my view, even if the Taliban comes to the negotiating table, we are looking at years of negotiations, and certainly no breakthrough before 2017 and likely much longer.

And so the question is whether we, the United States, are prepared to stand by with Afghanistan for that long and whether the Afghans will have the resolve. So it's really important that the military and the police fight as hard as they can, because the weaker they fight, the more they defect, the more intimidated they are, the more brain drain that flows from Afghanistan, the stronger the Taliban is viewed and the more intransigent they will be in the negotiations. Now the negotiations will be very much about the military battlefield as much as they will about what's happening at the table for a long time.

This interview was originally published by Vox.

       

Vanda Felbab-Brown writes that after more than a decade of struggles against al-Qaida and the Taliban, U.S. President Barack Obama hoped to extricate the United States from participating militarily in Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency. But as the end of his presidency approaches in the summer of 2016, Afghanistan again faces crisis. Very few trends in the country are going well. The U.S. drone killing of the Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in Baluchistan, Pakistan in May 2016 provides a fillip to the embattled Afghan government and may in the long-term result in fragmentation and internal withering of the Taliban. But that outcome is not guaranteed nor likely to materialize quickly. In fact, the Taliban swiftly announced Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, a deputy to Mullah Mansour, as its new leader to avoid the tensions and chaos that surrounded Mansour’s appointment.

The Taliban has mounted and sustained its toughest military campaign in years, and the war has become bloodier than ever. Despite the Taliban’s internal difficulties, its military energy shows no signs of fizzling out. The influence of the particularly vicious Haqqani network within the Taliban has grown. Moreover, the Islamic State established itself in Afghanistan in 2015, although it faces multiple strong countervailing forces.

Most ominously, Afghanistan’s political scene remains fractious and polarized. The National Unity Government of President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive officer and rival Abdullah Abdullah (created in the wake of the highly contested presidential elections of 2014) has never really found its feet. Fundamental structural problems of the government remain unaddressed, and after two years in power the government may face its end as a result of a possible Loya Jirga assembly in the fall of 2016. Even if the Jirga does not meet, Afghanistan’s leadership will face potentially debilitating crises of legitimacy. Afghanistan’s elite has not taken any steps to heal the country’s deep and broad political wounds. Instead, the dominant mode of politics is to plot the demise of the government and focus on a parochial accumulation of one’s power at the expense of the country’s national interest, and even the very survival of the post-2001 order.

Struggling to deliver the promised improvements in government efficiency and reduction in corruption, President Ghani staked the two first years of his presidency on negotiations with the Taliban. In order to facilitate the negotiations, he reached out to Pakistan in a daring and politically costly gambit in the fall of 2014 and repeatedly since. The payoff so far has been limited and Ghani’s political space is shrinking. The death of Mullah Mansour is likely to complicate the process even more.

In the paper, Felbab-Brown discusses the evolving international support for Afghanistan; military developments in Afghanistan since the fall of 2014 and the intensity of the Taliban’s battlefield thrust; the Taliban’s internal cohesion, fragmentation and leadership successions; President Ghani’s outreach to Pakistan and the effort to negotiate with the Taliban; and Afghan political processes and trends.

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• Blood and faith in Afghanistan: A June 2016 update

       

       

       

       

       

       

Event Information

Register for the Event

On April 30, 2007, the Brookings Center on the United States and Europe held its fourth annual conference. As in previous years, the annual conference brought together scholars, officials, and policymakers from both sides of the Atlantic to examine the evolving roles of the United States and Europe in the global arena. Panel discussions covered some critical issues about Europe and the U.S.-Europe relationship: "The French Elections", "NATO and Afghanistan" and "Islam in Europe". Panelists included, among others, Lt. General Karl Eikenberry, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee; Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan; Tufyal Choudhury of Durham University; Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution; and Corine Lesnes from Le Monde.

8:30 a.m.		Continental breakfast available
8:50 a.m.		Welcome and Introduction Strobe Talbott, President, The Brookings Institution
9:00 - 10:30 a.m.		"The French Elections" Chair: Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post Panelists: Laurent Cohen-Tanugi, Skadden Arps; Notre Europe Corine Lesnes, Le Monde Philip Gordon, The Brookings Institution
10:30 - 10:45 p.m.		Break
10:45 a.m. - 12:15 p.m.		"NATO in Afghanistan" Chair: Carlos Pascual, The Brookings Institution Panelists: Lt. General Karl Eikenberry, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan Marvin Weinbaum, Middle East Institute
12:15 - 1:30 p.m.		Buffet Lunch (Saul/Zilkha)
1:30 - 3:00 p.m.		"Islam in Europe" Chair: Jeremy Shapiro, The Brookings Institution Panelists: Daniel Benjamin, The Brookings Institution Tufyal Choudhury, Durham University Jonathan Laurence, Boston College

The Center on the United States and Europe Annual Conference is made possible by the generous support of the German Marshall Fund of the United States

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• Transcript (.pdf)

Event Materials

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Nearly eight years after a U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime, Afghanistan remains far from stable. As President Barack Obama considers alternatives to increasing the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, his administration’s new counternarcotics strategy meshes well with counterinsurgency and state-building efforts in the country. It is a welcome break from previous ineffective and counterproductive policies. The effectiveness of the policy with respect to counternarcotics, counterinsurgency and state-building, however, will depend on the operationalization of the strategy. The details are not yet clear, but the strategy potentially faces many pitfalls.

Efforts to bankrupt the Taliban through eradication are futile and counterproductive since they cement the bonds between the population and the Taliban. But interdiction is very unlikely to bankrupt the Taliban either. Security needs to come first before any counternarcotics policy has a chance of being effective. Counterinsurgent forces can prevail against the Taliban, without shutting down the Taliban drug income, by adopting an appropriate strategy that provides security and rule of law to the population and by sufficiently beefing up their own resources vis-à-vis the Taliban. Rural development is a long term and multifaceted effort. Simplistic strategies that focus simply on price ratios or try to raise risk through “seed-burn-seed” approaches are ineffective. Wheat replacement strategy as a core of the alternative livelihoods effort is singularly inappropriate for Afghanistan. Shortcuts do not lead to sustainable policies that also mitigate conflict and enhance state-building.

The Obama administration will need to reduce expectations for quick fixes and present realistic timelines to Congress, the U.S. public and the international community for how long rural development and other counternarcotics policies in Afghanistan will take to show meaningful and sustainable progress that advances human security of the Afghan people, mitigates conflict and enhance state building. Unless this is conveyed, there is a real danger that even a well-designed counternarcotics policy will be prematurely and unfortunately discarded as ineffective.

The New Strategy in Afghanistan’s Context

In summer 2009, the Obama administration unveiled the outlines of a new counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. The new policy represents a courageous break with previous misguided efforts there and thirty years of U.S. counternarcotics policies around the world. Instead of emphasizing premature eradication of poppy crops, the new policy centers on increased interdiction and rural development. This approach strongly enhances the new counterinsurgency policy focus on providing security to the rural population, instead of being preoccupied with the numbers of incapacitated Taliban and al Qaeda.

In Afghanistan, somewhere between a third and a half of its GDP comes from poppy cultivation and processing and much of the rest from foreign aid, so the illicit poppy economy determines the economic survival of a large segment of the population. This is true not only of the farmers who cultivate opium poppy frequently in the absence of viable legal and illegal economic alternatives. But, as a result of micro- and macro-economic spillovers and the acute paucity of legal economic activity, much of the economic life in large cities is also underpinned by the poppy economy. After a quarter century of intense poppy cultivation, the opium poppy economy is deeply entrenched in the socio-economic fabric of the society. Islamic prohibitions against opiates notwithstanding, the poppy economy inevitably underlies Afghanistan’s political arrangements and power relations. Profits from taxing poppy cultivation and protecting smuggling rings bring substantial income to the Taliban. A recent CRS report (August 2009) estimates the income at $70-$100 million per year, which accounts for perhaps as much as half of Taliban income. But many other actors in Afghanistan profit from the opium poppy economy in a similar way: former warlords cum government officials; members of Afghanistan’s police; tribal chiefs; and independent traffickers.

Moreover, the Taliban and many others who protect the opium poppy economy from efforts to suppress it derive much more than financial profits. Crucially, they also obtain political capital from populations dependent on poppy cultivation. Such political capital is a critical determinant of the success and sustainability of the insurgency since public support or at least acceptance are crucial enablers of an insurgency. Indeed, as I detail in my forthcoming book, Shooting Up: Counterinsurgency and the War on Drugs, along with providing order that the Afghan government is systematically unable to provide and capitalizing on Ghilzai Pashtun sentiments of being marginalized, protection of the poppy fields is at the core of the Taliban support. By not targeting the farmers, the new counternarcotics strategy is thus synchronized with the counterinsurgency efforts because it can deprive the Taliban of a key source of support. Its overall design also promises to lay the necessary groundwork for substantial reductions in the size and impacts of the illicit economy in Afghanistan.

However, while appropriate in its overall conception, the new strategy has pitfalls. Specifically how to operationalize interdiction and rural development will to a great extent determine the effectiveness of the strategy—not only with respect to the narrow goal of narcotics suppression, but also with respect to counterinsurgency and state-building. While many of the details still remain to be developed, some of those that have trickled out give reasons for concern.

Effects of Previous Eradication-Centered Policy

During the 2008-09 growing season, the area of cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 22% to 123,000 hectares and opium production fell by 10 percent to 6,900 metric tons (mt). Much of this decline in cultivation was driven by market forces largely unrelated to policy: After several years of massive overproduction in Afghanistan that surpassed the estimated global market for opiates by almost three times, opium prices were bound to decline. Even at 6,900 mt, production still remains twice as high as world demand, leading to speculation that someone somewhere is stockpiling opiates.

More significant, the persistence of high production betrays the ineffectiveness of simplistic policies, such as premature forced eradication before alternative livelihoods are in place, which since 2004 (until the new Obama strategy) was the core of the counternarcotics policy in Afghanistan. Policies that fail to address the complex and multiple structural drivers of cultivation and ignore the security and economic needs of the populations dependent on poppy cultivation generate vastly counterproductive effects with respect to not only counternarcotics efforts, but also counterinsurgency, stabilization and state building.

The eastern Afghan province of Nangarhar provides a telling example. For decades, Nangarhar has been one of the dominant sources of opium poppy. But over the past two years, as a result of governor Gul Agha Shirzai’s suppression efforts—including bans on cultivation, forced eradication, imprisonment of violators and claims that NATO would bomb the houses of those who cultivate poppy or keep opium—cultivation declined to very low numbers. This has been hailed as a major success to be emulated throughout Afghanistan.

In fact, the economic and security consequences were highly undesirable. The ban greatly impoverished many, causing household incomes to fall 90% for many and driving many into debt. As legal economic alternatives failed to materialize, many coped by resorting to crime, such as kidnapping and robberies. Others sought employment in the poppy fields of Helmand, yet others migrated to Pakistan where they frequently ended up recruited by the Taliban. The population became deeply alienated from the government, resorting to strikes and attacks on government forces. Districts that were economically hit especially severely, such as Khogiani, Achin and Shinwar, have become no-go zones for the Afghan government and NGOs. Although those tribal areas have historically been opposed to the Taliban, the Taliban mobilization there has taken off to an unprecedented degree. The populations began allowing the Taliban to cross over from Pakistan, and U.S. military personnel operating in that region indicate that intelligence provision to Afghan forces and NATO has almost dried up. Tribal elders who supported the ban became discredited, and the collapse of their legitimacy is providing an opportunity for the Taliban to insert itself into the decision-making structures of those areas. And all such previous bans in the province, including in 2005, turned out to be unsustainable in the absence of legal economic alternatives. Thus, after the 2005 ban, for example, poppy cultivation inevitably swung back.

The Ingredients of Success

Security
The prerequisite for success with respect to narcotics is security, i.e. sustained state control of territory. Without it, Afghanistan cannot be stabilized and the state strengthened; nor can counternarcotics policies be effective. Whether one adopts iron-fisted eradication or sustainable rural development as the core of a counternarcotics policy, security is essential. Without security first, counternarcotics efforts have not yet succeeded anywhere. Suppression without alternative livelihoods in place requires firm control of the entire territory to prevent illicit crop displacement and harsh suppression of the population dependent on illicit crops. Apart from being problematic with respect to human rights, this harsh approach is also very costly politically. Rural development requires security, otherwise investment will not come in, the population will not make risky long-term investments in legal crops and structural drivers of cultivation will not be effectively addressed. Development under a hail of bullets simply does not work, and in the context of insecurity, illicit economies persist and dominate.

Nor have counternarcotics policies, such as eradication or interdiction, succeeded in bankrupting or severely weakening any belligerent groups profiting from drugs anywhere in the world. Not in China, Thailand, Burma, Peru, Lebanon or even Colombia. Instead, they cement the bonds between marginalized populations dependent on illicit crops and belligerents plus severely reduce human intelligence flows to the counterinsurgent forces.

But counterinsurgent forces can prevail against insurgents and terrorists without stopping or reducing the terrorists’ drug-based financial inflows—either by increasing their own forces and resources vis-à-vis the belligerents or by adopting a smarter strategy that is either militarily more effective or wins the hearts and minds. This was the case in China, Thailand, Burma, and Peru where counterinsurgents succeeded without eradication. Evidence that counterinsurgent forces can prevail without bankrupting the belligerents through eradication also holds in the case of Colombia where the FARC has been weakened militarily not because of the aerial spraying of coca fields, but in spite of it. Today, more coca is grown there than at the beginning of Plan Colombia; but as a result of U.S. resources and training, Colombian forces were capable of greatly weakening the FARC even though forced eradication virtually eliminated human intelligence from the population to the government.

Interdiction with the Right Focus
The broad focus of the new counternarcotics strategy on interdiction is well placed, but interdiction’s effectiveness will depend on its objectives and execution. Just like eradication, interdiction will not succeed in bankrupting the Taliban. The Taliban has many other sources of income, including donations from Pakistan and the Middle East, taxation of legal economic activity, smuggling with legal goods, wildlife and illicit logging. In fact, it rebuilt itself in Pakistan between 2002 and 2004 without access to the poppy economy. Overall, drug interdiction has a very poor record in substantially curtailing belligerents’ income, with only a few successes registered in, for example, highly localized settings in Colombia and Peru.

Instead, the objective of the policy should be to reduce the coercive and corrupting power of organized crime groups. But achieving that requires a well-designed policy and a great deal of intelligence. Previous interdiction efforts in Afghanistan have in fact had the opposite effect: they eliminated small traders and consolidated the power of big traffickers, giving rise to the vertical integration of the industry. They also strengthened the bonds between some traffickers and the Taliban (although many traffickers continue to operate independently or are linked to the government).

Large-scale interdiction that targets entire networks and seeks to eliminate local demand for opium from local traders, which some are arguing for, is extraordinarily resource-intensive given the structure of the Afghan opium industry. Prioritization will need to be given to devoting scarce resources to drug interdiction or directly to counterinsurgency. The odds of success are not high. But even if such an interdiction strategy did succeed in shutting down local demand, the policy would become counterproductive since in local settings its effects would approximate the effects of eradication, thus once again alienating the population. Such large-scale interdiction is thus not currently appropriate for Afghanistan.

But even the NATO-led selective interdiction of targeting designated Taliban-linked traffickers (the United States has identified fifty such traffickers) is not free from pitfalls. First, selective interdiction can actually provide opportunities for the Taliban to directly take over the trafficking role or strengthen the alliance between the remaining traffickers and the Taliban, thus achieving the opposite of what it aims for. In fact, interdiction measures in Peru and Colombia frequently resulted in tightening the belligerents-traffickers nexus and belligerents’ takeover of trafficking.

Second, uncalibrated interdiction can provoke intense turf wars among the remaining traffickers, thus intensifying violence in the country and muddling the battlefield picture by introducing a new form of conflict. Mexico provides a vivid example of such an undesirable outcome. In the Afghan tribal context, such turf wars can easily become tribal or ethnic warfare.

Third, such selective interdiction can also send the message that the best way to be a trafficker is to be a member of the Afghan government, thus perpetuating a sense of impunity and corruption and undermining long-term state building and legitimacy.

Finally, the effectiveness of interdiction is to a great extent dependent on the quality of rule of law in Afghanistan plus the capacity and quality of the justice and corrections systems, all of which are woefully lacking in Afghanistan and are deeply corrupt.

Comprehensive Rural Development
Rural development appropriately lies at the core of the new strategy because, despite the enormous challenges, it has the best chance to effectively and sustainably strengthen the Afghan state and reduce the narcotics economy. But for rural development to do that, it needs to be conceived as broad-based social and economic development that focuses on improvements in human capital—including health care and education—and addresses all of the structural drivers of opium poppy cultivation. In Afghanistan, these drivers include insecurity; lack of physical infrastructure (such as roads), electrification and irrigations systems; lack of microcredit; lack of processing facilities; and the absence of value-added chains and assured markets. They also include lack of land titles and, increasingly, the fact that land rent by sharecroppers has become dependent on opium poppy cultivation as land concentration has increased over the past eight years. Poppy cultivation and harvesting are also very labor-intensive, thus offering employment opportunities unparalleled in the context of Afghanistan’s economy.

The price-profitability of poppy in comparison to other crops is only one of the drivers and frequently not the most important one. Without other structural drivers being addressed, farmers will not switch to licit crops even if they fetch more money than the illicit ones. By the same token, however, farmers are frequently willing to sacrifice some profit and forgo illicit crop cultivation as long as the licit alternatives bring them sufficient income and address all of the structural drivers, including the insecurity to which farmers are exposed in illicit economies.

Unfortunately, the wheat distribution program that was the core of rural development in Afghanistan last year (and that is slated to be its key component this year) is likely to be woefully ineffective for several reasons. First, in 2008, the program was based solely on an unusually high price ratio of wheat to poppy, driven by poppy overproduction and a global shortage of wheat. However, this price ratio is unlikely to hold; Afghanistan’s wheat prices are dictated anyway by surrounding markets, such as Pakistan and Kazakhstan. Second, the program did nothing to address the structural drivers. In fact, it had counterproductive effects because the free distribution of wheat undermined local markets in seeds. Afghan farmers can obtain seeds; their challenge lies in how to obtain profit afterwards. Thus, some sold the wheat seed instead of cultivating it. Third, those who actually cultivated wheat frequently did so not for profit, but for subsistence to minimize costs of buying cereals on the market. In fact, because of land distribution issues, many Afghan farmers do not have access to enough land to cover even their subsistence needs with wheat monocropping. A key lesson from alternative development over the past thirty years is that monocropping substitution strategies are particularly ineffective. Fourth, if all of current poppy farmers switched to wheat cultivation, Afghanistan would experience a great increase in unemployment since wheat cultivation employs 88% less labor than poppy cultivation and harvesting do.

Instead of wheat, rural development in Afghanistan needs to emphasize diversified high-value, high-labor-intensive crops, such as fruits, vegetables and specialty items like saffron. Generating lasting off-farm income opportunities will also be important, but even more challenging than jump-starting legal agromarkets.

After eight years of underresourcing and neglecting agriculture development, the new counternarcotics policy’s focus on the farm is appropriate. But the new strategy needs to take care not to throw away the baby with the bath water. The effort still needs to include developing value-added chains and assured internal and external markets plus enabling sustained access to them. Once again, thirty years of history of alternative livelihoods show that without value-added chains and accessible markets even productive legal farms become unsustainable and farmers revert back to illicit crops.

Finally, rural development requires time. Perhaps in no country in the world since Mao wiped out poppy cultivation in China in the 1950s did counternarcotics efforts face such enormous challenges as they do in Afghanistan—in terms of the scale of the illicit economy, its centrality to the overall economy of the country and hence its vast marco- and micro-economic and political effects, the underdevelopment of the country and its human capital and the paucity of viable economic alternatives. Even under much more auspicious circumstances along all the above dimensions, counternarcotics rural development in Thailand took thirty years.

Conclusion

Clearly, there is a need to quickly bring some economic, social and rule of law improvements to the lives of the Afghan people. Without such quick, visible and sustainable change, it will become impossible to rebuild the confidence of the Afghan people in the future, harness their remaining aspirations and to persuade them that the central state with support of the international community is preferable to the Taliban or local warlord- or tribal-based fiefdoms. But there is an equal need to urge strategic patience in the United States—both for counterinsurgency and for counternarcotics.

Eradication can be a part of the mix of counternarcotics policies, but should only be adopted in areas that are free of violent conflict and where sufficient legal economic alternatives are available to the population. Interdiction needs to focus on reducing the coercive and corrupting power of crime groups. Before interdiction measures are undertaken, an analysis of second and third- order effects needs to be conducted. It needs to be carefully calibrated with the strength of law enforcement in Afghanistan to avoid provoking dangerous turf wars, ethnic violence and cementing the relationship between the Taliban and the traffickers. It also needs to target top traffickers linked to the Afghan government. Interdiction needs to encompass building the justice and corrections system in Afghanistan and broad rule of law efforts. Rural development needs to address all structural drivers of poppy cultivation. It needs to focus not only on the farm, but also on value-added chains and assured markets. It needs to emphasize diversified high-value, high-labor intensive crops, and not center on wheat.

Evaluations of counternarcotics policies need to back away from simplistic and inappropriate measures, such as the numbers of hectares eradicated or traffickers caught. Instead, the measures need to encompass the complexity of the issue, including, size of areas cultivated with licit as well as illicit crops, human development indexes, levels of education, the number of resource-poor farmers dependent on illicit crops for basic subsistence or vulnerable to poverty-driven participation in illicit economies, food security, availability of legal microcredit, prevalence of land titles and accessibility of land, infrastructure density and cost of infrastructure use (such as road tolls), availability of non-belligerent dispute resolution and arbitrage mechanisms, quality of property rights, prevalence of value-added chains, and accessibility of markets. The United States and its allies must reduce public expectations for quick fixes and dedicate increased resources to rural development for a long time. Although U.S. forces do not need to stay in Afghanistan for decades, economic development will take that long.

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Policy Brief #180

	EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
	The year 2010 in Afghanistan had some encouraging signs but on balance it was less positive than had been hoped. In 2011, therefore, it is important to do two things: first, look for further improvements in our strategy; and second, develop a backup plan, should the current approach not yield the kind of progress that is necessary and expected. This policy brief addresses the first challenge, improving the U.S./NATO counterinsurgency campaign. The basic logic of current strategy is accepted, but several new initiatives or ideas are explored to make it more promising and more effective. Three main ideas are developed: Promoting Afghan political organizations built around ideas and platforms, not individuals and ethnicities, in a change from longstanding American policy that could improve the quality of governance in the country. Taking pressure off the bilateral U.S.-Afghan relationship on the issue of anticorruption, largely by creation of an international advisory board consisting of prominent individuals from key developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania that have had considerable success improving their own nations' governance in recent times. Offering a civilian nuclear energy deal to Pakistan, conditional on clear action by Islamabad to shut down insurgent sanctuaries that are currently using its territory to attack the Afghan government as well as NATO forces.

The past year was not without good news in Afghanistan. It saw a successful deployment of nearly another 40,000 NATO troops to Afghanistan; twice as much growth in Afghan security forces together with a much more robust approach to their training; increases in American civilian capacity in Kabul and in the field; and highly effective targeting of Afghan (and Pakistani) insurgents within Afghanistan and just over the border with Pakistan. I would also count the September parliamentary elections as more good than bad, since it was Afghans who held other Afghans accountable for infractions, and since the Karzai government appears on balance to be tolerating an outcome that will reduce the strength of its cronies in the elected assembly (though this issue remains a work in progress). Finally, NATO's decision at the November Lisbon Summit to emphasize the year 2014 as the time when Afghanistan would assume full control of security operations-rather than President Obama's earlier preference to emphasize July 2011 as the point when the U.S. departure would begin-clarified the American and international commitments to get the job done right before going home. Among other benefits, this change should help convince more Afghan and Pakistani fence-sitters that they can count on us, rather than encouraging hedging behavior out of fear of a premature, hurried NATO exit.

However, 2010 also witnessed a roughly 50 percent increase in the overall level of violence that can only partially be explained by our increased presence and tempo of operations. That increase reflects a very resilient insurgency. Problematic relations between the Obama administration and the Karzai government have also continued, the corruption problem has remained intractable (largely fueled by the western presence with all of its trappings), and the Pakistani government still tolerates sanctuaries for the Haqqani network and the "Quetta Shura Taliban" (that is, the Afghan Taliban) on its territory.

For the most part, the strategy of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) under General David Petraeus, and the efforts of the international community more broadly, seem sound. The paramount goal in Afghanistan is to put the country's government in a position to control its own territory. That is the way to ensure that no large terrorist sanctuaries re-emerge there that could threaten the United States, nuclear-armed Pakistan, or other core western interests. But to achieve that goal, a comprehensive counterinsurgency approach that helps build up the Afghan state is needed, because establishing control of territory requires that the government possess a certain legitimacy among its people-which in turn requires some measure of economic and political progress. Hence, to achieve a fairly simple goal, we have properly undertaken a fairly ambitious strategy, after having tried the opposite, minimalist approach for the first half dozen years of the war only to see the Taliban make a comeback. Yet the strategy still needs improvement to address its two main vulnerabilities: the weakness and corruption of the Afghan government, and the schizophrenic approach to the war on the part the Pakistani government. This policy brief proposes ideas to address each of these problems. The proposals would also improve the prospects of any sound backup plan that might have to be considered this year, such as the concept that Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel and I have recently developed that we call a "Plan A-" for the country.

Afghan Governance and Anti-Corruption Efforts

Working with the Karzai government is an inherently complex matter. On the one hand, we have no choice but to partner with Afghanistan's elected leader, who in fact remains reasonably popular among his own people with a 62 percent favorability rating according to the latest polls. On the other hand, the government is widely seen as ineffective by many of its own citizens, helping generate motivation and recruits for the insurgency. So do we work with Karzai, or work around him? In fact, we must do both. We need a better way to help the Afghan government improve its performance without inciting periodic public spats along the way that set back our efforts to cooperate. And we also need a way to help build for Afghanistan's post-Karzai future, the sooner the better.

Improving Afghan Governance and Fighting Corruption

General Stanley McChrystal's 2009 assessment of the situation in Afghanistan famously and dramatically concluded that corruption in the Afghan government was comparable to the insurgency itself in posing a serious threat to the country. As such, General Petraeus has been right to focus intently on corruption since assuming command, including assigning the formidable Brigadier General HR McMaster to the task, and some positive things are happening as a result. More intelligence assets are being devoted to the problem. Field commanders and development specialists are more aware of the need to understand the power of money, and to be cognizant of whom they are empowering or embittering through their contracting processes and economic development efforts.

Yet problems remain. Corruption remains very serious. And disputes about corruption with President Karzai still go public too often. The United States and the international community more generally should reframe the issue of fighting corruption, as Marine Colonel Greg Douquet and I have previously argued. The challenge should be seen and described primarily as one of improving governance in Afghanistan rather than tackling a culture of criminality.

Blantant, extreme corruption must be prosecuted. But by criminalizing routine corruption, we not only encourage unrealistic expectations in the U.S. Congress and elsewhere about the progress that is achievable over the next few years, we may miss opportunities to work with Afghan "reconciliables"-individuals who may have had some corrupt tendencies yet also try to provide a certain level of effective governance. We also fail to recognize our own past role in the dynamic. Pumping billions of dollars a year into a poor economy, and inadvertently favoring certain power brokers and tribes over others in the process, feeds the very corruption that we so abhor.

Research on fighting corruption and improving governance points to a better way of thinking about this problem. One key insight from renowned development expert Paul Collier and others is that young democracies with weak checks on presidential powers and an easy source of cash tend to have major problems with corruption-so Afghanistan's challenges, rather than being viewed primarily as criminal, should be expected in some ways. Taking this tone with the Karzai government can improve atmospherics and bolster our odds of eliciting cooperative behavior from Kabul.

Another key finding from MIT's Benjamin Olken and other researchers is that trained, independent auditors deployed from the central government to various parts of the country can improve the quality of government performance. Government auditors could also counter the "inverse pyramid" patronage network that is common in the Karzai administration, a network in which corrupt officials "invest" in purchasing government positions and their "dividends" are paid to them in the form of bribes and extortion. Reforming Afghanistan's government will require reversing this trend, or at least mitigating it, through such auditors and other governmental improvements.

And perhaps most important of all, the development literature shows that a number of countries around the world have made headway in combating corruption and improving governance over the years. Brookings and World Bank scholars Daniel Kaufmann, Aart Kraay and Pablo Zoido-Lobaton document progress in places including Indonesia, Hong Kong, Georgia, Albania, Tanzania and Rwanda. We should try to involve more experts from such countries in the effort. President Karzai and others might react more positively to hearing suggestions about how to reduce bribes, check nepotism, and improve governance from Indonesians or Tanzanians rather than Americans.

With U.S. assistance, Afghanistan's government has improved. We are now seeing points of light in the anticorruption effort, such as President Karzai's new specialized anticorruption agency-the High Office of Oversight. Several key ministers in the Karzai cabinet are also exemplary on this front, including for example Minister of Interior Mohammadi. We should emphasize their sound efforts more often. But there is clearly a long way to go, and an international contact group may help.

Strengthening Afghan Political Parties and Institutions

Afghanistan's corruption problem is largely rooted in the fact that the young political system is still too driven by personalities-and to a lesser extent ethnicity-and not enough by ideas.

Part of the challenge is to make sure that Mr. Karzai relinquishes power in 2014, when he reaches the constitutional limit of two full presidential terms. Prudence requires that we assume Mr. Karzai will seek to change the constitution or otherwise manipulate the electoral and legal process to stay in office-not out of any megalomania, but as much as anything out of fear for himself and his friends and relatives given the uncertainty of who might follow him in office. As such, it is possible that Karzai could declare martial law and suspend future elections. He could seek a peace deal with insurgents that makes him the compromise candidate under a future modified constitution. He could even consider a military coup.

It is important to deflate this possibility before it gains momentum. U.S. policymakers should, for example, mention publicly that Mr. Karzai will no longer be president after 2014. This is unobjectionable as a point of legal fact-at least right now-so there is no reason to shy away from saying so. Talking about it enough will help clarify the international community's intentions and expectations. And given Afghanistan's long-term need for international security and economic assistance, Afghan leaders would have to take notice.

The second imperative is to strengthen Afghan political organizations. That means helping Afghanistan's reformers and patriots, of whom there are many, to form strong political movements. Mr. Karzai has chosen some good cabinet officials and governors, but these are just a few individuals. Afghanistan's organized political parties are very weak. There are some fledgling new movements-like the one spearheaded by former foreign minister and presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah. But they are loosely organized and have relatively vague policy platforms.

Afghanistan needs political movements tied to ideas and governing principles rather than ethnicity or individuals. Mr. Karzai has so far discouraged their formation. He has argued that Afghans dislike political parties because of the legacy of Communist Party abuses in the late 1970s and 1980s. But the 1980s are increasingly ancient history. Those who oppose parties today seem motivated mostly by their own desire to divide and conquer a weak, inchoate opposition.

It is time for the U.S. government and the many other governmental and nongovernmental organizations present in Afghanistan to strongly support the activities of new political movements. They should encourage and fund Afghans as they hold policy conferences, create research institutes, do grass-roots political organizing, and talk policy and politics in print, on television and on the radio. This approach need not be anti-Karzai; the president himself could form a party.

Such dynamics could affect even the shorter-term calculations of Afghan politicians. If Afghan voters in 2014 and thereafter are empowered to make real policy choices, candidates will take notice and start developing ideas they can run on. That may be as good an antidote to weak governance and rampant corruption as we can find-not only for the future but for today as well.

Getting Pakistan Off the Fence

Pakistan arguably remains the most complex ally the United States has ever had in wartime. Nine years into the campaign, we still cannot clearly answer the question of whether Pakistan is with us or against us. America needs bold new policy measures to help Islamabad-in all its many dimensions and factions-make up its mind.

Despite allowing massive NATO logistics operations through its territory and helping the United States pursue al Qaeda operatives, Pakistan tolerates sanctuaries on its soil for the major insurgencies fighting in Afghanistan. These include the Afghan Taliban (known as the Quetta Shura Taliban because its principle base remains in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan) as well as the Haqqani and Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) networks. The Haqqanis straddle the border between the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, and Paktika as well as North Waziristan and other tribal areas within Pakistan; HiG is further north, operating in and around the Khyber Pass connecting Kabul and Jalalabad in Afghanistan with Peshawar and points east in Pakistan. Thus, all three major Afghan insurgent groups have home bases in Pakistan, and despite the occasional drone strike are generally beyond NATO's reach as a result.

Pakistan has taken some worthy actions against extremists in its remote northern and western areas in recent years. Specifically, it has recognized the so-called Pakistani Taliban (the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, or TTP) as a mortal threat to the Pakistani state and responded accordingly in some tribal areas. Pakistanis argue, however, that limited numbers of ground troops combined with the past year's devastating floods prevent them from doing more. Quetta, North Waziristan, and other key places remain dens of iniquity, havens for extremists who continue to attack NATO and Afghan troops across the border and then return home for rest, regrouping, and fresh recruiting. Major command-and-control hubs are permanently located within Pakistan as well, and key insurgent leaders like Mullah Omar (to say nothing of Osama bin Laden) probably remain safely ensconced on Pakistani territory where U.S. forces cannot get at them. But it is perhaps not just a matter of available troops. Pakistan would rather have the Taliban and the Haqqanis back in power, especially in the country's south and east, than any group like the former Northern Alliance, which it views as too close to India. Since Islamabad cannot be sure that the current Afghan political system will survive, therefore, it keeps a backup plan based largely on the Taliban and its associates.

Under these circumstances, part of the right policy is to keep doing more of what the Obama administration has been doing with Pakistan-building trust, as with last fall's strategic dialogue in Washington; increasing aid incrementally, as with the new five-year, $2 billion aid package announced during that dialogue; encouraging Pakistan-India dialogue (which would help persuade Islamabad it could safely move more military forces from its eastern border to its western regions) and coordinating militarily across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. But President Barack Obama needs to think bigger. The clarification that the U.S.-led ISAF mission will continue until 2014, and indeed beyond, at the November Lisbon summit was a step in the right direction but more is needed.

Obama should offer Islamabad a much more expansive U.S.-Pakistani relationship if it helps win this war. Two major incentives would have particular appeal to Pakistan. One is a civilian nuclear energy deal like that being provided to India, with full safeguards on associated reactors. Pakistan's progress on export controls in the wake of the A.Q. Khan debacle has been good enough so far to allow a provisional approval of such a deal if other things fall into place as well, including Islamabad’s compliance with any future fissile production cutoff treaty. Second is a free trade accord. Struggling economically, Pakistan needs such a shot in the arm, and a trade deal could arguably do even more than aid at this point.

But the key point is this: Pakistan should be told that these deals will only be possible if the United States and its allies prevail in Afghanistan. Small gestures of greater helpfulness are not adequate; bottom-line results are what count and what are needed. If Afghanistan turns around in a year or two, the deals can be set in motion and implemented over a longer period that will allow the United States to continually monitor subsequent Pakistani cooperation in the war. These terms are really just common sense, and they are based on political realism about America's domestic politics as well as its strategic interests, since there is no way the Congress would support such a nuclear deal if Pakistani policy ultimately contributed to our losing the war in Afghanistan.

Conclusion

Current strategy in Afghanistan is built on reasonably sound counterinsurgency principles and is fairly promising in its prospects for the year ahead. But every such operation is different. That is a basic corollary of counterinsurgency theory, with its emphasis on local politics, conditions, and personalities-meaning that there is no reason to believe that current strategy is good enough just because its fundamentals are time-tested.

A number of other policy reforms, beyond those discussed here, may be worth considering in the coming months as well. The numerical goal for the Afghan security forces is probably still too low, and should approach 400,000 uniformed personnel rather than the current 305,000 target (this debate is well underway as of this writing). The legal system remains weak, with glaring problems such as a major dearth of judges and severely inadequate pay for prosecutors, as well as no clear strategy for linking the formal justice system to the local, traditional justice systems that remain important in Afghanistan today. Finally, in the aftermath of the September 2010 parliamentary elections, some patchwork solution to the disenfranchisement of Pashtuns in provinces like Ghazni where many of them could not vote (or had their votes thrown out) is probably needed. Perhaps some additional modest number of Pashtuns could be given non-voting adjunct status in the parliament, allowing their voices to be heard even if they were ultimately not able to win seats.

But the three changes to our current approach discussed in this policy brief are central, and have not received their due attention. On the anticorruption front, adoption of a less bilateral approach that includes a high-level international advisory body on good governance for the Karzai government could improve the tone and substance of the effort. On the Afghan politics front, the international community should be unapologetic about supporting Afghan political parties built on ideas and agendas more than personalities and ethnicities. And finally, in regard to Pakistan, an informal but public U.S. offer to pursue a bilateral civilian nuclear energy deal should Pakistan help us win the war by clamping down on insurgent sanctuaries, might motivate greater efforts by our on-again off-again allies across the border. Adoption of these recommendations would improve our prospects for at least moderate success in Afghanistan and help make 2011 the belated turnaround year that we so badly need.

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President Obama is right to keep at it in Afghanistan, argues a new policy brief by Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research for the Brookings Foreign Policy program.

Some have criticized the president’s decision to maintain a significant troop presence there (5,500 troops), instead of following through on the planned military withdrawal. But Afghanistan remains very important to American security, O’Hanlon contends, and the situation in the country is far from hopeless in spite of recent setbacks. We should reinvigorate American efforts in Afghanistan, he argues—not returning to levels seen in previous years, but ramping up somewhat from our current posture.

O’Hanlon calls Obama’s resolve in Afghanistan commendable, but writes that he and his administration are still making mistakes on U.S. policy toward the war-torn country. He advises that Washington make two specific changes to its military strategy in Afghanistan:

1. Allow U.S. and NATO airpower to target the Islamic State and the Taliban (currently, they can only fight those groups if directly attacked). The narrow rules of engagement constraining foreign forces were intended to push Afghan armed forces to defend their territory themselves. While a worthy goal, O’Hanlon says, these rules often prevent us from attacking ISIS (though the targeting strategy towards the group may be changing) as well as the Taliban. They also impose unrealistically high demands on Afghan forces and make too fine a distinction between an array of aligned extremist groups operating in the country.
2. Expand U.S. force presence from the current 5,500 troops to around 12,000 for a few years. In O’Hanlon’s opinion, our current numbers are not enough to work with fielded Afghan forces, and skimping on ground forces has contributed to security challenges in places like Helmand, for instance, which experienced new setbacks in 2015. More broadly, leaders in Washington and Brussels should stress the value of a long-term NATO-Afghanistan partnership, rather than emphasizing an exit strategy. This will signal Western resolve to the Taliban and other groups. While the next commander in chief should set the United States on a gradual path toward downsizing American troops in Afghanistan, he believes it would be a mistake for Obama to do so in the short term.

The long haul

O’Hanlon also argues that the United States needs to take a longer-term perspective on key political and economic issues in Afghanistan. On the economic front, there seems to be little thinking about an agricultural development plan for Afghanistan, associated infrastructure support, and land reform, among other challenges. On the political front, conversations often tend to focus on shorter-term issues like organizing parliamentary elections, reforming the Independent Election Commission, or modifying the current power-sharing arrangement. In the process, conversations about foundational political strategy focusing on Afghan institutions and the health of its democracy get short-changed. The parliament is in need of reforms, for instance, as is the political party system (which should encourage Afghans to group around ideas and policy platforms, rather than tribes and patronage networks).

O’Hanlon concludes that the situation in Afghanistan today, while fraught, is understandable given the Taliban’s resilience and NATO’s gradual withdrawal of 125,000 troops. We should not be despondent, he writes—rather, we should identify specific strategies that can help improve the situation. At the end of the day, Afghans must make the big decisions about the future of their country. But as long as the United States and its partners are still providing tremendous resources—and as long as security threats emanating from South Asia continue to threaten the United States—leaders in Washington should use their influence wisely.

       

       

Following U.S. troop withdrawal in 2014, Afghanistan faces an uncertain future. Its fate could be compromised or even commanded by war lords, terrorists or corrupt government officials. Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown spent time on the ground observing events and talking to a mix of Afghans from high ranking officials to village elders, to merchants to the person on the street. In this four-part video series based on her book, “Aspiration and Ambivalence: Strategies and Realities of Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan,” Felbab-Brown offers analysis on an Afghanistan in flux.

Video

• Vanda Felbab-Brown: Counterinsurgency and State-Building in Afghanistan after 2014
• Vanda Felbab-Brown: The Afghan People Simply Want to Live and Thrive
• Vanda Felbab-Brown: Pakistan Plays a Significant Role in Afghanistan's Future
• Vanda Felbab-Brown: The Choices the U.S. Makes Will Largely Determine Afghanistan's Future