Photo: Afghan presidential candidate Abdullah Abdullah, top rival of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, displays the allegedly fraud ballot papers during a news conference at his residence in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, Aug. 25, 2009. Six Afghan presidential candidates, including one being floated as a potential "chief executive" for the next government, warned Tuesday that fraud allegations threaten to undermine the recent election and could stoke violence. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)


We have lost the war in Afghanistan. It will take another five to ten years for most Americans to admit it, but the failure to hold a credible election means it's effectively over... of course, we will drag this out, but after eight years this is the definitely the begining of the end. A strong state and functional economy has not been built, the ancien regime has been scattered but not vanquished, the drug trade was not sufficiently diminshed, the ideology of secular liberal democracy was not sold to the majority of Afghans. Progress was made on all of these fronts, particularly in the last two years, but it was clearly too little too late. If the elections had been credible, at least some of these structural failings could have been ignored for a few more months.

So the question now is what have we learned? At least provisionally, here are a few lessons:

1. Victory is declared just before the real fight begins. Whenever the US declares a military victory, it is time to settle in for a long fight.

2. The Powell Doctrine is dead. First, there are limits to the use of overwhelming force. In fact, flexing one's military muscle and superior air power can backfire and create more enemies than the conflict began with. Second, clearly defined exit strategies have a way of disappearing once a war/occupation gets underway. We wanted to hand this occupation off to the UN and then NATO, neither strategy worked out. Starting a second war to mask the failure to find an exit strategy is the worst possible solution. The rules of war should be clearly understood at the outset: you break it; you fix it. If you don't know how to fix it, don't break it.

3. Be wary of generals asking to double troop strength and administrators asking to double development assistance. The logic behind the rhetoric of "doubling" is dubious (why not "1.73" or "triple" or "quadruple"?) and generally a sign of utter incompetence or complete desperation.

4. Decentralized organizations are much more difficult to defeat than centralized organizations. Moreover, a centralized organization like the Taliban (1996-2001) can reorganize itself as a decentralized organization (2001 - Present). The pursuit of strategies designed to knock out centralized organizations (e.g. leadership assassination) when dealing with a decentralized organization are an indication of a failed military strategy.

5. The discipline of political science does not have much useful to contribute on the process of building a strong state. The process has been carefully studied, but there are no blueprints. The only states America has rebuilt successfully already had a strong state tradition. Weak states can be rebuilt as strong states (e.g. Korea under Japanese occupation; Taiwan under the KMT), but the process is very difficult to replicate.

6. Holding elections before building strong institutions and providing security is a major gamble for breathing room. Of course this was known before the elections were held. At the end of the day, elections are not a substitute for the hard work of institution building and security provision. Elections are necessary but not nearly sufficient for the establishment of a well governed democracy.

Labels: afghanistan, south asia, taliban, us