Afghanistan: A new strategy, an old dilemma

last updated 8 January 2015

It’s “the first step in what has become America’s second Afghan war,” said Mark Thompson in Time. In early July, the U.S. launched its biggest offensive in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, targeting a resurgent Taliban in the poppy-rich Helmand River Valley region in the south. The more than 4,000 Marines and 650 Afghan soldiers of Operation Khanjar (“Thrust of the Sword”) reached their targets in just seven hours. But as is usual in Afghanistan, real victory was elusive. Fierce fighting left at least 17 U.S. and British troops dead, along with some two dozen civilians. The Taliban, meanwhile, has “melted away when pressured, only to pop up and attack elsewhere.” The new U.S. commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, has a new set of orders, said The Economist. President Obama has told him to focus on protecting the local population from the Taliban, and on reducing civilian deaths, rather than just killing as many Taliban as possible. McChrystal, though, has warned that a real turnaround could take up to two years, with “permanent progress” taking even longer.

“Just give us two more years” sounds disturbingly familiar, said Derrick Jackson in The Boston Globe. It’s what American generals were saying in Iraq six years ago, and what they said in Vietnam for nearly a decade. As Obama pulls troops out of Iraq and pursues progress in Afghanistan, he risks “slipping slowly into his own quagmire.” It’s been almost eight years since we invaded, yet a stable, pro-Western democracy in Afghanistan remains an unlikely dream. The war may have made sense in 2001, when the goal was to drive the Taliban from power, but what is our goal now? asked the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in an editorial. The British abandoned this forlorn graveyard of empires in 1919, the Soviets in 1989. “How long is America prepared to stay?”

If this offensive bogs down, said Gerald Seib in The Wall Street Journal, the answer may well be: Not much longer. “The Obama administration is fighting two wars in Afghanistan now.” One is on the ground. The other is in Washington, where key congressional Democrats are beginning to grouse about our lack of progress. As part of the bill that funded the war this year, the White House must deliver a progress report early in 2010. The clock is ticking, and the Taliban knows it. Depending on how well U.S. forces perform in the next few months, our “patience could wear out before the Taliban do.”