Only three months after American troops entered Kabul, it became obvious that Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan had morphed from a mission justifiable by the Powell Doctrine into an open-ended exercise in global social engineering. In addition to “ridding the world of thousands of terrorists,” President Bush announced in his State of the Union address that the United States had saved the Afghan people from starvation and “freed a country from brutal oppression.” Its women “were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school, while now they are free,” all of which is “a tribute to the spirit of the Afghan people, to the resolve of our coalition and to the might of the United States military.”
A limited military operation prompted by the reasonable desire to punish and neutralize the culprits for Sept. 11 was thus retroactively turned into a nation-building project.
Almost two years and $20 billion later, the endeavor’s most tangible effect on this side of the ocean has been the rising availability and falling price of heroin. Whereas the former Taliban regime proved brutally effective in curtailing the production of opium, output has skyrocketed under its U.S.-sponsored successors. This year’s bumper crop, estimated at 3,500 tons, provides three- quarters of the world’s supply. Much of it is being processed into morphine and heroin inside Afghanistan—a rare example of profitable industrial activity in the country. The magnitude of the problem is becoming comparable to that created by Columbian cartels two decades ago. The Bush administration has no solution to it, as was evident in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s eccentric suggestion that this “whale of a tough problem” should be tackled through education. “I wish I had a quicker, better, easier answer,” he added with atypical timidity.
A better, albeit not easier, solution would be for American troops in Afghanistan to target the producers’ bosses, whose identities are well known to all. The snag is that opium cultivation and trade are controlled by local warlords who are nominally allied with President Hamid Karzai, a protégé of Washington.
Karzai—apparently decent but weak, and dependent on America even for personal security—cannot afford to alienate local strongmen. His own authority does not extend much beyond Kabul, and only by appeasing the warlords can he maintain the appearance of the country’s coherence. In return, these disagreeable and violent men are granted impunity in their strongholds. The dispensation is granted not by Karzai—he cannot influence them either way—but by his American protectors. The U.S.-sponsored Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), composed of soldiers and aid workers, are as unable as they are unwilling to challenge the control of warlords over five key regions in which they hold sway.
As next year’s June elections draw nearer, the warlords appear unexpectedly eager to support Afghanistan’s “democratic transformation.” They know that they will be the only ones able to buy enough votes and apply enough intimidation to get themselves elected, which would give their power a veneer of legality at home and some legitimacy in foreign eyes. The result will be not only a glut of narcotics on the world market, but also continued lawlessness, extortion, robbery, and murder inside the country. A cynic might conclude that the place is back to normal, as if the U.S. military occupation had never taken place.
Some administration officials hope to help their man in Kabul by spending more on Afghan reconstruction, possibly doubling U.S. development funds to almost $2 billion dollars a year. They argue that greater prosperity could lead to an earlier exit for American forces and save money in the long run. They say that Afghanistan’s economy has grown significantly over the past year and that the momentum should be maintained. With the mission in Iraq threatening to become a quagmire, Republicans would like to have a marketable foreign “success story” in their arsenal for next year’s campaign.
In reality the economy is now barely one half what it was in 1977, and back then Afghanistan was one of the poorest countries on earth. Double-digit growth from near zero is meaningless. A big infusion of cash and American oversight cannot improve the situation soon enough to offer an exit strategy. Unpromising to start with, after 23 years of foreign intervention and domestic civil war Afghanistan is a disaster zone in which $2 billion a year is not enough to make much difference. At the same time, $2 billion is far too much in terms of the likelihood that such funds will be deployed productively in a country with no effective central government, no enforceable laws, and no physical security.
Pro-Taliban guerrillas may provide a reality check. The killing of nine police officers in an ambush in Logar Province on Aug. 19 is the most recent major assault on government officials (at the time of this writing) by the resurgent Taliban. Such attacks occur almost daily, and the magnitude of the problem is evident in the ability of Islamic diehards to field substantial units. Until last spring most attacks were carried out by small, squad-sized teams of hit-and-run ambushers, but this has changed: last July, for instance, some 200 attackers were reported to have assaulted a government checkpoint at Spin Boldak, on the border with Pakistan. The human cost is also rising: 60-70 deaths a week are not uncommon.
The Islamists’ resurgence is partly fuelled by the nationalist sentiment of the Pashtuns who inhabit the eastern and southern parts of the country. That ethnic group, accounting for more than a half of Afghanistan’s population, resents the monopoly on power that the Tajiks of the north enjoy in Karzai’s regime. Although they are hardly more Islamic or more anti-Western than any “Northern Alliance” warlord, many Pashtuns support the Taliban because it is the only tool readily available to fight their traditional enemies. To classify either side as “pro-Western” or “fundamentalist” on the grounds of their attitude vis-à-vis Karzai would be simplistic and misleading.
The proximity of the Pashtuns’ kinsmen across the border in Pakistan enables the guerrillas to evade pursuers and to enjoy the safety of bases inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. The situation is comparable to when the Taliban seized power in the mid-’90s: a weak government in the center, autonomous warlords in the north and the west, and Pashtun guerrillas in the east and south. According to a recent International Crisis Group report, “Unless measures are taken to address [Pashtun] grievances, there will be a greater likelihood of the political process ending in failure.” One third of the country inhabited by Pashtuns is now considered too dangerous for foreigners.
The role of Pakistan is adding to the uncertainty. Some U.S. officers in Afghanistan suspect the government of General Pervez Musharraf of providing the Taliban with sanctuary and weapons after a period of hands-off caution in the aftermath of 9/11. President Bush’s pretense that Musharraf—a possessor and proliferator of nuclear WMD—is an ally in the War on Terror can be understood as a political expedient, but the reality is very different. He has not clamped down on madrassas and other Islamic institutions that breed terrorists, and he has not purged the Pakistani army of officers implicated in previous dealings with the Taliban. They allow Taliban fighters to slip across the border and to stay out of the U.S. military’s reach, and they may be sheltering Osama bin Laden himself. With such friends in the region America needs no detractors.
What America needs is to declare victory, wrap things up, and get out of Afghanistan. Karzai may not last long on his own, which may be regrettable, but it is of no consequence as long as the Taliban do not return to power. That can be prevented more effectively by putting pressure on Pakistan—there is ample leverage—than by maintaining international peacekeepers in Kabul and GIs in the provinces.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the U.S. action in Afghanistan was supportable in the name of hardheaded, Jacksonian realism. Now that the mission has lost its geopolitical rationale and rests on a mix of Wilsonian millenarianism and transatlantic multilateralism, it is no longer possible for conservatives to favor its continuation. 
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Srdja Trifkovic is Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.
