In its weekly analysis the well plugged in Swoop says about U.S. plans in Afghanistan:
Top US policy makers are coming to grips with the realization that the assumptions on which the ISAF’s exit from Afghanistan were based are unlikely to be fulfilled. Pentagon contacts tell us that behind Defense Secretary Panetta’s hurried visit to the country following the killings of 16 Afghan civilians by a US soldier lies a deep debate in Washington about the timelines of the mission. Officials had hoped that at the forthcoming May 20-21 NATO summit in Chicago it would be possible to announce a credible strategy for the Afghan endgame. They are now increasingly gloomy that this and that, instead, an accelerated withdrawal will take place, with few guarantees of continuing stability inside Afghanistan. One senior Pentagon officer put it to us this way: “We are revisiting the Soviet nightmare.” For President Obama, the Afghanistan confusion seems unlikely to damage him politically. With the Republican presidential candidates also calling for expedited withdrawal, Afghanistan does not appear likely to feature as a controversial election issue – at least at this juncture.
The analysis is likely correct. But the “revisiting the Soviet nightmare” the senior Pentagon officer says is serious historic misjudgement.
For the Soviets the exit from Afghanistan was no nightmare at all. It withdrew its forces from the country in a well planned, over five years prepared and orderly manner. A rather stable regime was in place and a quite capable Afghan military with even its own full fledged air-force and missile artillery. Treaties with other countries were arranged and, even as the U.S. immediately broke its part and continued to finance the Mujahideen, there was a much better formalized pull out the U.S. is likely to manage.
Consider that the U.S. is currently on hostile terms with two of Afghanistan’s biggest neighbors Iran and Pakistan and the other relevant neighbors in the north are Russian client state. Talks with the Taliban were broken off before they started because the U.S. could not even deliver on the agreed upon the confidence building prisoner exchange. Karzai can not be re-elected and it is completely unclear what the results of a new election in 2014 will be. It could be civil war within the current regime or a military coup.
The Soviet backed regime in Kabul was able to stay in its place for more than three years after the complete Soviet withdrawal. It only fell apart when the disintegrating Soviet Union cut off the money flow.
It seems unlikely to me that the current graft regime in Kabul, no matter how much finance it will get, will continue to function after the major U.S. forces leave.
The reasons for that are plentiful but the major one is, compared to the centralized top-down Soviet Union approach, a seriously dysfunctional foreign policy process in Washington with too many stakeholders, the president and his NSC, the state department, congress, the military and various other forces having a say on each and every tiny issue.
