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Washington Post ran a disturbing sentence Wednesday, high up
in its lead front-page story.
"The rebel
Northern Alliance has appealed for airstrikes against Taliban forces
arrayed in the north," according to the Post, "but
senior Pentagon officials have been reluctant to promise direct
air support, lest the United States be seen as backing a particular
political element in Afghanistan."
The U.S. has
so far been engaged in essentially quarry work in Afghanistan, making
big rocks into smaller rocks. And this may well be necessary as
a beginning to the campaign, but if the current bombing is not tethered
to a meaningful political strategy it will ultimately be about as
useful as President Clinton's cruise-missile strikes.
Such a political
strategy depends on having an answer to the question of what we
want a post-Taliban government to look like. Now, there may be good
reason to be cagey about this in public to keep Pakistan on board.
But simply not having an answer will risk plunging our whole effort
— no matter how well intentioned, no matter how resolute —
into incoherence.
It will prompt
us to engage in a self-defeating game of cat-and-mouse like that
of the Bay of Pigs — i.e., sort of supporting the Northern
Alliance, but not really, doling out airstrikes in carefully measured
spoonfuls to make sure our amount of support is just right.
This is what
happened in post-Gulf War Iraq, when we wanted the Kurd and Shiite
rebellions to succeed in toppling Saddam, but not to succeed so
much that they would pull the country apart. So, we tried to fine-tune
our support, and ended up letting Saddam crush the rebellions.
That attempted
fine-tuning was partly driven by our unwillingness to get too involved
in the messy job of shaping the future of a post-Saddam Iraq. An
understandable impulse perhaps, but a mistake, and one that should
not be repeated in the current war.
Bush can disavow
nation-building all he wants, but we're in for a bout of it in Afghanistan.
Bush has already symbolically acknowledged it with the airdrops
of food and medicine, which suggests that we feel some responsibility
for the well being of refugees in the area.
What would
make this instance of nation-building different from our other recent
experiences with it is that our national interest would be involved
in a way it wasn't in Haiti, Somalia, and the Balkans (you can argue
about Bosnia and Kosovo, but it certainly made no sense for U.S.
troops in particular to be doing the nation-building work there,
when we — as is clear now — had bigger fish to fry).
None of this
will be easy. Balancing the factions in Afghanistan, and doing so
in a way that doesn't fatally taint any new government with American
support, will require careful diplomatic and political work. It's
the sort of thing we used to be good at in the days when the CIA
would set up a government, say in Iran, that would be solid enough
to last 30 years.
Those are skills
we will have to discover again, or we will find ourselves with a
result as disheartening and a policy as incoherent as those that
attended the end of the Gulf War.
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