Losing Afghanistan

Steve Coll ponders the implication of an American failure in Afghanistan:

As I’ve argued, in my view, a purpose of American policy in Afghanistan ought to be to prevent a second coercive Taliban revolution in that country, not only because it would bring misery to Afghans (and, not incidentally, Afghan women) but because it would jeopardize American interests, such as our security against Al Qaeda’s ambitions and our (understandable) desire to see nuclear-armed Pakistan free itself from the threat of revolutionary Islamist insurgents. So, then, a definition of failure would be a redux of Taliban revolution in Afghanistan—a revolution that took control of traditional Taliban strongholds such as Kandahar and Khost, and that perhaps succeeded in Kabul as well. Such an outcome is conceivable if the Obama Administration does not discover the will and intelligence to craft a successful political-military strategy to prevent the Afghan Taliban from achieving its announced goals, which essentially involve the restoration of the Afghan state they presided over during the nineteen-nineties, which was formally known as the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

He then goes on to list a variety of potential outcomes, none of them cheery. But I want to focus for a minute on the definition of failure above. I think, as a baseline statement of American goals in Afghanistan, the prevention of this kind of restoration seems reasonable. But it's worth noting how - and how quickly - the original Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan collapsed. It took roughly 300 special forces, CIA paramilitary, U.S. airpower, and the Northern Alliance to run them out of town in a few weeks.

In other words, we didn't need 100,000 troops to shut down the Taliban in 2001 when they ran the place. I'm hard pressed to see why we'd need 100,000 to keep them away.

(AP Photos)