John Bolton is skeptical about nation building in Afghanistan. I think there's plenty of reason to be, but I can't quite understand the conclusion he draws:
But we cannot withdraw from the conflict just because the Afghans may not be meeting our standards. Leaving due to Afghan government failures, of which there are and will be many, would jeopardise our strategic objectives, frustrating the very reasons for intervening after 9/11 in the first place: preventing terrorists from re-establishing Afghanistan as a base, or using it to destabilise Pakistan and seize control of Islamabadâ??s nuclear weapons.
We must achieve these objectives â?? which means essentially destroying the Taleban â?? whether or not the Afghan government shapes up. That is the right metric, not nation building. This is a hard truth, but realistic unless you are prepared to risk a nuclear Taleban.
But how does one "destroy" the Taliban? Does Bolton know who they all are? Where they all are? And would bringing the necessary firepower to bear on the problem, while ignoring the depredations of the Karzai regime, make the Afghans more or less accommodating to foreign forces? As the U.S. wages a total war campaign against the Pashtuns, do fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan get more or less restive? Karzai has, on numerous occasions, blasted NATO for civilian casualties. Presumably under the Bolton doctrine, those casualties increase while our concern for what Karzai (or any Afghan) has to say decreases. Does that seem like a stable mix?
At least advocates of nation building have a coherent view: the Taliban can't be defeated in a conventional sense so the Afghan state has to be reconstructed to the degree that they can wage the insurgency on their own, while winning over an increasingly larger percentage of the population base. If you're skeptical that this approach is worth the costs, the answer isn't to go on a Soviet-style rampage in an ill-defined attempt to "defeat" an enemy deeply enmeshed in Afghan society. It's to leave and figure out a more cost-effective means of keeping al Qaeda (remember them?) from reconstituting in large numbers.
