Nation building won't win in Afghanistan
Paul Miller makes the case for nation building in Afghanistan:
There are no practical alternatives. Vice President Biden and a growing chorus of others believe we should give up rebuilding Afghanistan and, instead, sustain an indefinite worldwide assassination campaign against al Qaida's senior leaders. His view of the war is myopic, narrow, and troubling. Such a campaign would do nothing to address Pakistan, the drug trade, NATO, the other great powers, or any of our other interests across South Asia. It is also morally troubling -- it amounts to a declaration that we reserve the right to kill anyone we deem to be a terrorist, anywhere in the world, forever. Call it the Biden Doctrine of the Forever War. States should not maintain a state of war indefinitely just because it is too inconvenient to settle the political conditions that led to the war in the first place. War should be the last resort, not the first.Nation building in Afghanistan is the only pragmatic policy option that will secure the full range of our interests in South Asia and yield an actual end-point to the war, which is why Petraeus is right to be alarmed about the funding levels for our civilians.
I think Miller is right to warn about an open-ended campaign of assassinations against senior al-Qaeda leaders but his case for nation-building doesn't address that at all. What about al-Qaeda leaders operating outside of Afghanistan? The central question with respect to Afghanistan is which war our nation building efforts hope to win - the one against a native Taliban insurgency or the one against global jihadism? We could "win" in Afghanistan and still lose the broader effort. When you're dealing with constrained resources - and an executive branch in Washington seemingly eager to open up new fronts across the world - you have to question the wisdom of putting all our counter-terrorism eggs in one hugely expensive sinkhole called Afghanistan.
Furthermore, it's extremely difficult to see what American policy can do inside Afghanistan to "stabilize" Pakistan, other than to consent to Pakistan's wishes and make Afghanistan its proxy. Pakistan has made it abundantly clear that it will buck American wishes inside Afghanistan, yet proponents of indefinite nation building seem to wave this problem away or insist that somehow chaos in Afghanistan will endanger Pakistan. But that overlooks the rather glaring fact that it is Pakistan that is facilitating the chaos in Afghanistan for its own ends. Nation building proponents can't square that circle.
