US Nation-Building in Afghanistan

Conor Keane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780815396260
• eBook ISBN: 9781317003182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why has the US so dramatically failed in Afghanistan since 2001? Dominant explanations have ignored the bureaucratic divisions and personality conflicts inside the US state. This book rectifies this weakness in commentary on Afghanistan by exploring the significant role of these divisions in the US's difficulties in the country that meant the battle was virtually lost before it even began. The main objective of the book is to deepen readers understanding of the impact of bureaucratic politics on nation-building in Afghanistan, focusing primarily on the Bush Administration. It rejects the 'rational actor' model, according to which the US functions as a coherent, monolithic agent. Instead, internal divisions within the foreign policy bureaucracy are explored, to build up a picture of the internal tensions and contradictions that bedevilled US nation-building efforts. The book also contributes to the vexed issue of whether or not the US should engage in nation-building at all, and if so under what conditions.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315548623-1

On 11 September 2001 an event occurred that impacted significantly on the shape and nature of US foreign policy. The destruction of the World Trade Center, damage to the Pentagon, and the deaths of almost 3,000 US citizens, could not go unanswered. An overwhelming majority of a stunned US population looked to the government and military for retribution. In this heated political climate, President George W. Bush declared a ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT), a protracted conflict against an insubstantial enemy. Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint-Chiefs of Staff, described it as ‘a different kind of conflict … unlike any other in recent American history’.¹ This would be a conflict without temporal and spatial horizons, where non-state, terrorist actors were as much a target of US military action as the states that harboured them.

¹ Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 220.

Barely a month after 9/11, the first battleground in the GWOT became Afghanistan. Here the Taliban government was sheltering Al Qaeda, the fundamentalist, Islamic terrorist group responsible for the attacks. Bush called for the Taliban to hand over Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, and their refusal to do so precipitated a US invasion. Rallying under the banner of national self-defence, the organs of the US government swiftly mobilized for a military strike aimed at regime change. Following a resounding military victory, however, the ties that bound the foreign policy machine together began to fray, as the realities of the political and military situation unfolded over the coming months and years.

As the Taliban regime crumbled in the face of American military might, some educated Afghans and many more Americans hoped that a stable and representative government could replace it. But a smooth transition to Western-style democracy was always an unlikely, if not altogether utopian, challenge, given Afghanistan’s economic underdevelopment, ethno-sectarian fissures, and institutional fragility born of decades of military conflict and authoritarian rule. From 2001 to 2003, the scale and complexity of this challenge was not something the Bush Administration seriously considered. On the one hand, the abstracted rhetoric of long-term political goals and ambitions envisaged the cultivation of a stable, pluralistic and representative Afghan government. On the other hand, the human and material resources on which such an outcome would be premised were never forthcoming. Consequently, US insouciance in the years immediately after the invasion, thinly disguised beneath the euphemistic language of having a ‘light footprint’, contributed to the rise of a ferocious and destabilizing insurgency. This heralded the return of the Taliban as a significant political force. As the insurgency intensified, policymakers reappraised the situation and emphasized the need for a comprehensive, whole-of-government approach.

Despite some limited progress, a refurbished, ‘whole-of-government’ approach to Afghanistan’s problems fell far short of its objectives. By 2008, a quarter of Afghanistan’s population still did not have access to clean water, and 50 per cent of Afghan children were malnourished. Over six million people required food aid, including approximately 172,000 teachers who were not able to support themselves.² There was also rampant unemployment due to a lack of industrial or farming opportunities. It has been estimated that 60–70 per cent of those who joined the Taliban between 2001 and 2008 did so because of a lack of income.³ By 2010, Afghanistan remained bereft of a national road network, and the highways that the US had constructed were used for drug trafficking and extortion. Schools lacked equipment and sometimes even a schoolroom, and there was little sewerage or electricity infrastructure outside of Kabul.⁴ Recorded acts of violence increased exponentially, from an average of 900 a year between 2002 and 2004, to 8,950 a year by 2008.⁵ This violence at least partly reflected the regrouping and growth of the Taliban after their earlier dispersal. As a consequence of the Taliban’s intimidating presence, only a third of schoolchildren in Afghanistan’s southern provinces entered schools for food aid.⁶ When the majority of US officials and soldiers withdrew from the country in 2014, they left a volatile and fragmented political environment in their wake, much as the British and Soviets had done before them. This was despite more than a decade of US nation-building efforts in Afghanistan.

² Carlotta Gall, “Hunger and Food Prices Push Afghanistan to the Brink”, New York Times, May 16, 2008. ³ Robert Crews and Amin Tarzi (eds), The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 345. ⁴ Michael O’Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan, Toughing it Out in Afghanistan (Washington DC: Brookings University Press, 2010). ⁵ Committee on Armed Services, Assessment of Security and Stability in Afghanistan and Development in US Strategy and Operations (House of Representatives, One Hundred Tenth Congress, January 23 2008); Gilles Dorronsoro, Revolution Unending: Afghanistan 1979 to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 342. ⁶ Alastair Scrutton, “Attacks on Aid Challenge Afghan Reconstruction”, Reuters, September 18, 2008.

Nation-building in Afghanistan reached its zenith, in terms of funding and attention, toward the end of the Bush Administration’s second term in office, but it was a stated objective much earlier than this. Bush himself, who had derided the concept during his Presidential campaign, came to accept it as a part of the mission in Afghanistan from April 2002 onward. Nation-building, both as a concept and a practice, is mired in controversy and ambiguity. Some scholars regard its contemporary uses in places such as Afghanistan as little more than an ideological veil for US imperial ambitions.⁷ For others who subscribe to the alleged benefits of nation-building, it is a normative concept that refers to ‘the use of armed force in the aftermath of a conflict to underpin an enduring transition to democracy’.⁸ For many it is simply a synonym for a cluster of related concepts such as ‘nation-building’, ‘peace-building’, and ‘post-conflict operations’, yet others consider each of these activities to be distinct. The pros and cons of these various uses of nation-building and cognate terms will be explored in Chapter 1. For now, nation-building will simply be defined as a set of processes through which a foreign power or powers, by direct intervention and in collaboration with favoured domestic political elites, seek to erect or re-erect a country-wide institutional and material infrastructure that can become the enduring foundation of political stability after a period of armed conflict and civil strife. Hence, nation-building involves a complex of issues including security and pacification, infrastructure development and humanitarian relief, and governance and law and order. Crucially, it can also involve, as it did in Afghanistan, an ideological project to win the active support or tacit consent of the local population for the new or restructured state – what has often been euphemistically labelled as the ‘winning of hearts and minds’. Understood as such, nation-building is always confronted with a unique set of problems and obstacles, arising from the historical specificity of the country in which such projects are pursued.

⁷ Andrew Bacevich, Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War (New York: Metropolitan books, 2010); Andrew Bacevich, The New American Militarism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004). ⁸ James Dobbins et al ., The Beginners Guide to Nation-Building (Santa Monica: RAND Corporation, 2007).

But the complex requirements of nation-building were neglected and the responsibilities of each US agency, and indeed official, remained undefined or ambiguous. The way in which the activity was approach by the US government also revealed a deep ambivalence at the heart of the foreign policy bureaucracy. With this in mind, the main objective of the current study is to contribute to deepening our understanding of the impact of bureaucratic politics on nation-building in Afghanistan, which clearly has implications for similar interventions elsewhere. The central research question is: Why, and how, did bureaucratic politics contribute to the failings of US nation-building efforts in Afghanistan? However, the subject must first be contextualized.

Current Literature on Nation-Building in Afghanistan

Disorder within the US foreign policy bureaucracy was certainly not the cause of nation-building failure; it was one factor among many. Bureaucratic conflict was complicated, exacerbated and sometimes even caused by a raft of other issues. These issues include the Bush Administration’s approach toward the War on Terror; the invasion of Iraq; a failure to consider the regional consequences of intervention in Afghanistan; fractures within the international nation-building effort; an imbalance of power between the US military and civilian realms; strategic ambiguity; the controversial relationship between nation-building and counter-insurgency, and Afghanistan’s historical and cultural nuances.

Scholars such as Daalder and Lindsay argue that the ‘Bush revolution in foreign policy’ was cloaked in a doctrine of preemption, which required an ‘America unbound’ to forcefully reshape the international system by aggressively searching for monsters to destroy.⁹ Although this attitude prevailed within the Bush Administration before 9/11, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) invigorated and legitimized foreign policy based on the unilateral projection of military power. For the remainder of Bush’s time in office, the GWOT superseded all other foreign policy matters. The attitude of the White House during this period has been described as a combination of arrogance and ignorance.¹⁰ President Bush has been derided for lacking sufficient knowledge of international relations and an understanding of the nuances of global politics. Some observers considered the Bush Administration to be no more than a ‘callow instrument of neoconservative ideologies’, but this is disputable. ‘Assertive nationalists’, such as Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, (at least initially) dismissed the neoconservative camp’s conviction that it was in the national interest to aggressively encourage authoritarian states to become US-style democracies. However, as Epstein notes, what both factions had in common was faith that military force should unequivocally be used to destroy the enemies of the United States.¹¹ Buttressed by this common belief, and with the help of a compliant President, Bush’s inner circle constructed an overarching strategy that convinced, some would say exploited, the US public to support their foreign policy ideology.¹² This came to be known as the Bush Doctrine, which was evoked to justify regime change through armed conquest. During the Bush epoch, more than any other period in history, the United States was characterized as an imperialist power.¹³ The ambitions of the Bush Administration left no room for a White House role in instigating a whole-of-government response to the mission in Afghanistan. This allowed the US bureaucracy to run its own race and little effort was made by the White House to mitigate bureaucratic conflict until near the end of Bush’s second term as the conflict with the Taliban-led insurgency intensified.¹⁴ Strachan claims that militarizing nation-building should be attributed to the vague policy mandate that emanated from the White House. The Bush Administration failed to establish ‘a tangible link between the policy of its administration and the operational designs of its armed forces’.¹⁵ Without effective guidance counter-insurgency increased policy incoherence, which stoked the flames of bureaucratic conflict.

⁹ Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay, America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (New Jersey: Wiley, 2005). ¹⁰ Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation-Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia (New York: Penguin, 2008), xlii. ¹¹ Jason Epstein, “Leviathan”, New York Review of Books, May 1, 2003, 12. Joshua Marshal, “Remaking the World: Bush and the Neoconservatives”, Foreign Affairs, 82:6 (2003). ¹² Scott A . Bonn, Mass Deception: Moral Panic and the US War on Iraq (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2010). ¹³ Rodrigue Tremblay, The New American Empire: Causes and Consequences for the United States and for the World (Haverford: Infinity, 2004). ¹⁴ Douglas Porch, Counter-Insurgency: Exposing the Myths of the New Way of War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ¹⁵ Hew Strachan, “The Lost Meaning of Strategy”, Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, 47:3, 33–54.

The US Congress and public’s hunger for retribution enabled the Bush Adminis...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Background and Methodology
• Part II US Nation-Building in Afghanistan
• Part III Avenues for Inter-Agency Cooperation
• Bibliography
• Index