Eight years after American forces invaded Afghanistan, the conflict there drags on. U.S. casualties are rising, and the Taliban appears resurgent. Soon after taking office, Barack Obama unveiled a new and ambitious war strategy. He doubled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, and he replaced the four-star commander on the ground with his own man. But it is too early to tell what the effect of such changes will be.
Seth Jones attempts to show how we got here. "In the Graveyard of Empires" echoes some of Mr. Obama's campaign themes. "The United States," Mr. Jones writes, faulting President Bush's policy after 2003, "shifted resources and attention to Iraq and allowed the Taliban, al Qaeda and other insurgent groups to rebuild in Afghanistan and Pakistan." He does not go on to prove this claim, but his narrative lays bare the hard choices that American policymakers have faced -- from the collapse of the Taliban two months after 9/11 right up until today.
The invasion, it turned out, was the easy part. In autumn 2001, American forces routed the country's Taliban rulers, Osama bin Laden's hosts. U.S. special-forces soldiers on horseback called in targets to B-52s, and Afghan anti-government forces belonging to the Northern Alliance took Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city. Within a year, a new Afghan government was formed under Hamid Karzai, a moderate with pro-Western views. The outlook was good.
But the follow-up was not. Mr. Jones quotes Sir Frederick Roberts, the British commander who defeated the Afghans at Kandahar in 1880, during the Second Afghan War: "The less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us."
It was such reasoning that led Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Bush's defense secretary, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, to aim for a "light footprint" in Afghanistan. "We don't want to repeat the Soviets' mistakes," Gen. Franks said, alluding to the 1979 invasion by the Soviets, who found themselves occupying the country and fighting Muslim insurgents for the next decade. U.S. forces, by contrast, focused on flushing out al Qaeda, and Mr. Bush tapped an international coalition to help the Afghans "stand up" their state. It was thought that such efforts would be enough. They were not.
In the Graveyard of Empires
By Seth G. Jones
(Norton, 414 pages, $27.95)
When it comes to nation-building, the challenges in Afghanistan are breathtaking, even compared with, say, those of Bosnia or Timor. For one thing, the conflict in Afghanistan is now three decades old. The urban elites fled the Soviets, and the middle classes fled the civil strife of the mid-1990s, when a civil war broke out and the Taliban won, imposing its brand of medieval Islam.
And exactly what kind of country did the Taliban rule? A desperately poor, dysfunctional one inhabited by a largely illiterate rural population. The normal institutions of government were gone. The wealthcreating classes were gone. Warlords had risen up, undermining traditional tribal authority. Hardcore Islamists had risen up, too, demanding religious severity and eventually allying themselves with al Qaeda. When the Taliban fell, the U.S. inherited a failed state.
Mr. Jones suggests that, after the 2001 invasion, America "squandered" a good start by stinting on aid and deploying troops in insufficient number -- in short, by allowing itself to be distracted by Iraq. Perhaps, but there is plenty of blame to go around. For one reason or another -- a flawed character, an impossibly fractured society -- President Karzai failed to extend his new government's legitimacy into the hinterlands, earning him the dismissive moniker "the Mayor of Kabul."
Meanwhile, the poppy trade boomed, and corruption flourished, enriching everyone with even a minimal claim to authority, from the cop on the beat to the government minister. When I visited Sangin in 2007, a village in the south's Helmand province that the U.S.-led coalition had recently taken back from the Taliban, the newly arrived Afghan police went door-to-door and took for their own the residents' TVs and radios -- one sure way to turn villagers into Taliban sympathizers.
In reality, of course, the Taliban never went away. Yes, the Taliban government ended in 2001, but its leaders fled into Pakistan, securing havens in that country's western tribal areas and around the city of Quetta. The Taliban's influence had always been felt in Afghanistan's rural southern areas and the valleys and mountains in the east along the Pakistani frontier. Poor Afghans, when poppy season was over, made easy Taliban recruits, willing to fight for a meager wage.
When NATO forces took over the Afghan peacekeeping mission and in 2005 expanded from Kabul and other cities into the south, they suddenly came into direct contact with the Taliban. They had some success, but Mr. Jones justifiably faults the alliance for not having enough strength to clear and hold territory. The British commander in the south, Maj. Gen. Jacko Page, told me in 2007: "It's not about controlling ground." But it is. The new U.S. strategy in Afghanistan -- modeled on the surge strategy in Iraq -- aims to do just that.
Mr. Jones scoldingly quotes Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who in December 2007 told Congress: "Our main focus, militarily, in the region and in the world right now is rightly and firmly in Iraq. It is simply a matter of resources, of capacity. In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must." But surely Adm. Mullen had a point. Then, as now, an American defeat in Iraq would have had far graver consequences than a spreading rural insurgency in Afghanistan, however unwelcome.
Though Afghanistan has a long way to go to become a successful state, the U.S. has achieved its chief strategic goal: to deny al Qaeda a safe haven there. At the moment, the more serious threat out of south Asia is the Talibanization of nuclear-armed Pakistan. The people who are planning the next 9/11 are there -- in the mountains of Waziristan. Afghanistan may still be a battlefield in the conflict, but it is not now the most important one.
Mr. Kaminski is a member of the Journal's editorial board.