The least bad option

Drop in the desert: even after President Obama's surge, troop numbers in Afghanistan will fall well short of the 20-25 per 1,000 population recommended by General Petraeus. Photograph: Reuters

It was the run-up to the presidential elections in Afghanistan in August and I was determined to find an upbeat story after several years of reporting on the ever-deteriorating security situation. Afghanistan’s flourishing TV industry is often a fertile subject but I had already written about Afghan Dragon’s Den, and Afghan Masterchef – how many ways to cook goat and pilao rice – was still only a concept.

But then I remembered someone telling me about an Australian who was trying to introduce skateboarding to Afghanistan. His name was Oliver Percovich and he was planning to open the country’s first skateboarding school. The project was called “Skateistan” and it brought together different ethnic groups, rich kids and street kids, boys and girls, all together. It sounded perfect.

I got in touch and he told me the kids skateboarded in the empty fountain at the Makrorayon housing estate. We arranged to meet there the following afternoon.

The next morning I got a panicked call. The locals in Makrorayon had got fed up of the sound of children playing and filled the fountain in with water.

A day or so later Percovich called to say he had arranged another venue: the old empty Soviet swimming pool on the hill overlooking Wazir Akbar Khan, popularly known as “Swimming Pool Hill”. That afternoon I set off there with a photographer. Sure enough the empty pool was full of children zooming up and down on the boards: Uzbek, Hazara, Tajik, Pashtun and girls and boys, some well dressed, some in rags.

It was wonderful to see children laughing and playing – so rare in this country which has endured three decades of war.

Then a Hazara girl came up in tears. One of the Pashtun boys had snatched her skateboard. Kids will be kids, I thought. But then another girl appeared crying. The boys had knives and soon this gang had grabbed all the skateboards and were threatening Percovich.

What was supposed to be a fun story in the run-up to the presidential elections ended up with myself, the photographer and the organisers fleeing in the Skateistan van with the gang hurling rocks at us.

The Skateistan incident seemed a microcosm of the problems of Afghanistan and illustrative of why invaders over the centuries from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union in the 1980s all decided the country was more trouble than it was worth. It is why it took US President Barack Obama 93 days to decide whether to agree to the request from his commander in Afghanistan to send more troops or risk failure.

When on December 1 he finally did announce a troop surge of 30,000 – 10,000 less than General Stanley McChrystal’s request – it was clear from his body language that his heart was not in it.

As the conservative American commentator Charles Krauthammer pointed out, this was no call to arms like Henry V at Agincourt or Winston Churchill during the Blitz. Obama’s speech to cadets at West Point military academy in New York state was so lacking in passion that some started nodding off.

“None of this is easy,” the president told columnists at a lunch before his announcement. “I mean, we are choosing from a menu of options that is less than ideal.”

Not only was escalating a war not ideal for someone who had opposed the war in Iraq and was about to collect his Nobel Peace Prize, but there was another distant conflict preying on his mind. Prominent among his bedtime reading during his deliberations was a book called Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam by Gordon Goldstein.

Many see parallels between Obama’s description of Afghanistan as a “war of necessity” to fight terrorism and the 1960s when President Lyndon Johnson believed he had to fight communism in Vietnam to protect US national security. At the urging of his generals, he changed the policy of his predecessor John F Kennedy and turned a low-level counter-insurgency into a massive war with more than 500,000 troops. It is a war from which America is still scarred.

This account of the Johnson administration’s hawkish war stance and eventual disavowal of it by his National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy illustrates the Obama administration’s concerns about accepting military demands for more troops unchallenged. “Bundy said we debated a number and not a use,” wrote Goldstein.

Perhaps the most important point in Lessons in Disaster is Bundy’s observation: “Kennedy didn’t want to be dumb,” he said. “Johnson didn’t want to be a coward.”

It would have taken a brave president to go against his generals in his first year in office, particularly as Obama himself had appointed McChrystal. Leaks from the military, which saw the McChrystal plan end up on the front page of The Washington Post, meant he had little choice.

In the end, Obama went for McChrystal’s counter-insurgency strategy. However, with Vietnam in mind he did not want this to be seen as America’s war. Under President Bush, the US had given up on seeking more help from NATO. But Obama is far more popular overseas and NATO had acquired an energetic new Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was only too conscious of what failure in Afghanistan could mean for the Atlantic alliance.

Rasmussen managed to round up far more troops for Afghanistan than the US administration had thought possible, even if many were scraped together with a few hundred here or there from a number of eastern European countries (and some were previously agreed deployments).

With the 7,000 from NATO, McChrystal has almost the 40,000 troops he asked for, though the problem remains that many of the allies operate under national caveats that restrict their use. The Germans, for example, cannot fight at night.

So will it work? The first problem is McChrystal himself did not ask for enough to fight a proper counter-insurgency. Using General Petraeus’s own manual for the US army, the recommended number is 20-25 troops per 1,000 population. Taking the Afghan population at 28.4 million, this would mean 568,000 troops. Yet even after Obama’s escalation, the total will be 140,000. It is questionable how another 30,000-40,000 would improve things when doubling the number on the ground in 2008 had simply made the security situation worse.

Secondly, Afghanistan is not Iraq, on which the strategy is modelled. There, the Sunni tribes were fed up with the violence and worried about losing control to the Shiites, so they took up arms against al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan many of the tribes see the Taliban as preferable to a corrupt government.

Perhaps most importantly, it is not clear the troops were headed for the right country. “Unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan and remain a target for those same extremists who are plotting along its border,” Obama said in his speech.

But by “along its border”, he really meant across. The real threat to US or global national security is al-Qaeda, not the Taliban and their base is Pakistan. The question remains how sending more troops to Afghanistan can help vanquish terrorist strongholds in Pakistan, particularly if the latter does not cooperate.

“Pakistan was the real audience for his speech,” says David Sedney, assistant secretary for defence.

That is not how it seemed. The difficulty for Democratic leaders is they have another constituency back home to think about. Afghanistan is an increasingly unpopular war. Even if public support in the US has not dropped off as much as in Europe, Obama’s own party does not want to go into the next election at war, spending billions of dollars in a far-off land amid the worst financial crisis since the Depression.

So he threw in a date – July 2011 – by when he hoped to start pulling out. To the Taliban, it must look as if they just have to hold on a bit longer. As for Pakistan, which has been hedging its bets by supporting both sides, there seems to be no incentive to come down from that hedge. Afterwards realising what they had done, officials hit the TV networks trying to explain this was not really a withdrawal date. “It’s a ramp, not a cliff,” said General James Jones, the national security adviser.

And what about the Afghan people, notably left out of the consultations?

The night after Obama’s speech I had two Afghan friends over for dinner. One was from Loghar, the other from Khost – both areas where the Taliban are now strong.

Faizullah from Khost told how his friend had been supporting the West but then one day US forces came looking for Taliban and called in an air strike which killed five members of his family. No guesses which side he is now on.

Taher spoke of how his own mother had begged him not to come home as his contacts with Westerners, working as an interpreter, would put the whole family at risk.

This is the real problem which Obama’s speech did not address. Afghans need to see some benefit from the presence of foreign troops, but in far too many cases the situation has worsened.

The majority of people still do not have water or electricity. Life expectancy has decreased since 2003 and the country has the world’s highest infant mortality rate, with 257 deaths for every 1,000 live births.

“Afghanistan today is without a doubt the most dangerous place to be born,” said Dan Toole, the South Asia regional director for UNICEF, in November. He also said a lack of security prevents polio and measles vaccine campaigns and decreases the number of children attending schools, especially girls. During the past year, 317 schools have been destroyed by the Taliban, he said.

Of course the real aim of the Obama plan is to get out of Afghanistan. The hope is that his surge will give space to train the Afghan army so they can defend the country and give the Taliban enough of a bloody nose that some at least will wish to negotiate.

Whether or not this works remains to be seen. The first of the extra troops were already despatched in December and officials say they will know by the summer if it is working.

“There are no silver bullets,” Michele Flournoy, undersecretary of defence for policy, told the Council of Foreign Relations. “We looked for them.”

Rising poverty

Thirst for stability: the Taliban have destroyed 317 schools in the past year, according to UNICEF. Photograph: Reuters

Eight years on from the Taliban regime, Afghanistan it still is one of the world’s poorest countries

Afghanistan is 174th poorest out of 178 countries according to the UN global development index.

Its 2008 GDP per capita of $426, according to the World Bank, is the lowest in Asia and the fifth lowest in the world after Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Liberia.

An estimated 60-80 percent of Afghans live on less than $1 a day.

Life expectancy for Afghan citizens is 43 years, compared to 59 years for low-income countries worldwide, according to the World Bank. It has declined from 44.5 years in 2003.

It is the most dangerous place to be born – Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world: more than 1 in 4 die by the age of 5, according to UNICEF.

More than 30 Afghans die from tuberculosis each day, according to the UN global human development index.

Afghans’ access to electricity is among the lowest in the world, according to the World Bank.

Only 13 percent of Afghans have access to safe drinking water and 12 percent to adequate sanitation.