The Dallas Morning News: Point Person: Our Q&A with Bernard Finel
By Tod Robberson
Bernard Finel is a senior fellow at the American Security Project, a nonpartisan group of retired senators, congressmen, senior government officials, retired military leaders and academics devoted to analyzing U.S. national security challenges. He was in Dallas last week to speak at an SMU conference on Afghanistan and Iraq. He also met with the editorial board, arguing that the U.S. can withdraw from Afghanistan and still meet its goals.
Your organization suggests that American has become over-reliant on the use of military force. Do you agree?
I feel that we have this tremendous instrument here to wage decisive conventional operations. I’m very skeptical, on the other hand, of our ability to [conduct] counterinsurgency warfare. If you look at the conflicts in both Iraq and Afghanistan, 80 percent of our accomplishments in both countries were in the first several months of the war. By the end of 2003, Saddam Hussein had been removed, his threat to the region had been eliminated, the human-rights abuses in his country had largely been stopped. What we’ve been doing since then is try to lock in the future, hoping that if we stay there long enough, things will never get bad again in Iraq, we’ll never have to go back, and we’ll fix it once and for all. That’s a mistake. The use of force doesn’t work that way.
What’s the best approach for Afghanistan?
We ought to withdraw our forces. What we ought to be doing, essentially, is training Karzai’s military, providing generous financial and military assistance, continuing to fly drones over the country in order to have some counterterrorism presence, providing perhaps some limited air support. What you get out of that is a sort of best-case scenario where he is able to hold his own.
The historical analogy is the Najibullah regime after the Soviets pulled out. Everybody thought they were going to collapse in a heartbeat. Actually, it held on three years and only fell apart after the Soviets cut off financial assistance, which meant they couldn’t buy fuel or oil for the winter in 1982. It seems to me that a regime which was as brutal and hated as Najibullah’s — and corrupt — if they could hold on for a certain number of years, Karzai should be able to. If he can’t, if he’s less effective than Najibullah’s regime — the propped-up regime that killed a million Afghans — does it make sense for us to be devoting resources to that country? I say no.
But the Taliban didn’t exist in 1982. They pose a considerable military threat today.
From my view, the worst case is that we have to do this [invade] again at some point in the future. That’s unpleasant, but I’d argue it’s cheaper than being there continuously. Doing a sort of repetitive raiding is a better alternative than long-term occupation. We have a very poor history of actually transforming countries in a way that we would’ve liked [by occupying them].
If the U.S. wasn’t there to put a brake on drug trafficking and corruption, wouldn’t everything explode?
Our presence also is a source of corruption.
We’re funneling tons and tons of money. Essentially, next year in Afghanistan, we’re going to spend five times Afghanistan’s gross domestic product in terms of our military operations there. That’s a ton of money, resources, equipment sloshing around, and we already know that the contractors are paying off [insurgent groups] to maintain supply routes and not be attacked. So there are all these ways they’re holding us up. We’re paying ransom when people get grabbed in some cases. So there’s a lot of money that has flown into illicit coffers by virtue of our operation.
If President Barack Obama opted for a sharply reduced McChrystal plan, what should be the strategy for most effectively apportioning those extra troops?
It may be you end up having to do a lot of that purely from the air, which is imperfect. Ultimately, we have to be a little bit resigned to the existence of some sort of regional autonomy involving the rule, essentially, by a number of dicey people who actually are full-blown Taliban members or may have close ties with them.
The deal we would cut with them is, OK, we will allow you to rule in your area, but you won’t allow foreign terrorists into your territory. But if the Taliban think they’re winning, they don’t have as much incentive to bargain. The message that we would hope to send to them is, guys, we can do this [attack and seize your territory] whenever we want. We can destroy whatever you’ve built in terms of institutions. Here’s the deal: We can’t hold it, but you can’t hold it either.
We’re not going to be able to kill enough of them to win the war, but you might be able to send the message to them that the best they can do is to bargain.
This Q&A was conducted, edited and condensed by Dallas Morning News editorial writer Tod Robberson. His e-mail address is trobberson@dallasnews.com. Bernard Finel’s e-mail address is bfinel@americansecurityproject.org.
