Afghanistan end-game

Much has been written and talked about regarding what the end game in Afghanistan looks like. Today the US and Afghanistan have finalised their strategic partnership arrangement.


Very much it's reminiscent of the CCCP's withdrawal from Afghanistan when it continued to give massive financial aid to shore up the regime, successfully. When the aid stopped, the regime was toppled.


The NYT reports:

However, the United States is already anticipating that it will make a substantial contribution toward paying for Afghanistan’s security forces beyond 2014 and is searching for contributions from its NATO partners. The amount is not settled but a figure of $2.7 billion a year has been under discussion.  There would be additional foreign aid for civilian fields.


Which is similar to the Russian's annual aid back in the early 1990s. Not so much nation-building, as regime-propping. Offshore balancers are in the ascendency in terms of fashionable thought and with good reason after the confused aims and utopian ideals cited in the Iraq and Afghan invasions. 


So where are we? When Russia left Afghanistan, it ranked 170 out of 174 in the UNDP's Human Development Index (Barakat, S. (2004). Reconstructing war-torn societies: Afghanistan. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (p.7)).

In 2001 in ranked 89 of 90 in a UNDP Human Poverty Index using various indicators. In 2006 it conspicuously did not feature on the numbered tables, being considered in separation to that with other states lacking enough data. In 2011, it ranked 172 out of 187 (Democratic of Congo was in last place, probably justifying even greater faith into the theory of Resource curses now that globalization has opened up the world's resources to all markets). There can be no doubt, given the numerous documentaries that have emerged, that Western forces went there to do good, to nation-build, to conduct counter-insurgency. But this was war, with resistance, and there was never a post-conflict setting, never a time when the resistance had subsided to such an extent that nation-building could begin. Defence won out over offence. 

Psychological and physical traumas after Iraq and Afghanistan

Dignity comes in many forms. Lt Col. Tammy Duckworth lost her legs in a helicopter crash which came under RPG fire in Iraq. She is the current Assistant Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs in the United States Department for Veterans Affairs.

In November 2012 she will stand as the Democratic nominee for the 8th Congressional District of Illinois, standing against conservative Republican Joe Walsh, having stood and lost for the 6th Congressional District in 2006.

Duckworth is standing on a platform of strong social cohesion, especially protecting Medicare. She has made the point that there are hidden costs to the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Advanced battlefield aid has meant the return of many combat troops that would not previously have survived their injuries. The accelerated use of IEDs in both theatres amplified the injury rate.

Liberal democracies have a duty of care to their returning service personnel. Costsofwar's (Part of The Eisenhower Research Project at Brown's Watson Institute) research concludes:

• Over 6,000 US troops have died, as have 2,300 Pentagon contractors
• Over 550,000 disability claims have been registered with the VA as of fall 2010
• Nearly 70,000 allied troops have been wounded
• A RAND study screening of returning troops found 26 percent likely had some kind of mental health condition.
• Toxic dust exposures in theater have been associated with high rates of respiratory, neurological, and cardiovascular disease in returning troops
• The middle class is somewhat overrepresented, the poor and the very wealthy underrepresented among the casualties[1]

550, 000 disability claims in a population of 311, 591, 000 people represents a disability claim of 0.176% of the population. Which means that as a result of the war on terror, 176 in every 100 000 have filed disability claims in the United States. These are hidden costs.

But more difficult to gauge, assess, treat and hence reintegrate soldiers are psychological traumas. In the Canadian film "Passchendaele", there is a general sense of the inhumanity of war, that men cannot prepare for its horrors, and that, also, bodies becomes twisted into shapes by explosions that are incomprehensible to the human mind. The documentaries are starting to emerge on Iraq and Afghanistan that deal with this explicitly. The three-part documentary series by the British Broadcasting Service, Our War, is one such attempt, which incorporates a large percentage of footage shot by the troops themselves and only recently released by the Ministry of Defence (first, second, third).

Though politicians may be desperate to draw a line under Iraq and Afghanistan, as the two theatres of the War on Terror that incorporated substantial troop deployment, the media may come to delve deeper into it as the picture of what the aftermath actually looks like becomes clearer. A Daily Mirror investigation concluded that mental health problems in the UK military stood at 2, 510 in 2010, and those with severe PTSD, at 185. These are diagnosed mental injuries. It seems probable that given the machismo culture of front line military forces, any mental problems would be preferrably self-medicated.

The war on terror as a name and venture is soon to be confined to history but the hidden costs will still be very much a part of our liberal democracies for decades to come. Identifying this, and giving voices to those who have important things to say, such as Tammy Duckworth, will be vital to the relationship between civil society and our armed forces in the coming decades.

Iran (4)

David Shorr at thebulletin reviews Trita Parsi's 'A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran'. The book is welcome in drawing attention to the myriad actors involved in pulling Obama in different directions and proving central to his consideration in dealing with Iran.

Meanwhile, Joseph Wouk runs a Debka story that is interesting in an of itself. The content is absolutely unverified but does state that after the RQ170 crashed in Iran, Obama has cancelled all drone flights over the country, relying solely on satellite relays. That led the israelis to try and fit a drone with the necessary imaging but the drone crashed and the Israelis haven't proceeded, with the accompanying loss of data being received on sensitive installations.

Yahoo! runs the story that the Israelis and US agree that Iran does not currently have a bomb, but that's good news for the Israelis, who can hence argue that they can go in without a nuclear reprisal.

Without continuous drone footage of the installations, there's going to be much less of a granular understanding of the sites, couple with the loss of the RQ170 there are going to be so many unknowns involved in a strike, which might also play into the hands of the republican nominee (israelis running wild on Obama's watch). So Obama will press stridently for diplomacy.

Iran (3)

The role of narratives in establishing norms have become a central consideration in policy formulation, accelerated by the past decade of a war against terror, and what exactly that might mean, and how exactly language has shaped policy.

Two articles have now considered the effect of the media debate on policy formulation with regards to Iran. Stephen Walt in FP and Benn in the generally left-of-centre Haaretz (thanks to Nina for the latter link).

With the discourse shaped towards "not if but when", the next development will be post-conflict planning discourse, without the conflict having yet occurred. In that way, societies will start to live with the idea of the conflict. Then when it happens, it's simply a part of the normative framework of the foreign policy.

So the next discussions will be on how Iran will respond - will it use Hezbollah and can it. Will it act in Hormuz? Will it start an energy war? How will this affect the internal dynamics of the country? It's a little early for history to repeat itself, but expect some analysts to suggest that the nation will rise up once Israel and American take action against the nuclear installations which are the property of a tyrannical regime.

Also, Ahmadinejad is getting sidelined after his support base was weakened in parliamentary elections for the majilis earlier in the month. Hardliners are now in place.