Three Pots of Tea
Peace in Afghanistan Depends on Its Leaders, Neighbors, and Security Forces
There are three key ingredients for peace in Afghanistan. Afghan leaders must negotiate a peace. Afghan neighbors must respect the peace. And Afghan soldiers and police must keep the peace.
Only the Afghan parties should take part in the formal negotiations over their country’s future. But all of the major external stakeholders, including India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and the United States, should conduct parallel, less-formal discussions, with a view to exercising convergent influence on the Afghan parties. All potential parties to a peace treaty accept that the Taliban must be involved in negotiations and granted some role in the resulting government.
Afghanistan is a weak polity that has been torn apart by its neighbors, not unlike the hapless sheep that is pulled apart by mounted riders in buzkashi, the Central Asian version of polo.
As for keeping the peace, there is likely no organization in the world other than the U.S. Army that can train security forces on the scale needed in places like Afghanistan. But current U.S. Army doctrine is insufficient for this task, and Western models for security forces may not work in Afghanistan. Developing and fielding host-nation forces that take the unique context of the country into account will be critical. So will be the army’s selection of advisers and preparation of leaders.
Pacifying Afghans and Their Neighbors
Agreement among the main Afghan parties is a necessary but not sufficient condition for peace. Unlike Iraq and Yugoslavia, which are strong states riven by even stronger ethnic antipathies, Afghanistan is a weak polity that has been torn apart by its near and more-distant neighbors, not unlike the hapless sheep that is pulled apart by mounted riders in buzkashi, the Central Asian version of polo. Until these neighboring countries sense that there is a credible endgame for an Afghan peace accord that protects their interests, they have every incentive to continue meddling destructively and to promote divisions among Afghans. To succeed, any peace process must include Afghanistan’s neighbors.
AP IMAGES/HOSHANG HASHIMI
Taliban fighters hand over their weapons in Herat, Afghanistan, on September 21, 2011. Mullah Aminullah, the Taliban shadow governor for the Kohsan district of Herat province, joined the peace process with nine of his associates in cooperation with local elders.
In the event of a pell-mell American and European retreat, the neighboring states would likely revert to their historical patterns, arming and financing their proxies and pulling Afghanistan asunder. The result would be a return to the earlier constellation of civil wars, with India, Iran, and Russia supporting northern, non-Pashtun resistance to a Pakistan-backed Pashtun hegemony. If Afghan history is any guide, this conflict would be much more violent than the one currently under way, producing many more casualties, larger refugee flows, and expanded opportunities for extremist groups to use Afghan territory, as they already use Pakistan, as a hub for more-distant attacks.
Fortunately, the priorities of all potential parties to an Afghan peace process overlap to a considerable degree. Each desires a withdrawal of Western armed forces. All Afghans want foreigners to stop interfering in their affairs. All foreign governments want assurances that Afghan territory will not be used to their disadvantage and thus want to ensure that terrorists hostile to their countries cannot use Afghanistan as a sanctuary.
Interests diverge less in the area of outcomes than in that of timing. Western governments want to withdraw NATO forces from Afghanistan sooner rather than later, a preference shared by the Taliban. Most other potential participants, including the Kabul government, are not in such a rush. Indeed, continuation of the current conflict, with the United States tied down and neither side able to prevail, is acceptable to most regional governments and, for Iran, probably optimal.
The United States should seek the appointment of a United Nations–endorsed facilitator to promote agreement among all the necessary parties regarding a venue, participation, and agenda to initiate a peace process. The U.S. objective in these negotiations should be a stable and peaceful Afghanistan that neither hosts nor collaborates with international terrorists. Only to the extent that other issues impinge on this objective should American negotiators be drawn into a discussion of Afghanistan’s social or constitutional issues, such as the role of women.
AP IMAGES/RAHMAT GUL
People enter Afghanistan through Pakistan’s border crossing in Torkham, east of Kabul, on November 4, 2011.
Negotiation among the Afghans will focus on the nature of any power-sharing arrangement, on possible modifications to the existing constitution, on social norms, and on the role of sharia, or Islamic law. Several broader issues include the withdrawal of NATO-led forces, the residual commitments and arrangements to combat terrorism, a commitment by the Afghan parties not to allow their territory to be used against any third party, a reciprocal commitment by Afghanistan’s neighbors not to allow their territories to be used to destabilize Afghanistan, a promise of continuing American security assistance, a United Nations peacekeeping operation, a commitment by Afghanistan and its neighbors to cooperate against drug trafficking, and commitments by the international community to continue economic assistance to Afghanistan.
The process will probably require years of talking. During this time, fighting will likely continue and may even intensify. Negotiation does not represent an easy or early path out of Afghanistan for the West, but it is the only way in which this war is likely to end in a long-term peace.
The most difficult challenge will be establishing and sustaining a minimum of law and order going into and lasting through the political transition. It will be important both for the parties to an accord and for international peacekeepers to identify deliberate violations of ceasefires. The terms to hammer out include the timing of the withdrawal, the conditions that will have to be met beforehand, and what, if any, security forces will remain to help train Afghan national forces. The most likely outcome is a United Nations–led peacekeeping force made up largely of non-Western troop contingents from Islamic countries that do not border Afghanistan, such as Indonesia, Jordan, and Malaysia. Turkey might also be an acceptable participant.
A basic precept of competent negotiation is to keep the best alternative to no agreement clearly in mind and to reject any accord that does not improve on it. In Afghanistan, the best alternative to no peace agreement would be a regime in Kabul that can sustain itself indefinitely against the Taliban with much lower levels of U.S. support. To the extent that the United States and its allies succeed in improving the capacity of the Afghan army, police, and government, they create an acceptable alternative to a negotiated agreement and thereby enhance their negotiating position.
U.S. policymakers should, therefore, prepare for two futures: one negotiated, one not. Both must meet the bottom-line need to prevent Afghanistan from falling into the hands of an Al Qaeda–linked regime. This means preparing both to leave definitively and to stay indefinitely. If negotiations fail, some level of U.S. military engagement will probably be necessary well beyond the 2014 date by which President Obama has promised to remove all American combat forces.
Assisting Afghan Security Forces
The outcome of the Afghan campaign rests, in large part, on the effectiveness of security force assistance (SFA). In Afghanistan, SFA is the support provided by NATO forces to the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, and other indigenous security forces to help them bring their country under government control. To date, the U.S. military has struggled in its leadership of the SFA component of this mission.
Moving forward, the U.S. Army will likely play a central role in building Afghan security forces, but current army doctrine (as well as policy guidance) is insufficient for this mission. Today’s doctrine focuses heavily on the actions of army brigade combat teams, but those teams represent just one piece of SFA in Afghanistan, where all of the security institutions are in development. SFA cannot be done by some forces in isolation or assigned to one organization; it requires horizontal and vertical coordination among all coalition forces. And because the security forces must act jointly and with other government institutions, SFA must encompass not just the military but also the entire security enterprise.
Civilian control of the military does not have the same meaning in Afghanistan as it has in the West.
Effective SFA requires more than effective forces; it also requires assisting the agencies and commands responsible for designing, fielding, and maintaining those forces. A complete doctrine would stipulate that U.S. forces should give feedback to national-level institutions, such as the security ministries, general staff, logistics command, and training and doctrine command, because these are the institutions that must design, field, and maintain the indigenous forces.
Afghan security institutions were built on Western models, in which civilian control of the military is a bedrock concept. But civilian control of the military does not have the same meaning in Afghanistan as it has in the West. In tribal and authoritarian political systems, civilian control of the military may result in one political party placing its adherents in a majority of military leadership posts to ensure it stays in power. The concept may also often result in something other than a merit-based system. Rather, personal, ethnic, or party loyalties are likely to be the conditions for important assignments and promotions. In Afghanistan, we see positions being sold if they offer the promise of illicit profits from corruption. We also see that some soldiers and police charged with protecting the population give their primary loyalties to individuals or social structures other than the nation.
Not all soldiers are equally able to work with indigenous forces.
The Afghan Ministry of Defense is not in fact a civilian institution. Of its 780 civilian slots, only 16 were filled with civilians as of January 2010. As a result, the Afghan defense establishment has what amounts to two competing general staffs, a situation exacerbated by the fact that each is led by officials from different ethnic backgrounds who do not work well together.
These factors imply the need for training U.S. commanders and units to help professionalize indigenous forces and to design and develop those forces in ways that recognize the local constraints without compromising U.S. goals. Thus, these factors have implications for U.S. leader development and education programs. Case study readings and seminar discussions in the U.S. Army War College might focus on such situations and trade-offs.
AP IMAGES/HYUNSOO LEO KIM
An Afghan police officer searches community leaders attending a shura, or council meeting. U.S. troops are pushing local security forces to the forefront, trying to get the country to stand on its own.
The idea that leaders should place the welfare of their soldiers above their own is also a foreign concept in Afghanistan. This means that the entire ethos of leadership that is taught in the U.S. military will be difficult to instill in Afghanistan’s security forces in the short term. It also means that SFA providers must work with forces whose leaders may be corrupt and must be prepared to curb that corruption (such as the theft of soldiers’ pay and food rations by self-serving leaders) and to temper the expectations of leaders about what outcomes can be expected from SFA efforts with such forces.
There is also concern that Afghan basic training does not produce soldiers and police with sufficient skills. But there is a mismatch between Western-designed security systems and the capabilities of Afghan security personnel to run them. Large parts of the training model installed by U.S. forces reflect a Western approach, which relies on having literate indigenous partners to train. Instead, U.S. advisers should be trained on how to instill, develop, and reinforce skills in Afghan personnel who may be illiterate. Efforts to train U.S. advisers must be designed from the beginning to account for such factors as illiteracy.
The selection of U.S. advisers is also critical. Not all soldiers are equally able to work with indigenous forces. Moreover, the army’s personnel system does not adequately capture such critical factors as personality, and the army’s selection process for trainers does not consider experience with advising. Such experiences should be career-enhancing if the army wants its best people to sign up for them. Lessons in these areas may be available from the U.S. Army Special Forces, because this type of work is what they have traditionally been selected, structured, and trained to do.
The skills needed by SFA leaders and staffs are very different from those needed by commanders in other aspects of war. SFA leaders must be able to work with other U.S. government agencies, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and host-nation government and political leaders. SFA leaders must understand how to develop host-nation forces and employ them with coalition forces in such a way that both host-nation and U.S. interests are met. They must also plan to develop these forces on a time line that meets U.S. requirements to end the conflict in accordance with political direction. This is a tremendous challenge under the best of circumstances. It is made even more difficult because the necessary skills have not traditionally been part of the army’s leadership development. But they should be if the army wants to perform this mission well. 
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