MB Civic

The Jabberwock In Afghanistan

Daniel M. Smith

July 28, 2006

Colonel Daniel M. Smith (USA, ret.) is a senior fellow for military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation .

Four battle-hardened Afghan mujahedeen visited my office July 20, ostensibly to discuss how a pluralistic, secular (non-establishment) government interacts with, discerns, harmonizes, and incorporates into its laws the values of the many faiths practiced by its people.

Their visit, long planned, seemed from another world, given the events in Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, and Israel and the seemingly indifferent attitude of the Bush administration to the carnage being inflicted.

But it also comes at a time when the U.S. press is noting a degree of malaise among the president’s conservative supporters. One gets the sense that conservatives are nostalgic for George H. W. Bush’s presidency and what is remembered as an unambiguously successful U.S. foreign policy. On his watch, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the Soviet Union imploded, comprehensive reductions in nuclear arsenal were negotiated, the U.S. rallied an unprecedented “coalition of the willing”—including Arab countries—to reverse Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait, and the initiation of what some regard as the most evenhanded, U.S.-brokered discussions cum direct negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis.

The world may not have been completely transformed into a U.S. clone, but as in the Lewis Carroll poem “Jabberwocky,” much seemed to have been done with minimal time and effort. Moreover, the great enemy, the Soviet Jabberwock, was dead:

“And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One two! One two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.”

The reason for today’s nostalgia is simple: 14 years after Bush Sr. left the White House and five years after his first electoral “win” for the presidency, son George W. Bush was accused of squandering his father’s achievements through a series of miscalculations—both opportunities passed up and initiatives that misfired.

What makes the current state of affairs so galling to conservatives is that “Bush 43” had the entire country and most of the world ready to help out the U.S. following the destruction of the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon on 9/11. Almost unnoticed, the unraveling began in earnest October 8, 2001, with the first bombs that rained down on Afghanistan. One had to be in Europe (where I was) or in Asia to grasp the beginning of the divide separating governments from their publics.

By December the Taliban had been driven from power. Victory, although not proclaimed officially, was simply accepted. There would be congressional hearings on intelligence failures and other shortcomings, but these were destined to be overshadowed by cautiously enthusiastic articles about the political steps taken—election of a president, convening of successive loya jurgas (parliaments), and a constitutional drafting committee. But of some $14.6 billion in promised foreign aid, only $3.5 billion has been received by mid-2006.

Now, the Taliban poses a renewed threat to the government of President Hamid Karzai. According to a visiting Afghan parliamentarian, fully one-third of the 34 provinces in Afghanistan are effectively under the control or significant influence of Taliban fighters or sympathizers. Just days before the Afghan delegation arrived in the U.S., Taliban forces seized and held two towns in southeast Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan until a hastily assembled task force of 1,000 U.S. and Afghan army soldiers recaptured the terrain.

Having been abandoned by the U.S. once in the 1990s, Afghans, especially in the south and east, fear that the same future awaits them today. NATO has already assumed leadership of the U.N.-approved International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) around Kabul, and, now, non-U.S. NATO soldiers are taking responsibility for security in four of Afghanistan’s southern and eastern provinces as U.S. troops withdraw.

And that gets us back to today.

Listening to our Afghan visitors tell of that which sustains them, one can also detect what it is they fear. Give them equipment to build the security forces, money to rebuild the economy, and time to build a more democratic system of governance under law, and they will see to the emergence of a re-formed and reformed Afghanistan—allowing foreign troops to go home. Should U.S. interest be diverted or waiver, if Afghan police and army units do not get the training and equipment they need, or if enough, sustained international funding fails to materialize, the upshot may be a defeat for the U.S. and a catastrophic relapse into chaos for the Afghan people.

Meanwhile, deep in the background, one hears the racing Jabberwock heading for his rendezvous with the “vorpal blade.” Only this Jabberwock is the United States.