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History, and some hope, in thoughtful ‘Graveyard’

If you think a title that includes “graveyard” conveys little optimism for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, you have a point.

But do not abandon hope, all ye who read here.

“In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan” strikes back at current assumptions — and at history, from Alexander the Great to Rumsfeld the Secretary.

Seth G. Jones, a Rand Corp. analyst and a professor, has made more than a dozen trips to Afghanistan since 2001, and researched past and present tensions exhaustively. His sources include interviews, polls of Afghans, histories, CIA reports and studies.

He has three suggestions for the U.S. to succeed:

• “The first step must be to address the massive corruption at the national and local levels,” including “drug trafficking, bribery among senior officials, and pervasive extortion among Afghan police and judges.”

• “A second step is ... to find a better balance between top-down efforts to build a viable central government and bottom-up efforts to support local actors.”

• “A third step is addressing the sanctuary in Pakistan, which has been fundamental to the success of every successful insurgency and counterinsurgency in Afghanistan’s recent history.”

Why didn’t somebody think of this before?

They did, sort of. In 2001, the State Department “favored a peacekeeping force in Afghanistan,” Jones writes, but the Pentagon “vehemently opposed any pretense of nation-building.” He considers this “light footprint” strategy a serious misstep that contributed to the collapse of governance.

Daoud Yaqub, of the Afghan National Security Council, tells Jones that in 2003, “there was an increase in the number of improvised explosive devices, and soft targets were increasingly attacked. U.S officials didn’t see the Taliban as a strategic threat then.” One U.S. general called the Taliban amateurish.

Amateurish or not, the organization succeeded: “There was a supply of disgruntled locals because of the collapse of Afghan governance, and a demand for recruits by ideologically motivated insurgent leaders. This combination proved deadly.”

Indeed, 2006 and 2007 “witnessed some of the most intense battles since the Taliban was overthrown in 2001. Fighting became so fierce that British soldiers had to fix bayonets for hand-to-hand combat in Helmand Province.”

So will Afghanistan ever see stability?

“Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Afghanistan is its continuity,” Jones says. “Afghans have shown an uncanny ability to regenerate,” Jones writes. “Time has a rather curious way of slowing down here.”

In the words of one Taliban detainee: “You have the watches, but we have the time.”