A crucial role
Toolbox
Published: July 2, 2009
Iraq celebrated its sovereignty Tuesday as U.S. troops pulled back from the major cities and prepared to hand over most security operations to Iraqi troops.
Meanwhile, National Guard troops in Vermont have been alerted that they will experience the largest mobilization since World War II when they travel to Afghanistan sometime next year.
The Guard troops are expected to be involved in the training of Afghan police and army in all parts of the country. The Obama administration hopes that the success that has allowed U.S. troops to hand over security duties to Iraqi forces in Iraq can be a model for similar success in Afghanistan.
Certainly, the role of the Guard troops will be a crucial part of the efforts in Afghanistan to foster stability and turn back the insurgency led by the Taliban. As everyone has said, from the secretary of defense on down, the war in Afghanistan cannot be won by military means alone. It can only be won when Afghanistan is able to defend itself against insurgents.
The same could be said for Iraq. For the moment, the Iraqi government led by Nouri al-Maliki is trumpeting its achievement in negotiating the U.S. withdrawal. And yet numerous dangers lurk. The potential for renewed conflict between Shiite and Sunni groups and between Kurdish and Arab groups is real, and there will be extremists eager to exploit that potential. Meanwhile, the race is on between the corruption and incompetence of the Iraqi government and military and their growing professionalism.
The United States went to Iraq with a grand vision of imposing democracy on a fragmented demoralized nation that had been tyrannized for decades. Even if the United States had made no mistakes, that would have been a difficult task. But the mistakes were many, and the process of rebuilding the shattered nation will not end soon.
Afghanistan, like Iraq, requires competent and professional police and military forces. Observers have said that the Afghan military has made strides and may even be the most reliable institution in the country. The police and the judiciary are another matter. It is for want of simple justice that ordinary villagers sometimes turn to the Taliban, whose form of justice is firm and swift, if not always just.
The Vermont troops traveling to Afghanistan will find a nation that had never advanced far beyond the 12th century and then was pummeled back to perhaps the sixth. The Afghan people are as deserving of justice and economic security as any, but their nation is as undeveloped as virtually any on Earth. Helping them learn the rudiments of modern policing and effective soldiering will require patience and sensitivity to an alien culture.
The Vermont troops will be encountering a society that lacks the cohesive tribalism that allowed the U.S. to reach lasting agreements with Sunni tribes. Decades of war have ravaged Afghanistan's tribal system.
The Obama administration intends to address the military problem partly by a significant increase in economic development. The Bush administration tried a few grand model development projects that were inappropriate and doomed to fail. One hopes the Obama development effort gets down to the ground level, working at the small scale where most villagers live. It is a good sign that U.S. forces no longer plan to target opium growers, which meant targeting the Afghan people, and plan instead to target the opium dealers, which are tied with the Taliban.
The eyes of America will be on Vermont's Guard troops, hopeful that they succeed in giving their Afghan colleagues the training needed to bring stability to the Afghan people. Only when the people trust their own government, police and military will they have the confidence needed to spurn the appeals and rebuff the coercion of terrorist groups that want to return them to the violent repression of the past.
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