The Afghanistan conundrum

Because of Fort Drum, there aren't many areas of the country any more directly affected than the north country by the Obama administration's decision on what course of action to take in Afghanistan. The men and women of the 10th Mountain Division, the most-deployed unit in the Army, have a real stake in decisions made in Washington.

With the Pentagon's request for an expanded force, the president must decide what course this long war will take. The U.S. has been the major force in Afghanistan since the 2002 invasion, and now military leaders say the best way to end this conflict is to expand it. A lot of 10th Mountain Division lives hang in the balance.

Before President Obama makes a commitment, I hope his advisers force him to look at the history of Afghanistan, and the history of foreign invaders there. They need not look any farther back than the 1980s to see some eerie parallels between the U.S. situation there today, and a failed Soviet invasion 30 years ago.

With Afghanistan in a civil war in 1978, its government called on the Soviets to provide assistance. The Russians complied with a vengeance, eventually invading the country on Dec. 19, 1979 and promptly deposing the president and installing its own government. The Soviets invaded from the northeast in Termez, from the northwest in Kushka, and swiftly moved to Kandahar and Kabul, controlling the major cities.

And then the Soviets discovered what other invaders of Afghanistan had discovered over the centuries: it isn't a country easily captured, and once invaded, is heart-breakingly costly to control. The Russians' initial force included three rifle divisions, an airborne assault brigade and an air force division, with an initial troop strength of 80,000. Within two years, the force had grown to 100,000. When Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev gave military leaders one year to end the war in 1985, troop strength grew to 108,800.

And how did this work out for the Soviets? They lost 14,500 soldiers, with an additional 53,750 wounded. The Soviet Army never, in nine years of occupation, controlled more than 20 percent of the country. It took almost a year – from May 1988 to February 1989 – to pull out of the country. The war sapped Russia's defense forces and treasury, and Osama bin-Laden, who rose to power as a tribal commander as a direct result of this invasion, says it was Afghanistan, not U.S. pressure, that brought about the collapse of the Soviet system. Many people outside the U.S. to some degree agree with this.

And there are other parallels that should make us think long and hard about our presence in Afghanistan. The Soviets' exit strategy, for example, was to build the Afghanistan Army into a real fighting force, and turn the war over to it. Sound familiar? Although the Afghan Army grew to a nominal size of more than 300,000 when the Russians pulled out, the desertion rate was 30 percent and many of the units, let alone individual soldiers, were more loyal to the mujahideen than the government.

Afghanistan poses the same swamp for the U.S. today that it did for the Soviets in the 1980s. The mujahideen have been replaced by the Taliban, but for all practical purposes, we are facing the same foe that sent the Soviet Army packing after nine years of punishment. Like the mujahideen, the Taliban are little more than feudal warlords, loosely tied politically but fiercely united militarily. The geography of the country – nearly impassible mountains surrounded by inhospitable deserts – lends itself to the guerilla warfare tactics of the militants. And the government of Hamid Karzai has about the same control over the country that a farmer has over a herd of barn cats.

To really believe the U.S. can achieve a positive outcome in Afghanistan is truly an example of the triumph of hope over experience. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal asked for a surge of troops in Afghanistan similar to the one in Iraq, he was confusing a more graceful American exit in Iraq with a U.S. victory. Since the Iraq war had no real point – there were no weapons of mass destruction and Iraq posed no more danger to the U.S. than Liechtenstein – it would be hard to declare any victory.

In Afghanistan, we set out to capture bin-Laden and destroy al Qaeda, ousting the Taliban along the way because bin-Laden and his group were under the aegis of Afghanistan's ruling factions. We should refocus our Afghanistan strategy on our initial goal: destroying al Qaeda. If that goal is no longer possible in Afghanistan because the terror group's leaders have moved on, we should move on. If it still is possible to destroy al Qaeda in Afghanistan, that's what we should be working toward. Making the seven or eight significant ethnic groups and hundreds of Afghanistan tribes support our mission through some "hearts and minds" initiative simply isn't possible, and we'd be wise to forget about it.

We do need to refocus our objectives and our strategies in Afghanistan. But for the sake of our military and our treasury (and perhaps our moral health), we should take a real look at what we're trying to do and where we're trying to do it, and find a realistic path to a reasonable goal.