We Ignore Afghanistan at Our Strategic Peril

In many ways, it is a tale of two armies. Perhaps the most important mistake the Bush administration made after the invasion of Iraq was to disband that nation's army.

A Lebanese friend of mine, a man steeped in all the ways of his region, told me recently: "It was necessary for the Americans to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But in Iraq, they only needed to change the decision maker, they shouldn't have destroyed the one institution that bound the country together."

In Afghanistan, which holds its presidential election today, the mistake was similar. In the heady optimism following the military vanquishing of the Taliban, there did not seem at first to be very widespread opposition to the US and its allies in Afghanistan.

As a result, the US did not help the Afghan state build a big army. Washington's calculation was as simple as this: Afghanistan is a poor country, it can only afford a small army.

The US has learned to its bitter cost that it is much cheaper to field an Afghan army than an American army. Training up an Afghan National Army, so that it does the vast majority of fighting and policing in its country, is now critical to overall success in Afghanistan.

But what is overall success?

The situation in Afghanistan is now so complex and involves so many moving parts that it is hard to keep in mind what we are doing and why.

Two very useful insights into this question come from the ministerial statements on Afghanistan by Defence Minister John Faulkner and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith. The media are too focused on political conflict. Statements like these -- systematic adumbrations of complex, and in this case deadly, policy matters -- ought to get more attention.

Faulkner said that Australia has three objectives in Afghanistan: to help stabilise the nation, to train the Afghan National Army so that it can take the lead in providing its nation's security, and to prevent terrorists coming back into control in Kabul.

Faulkner linked our effort there to our own security: "An Afghanistan which allows terrorists to flourish means less security for Australia."

Smith drew the same lesson. A failure in Afghanistan would, he said, "lead to a jihadi state and again allow international terrorists to re-establish themselves in Afghanistan.

"It would also put intolerable pressure on Pakistan."

Incidentally, when the government links the struggle in Afghanistan to the terrorist threat faced by Australians at home and in Southeast Asia, it is routinely pooh-poohed by the academic establishment. But it is certainly correct to make the link.

Afghanistan under the Taliban provided training, logistics and finance facilities for the terrorists who attacked Australians. It can't be much plainer than that.

But beyond Afghanistan, Smith provides a broader strategic rationale for what Australia is doing. A Taliban or jihadi-style Afghanistan would be a disaster for Pakistan and that is a disaster for global security.

So even if, like some academics, you regard terrorism as a bit of a joke strategically, the full geo-strategic justification for the effort in Afghanistan resides in neighbouring Pakistan.

The West has had to learn over and over not to abandon Afghanistan when an immediate threat passes. Way back in 2002 I interviewed Abdullah Abdullah, now the leading challenger to President Hamid Karzai in today's presidential election. He pleaded in that interview for the West not to ignore Afghanistan. Doing so before led directly to 9/11, he said.

In words which now ring with the pregnant wistfulness of what might have been, he also said to me: "Some Taliban and al-Qa'ida leaders have relocated in Pakistan. I hope this won't be a problem for us."

The reason it did become a problem, in part, is that the US and other allies, including Australia, did indeed take our eyes off Afghanistan. Our aid and mentoring were inadequate in producing an effective state.

Afghanistan is inherently a much less governable space than Iraq, and Iraq's ungovernable enough. In any year, depending on oil prices, Iraq will have $US40 billion ($48.3bn) to $US80bn of government revenue to deploy. Afghanistan typically has less than $US1bn.

But the real reason the problems just got worse and worse in Afghanistan is that Pakistan gave shelter to Taliban fighters and leaders. This is of course partly a question of bad faith on Islamabad's part.

But to look at it entirely in strategic terms, the attitude to the Taliban by Pakistan's all-powerful military intelligence establishment, the ISI, depends to a large extent on whether it believes the US and its allies are in for the long haul.

If they believe, or even suspect, that the Americans and their friends will leave in retreat and chaos, and their Afghan collaborators will evaporate like the Soviet-sponsored puppet governments of the past, they will of course look for their own avenues of strategic influence in Afghanistan. Given that the ISI created the Taliban, this is where they will look. As with so many security issues across the world, therefore, a central, hard power element of the strategic equation is US credibility.

It is easy to underestimate the Americans' staying power. But of course, it is not limitless.

Nonetheless, even with slowly eroding public enthusiasm for the effort in Afghanistan, the war there is seen in the US to some extent as a homeland security issue. It is fairly easy for political leaders such as Barack Obama to remind Americans that a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan led directly to the 9/11 attacks, and renewed Taliban control could easily lead to something worse.

But it's clear that we need to make more rapid progress. Jim Molan, the Australian major-general who knows these issues better than any other, believes there are just not enough troops in Afghanistan to run a traditional counter-insurgency strategy. However, it is very unlikely that there will be a big increase in Western troops there. Instead there needs to be a big increase in Afghan troops.

The military effort needs to provide the security to allow a civilian development effort.

While things look grim in Pakistan in many ways, the fact that the conflict in Pakistan is becoming more polarised between the army and the Taliban is encouraging, in that it suggests there is some chance of the army fully mobilising against the Taliban, notwithstanding the ISI's dark history. That would help Afghanistan.

Overall, despite its infinite problems, today's election is a moment of hope for Afghanistan. Those who take part in it peacefully deserve respect.

Those who try to discredit it, or discredit the US-led military forces, or even the very flawed politicians vying for power in Kabul, do the Afghans no service.