IN Kabul these days, those wishing to sound knowledgeable fire one phrase at visiting reporters: "This has no military solution!" One hears it from President Hamid Karzai, UN "experts" and diplomats. Yet they appear stuck when asked: What precisely is the "this" that has no military solution?
If pressed, they offer various answers: Afghanistan's poverty, gender inequality, corruption, the drug trade, ethnic rivalries and intrigues by rival powers such as Pakistan and Iran.
Obviously, none of those problems has a military solution. But the main problem Afghanistan faces today is the threat posed to the security of its citizens and infrastructure by insurgents using terror tactics such as roadside bombings and suicide attacks.
And that problem does have a military solution -- indeed, the only solution is military. The insurgents must be defeated on the battlefield.
The fact is that, although President Obama has spoken of a "war of necessity," there is little actual fighting in Afghanistan.
The majority of US and other NATO nations' casualties are caused by improvised explosive devices planted on the roads. These devices also kill many noncombatants, mostly Afghan peasants. A few other US/NATO casualties are the results of ambushes organized by insurgents.
The Afghan experience could be divided into three phases. In the first phase, the US, backed by the Afghan Northern Alliance, managed to flush the Taliban out of Kabul, gain control of the country and establish a new regime.
The second phase, between 2004 and 2008, saw America and NATO focusing on such nonmilitary issues as creating a new administrative machine, raising a new Afghan army and police and inventing a new judiciary.
All that was done under the assumption that the UN-backed NATO presence was a peacekeeping, rather than a peace-enforcing, mission. The bulk of NATO forces behaved more like the Salvation Army than a fighting machine in a real war.
US forces did some fighting in the southeastern provinces (often by firing missiles from drones into Pakistan). British, Canadian and French units also did some fighting in the provinces entrusted to them -- but seldom took the initiative by actually going after the insurgents. Their measure of success was the number of children (especially girls) who went to school in areas protected by them, not the number of insurgents killed or captured.
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