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TOM HANSON

The war in Afghanistan seems in greater political flux today than at any time since the U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom was launched to throw out the Taliban eight years ago. With the momentum in the war clearly turning in favour of the Taliban, all of NATO seems to be discussing "exit strategies."

As of now, Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark have all announced that they will be out of Afghanistan as of 2011. Italy also wants to leave. Germany will take its annual vote on the mission in the Bundestag next month; the German parliamentarians are likely to agree to stay, especially after this week's endorsement by the cabinet, but only for another year. This week, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Britain, proposed that NATO withdraw from certain areas of the country by the end of 2011 and turn them over to the Afghan National Army. President Barack Obama has not decided whether to increase U.S. troops or to impose other conditions on the Karzai government in return for an expanded troop deployment.

The people of NATO's member countries are surely more confused than ever about the mission and have lost sight of the West's vital interest: to show the Taliban and their Islamist allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan that they will not be allowed to threaten a wide swath of South Asia from their mountainous redoubt along the border between the two countries.

"Exit strategy" is a compelling term that has come into universal use since the end of the Cold War primarily because "the West" is - understandably - tired of an endless series of "small" wars that have taken a steady toll of life and treasure since 1990.

When the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago this month, everyone thought a new era of peace was at hand and some 200 years of Europe-centred wars that had started roughly after the French Revolution, was finally over. The American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama dubbed the period "the end of history." President George H.W. Bush spoke of the "new world order." Some "experts" even proclaimed the imminent disappearance of the nation-state.

In fact there was little break in the march of history or in the succession of wars. When the peoples of the Western democracies began to realize that their safe, secure and prosperous world still had to pay a blood tithe for their safety and security, they began to demand "exit strategies": virtual guarantees that every war would have a predictable, controlled ending. But that's not what happens in war.

THE WEST'S DIMINISHING WILL

We think too often of May, 1945, as epitomizing the end of a war - an exit strategy completed - but the Second World War was almost unique in history in that it was a total war, fought to the bitter end. Most wars have not ended that way. Even the Great War of 1914-1918 ended with a political settlement: the Treaty of Versailles.

Wars almost always end politically, or they simply peter out - no matter how long it takes - because the determination and the physical capability of one side are greater than those of the other. When the stronger side persists, an end of some kind follows.

The West has the physical resources to wear the Taliban down, but now seems to have lost the will to do so.

Canada, Britain and the United States have lost fewer soldiers killed in six years of conflict in Afghanistan than the Allies did in one morning on June 6, 1944. Some will say, "Well, that was a fight to the death against the Axis, and there is no parallel to what is happening today," and that is mostly true. But it does show that the West can absorb much greater punishment than it has up to now, if it believes its vital interests are at stake.

Today a diminishing number of Western nations believe that.

A successful exit strategy is, in fact, what Karl von Clausewitz would have called a unified and achievable political objective that once achieved, leads to the end of conflict.

At this point, there is no such unified achievable political objective in Afghanistan. American objectives range from the simple prevention of a Taliban takeover to building a "non-corrupt" government in Afghanistan, to planting the seeds of democracy there, to beating the Taliban militarily in Afghanistan as one part of a larger campaign to eventually defeat the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. This last is possible only with a persistent military effort by the Pakistan's army in its own country and much greater military power in Afghanistan.

Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and Denmark share the U.S. belief that a war is being waged, but the rest of NATO acts as if it is engaged in one large stability operation, not a war, let alone a counterinsurgency.

Unless the NATO countries actually fighting the Taliban can agree on a single unified political objective (the rest of NATO is important only symbolically but not militarily), there is no foreseeable successful exit strategy, and the only realistic exit strategy on the table right now consists of evacuation and defeat, either sooner or later. No political solution is in the cards for Afghanistan, as long as the ideological and religious core of the Taliban keep faith with their holy mission. At this point they have no reason not to.

Defeat in Afghanistan would return the Taliban to power in at least part of the country, virtually ensuring a resurrection of the civil war that raged from 1989 (when the Soviets left) to 1996, when the Taliban prevailed. Defeat could also embolden the Taliban in Pakistan to the point where they might eventually dominate that country or turn it into an Islamist state.

How long would India tolerate an Islamist state on its northwestern frontier?

If a unified and achievable political objective can be agreed upon among the fighting members of NATO, a very different and successful exit strategy could emerge. That strategy would almost certainly combine a series of very hard kinetic blows to the Taliban and a long (three to five years?) counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan, with continued efforts by the Pakistani army to destroy Islamist power in Pakistan's northwest.

Such a series of blows would have to be hard enough to greatly degrade the Taliban's ability to run a drug trade and thus significantly disrupt their use of drug money to conduct a war of terror. Constant military strikes on drug-smuggling routes, combined with incentives for farmers to grow other crops, and improvement of the means to get those crops to market, could work, given persistence.

The blows would also need to be hard enough to make it very difficult for Taliban leaders to plan and carry out sophisticated military operations unhindered by fear of their own death and destruction. At the same time, every effort should be made - and incentives offered - to get rural triggermen and local bomb planters off the Taliban payroll and on to the U.S./NATO/government payroll. The locals are the true weak link in the Taliban chain of command.

Such blows cannot be struck at once, nor can they be done quickly. But they can be carried out with resolve and a unified political strategy. That is what happened in Korea from the early winter of 1951, when the UN forces there were on the brink of defeat, to the end of the Korean War in July, 1953.

TIME AND OPPORTUNITY

What can be achieved thereby is a series of solutions overlapping in time, which would bring greater security than insecurity, and greater stability than instability, to most of the people of Afghanistan most of the time. Such an outcome would at least give the people of both Afghanistan and Pakistan time and opportunity to choose the best way for themselves, which is most assuredly not to live under the tender mercies of the Taliban.

A third exit strategy would be to announce withdrawal timetables now (or soon) before the military momentum has been shifted away from the Taliban. This would merely hasten defeat. One likely result would be that the Taliban would increase their attacks and try to create an even greater momentum toward their victory. Such a strategy would be an admission that no successful outcome is possible for the U.S. or NATO because, despite Gordon Brown's desires, no Afghanistanization of the war can be achieved until a working police and justice infrastructure is put into place. That is surely years away.

When the talk of "exit strategies" is closely examined, the real choices emerge. And they are stark. Fight this war to a successful outcome - understanding that success does not mean victory, though it must mean stability and security for most of the people of Afghanistan - or choose the pace of defeat.

War is both terrible and complex but one age-old dictum still applies. If you are attacked and you are defeated, you will pay significant consequences. The West was attacked and cannot lose the war in Afghanistan with impunity. That is an exit strategy with a high degree of risk and even more punishment in the long run.

David Bercuson is Director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary

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