America’s air war in Afghanistan is producing a political reality that Washington needs to confront: a power vacuum. The Taliban’s hold on the country is being eroded. Its rivals are increasingly emboldened. But none of them could (or should) run all of Afghanistan. Some transitional governing authority for Afghanistan has to be patched together–and fast.
President Bush has wisely shifted his position on nation-building. He says he is now in favor of “the stabilization of a future government after our military mission is complete.” That’s fine. It’s a time-honored tradition in politics to change the names when you change your mind. (Thus members of Congress can say they hold the line on government “spending” while voting in favor of “investments.”) But there’s still a problem with the president’s new phrasing. The sequence is off. We are going to have to figure out what to do with the future government of Afghanistan before our military mission is complete.
Interventions cannot proceed in an orderly sequence, with postwar political arrangements being planned only after military operations are finished. Whether in Somalia or the gulf war, military actions had political effects. Both must be planned in tandem. In Afghanistan our intervention is restarting a civil war. This dilemma has actually slowed down America’s military game plan. We are not, for example, bombing Taliban troop positions around Kabul, for fear that it will result in a major advance on the capital by the Northern Alliance. The sooner we decide who is going to govern from Kabul, the faster we can return to our military strategy–which is to destroy the Taliban.
A new government in Kabul will fill the void and prevent Afghanistan’s various groups from jostling for power. And, in a practical sense, it will mean that there is some central authority to which weary Taliban commanders can defect. (In the past it’s been easier to get Afghan warlords to switch sides than to surrender.) The Durrani tribes in Kandahar, for example, appear ready to swear new allegiances. But where should they go to do this?
The new government will need two things: legitimacy and power. For the first, there are various proposals to create a national council under the auspices of the 86-year-old king of Afghanistan with representation from all the major ethnic groups and tribes, except for the Taliban. That’s fine, though getting the Afghans to agree to work together has proved a nightmare in the past.
In the meantime you need a force that can actually occupy Kabul and an organization that can set up a provisional administration there. The obvious–in fact, the only–choice is the United Nations. The president has already suggested that it take on this role. The United Nations has a body of experience in this area from Cambodia to East Timor to Kosovo. As secretary-general, Kofi Annan has succeeded in making it an organization that can work with the United States and yet retain its international legitimacy. This is the art of practical peacemaking, for which Annan richly deserves the Nobel Prize.
The Bush administration should work with the Security Council to pass a set of resolutions providing for a U.N. force. That force should start out with American and European troops, with some significant Muslim contingent from countries like Turkey. (Without some American combat troops, the force will not be effective, a lesson the United Nations learned the hard way in Bosnia.) Once the military force is in place, the United Nations can begin coordinating relief and reconstruction efforts. The Western nations should contribute financially. The goal is to turn Afghanistan not into a Jeffersonian democracy but into a quasi-functioning state, restoring order, roads, bridges and water supplies and ending the faminelike conditions that are producing refugees.
In the past I have been skeptical of nation-building in places like Somalia and Haiti. My reasons were simple. It’s tough as hell, so doing it in places where the United States has few interests is not worth the effort. But it’s clear now that political stability in Afghanistan has a vital impact on U.S. national security. Left alone, it will once again become a camping ground for terror. We have no option but to create some political order in that country. Call it nation-building lite.
