In an op-ed piece in today’s Washington Post, David Ignatius quotes an anonymous former government official as noting that “[w]hat is tragic is that Iraq’s slide toward an Iranian axis and civil war were not only predictable but indeed predicted by Iraq experts within the U.S. government.”
Without a doubt, this is an accurate assessment, but the same specter looms further east in Afghanistan. It is a place where foreign powers and local warlords have struggled against and among each other for millennia. The addition of some schools, vaccination programs, and infrastructure in the last twelve years has not changed the underlying geographic and social constraints that have historically made Afghanistan a place nearly impossible to govern centrally in the sense that most Americans would conceive of it. When the U.S. military completes its withdrawal in 2014, history and geography will return, and unfortunately, will bring more strife to the Afghan people. With that strife will come safe haven – at least in parts of the land – for al-Qaeda and its ilk, and while it’s too early to say that the jihadis sheltering, training and recruiting in a post-withdrawal Afghanistan will again strike the United States, the prospect is not unrealistic.
Some will no doubt argue this is demonstrates the need for a continued U.S. presence, but troops cannot change geopolitical reality in Afghanistan – not in the numbers that the Pentagon would have there, at least. This will leave many Americans – and certainly many more veterans of the war – asking what we spent over a decade there for, if extremists were to take root there again so soon. We’ll take a look at this issue and other related ones in the coming weeks as RealGeopolitik gets rolling.
