A report by the Center for a New American Security has laid out 3 scenarios for Afghanistan–the first is that Afghanistan slips back to the pre-September 11 days of the Taliban, the second is that other NATO countries withdraw, leaving the United States to support its Afghanistan allies for a long-term struggle, and a third where Afghanistan succeeds in becoming inhospitable to transnational terror groups. Which do you think is most likely?
Mr Cole: I’d say that there’s a fourth possibility that they’re missing, which is that there would continue to be a relatively weak Afghan government, but which would anyhow manage to make a fragile peace with its challengers and provinces.
The idea that Afghanistan could be set up with a strong central government that asserted itself throughout the country is a wild idea because its whole GDP, in real dollars and not purchasing power parity, is something in the order of $9 billion a year. And their government budget is less than a billion.
Just maintaining a 400,000 man security force, equipping it and keeping it in place, would certainly cost $2 billion per year. Where is Afghanistan going to get that kind of money? It’s just too poor a place to have a strong central government. And although social structures are changing, sometimes rapidly, there are still a lot of people in Afghanistan for whom tribal identity is foremost, for whom localism is very important and who resent federal government. So the idea of a strong central government dominating these clans is also unlikely because what are clans about? They’re about feuding–they feud with each other and they feud with outsiders.
So the dream that Afghanistan could be made into Sweden doesn’t take into account local realities. There will always be these tribal rebellions in the provinces. Past Afghan governments have dealt with these rebellions by negotiating with the rebels or setting the enemies of the rebels on the rebels and occasionally crushing them with a targeted central intervention. But the Afghan central government is more like an acrobat than a king upon his throne. And so I think the most likely scenario is that the US will eventually withdraw, because I don’t think the public will put up with this for very much longer, and that it will leave behind a relatively weak government that will be forced to cut deals with the forces that are opposing it.
I don’t think people realize the degree to which that is already the case–Karzai only really controls about 30 percent of the country and the Taliban probably have about 10 or 15 percent, which means in much of the country, local warlords and other forces are ruling, and they’re ruling in a way that doesn’t cause them to come into direct conflict with Kabul. And so Kabul and them coexist. So it’s not a unified state, and the best thing would be to convince the rebels of various sorts–all of whom are being lumped together as Taliban, quite inaccurately–to accept that same deal of fair local autonomy but with more fruitful relations with the central government.
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