Democracy in America | America and Afghanistan

Scenes from Ashton Carter’s trip to Afghanistan

Despite bracelet-making at the NATO headquarters in Kabul, the American mission is now almost wholly focused on fighting terrorism

By LEXINGTON | BAGRAM AND KABUL, AFGHANISTAN

THE scene at NATO headquarters in Kabul on December 9th was enough to give President-elect Donald Trump a fit. In a dusty walled garden surrounded by high walls and watchtowers, American officers and civilians huddled in a blue-painted gazebo with a group of young Afghan girl scouts, making bracelets.

Mr Trump has to yet sketch out an Afghan policy in more than the broadest of strokes, but has made it clear what he dislikes. At rallies during the election campaign and in a speech just this week in North Carolina, he promised cheering supporters that he would put an end to nation-building overseas and start spending money on roads, bridges and American airports that are, he grumbles, “horrible, like Third World countries.” Mr Trump, a skilful story-teller, has a tale to tell about why the most powerful country on earth has been fighting terrorism from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond for 15 years, without seeming to win. His story involves naïve, chump-like leaders who foolishly toppled foreign autocrats—“foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with,” as he puts it—instead of applying brutal, unsqueamish violence to the single task of eradicating Islamic State (IS) and other fanatical extremists.

Yet some 50 days from Mr Trump’s presidential inauguration, Lexington found himself in a garden in the heart of the massively fortified headquarters, watching giggling girl scouts weaving bracelets and playing a giant version of snakes and ladders, demurely hopping around in long-sleeved uniform tunics and trousers, their scout-badged baseball caps wedged on top of pale blue headscarves. When a burly corporal arrived with a carton of “Animal Crackers” biscuits, freshly shipped in from America, the nation-building moment seemed complete.

Your columnist was in Kabul on day seven of a two-week, 25,000 mile farewell tour of the world with the defence secretary, Ashton Carter. The secretary’s giant flying command post, a military version of a Boeing 747, was parked at Bagram airbase outside the city and we had just clattered into Kabul aboard Chinook helicopters. While waiting for a press briefing, Lexington wandered around the garden used by NATO troops as a place to unwind, and bumped into the scout troop, complete with earnest, English-speaking scout masters, “Afghanistan” patches on their shoulders. A casual observer might be reminded of the years when as many as 140,000 American troops were stationed in the country, vast sums were spent building roads, classrooms, wells and playgrounds in towns and villages far from Kabul to win hearts and minds, and when politicians would routinely cite the importance of helping Afghan girls go to school, as part of their moral case for fighting the Taliban.

But appearances can be deceptive. A few questions revealed that no government or NATO money was being spent on this bracelet-making. Instead it was a brief voluntary activity organised and funded by military and civilian officials on the base, taking advantage of the free time they often have on Friday mornings, a “low-ops” time of the week, somewhat resembling a weekend. An air force colonel had a stab at linking her attendance to her broader mission, saying that the goal was “getting younger generations to interact with coalition forces,” to see that the men and women in camouflage fatigues are not monsters. But then she mentioned her own children at home, aged nine and three. “Personally, I haven’t seen my kids in two months. It’s just good to see children,” she sighed. A British colonel confided that he runs a scout troop back in England and misses it greatly, so had dropped by. The same thought seemed to have occurred to a motley assortment of Bulgarian, Romanian and Georgian soldiers who also ambled past to beam at the young visitors.

Leave the walled garden at the coalition headquarters, with its flower beds, slightly forlorn trees and memorial stones to fallen comrades, and the mood could hardly be more lean and business-like, or more relentlessly focused on fighting terrorists who might harm America. As so often with Mr Trump, when he attacks the Obama administration for a hand-wringing approach to fighting IS, with billions squandered on nation-building, he is both oddly out of date and over-simplifying a complex problem.

Mr Trump is absolutely right that shocking sums were skimmed, stolen, embezzled or wasted on projects in Afghanistan that were unwanted, unfit for purpose, quickly destroyed or soon abandoned: some $110bn in American aid between 2002-15 did almost nothing to create a sustainable economy. But the days are long gone when American troops fanned out across Afghanistan to supervise the construction of schools. The official cap for American troop numbers is 8,400 and that number is only guaranteed until 2017. In July America twisted arms at a summit in Warsaw to secure pledges of financial support from about 30 allies to fund Afghan security forces until 2020, and in October joined international donors at a meeting in Brussels that promised some $15bn in development funding. Still, the lion’s share of promoting economic development, government reform and counter-narcotics programmes—the pillars of nation-building during the first years of the war—is now mostly done by such allies as Germany, Italy or Japan.

For any reporter who visited Afghanistan at the height of the war, it is startling to hear how America’s objectives have been distilled down to the purest essence of realpolitik and self-defence. In an interview in New Delhi, a day ahead of the Kabul leg of the trip, Mr Carter spelled out just two vital national security objectives for the country, namely: “To make sure that a 9/11 never emerges again from Afghanistan and to have a stable counter-terrorism platform there.”

The outgoing defence secretary repeated the same two goals at a faintly surreal ceremony at the presidential palace in Kabul, alongside President Ashraf Ghani. Squint a bit, and the setting was a tribute to the development of Afghan institutions. Your columnist was last in Kabul in 2011 to watch the then British prime minister, David Cameron, meet the then president, Hamid Karzai, who had by then largely fallen out with the Americans, treating them as barely-tolerated foreign interlopers if not neo-colonial occupiers.

President Ghani is a very different figure, a cerebral former anthropologist and finance minister who makes a point of thanking the Americans in heartfelt and even flowery terms for spending so much blood and treasure on his country. The physical setting was unfamiliar too: the lovingly-restored Dilgosha Palace, a 1914 mansion complete with a pillared central hall and high-ceilinged drawing-rooms. Thanking Mr Carter and the Pentagon for persuading Mr Obama to leave more American troops in his country and for playing a “key role” in persuading allies that “Afghanistan is worth investing in,” Mr Ghani suggested that these decisions would be remembered in 50 or 100 years time. He turned to the defence secretary’s wife, who is travelling with him, and thanked Mrs Carter through an interpreter for tolerating the long hours that her husband had to put in running the department of defence. Switching to English, Mr Ghani declared: “Mrs Carter, all these hours he spent on Afghanistan, for us, they have been more valuable than gold.”

Mr Ghani is more than a flatterer, however. A canny and decent man in a country filled with brutish warlords and corrupt power-brokers, he needs foreign help to survive. It is more than symbolic that his palace cannot be reached from NATO headquarters without leaving a secure zone fortified with high concrete blast walls and closed to most Afghans. A high-tech surveillance blimp flies high above the palace grounds, and the air is filled with the whop-whop-whop of helicopters roaring in and out of the coalition base. Back in 2011 Lexington was driven to the presidential palace in an armoured convoy. Now most movements between Bagram and central Kabul are undertaken by air. Several officers at the headquarters said that they never set foot in the streets of the capital, though on previous tours of duty a few years ago they shopped in public markets and patrolled in soft berets. “Now we go out looking like Robocop,” said one.

For his part Mr Carter told dignitaries, Afghan and foreign reporters at the presidential palace that Afghan security forces had been “put to the test” in 2016. The Taliban had stated that their goal was to seize control of a major population centre, such as a provincial capital, and government forces had thwarted each of their attempts, Mr Carter said—though many would call that a pretty desperate way to measure success. Some 30% of the country is classed as either contested or controlled by the Taliban, including territory for which much American, British and allied blood was shed. In still larger rural areas the Taliban can roam all but unmolested. Later in a hangar in Bagram, General John “Mick” Nicholson, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan as well as of the NATO mission there, told press accompanying the secretary that on a single day in October there were four simultaneous attacks on Afghan cities which were repelled by government forces. He listed several senior commanders of al-Qa’eda and local affiliates who had been killed in joint operations, involving coalition forces dedicated to counter-terrorism and Afghans working with NATO advisers and trainers. But when asked, point-blank, whether al-Qa’eda had the capacity to launch attacks on America, neither man could guarantee that the threat of terrorism has been eliminated. Neither offered any clue as to when American troops might be ever able to leave.

If only Mr Trump were right that Americans are still fighting a war begun in 2001 because Mr Obama and his commanders are soggy liberal internationalists, with expensive dreams of turning Afghanistan into a perfect Jeffersonian democracy, ideally with a special focus on gender equality. In these final hours of the Obama era, the truth is that the American mission is almost wholly focused on fighting terrorism, after ambitions for the country were reduced, then reduced again. But even those most bare-bones of goals remain out of reach. So the war goes on.

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