Was Peace in Afghanistan Ever a Possibility?

If you’ve been following the war in Afghanistan via the Internet or major print media, you might remember a notorious PowerPoint slide from the Pentagon that started circulating in April of 2010.

It had originally been presented during a staff meeting in Kabul the year before. The slide—essentially a flowchart—attempted to illustrate the complexity of US strategy in the region using arrows, boxes, and color-coordinated text.

The result was a swarm of incomprehensible rainbow spaghetti—a headache-inducing intelligence nightmare belonging more in a Saturday Night Live sketch than a genuine military presentation. With categories like “ANSF Institutional,” “Outside Support to Insurgent Factions,” “Coalition Domestic Support,” and “Tribal Governance,” it’s no wonder General Stanley McChrystal reportedly took one look at the chart and said “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

Fast-forward two years, and America has not won the war. A US soldier has been charged with slaughtering Afghan civilians, the Taliban has broken off negotiations and a decade’s worth of efforts to establish peace in Afghanistan are on the brink of total collapse.

So it may be worth asking: Is Afghanistan a puzzle we’re capable of solving?

For most onlookers, it doesn’t make immediate intuitive sense that the most powerful nation in the world would have such a hard time exerting its will on a chunk of desert in the Middle East hosting fewer than thirty million people. And we’re not the first superpower to have this problem—the Soviets spent nine years fighting Mujahideen rebel forces in the 1980s and were unable to achieve anything resembling a victory. The history of military conflict in Afghanistan suggests that it really is, as Dmitry Orlov said, “the place where empires go to die.”

The problem for us—as it was to some extent for the Soviets—is that the War in Afghanistan is not a War Against Afghanistan. Since day one, the war has been directed against various guerilla presences operating within Afghanistan, independent of the government: Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban. These are not enemies you can send a hundred thousand troops with M16’s to gun down in an open field; achieving victory against violent non-state actors is much more complicated than that (hence the Pentagon’s rainbow spaghetti diagram).

But after eleven years of combat and still no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s hard to imagine that any amount of strategizing, outlining or diagraming would yield a winning formula for the war in Afghanistan.