The Foreign Service Journal, June 2019

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2019 17 It would be contrary to our interests to cut off assistance to the Afghan security forces before there is a genuine peace and a path toward regional buy-in to Afghan stability. would be able to take economic advan- tage of its mineral wealth, nearby energy resources and trade with important markets in the region. There have been some very posi- tive U.S. steps in the past two years, chief among them the appointment of a special representative who is highly and uniquely qualified, and whose “special” mandate is better defined than oth- ers have been in the past. He is on the job to catalyze a peace agreement, and unlike previous Special Representatives for Afghanistan and Pakistan (known as SRAP), he has focused on the intricate and interwoven negotiations with the Taliban and the government, and leaves other elements of U.S. policy to the South and Central Asian Affairs Bureau. What Changes and What Stays the Same In my two tours, there have been some constants frommy Afghan hosts: tea at every meeting; manifold expres- sions of gratitude for what we have done, along with accusations that their enemies are corrupt; and those allusions to being deserted in the 1990s and the chaos that ensued. Also constant in two tours, almost a decade apart: a newly minted U.S. strat- egy that combined, supposedly forever, the strands of what we wanted to achieve with what we thought was truly achiev- able, including a new framework for our civilian assistance and evolving military goals. The strategies—one called for a surge in civilian personnel and aid fund- ing, and the other called for a refocusing from “nation-building” to counterter- rorism—constituted only two of the multiple, contradictory, fully fledged strategies since 2002. The turnover of U.S. diplomats and military officials, and our short political attention span at home, stand in contrast to the long-term nature of the problems we try to solve. We have had a succession of sometimes mutually exclusive goals and approaches. One example is our love-hate relationship with fighting cor- ruption, which we pursue vigorously— except, unfortunately, when we don’t (in the name of security). An example of this inconsistency is our support for regional strongman Atta Noor, a former governor of Balkh province. If we care about corruption, he should be reined in from his activi- ties, including dominance over border and customs revenues. But for stabil- ity’s sake, we keep him on our side to head off even more Russian influence in Afghanistan’s north. We may be fighting a series of “one- year wars,” but the Afghans have been watching us closely for 17 years. And they have learned a great deal about our inability to stick with a goal. Distorted Mirror, Distorted Policies In addition to our inconsistency, our policies suffer from a Pygmalion com- plex. We wanted a miracle—to trans- form a country economically, politically and culturally and to end bitter rivalries that tore it apart two decades ago. We paid for this miracle, or so we thought. Several thousand U.S. and allied troops have died, as well as many thousands of Afghan military personnel and civilians. And less profoundly, we put in exhausting amounts of effort: so many plans, proposals, grants, vision statements, exchanges, visits, cultural promotion, monitoring and evaluation reports, conferences, lessons-learned statements, technical assistance, envi- ronmental impact reports, engineering studies, community meetings, training, equipping, “key leader engagements” and, of course … cups of tea. From all this we wanted a beautiful reflection in the mirror. Instead we got ordinary, mixed results that might have been considered pretty impressive—if they were achieved somewhere else, with fewer illusions. I would argue that whether our inter- vention “worked” or “failed” depends on one’s politics or confirmation bias. And how do you tell, really? No one agreed at the outset how we’d measure progress, and metrics changed constantly. When I was at post in 2010, success was based on howmuch foreign assis- tance per month was “burned,” because that proved that the civilian effort was as serious as the military one. (That is a metric we now regret when faced with inspection reports showing how hastily designed some of our programs were, and how we should have watched our U.S. and local contractors more carefully.) Are we there to promote women’s rights, or stop al-Qaida, or promote self-sufficiency, or change the culture of impunity? We can and did explain to visiting congressional delegations that progress had been far more good than