The Foreign Service Journal, December 2014

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2014 39 As Western troops withdraw and aid ows are reduced, Afghanistan’s dealings with the United States will need to become more like traditional bilateral relationships. is will entail confronting several thorny dilemmas, however. For instance, the Ghani administration has listed making peace with the Taliban as a key priority. Washington will need to decide to what extent it can allow Kabul to reach whatever accord it can with the Taliban and Pakistan, even if such arrangements under- mine interests that the United States has up to now described as critical, such as the guarantee of civil and political rights to all Afghans. In confronting these dilemmas, U.S. policymakers will be burdened by the massive investment they have made in rebuild- ing and protecting Afghanistan, and the high hopes it once had for the country’s future. ey will also have to start treating their Afghan counterparts as colleagues rather than clients. e dan- ger is that, if not managed well, frustration on the U.S. side may lead to temptations to disengage non-strategically. Instead, the Obama administration should use these next two years to pave the way for a relationship characterized by di erent expectations and di erent means of leverage than before. Reasons for Optimism Whatever the unachieved hopes since 2001, America’s involvement in Afghanistan has transformed the country in ways that are not yet fully apparent. As an older generation of disap- pointing political leaders fades from the scene, a younger, more urbanized population is emerging. Since they are, for the most part, reluctant to forgo those elements of modernity that the international presence has o ered, they are likely to favor good relations with the West. At the same time, both the Taliban and a generation of rural youth have had more traumatic interactions with the inter- national presence. Like their urban peers, many of them have used technology to engage with the modern world. But this has exposed them to globalized jihadist ideologies like al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. e future in Afghanistan lies not between the old generation and the emerging one, but between the cities and the towns— between an urban-rooted state struggling to assert itself and a rural-based society that remains suspicious of state power. While these old patterns endure, Afghans’ clash with modernity has already had irreversible consequences. A modern Afghanistan will not look exactly like the one that was imagined by international policymakers a decade ago. But neither will it look like the society of the past. n