The War Within

It’s a concept everyone in foreign relations understands: If you want to really know what’s happening on the ground in a country -- in Afghanistan, say -- you have to have people there who speak the language, people who can talk and listen without interpreters. The State Department certainly knows this, which is why it runs months-long language and culture intensive programs for younger diplomats to bring them to full, functional fluency as quickly as possible. So, guess how many employees of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have completed -- or even started -- the 10-month program to master Afghan languages since our military victory there. None.

That troubling fact is one small indication of why we have lost momentum in Afghanistan.

It’s more complicated than that, of course: There has been insufficient money from the United States and other countries for reconstruction. The U.S. funding that has been delivered often hasn’t been effectively spent. Radical Taliban and Al Qaeda followers, operating both within Afghanistan and from Pakistan, are disrupting reconstruction and aid programs. Warlords competing with President Hamid Karzai’s legitimate government and with each other are successfully resisting change. And Afghan factionalism is frustrating the national unity now so important to restore the Afghan state.

But U.S. strategy is also at the heart of Afghanistan’s problems. The four American entities responsible for overseeing and implementing policy there -- the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA and USAID -- are too busy with turf wars to properly attend to details. As worried policymakers in Washington consider options for regaining the initiative in Afghanistan, the first thing they should focus on is not what’s happening on the ground there but rather what’s happening on the ground here.

Today, nearly eight months after Congress passed the Afghanistan Freedom Support Act authorizing more than $3 billion in reconstruction aid to Afghanistan, the absence of interagency unity on our policy there is seriously hampering success. The congressional legislation recommended naming a coordinator to create “an overall strategy” for Afghanistan, while “ensuring program and policy coordination among agencies of the United States Government.” But that never happened.

Instead, there are, in effect, four different U.S. policies in Afghanistan, where the American ambassador is “chief of mission” in name only. State Department personnel in Afghanistan back the administration’s goal of withdrawing U.S. assistance to warlords, but CIA and Defense Department support to them continues to flow. Administration guidelines give a high priority to Afghan institution building and to spreading the Kabul government’s authority around the country. But USAID bureaucrats in Kabul continue to resist taking an important step toward that end: channeling American aid through the moderate, pro-Western Karzai government.

As Elisabeth Kvitashvili, a USAID official in Kabul, told the New York Times: “If we felt the government and the ministries had the capacity to handle the money in a manner that would satisfy the U.S. taxpayer, we’d give it to them, but that’s a big if.”

It’s not that individual agencies aren’t doing good things. Provincial reconstruction teams run by the Defense Department have undertaken important -- if underfunded -- projects in poverty-stricken rural areas. But these and other worthy efforts are not coordinated as part of a larger effort. All four agencies have important roles to play in Afghanistan. But before they can be effective, the U.S. must establish a framework in which they can all operate as part of a whole. We must articulate exactly what we want to accomplish, how these goals will be paid for and who will be in charge. The policy and direction must be set in Washington and then clearly communicated to the field.

The problems in Afghanistan have been brewing since our military involvement began there after Sept. 11. Bob Woodward reported in his book “Bush at War” that Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage complained at a White House war strategy session in October 2001 that he did not know who was in charge in Afghanistan. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld grumbled at the same meeting that he felt that the CIA had developed the game plan and that “we’re just executing the strategy.”

That’s worrisome given what Afghans privately say about the lack of knowledge of Afghanistan among CIA personnel arriving there. Like State, the CIA has not invested over the years in building a well-trained pool of Afghan experts, and it has lacked valuable “human intelligence assets” on the ground in the region. CIA slots in Afghanistan are often filled with recruits from Latin America or other regions. Quick rotations of a year or less do not permit accumulation of area knowledge and valuable personal contacts.

The situation in Afghanistan isn’t without precedent. In 1985, then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz was concerned about a lack of coordination of U.S. Soviet policy. In his memoir, “Turmoil and Triumph,” Shultz wrote that he told President Reagan: “To succeed, we have to have a team: right now there isn’t one. [Defense Secretary Caspar W.] Cap Weinberger, [CIA Director] Bill Casey, [United Nations Ambassador] Jeane Kirkpatrick and I don’t see things the same way.... I’m frustrated and I’m ready to step aside.... “ Reagan urged Shultz to stay. But more important, the president put Shultz in charge of coordinating Soviet policy. The resulting policy, one in which the U.S. spoke with a single voice, produced five U.S.-Soviet summits and the first U.S.-Soviet strategic arms reduction treaty in history, and it laid the groundwork for the end of the Cold War that came with the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Those momentous successes were made possible by teamwork, certainly. But they were also possible because someone was put in charge and given authority to implement policy. In Afghanistan today there is a lack of both teamwork and leadership. But as Reagan demonstrated, those are problems that can be solved.