David Budge, August 14, 2010

The Afghanistan war, while not the most talked about issue in the upcoming midterm elections, is nonetheless an important one. Even more crucially, it will be a very important factor in the 2012 presidential election.

While Afghanistan has been inhabited for thousands of years, modern Afghanistan began in 1919 when the country managed to successfully throw off British control during the third Anglo-Afghan war. After a series of power struggles lasting 14 years, Afghanistan found a measure of stability in the rule of Mohammed Zahir Shah, which lasted for forty years from 1933 to 1973. In 1973, while Zahir Shah was on an overseas trip, his brother-in-law, Mohammed Daoud Khan, orchestrated a bloodless coup, naming himself the President of Afghanistan.

Five years later, in 1978, Mohammed Daoud Khan and his family were assassinated by members of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the Afghan branch of the Communist party. On May 1, 1978, a PDPA member, Nur Mohammed Taraki, was named Prime Minister of the newly created Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The new government declared equal rights for women but also began to seize land and imprison, torture, and execute members of the former religious and political elite. The PDPA’s land reform policy and its official state atheism angered the people, and in 1979, the new Communist prime minister, Hafizullah Amin, was assassinated. During the infighting that ensued, the Soviet Union moved into neighboring Afghanistan to back the Parcham faction of the PDPA, which the Soviet Union had been sponsoring. In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States began to equip and fund a loosely-knit group of conservative Muslim rebels known as the Mujahideen who were attempting to overthrow Soviet control of the country.

The Soviet-Afghanistan war lasted for ten years. During the war, between 600,000 and 2,000,000 Afghanis died, and while Soviet influence was successfully removed from the country, Afghanistan had almost been destroyed in the process. After Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan, the United States lost interest in the country and stopped sending substantial aid. A bloody civil war ensued, which lasted from 1992 to 2001, and prevented the country from rebuilding. During this civil war, an Islamic fundamentalist group known as the Taliban managed to gain control over most of the country. During the Taliban’s rule, other extremist groups like Al-Qaeda, a Saudi-led, mainly Arab terrorist group, which had helped the Mujahideen fight the Soviets during the Soviet Afghanistan War, began to operate freely within Afghanistan.

While the Taliban was able to control much of the country, there were many remote areas in which they could not enforce their rule. Many of these areas were ruled by the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan, a loose coalition of anti-Taliban resistance groups better known as the Northern Alliance.

In April of 2001, the head of the Northern Alliance, Ahmad Shah Massoud, made an address to the EU stating that he believed that the Taliban had ties to al-Qaeda, and that a massive al-Qaeda led terrorist attack was imminent. Five months later, on September 9th, Shah Massoud was assassinated by two al-Qaeda suicide bombers posing as Belgian journalists. Two days later, on September 11, 2001, members of al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners and flew them into both the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The United States resolved to remove Al-Qaeda, and by extension, the Taliban, which had been harboring Al-Qaeda, from Afghanistan. On October 7th, 2001, the United States ("Operation Enduring Freedom"), the United Kingdom ("Operation Herrick"), NATO, and the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), an international military force created by the United Nations Security Council, initiated an invasion of Afghanistan. The Northern Alliance fought alongside American and NATO troops and did much of the most intense fighting against the Taliban. While the invasion and suppression of the Taliban was a success, many of the leaders of Al-Qaeda and the Taliban managed to successfully escape into neighboring Pakistan.

Despite these failures, the US and ISAF forces set to work attempting to rebuild the country and establish a stable, democratic government. This effort, which continues to this day, has met with mixed results. While Hamid Karzai was Afghanistan’s first democratically elected president, there are widespread concerns over corruption in his administration. During the period from 2002 to 2008, US forces in Afghanistan acted more as advisors to the Afghan government, and to the newly formed Afghan National Army, with US troops numbering less than thirty thousand men.

Despite successes early in the war, conditions in Afghanistan have been gradually getting worse. The Taliban began to regain strength in 2003 and started to establish training camps in wilderness areas on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that began to launch raids into Afghanistan. In February of 2009, in response to the increasing violence, President Obama and the military leadership of the United States decided to send an additional 17,000 troops to the country. Then in December 2009, Obama ordered an additional 30,000 troops into Afghanistan. Unfortunately the increased number of troops in Afghanistan has led to a steadily rising number of casualties, and the first two years of the Obama administration have more than doubled the number of American fatalities over the previous seven years of the Bush administration.

The increasing chaos in Afghanistan has facilitated an increase in the drug trade. With the economy smashed, growing opium poppies has become an important source of income for people in Afghanistan, and, as such, opium exports from Afghanistan have increased by fifteen percent this year. The Taliban recently changed their policy on opium, forcing local farmers to grow opium poppies and selling the flowers to finance their other operations. Also, drug use in Afghanistan has increased to include eight percent of the population. According to several sources, including Foreign Policy magazine, Afghanistan is at risk of becoming a failed state, due to massive human rights violations on the part of the Taliban, a weak and corrupt central government, a large amount of collateral damage caused by NATO forces, and an extremely low standard of living for the Afghan population. Now, the chaos in Afghanistan is beginning to spill over into neighboring Pakistan, with the Taliban establishing training camps there and the United States conducting special forces raids and UAV strikes in an attempt to remove them.

The increasing instability of Afghanistan has made the questionably successful war one of the more important issues in the mid-term elections, if not the most noticed. Although the sagging economy and the contentious issues of immigration have been more visible over the past year, the outcome of the Afghanistan war will have a great effect on America’s standing on the world stage, and its national security. While important, the war is a difficult issue for politicians on either side of the isle to tackle, and has managed to embarrass both the Democrats and Republicans recently.

The Democratic party, specifically President Obama, has the most at stake in the war. Over the past year the President, the Congress, and the military have increased the number of US troops in Afghanistan to double their previous levels, most recently sending a surge of thirty thousand troops to the country. The President has also changed out the commander of US forces in Afghanistan twice so far, replacing General David McKiernan with General Staley McChrystal, who he later replaced with David Petraeus, after McChrystal’s aides made negative remarks about the Vice-President in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. Many observers applauded President Obama for appointing General David Petraeus, who is famous for successfully executing the Iraq surge and stabilizing the country, to lead the war in Afghanistan. But if the war gets dramatically worse, Obama risks appearing as if he derailed the Afghanistan war due to a personal vendetta. These changes by most opinions have now made Obama culpable for the war in Afghanistan and its possible failure. If the war gets dramatically worse, it will hurt the president politically in the 2012 presidential elections and the Democratic Party in the midterm elections in November of this year.

There are three major criticisms of the President‘s policies in Afghanistan that could be used against him in the upcoming elections. The first is the 2011 pullout date the President has established, which could encourage the Afghan government to make deals with the Taliban before the US leaves and the whole country tumbles into disarray. Secondly, the President has antagonized of Hamid Karzai. While most of the President’s complaints over the corruption in the Afghan government are correct, his attacks on Karzai have created a great deal of friction between the US and Afghani governments without actually decreasing the corruption in Afghanistan. Thirdly the President has come under criticism for not creating an environment conducive to cooperation between the military and the State Department. The State Department has no consistent liaisons with the military, only a patchwork of constantly shifting diplomats and advisors, all with different opinions on how the war should be fought and organized.

For the midterm elections, Obama’s role in the Afghanistan surge could result in lower voter turn-out from the Democratic base, which largely opposes the war. But with the considerable risks the war brings to the Obama administration, there is also the possibility of great rewards. While the war is not likely to change drastically between now and November, its results will likely have a significant effect on the next presidential election. If Petraeus can salvage the situation in Afghanistan, make significant improvements, and bring the troops home before the 2012 elections, it would be a significant boon to Obama’s reelection campaign.

While a US failure in Afghanistan would reflect most unfavorably on the Democrats, the Republicans are not immune from the political fallout from the Afghanistan war. Obama’s handling of the Afghanistan war has created an ideal field for the Republicans to criticize the Democratic party’s leadership, but Republicans must be wary of alienating their voter base as in the case of Republican party chairman Michael Steele. Steele recently criticized the President for his handling of the war, implying that US troops should be pulled out of the country. Many people in the Republican Party who support the war were offended by these statements, and have called for Steele to resign from his post. Steele’s plight provides a strong warning to Republican candidates not to shelve their ideals in order to try to win seats.

For now, the Afghanistan war remains a murky issue, with no obvious solutions to the problems it raises. If handled improperly, the war could be a major stumbling block for both parties in the November midterm elections, and the 2012 presidential elections.