Testimony presented before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2007.
Many Americans believe that in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush Administration formed a multinational coalition that drove the Taliban from power. It would be more accurate, however, to say that the United States joined Russia, India, Iran, and the Northern Alliance in an existing coalition that had been fighting the Taliban for half a decade.
If there is any lesson to be drawn from the Afghan experiment with frugal nation building, it is “low input, low output.”
The RAND Corporation has conducted several studies on nation building and counterinsurgency drawing on dozens of American and non-American case studies over the past century. One conclusion reached highlights the near impossibility of putting together broken societies without the support of neighboring states, and of suppressing well established insurgencies that enjoy external support and neighboring sanctuary. The validity of this lesson is evident today both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Often one hears that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 diverted American manpower and money Afghanistan. This may be true. But a more serious charge is that the war in Iraq has diverted American attention from the real central front in this war, which neither in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in Pakistan.
