Barnett Rubin

After more than 15 years of war, Afghanistan fatigue has set in among the U.S. public, a condition extending to the very top. Since taking office, President Donald Trump has said little about the war. Indeed, in June the New York Times reported that the president had given Secretary of Defense James Mattis authority to set troop levels, further detaching the war from the White House agenda. The Diplomat’s Ankit Panda recently spoke to Barnett Rubin, a senior fellow and associate director of the Center on International Cooperation at New York University, about the war, the Afghan government’s dysfunction, the future of U.S. policy in the region and more.

How do you assess the performance of the Afghan National Unity Government since 2014? Did the unconventional U.S.-backed compromise outperform initial expectations or did the NUG set a dangerous precedent with little governance payoff, as observers feared at the time of its announcement?

The National Unity Government (NUG) was the most recent attempt to find a formula for ruling Afghanistan satisfactory to all major political elites. In broad terms, Pashtuns see Afghanistan as a unitary state ruled by a Pashtun president, while non-Pashtuns want a power sharing arrangement through a parliamentary system or some form of decentralization. The NUG incorporated both asymmetrical power sharing between a Pashtun president and a Tajik-supported chief executive officer and the promise of a Constitutional Loya Jirga to consider whether to amend the Constitution in such a way as to resolve the dispute once and for all. The power sharing has largely broken down in disputes over appointments, with the president emerging as the decisive, though weakened figure. Nearly a year after the putative deadline for convening the Loya Jirga, the government has taken none of the steps needed to do so. Hence the government is increasingly factionalized and losing its legitimacy. No amount of training, equipping, or assisting of the Afghan security forces can compensate for the loss of legitimacy.

I'll keep this one short: What is the current U.S. policy objective in Afghanistan? Is it peace and reconciliation or is it stability?

The current U.S. policy objective in Afghanistan is the same as it has been since 2001: To eliminate safe havens for al-Qaeda and other international terrorists, such as the Islamic State, and prevent them from returning. All other goals, including peace, reconciliation, stability, or sustainability, are subordinate to that primary goal. Many policies and practices that observers claim are “mistakes,” such as support for non-state tribal militias, are in fact the result of this prioritization of objectives. Neither the Bush, Obama, or, so far, the Trump administration has articulated any strategic vision or positive goals for the region. Counterterrorism, narrowly construed, trumps everything.

If the Trump administration does decide to go ahead with a troop increase in Afghanistan, do you have any advice for how best to deploy that capability? Commentators have proposed a range of strategies, from buttressing Kabul and other population centers with an expanded protection force to a more ambitious force charged with containment of the Taliban.

The troop presence will consist entirely of forces to train, advise, and assist the Afghan national security and defense forces (ANDSF), especially in key tasks such as air support and intelligence. The addition of a few thousand trainers will enable the U.S. and NATO to embed advisers with the Afghan forces closer to the battle, as well as in headquarters. The hope is that this will strengthen the reach and capacity of the ANDSF so that it can repel assaults on population centers, enlarge zones of security around them, and recapture control of some of the territory and population that have been lost to the Taliban since the departure of NATO forces at the end of 2014. Secretary Mattis and others have stated that the aim of these military operations is to create conditions for a regional strategy and political settlement in which the U.S. and Afghan government will be able to negotiate from a position of strength, but so far they have not decided on or revealed what their political objective is. It is impossible to recommend a military strategy without knowing the political objective.

With the broader attention being paid to the Islamic State worldwide, did the establishment of the group's so-called Khorasan Province help reinvigorate attention toward Afghanistan in your view? How has the Islamic State's' presence in Nangarhar affected how Americans think and talk about Afghanistan?

There is still no meaningful public discussion of Afghanistan in the United States. Recently many analysts, including me, have published articles in policy and scholarly journals, as well as opinion pieces in the press, but the president has still not said a word, and there is no debate in Congress. The establishment of an officially recognized unit of the Islamic State in Afghanistan has not led to a strategic shift. The military is just treating IS in the same way as they previously treated al-Qaeda. Thus far it has not changed the regional approach. The states apparently most alarmed about IS in Afghanistan are Iran and Russia, with whom the U.S. is currently at odds in Afghanistan, as elsewhere. How to recognize and act on the convergence of counterterrorism goals with those of states we regard as hostile also bedevils U.S. policy in Syria and Iraq. Thus far there is no coherent approach.

Pakistan is commonly cited as a "spoiler" in Afghanistan and President Ghani has been particularly harsh on Islamabad in recent months. Meanwhile, a range of geopolitical factors are driving changes in how Russia and Iran assess their interests in Afghanistan, also positioning them to potentially make the government's task much more difficult. How do you see these three states affecting the situation in Afghanistan in the coming year?

The Pakistan military, security establishment, or Deep State, has consistently regarded the current dispensation in Kabul as a security threat. It regards the current government of Afghanistan as pro-Indian (though without any introspection as to why that is the case), claims that it faces active security threats from Afghanistan-based Indian activities whose existence the U.S. has rarely been able to confirm, sees (rightly) that Kabul has not abandoned ethnic irredentist claims against Pashtun- and Baloch-populated areas of Pakistan, and knows that the U.S. can use its position in Afghanistan for “drive-by interventions” against Pakistan, such as the attack on Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad. Pakistan is particularly concerned about potential U.S. action against its nuclear arsenal and materials. It notes that the U.S. and India are evolving into multifaceted strategic partners.

Therefore the Pakistan military (which controls and defines Pakistani policy) is determined not to abandon the Taliban, its only agents of influence in Afghanistan. China, however, is gradually pressing Pakistan to play a more stabilizing role in Afghanistan by pressing the Taliban into a peace process with the Afghan government. If the experience of North Korea is any guide, China is unlikely to place Pakistan under a degree of pressure that risks the relationship.

Iran and Russia’s activities in Afghanistan will largely be reactive to those of the U.S., as they see a long-term U.S. military presence there as a greater threat than IS or the Taliban. If the U.S. heightens tensions with Iran, or even carries out a program aimed at regime change, Iran is likely to act against U.S. interests in Afghanistan. Iran potentially plays a growing and strategic role in Afghanistan’s economy. It has become the country’s leading trading partner at the expense of Pakistan. In partnership with India and Japan it is expanding the Iranian port of Chabahar and connecting it to Afghanistan overland, a project that has the potential to reduce Afghanistan’s dependence on Pakistan. Russia will work with the Taliban and others to assure that the U.S. is unable to stabilize Afghanistan through its military presence, but it has also proposed its own framework for a peace process in the region, the Moscow process, which aims to create conditions for the U.S. to withdraw militarily. The U.S. and Afghan government have tried to take control back from that process through a “Kabul process,” which met in Kabul on June 8.