Reporter's Podcast: Author Compares U.S. Actions in Afghanistan With the Past

DAN SAGALYN, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer: Your book is provocatively called "In the Graveyard of Empires: America's War in Afghanistan." Why did you call it that, and is America repeating the mistakes other countries have made in the past in Afghanistan?

SETH JONES, RAND Corporation: The title really is "in" the graveyard of empires, it doesn't necessarily signify that the United States will follow that path. It's merely to note that it has been extremely difficult for foreign armies to have large-scale success. I think from the U.S. standpoint, a lot of realization needs to come to fruition that Afghans have been able to stabilize their country, foreign armies have not.

So I think that the more that the U.S. can leverage locals, the greater its chance of learning from learning from the mistakes of past empires have been.

DAN SAGALYN: Has America during the last eight years made or repeated the mistakes of previous empires that have failed in Afghanistan?

SETH JONES: It's made some of the mistakes. The Soviets, for example, in Afghanistan fought a conventional war. That is they used tanks, artillery, hind gunships that leveled entire villages. The U.S. hasn't made that mistake because their methods of operation have been a little more technically savvy. They haven't destroyed in large scale en mass villages. The population hasn't turned against them the way they did the Soviets.

But I do think there have been some challenges. One is the bulk of successes against past empires in Afghanistan have been in rural areas. The United States has a range of forces in urban locations and on major roadways. It has not succeeded in holding chunks of areas in rural Afghanistan.

So in one sense it is running into challenges in rural Afghanistan the way the Soviets did. Second, another challenge major empires have faced in the past and the U.S. is facing now is to try to win Afghanistan largely from the top down, by either building a central government and building central government forces that can establish order in rural areas or trying to do it with international forces. That is, with U.S., British and other forces. That's generally not been a recipe for success by past empires.

DAN SAGALYN: Hasn't the U.S. effort been though to try to create a strong central government as part of its plan for winning in Afghanistan?

SETH JONES: Well, it has to some degree, but a lot of the fighting as we've seen now with the Marine Corps in Helmand is largely U.S. forces. There are very few Afghan national security forces. But I think still conceiving of establishing order in Afghanistan based on a central government's power has not been a recipe for successful stability in Afghanistan.

During the Zahir Shah period, between 1933 and 1973, Afghanistan was stable because there was a central government that could establish order in urban areas and you had a range of tribes, sub-tribes, clans and other entities that could establish order in rural parts of the country.

I think it's been a mistake that the Soviets made a similar mistake in trying to build stability from the center out. And many Afghans, including Pashtuns, power is very localized. This is a mistake that a lot of foreign countries -- they don't understand the tribal dimension of Afghanistan. It's not a normal Western state, it doesn't have a strong central government. So trying to make a central government be the answer for stability I think is bound to run into the same problems that foreign empires have faced. And that is rural areas will revolt against that.

DAN SAGALYN: But that's what the U.S. has been doing there.

SETH JONES: That is what the U.S. has been doing. That's my point is that the U.S. has been making that same mistake that other empires have made.

DAN SAGALYN: Is the U.S. government now with the strategy of the Obama administration moderating that approach and trying to adjust that strategy? Or are we continuing to just support the central government.

SETH JONES: I think the strategy that matters most is the one that is currently ongoing right now by General McChrystal in country because he actually has control over those forces in Afghanistan. He's doing it from Afghanistan. And that review is not over yet. There's a 60-day review that will conclude in July and August of 2009. So I would say a lot of these questions are up in the air right now.

DAN SAGALYN: So that review is assessing what, the tactics and whether the U.S. will continue to support the central government?

SETH JONES: Well, it's looking at a whole range of things from civilian casualties and ways to limit that to how to develop not just a top-down strategy but also a bottom-up strategy. Are there areas of the country that one can reach out towards tribes and clans that are anti-Taliban and work with them against the Taliban or other insurgent groups operating in their area. So yes, ways to leverage local tribal and other local entities that are not the central government.

DAN SAGALYN: You wrote in your book that despite initial success the U.S. had in Afghanistan, the United States squandered this extraordinary opportunity. And you wrote the rise of the insurgency in the wake of the U.S. victory over the Taliban was deeply unfortunate but was not inevitable. Explain that.

SETH JONES: Well, what was striking to me was interviews with, for example, people involved in targeting for (CENTCOM Commander in Chief Gen.) Tommy Franks' staff in November of 2001 and how while the Afghanistan war was raging before the Taliban had been defeated, Mullah Omar was still in Kandahar at this point, the south of Afghanistan had not been -- Taliban operating in the south had still not fled into Pakistan. The U.S. pulled a range of targeters to start planning Iraq. They took them from Tommy Franks' staff, and that led to I think a general refocusing of U.S. efforts from Afghanistan to Iraq.

That meant policy attention shifted from Afghanistan. The number and amount of CIA people on the ground shifted from Afghanistan to Iraq. The number of Predators that could fly in Afghanistan, and they were coming off production lines -- much larger numbers were going toward Iraq. Military forces were pulled from Afghanistan including special operations forces to Iraq.

So I would say across the board in terms of money, in terms of forces, and in terms of policy attention, Afghanistan took a back seat by the end of 2001, so before the war had even concluded, to planning for operations in Iraq. So I think in that sense, just the levels of resources used to stabilize Afghanistan were strikingly among the lowest of any nation-building effort since World War II on a per capita level.

So I think that that definitely demonstrates among other things that the commitment was really not there to stabilize Afghanistan.

DAN SAGALYN: Now this is a controversial point, isn't it? I mean hasn't the Bush administration said that they had not taken their eye off the ball in Afghanistan, that they did everything they could to win the war, and that Iraq was not a distraction?

SETH JONES: Right. Well, there are a lot of people who said exactly that. That Iraq was not a distraction, they kept their eye on Afghanistan. I would say, though, in interviewing pretty much every single military, diplomatic and intelligence officer in Afghanistan from 2001 on, as well as a range of people operating from Pakistan, that virtually everybody came to that same conclusion, so I would say that argument is simply not supported by both data and virtually every single mid-level and senior U.S. official that I spoke to in Afghanistan and Pakistan as well.

DAN SAGALYN: For the Online NewsHour, I'm Dan Sagalyn.