The Afghanistan Reckoning

This story was written by CBSNews.com political reporter Brian Montopoli.

It's been nearly nine years, after all. Nine years in which what was seen as a righteous response to the Sept. 11 attacks slowly morphed into just another fact of life, a distant and murky conflict fading into the background, displaced by everyday problems and new distractions.

In June, 102 American and allied soldiers were killed in Afghanistan, the worst month since the war began. That figure may well be surpassed in July; the number of wounded is up substantially as well.

In one 24-hour period last week, eight American troops died in a trio of attacks, including a car bomb. The Pentagon has not yet released the names of these latest fallen, who join 20-year old Lance Cpl. William T. Richards of Trenton, Georgia, 22-year-old Cpl. Claudio Patino of Yorba Linda, California, and more than 1,000 others on the list of Americans who went into Afghanistan and never came out.

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The war is now entering its most crucial period, the year that will dictate if and when we will leave, and what, if anything, we will call victory. President Obama has insisted that, if conditions on the ground permit, America will begin the process of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 - one year from this month. Afghan president Hamid Karzai, meanwhile, said Tuesday that Afghan police and soldiers will be ready to take control of the country's security by 2014.

With the clock ticking loudly, Afghan leaders are plotting, politicians are bickering, and coalition forces are embarking on a go-for-broke push that is being portrayed as the best, last chance to break the back of the Taliban insurgency.

Meanwhile, violence remains a fact of life for the Afghan people. There was little surprise when the arrival of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other top-level diplomats in Kabul for an international conference Tuesday was marked by explosions echoing through the capital.

Here are the four factors that will determine if, and when, the war will finally come to an end.

The Fight

In February, coalition and Afghan forces pushed into a Taliban stronghold in southern Afghanistan called Marjah. The effort was seen as a test run and momentum builder before an offensive in nearby (and much larger) Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban.

While the initial push into Marjah was largely a success - albeit a bloody one - the aftermath was a different story.

The U.S.-led counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan is not primarily about killing the enemy. Rather, the focus is on nation building - creating stable and functioning governing structures that encourage potential enemies to turn away from the Taliban and al Qaeda.

In Marjah, the coalition attempted to install a "government in a box," as then-top Afghanistan commander Stanley McChrystal described it. It was meant to foster an environment in which insurgents, enticed by the possibility of a steady paycheck and easier life, were incentivized to work within the new reality instead of against it.

It didn't work. The Marjah offensive was widely publicized before it began, giving the Taliban plenty of time to hole up, wait out the initial push, and then go on the attack. The insufficiently-manned government in a box failed to take hold, and the Taliban was able to keep a high-profile, threatening presence, executing those who cooperated with the Americans. Three months after the initial offensive, McChrystal would be describing Marjah as a "bleeding ulcer."

The planned Kandahar offensive, meanwhile, got pushed back. Local leaders have proven less-than-eager to sign on with the coalition for a number of reasons: their longstanding ties to the Taliban, the lessons of Marjah, and the belief that the U.S. will be gone by July of next year, leaving the coalition's allies at the mercy of its enemies.

President Hamid Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, essentially rules Kandahar. Nothing gets done there without the approval of the president's brother, who is reportedly tied to the opium and heroin trade and believed to operate something like a crime boss; reconstruction money in the region often ends up in the hands of criminal elements, who battle over who gets to be the one to steal it.

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The United States has an uneasy relationship with Ahmed Wali Karzai, reportedly buying him off and benefiting from his inside knowledge while also lamenting the corruption and lawlessness that helps keep him (and his brother) in power.

It is into this environment that thousands of coalition and Afghan troops are now pouring into the region for a planned push to clear the area of insurgents in late July or early August. They are not, military officials now insist, there for an "offensive": instead, the sure-to-be-bloody push is being called a mission of cooperation, as though, as CBS News' Mandy Clark put it, the troops had shown up for a neighborhood barbecue.

Other places in Afghanistan (Kunduz in the north, Khost in the east) are arguably just as problematic as Kandahar right now. But the coalition is heavily invested in achieving success in the region, with victory there being portrayed as the key to turning the tide against the Taliban. If nothing else, the already tenuous domestic support for the war is unlikely to hold without tangible progress in what has become the military's central operation.

The Military

The now-famous Rolling Stone article that led to McChrystal's dismissal laid bare the tensions between the former general's team and much of the war's civilian leadership. But it also spotlighted something that from the troops' perspective is a much bigger issue: The war's rules of engagement, which many have complained are far too restrictive.

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Fearful of killing civilians (and in the process, potentially creating a host of new terrorists), McChrystal last year tightened the rules of engagement to limit the circumstances in which troops can fire and launch attacks. While there had been complaints about restrictive rules of engagement even before the change, the decision brought to a boil complaints that the rules put troops' lives at risk. (Said one service member to the Washington Post: "We've been handcuffed by our chain of command.")

General David Petraeus, who took over for McChrystal, has promised to "look very hard" at the current rules, though it's not clear what, if anything, he will change. In a counterinsurgency strategy - something about which Petraeus literally wrote the book - keeping a lid on civilian casualties, despite the risks associated with it, comes with the territory.

Petraeus made his first big move last week, when, in an effort to improve the overall security situation, he successfully pressured the Afghan government to allow for the creation of local security forces in rural areas. Karzai initially opposed creation the groups, fearing they will evolve into autonomous militias outside his government's control.

The hope is that the groups will help establish some semblance of law and order in rural areas, and in doing so encourage opposition to the Taliban and al Qaeda. The fear is that they will be just as corrupt as the official Afghan police force, and that the move will ultimately strengthen local power brokers loyal to American enemies. (Past attempts to create similar local forces have met with little success.)

The Politics

President Obama walked a careful line when he announced his Afghanistan troop surge in December. Yes, he said, he was adding 30,000 troops -- but he would also start bringing them home in July 2011.

The timeline, however, was fuzzy: It sounded like a deadline to bring the troops home -- something to placate those who think the time has come to end the war -- but it wasn't, really, since Mr. Obama noted that he would push back the deadline if conditions on the ground warranted. A strategy review is planned for the end of this year.

The administration has been pretty explicit that even if troops do start coming home next July, America isn't going anywhere - it's hard to imagine, given the state of the war, that a significant number of troops will leave anytime soon. (There are about 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan now, with the 30,000 surge troops still deploying.) Proponents of the president's decision to set a withdrawal date say it has helped spur the Afghans to action. But critics note there is now a widespread assumption in the country that the coalition will be gone by next summer, something that makes it difficult to build partnerships.

The July 2011 date "gets Afghanis to hedge their bets," Michael O'Hanlon, Senior Fellow on Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, said in an interview. "They're not sure Karzai is going to survive without the U.S., so they want to make sure to keep some friends with the Taliban so they don't end up on the outs if Karzai falls after we leave."

In Congress, senators from both parties are questioning what Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calls "a lack of clarity" about the U.S. mission. (They're not crazy about the cost, either.) Republicans have largely supported the president's war strategy, though Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and others have complained about the perceived timeline.

Democrats, meanwhile, have grown increasingly skeptical of the war effort as the public has grown weary of it - a CBS News poll this month found most Americans support a timetable for troop withdrawal. Without a clear improvement in the war effort before next July, Mr. Obama could face a revolt from within his own party about America's continuing commitment.

As O'Hanlon points out, Mr. Obama's decision not to flatly say "we're going to be there until the job is done" has left him with an opportunity to change course.

"He realizes there is some danger of mission failure," he said. "There is some danger that this just won't work. And he reserves right to have a plan B."

The Afghan People

Asked in an interview to identify the enemy in Afghanistan, military consultant Joshua Fount said simply: "Afghanistan itself is the enemy."

For at least a generation, he argues, there have been two ways of dealing with a problem in the country: Killing it, or buying it off. The Taliban and the largely corrupt government, he says, are two sides of the same coin.

That isn't to say that average Afghanis like the Taliban, who are widely seen as violent and vicious thugs who failed to govern well when they were in power.

But unlike under the current government, where justice can be bought, the Taliban was at least consistent in its harsh rulings. In areas controlled by the Karzai government, a rapist can easily buy his freedom; under the Taliban a rapist generally gets punished, and punished severely. So, of course, does the woman who was raped.

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The Taliban is both a hard-line religious movement and a lucrative business. As Fount points out, the group effectively taxes all the economic activity in the country, legal and illegal - something that the government has largely failed to do.

Karzai is now considering making a deal to bring at least some Taliban into the government, but it's not clear how that would work: Would he make concessions around women's rights, for example? Would the Taliban, with its strict adherence to Sharia law, be willing to participate in a government that enforces laws it sees as unforgivably permissive? And can the United States really stomach seeing the Taliban, which refused to hand over Osama bin Laden after the Sept. 11th attacks, back in power after nine years of war?

With the Kandahar offensive and parliamentary elections on deck, meanwhile, the battle is about to get bloodier. And uncomfortable questions are starting to be asked about what comes next, even if Kandahar goes well: Will the coalition redouble its efforts in eastern and northern regions, where insurgents are suddenly making gains?

The training of the Afghan Army and national police force, which are supposed to take over security responsibilities when the coalition leaves, is a slow and arduous process that has thus far yielded discouraging results; the police, in particular, are widely seen as corrupt and untrustworthy. And then there is the question of Pakistan, with its porous border and mountainous tribal regions where al Qaeda and Taliban militants can retreat more or less at will. (Though they do have to look out for U.S. drone attacks.)

It is against this backdrop that the people of Afghanistan try to choose the least bad of their largely-terrible options.

"People really hate the Taliban, but they're trying to figure out how to live with them, because they think they're winning, and they think we're leaving," says Fount.
By Brian Montopoli