Iraq and Afghanistan

The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan continue in their bloody ways. Taken together, and they should generally be, they constitute a major drain on American resources and attention. As long as they continue to require our presence, the ability of the United States to take an active role in other violent contests in the world is limited.

So let us compare them. In both cases, one reason for insurgent success is the continuation of support from outside. In both cases, the struggle of Muslim extremists against what they regard as infidels and traitors to Islam is central to the motivation of the persons involved. In both cases, Al-Qaeda and its off-shoots play a major role. In both cases, the insurgency is confined largely to the one ethnic group, with the other groups either supportive of the government or have interests of their own that do not affect the insurgency.

But there are also important differences. The insurgency in Afghanistan is both nationalist and religious, with the emphasis on the latter. As such, it represents a continuation of the Taliban movement that once ruled most of the country. In Iraq, the religious side of the insurgency is not related to previous rule, for Saddam was a secularist. However, the former Baath members that are critical to the insurgency represent the previous ruling system.

The ranks of both insurgencies are filled from the outside to some degree. However, in Iraq, these outsiders serve primarily as suicide bombers. Native Iraqi insurgents seem to very seldom agree to play such a role. Perhaps less than a tenth of the insurgents are from outside. Those that do come in, however, can be easily identified by their accents as non-Iraqis. Because of their small numbers and specialized but critical role, stopping the route of entry for outsiders into the insurgency seems feasible. They are vulnerable to interdiction as they come in because they essentially follow the Euphrates, which gives them a narrow path, and they must make several stops before they are utilized. (The fact they enter unarmed makes them harder to spot, however, than in Afghanistan where they generally come with their arms.)When Iraqi insurgents are killed or captured in large numbers, the insurgency cannot easily replace them from outside. On the other hand, the Taliban movement was from the beginning a Pashto (Pathan, Pushtu) movement that recruited from a large alliance of tribes inhabiting both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. This has not changed. The result is that the insurgents from Pakistan speak the same dialect as the Pashtos with whom they are intermixed. An armed people, as most rural Afghans are, they are able to quickly replace any insurgents that the Americans recruit with fresh blood. This makes the defeat of the insurgency in Afghanistan essentially impossible, although under many conditions, it could "wind down".