Toughing It Out in Afghanistan

Is Afghanistan another Vietnam, a quagmire that the United States should escape as soon as possible? Or is it a crucial war than can and must be won? The daily news is sobering, with its continued attacks on NATO troops and a resurgent Taliban. In Toughing It Out in Afghanistan, however, Michael O'Hanlon and Hassina Sherjan show that all is not lost -- far from it.

The authors acknowledge current difficulties in Afghanistan but also explicate how the war-torn country can emerge as a stable sovereign nation, free from the yoke of the Taliban and al Qaeda. Toughing It Out in Afghanistan is designed to help the reader understand more about the Afghan nation and to inform international debate on how to approach the conflict there in 2010 and 2011.

The stakes are very high, and O'Hanlon and Sherjan are not Pollyannas. They acknowledge that the war could still be lost. But they consider the prospects for establishing a reasonably stable and functional Afghan state to be much better than is commonly perceived.

Drawing on personal experience, eyewitness accounts, and the Brookings Institution's Afghanistan Index, O'Hanlon and Sherjan present the current lay of the land. They strongly support the war effort at this point but readily acknowledge that it should not be -- and cannot be -- sustained indefinitely in the absence of progress. They hope for substantial improvement in significant parts of Afghanistan in 2010 and early 2011 and believe it is realistic to expect the new NATO-Afghan counterinsurgency strategy to show such results within that time frame.

O'Hanlon and Sherjan offer suggestions for how strategy can be improved on the civilian and military sides, including supportfor General Stanley McChrystal's general concept of counterinsurgency as well as strengthened civilian efforts. They present ideas on how Afghan businesses can be brought fully into the effort. And to improve its utility for all audiences, they include an updated version of the Brookings Afghanistan Index.

Michael E. O'Hanlon is the director of research and a senior fellow in the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, where he holds the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair. His books include The Science of War (Princeton University Press, 2009) and numerous Brookings books. Hassina Sherjan is the president of Aid Afghanistan for Education, a nonprofit group based in Kabul, and is also the president of Boumi, a Kabul-based textiles company. She started working on education in Afghanistan during Taliban rule in the 1990s, moved back to Kabul in 2001, and has lived there ever since.