Forget any grand plans of building a society for Afghanistan, said the former commander of international forces in that decade-old war.
A respite from decades of violence is the best international forces can provide there, retired four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal told a crowd of about 100 on Wednesday afternoon at Robert Morris University. He also spoke at Heinz Hall last night as part of RMU's Pittsburgh Speakers Series.
"They want enough breathing space to do other things" by the time U.S. forces are scheduled to pull out in 2014, McChrystal said. "You give them an opportunity to craft their future. We don't craft their future. It'll fail if we do that."
McChrystal, 57, led the Joint Special Operations Command from 2003 through 2008 and commanded international forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010. He resigned his command in June 2010 because of comments he made that were quoted in a Rolling Stone article, and retired that August. He is a senior fellow at Yale and heads the Obama administration's Joining Forces program to encourage private organizations to help military families.
More than 1,500 American troops have died in the war, which began in October 2001.
Foreign policy analysts agreed that providing basic security is so difficult that a Western-style society is out of reach.
"The fact is that we set all kinds of goals to transform Afghan society, but simply leaving in ways to give them security and stability on their own terms is seen as a major challenge," said Anthony Cordesman, former director of intelligence assessment in the Defense Department, in a phone interview. He works for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington policy analysis group.
But unlike Iraqis at the close of that war, Afghans want some American presence to guard against "being swallowed up," particularly by neighboring Pakistan, McChrystal said.
"They would like an American base somewhere, and they would like to have enough people on that base -- say 15,000 -- to show the world, 'Hey, we've got Americans here. If anything happens, American power is right over our shoulder,' " he said.
While they don't want soldiers on their streets, "They would like to see a boatload of businesspeople out building businesses, helping entrepreneurs, investing. The reason they want that is they're convinced that if we are financially vested in the country, we won't leave. We won't let them slide down," McChrystal said.
The deterioration in the relationship between Pakistan and the United States was the only failure in the May 2 raid in which Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, McChrystal said. He called the raid -- a covert operation deep inside Pakistan, without that country's knowledge -- "absolutely masterful," but said the failure to deal with Pakistani public opinion in the aftermath will haunt relations "for a generation."
"They were humiliated" by the combination of bin Laden's hiding near their military academy in Abbottabad, the ability of U.S. forces to slip in and out of their country undetected, and the fact that their ally -- the United States -- didn't inform them ahead of time, McChrystal said.
He criticized how U.S. officials handled the final troop drawdown in Iraq in December. As the withdrawal deadline neared, Iraqi and U.S. officials discussed keeping troops in the country into 2012 because of security concerns, but they could not come to an agreement.
"I'm not sure we, the U.S., did that very well, either, to be honest. But we hit a point where everybody was ready to sort of have a parting of the ways, and that's what happened," McChrystal said.
Because of the enmity that would be caused by a return of U.S. troops, Iraq, for better or worse, is on its own, he said. "It's going to be very hard to increase that (troop level) at any point, even if they would like us to."
