Considering their failure the first time, its sad to see that the ISAF has brought the age old practice of "zippo raids" - pumped up on 50,000 pounds of steroids - to Afghanistan.
Translated from obnoxious mil-speak, she is describing the village being intimidated by the Taliban, who are chased away by soldiers, then “cleared” by special forces, and leveled by massive aerial bombardment, apparently with no casualties. Nowhere in this account is there a sense that the villagers felt any ill-will toward the Americans beforehand—rather, Broadwell explicitly describes the village as being victimized by the Taliban first, then being completely obliterated by the Americans. In other words, rather than actually clearing the village—not just chasing away the Taliban but cleaning up the bombs and munitions left over—the soldiers got lazy and decided to destroy the entire settlement… “to give the men confidence.”
Its little wonder that these sorts of activities have costs as much as $100 million dollars in damage in the last 6 months.
Tell Me How This Ends
Back at the end of May, I had my own version of a 'Walter Cronkite Moment' as I realized that the war in Afghanistan possibly couldn't be won, and that even it could be, the U.S. was not fighting to win but instead was planning to fail.
Today we see that planning to fail has evolved into a strategy of tying to blast our way out. If Obama was planning to keep his 2011 draw down date this would be less odious, but the administration has now shifted to keeping American forces in Afghanistan until at least 2014.
Apparently, the developing U.S. strategy is just to wait out the remainder of Karzai's administration and then hope for a reboot, of sorts, in 2014. In retrospect, backing Karzai versus Abdullah was probably a bad move. At this rate, the U.S. will be just wasting time - and burning through $100 billion per year - and watching 500 troops dies, per year - while we run out the clock on Karzai's administration.
But both things can be true: Bush was a bad president; he was also right about Iraq versus Afghanistan in 2002. He was right that Afghanistan would turn out to be un-winnable.
In short, I argued that all the assumptions about Bush's policies towards Afghanistan missing some opportunity in 2002 or 2003 were probably wrong, and that in hindsight taking out Hussein remains a pretty good bet given the alternative of doubling down in the 'Stan.
Removing the Taliban from power in 2001 was deceptively easy, leading Washington to believe that the Afghans could largely take it from there. Fewer than a thousand American troops and C.I.A. officers, some on horseback, joined with the indigenous Northern Alliance to chase the Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his forces out of Kabul. That would have been the moment, it is argued, to put 20,000 to 30,000 American troops — and perhaps a similar number of NATO forces — into the country as a stabilization force.
But Mr. Bush and his defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, wouldn’t hear of it. “The consensus was that little could be accomplished in Afghanistan given its history, culture and composition, and there would be little payoff beyond Afghanistan even if things there went better than expected,” Richard Haass, a senior official at the State Department in the Bush administration who advocated the insertion of a far larger force, wrote recently. “They had no appetite for on-the-ground nation building.”
Gee, I wonder why?
Bush and Rumsfeld's first instincts on Afghanistan were correct. Iraq was an easier - and likely more successful - venture in nation building. Also, the doctrinal changes that occurred during the tough slog in Iraq allowed American to build a skill set that can be applied to the Af/Pak theater.
The Iranian-Indian-American Security alliance will someday be the most important in central Asia and the Middle East. The only question is whether it come about in the near future, or after a disastrous Israeli-Iranian war followed by a Pakistani attack on Iran, India and the U.S. Don't believe me? Read the news:
Iran’s deputy police chief accused Pakistan on Saturday of providing a haven for members of an armed rebel group that has claimed responsibility for the deadly twin suicide bombings last week in front of a mosque in the southeastern city of Zahedan.
Chief Ahmadreza Radan also said the authorities had detained 40 people who were seeking to create a disturbance in the city after the bombings, the semiofficial ILNA news agency reported.
The arrests appeared to be part of a crackdown in the Sunni-dominated province of Sistan-Baluchistan, where the rebel group, Jundollah, has been operating.
Without naming Pakistan specifically, he issued a tough warning to “neighbors on the eastern borders” of Iran.
So Iran is being attack by insurgents based in Pakistan? Hmmm. I wonder if any other countries have that problem?
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton worries all the time about the possibility that an attack against the US could emanate from Pakistan and has called on Islamabad to take further, specific actions against militant networks.
Without entering into the details, she seemed to indicate in a BBC interview that the US wanted Pakistan to do more to tackle the Haqqani network, a branch of the Afghan
Taliban which operates in Pakistan and is widely suspected of having close ties to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI.
During the interview at the US embassy compound in Islamabad, Mrs Clinton also said the state department was looking into the possibility of listing the Haqqani network as a terrorist organisation.
The violent and feared network operates along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and is seen as the main threat to US and Nato troops in Afghanistan.
"We have designated a number of their leaders over the years as terrorists, and we're now looking at whether and how to describe the group and if it meets the legal criteria for naming it," she said.
Ok, let me get this straight; Iran is under attack, American troops are under attack in Afghanistan, the SECSTATE is worried that Pakistani based insurgents the ISI will attack America and yet....? We ramp up tensions with Iran? And this makes sense to people?
NEW DELHI (AFP) – India has accused Pakistani intelligence services of overseeing the 2008 militant attacks on Mumbai, a report said Wednesday ahead of a major meeting between the rival nations.
Home Secretary G. K. Pillai told the Indian Express newspaper that the level of involvement of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had become clear through recent questioning of David Headley, a suspect under arrest in the United States.
If a political scientist from Mars landed in South Asia and tried to study the situation he or she could be forgiven for quickly concluding that Pakistan was clearly a pariah state and that Iran, India and America must have an alliance to try to contain Pakistan. Of course he would be wrong, but he would not be illogical.
[Setting; a military outpost near the Pakistani border; 2005]
At 1 a.m., approximately forty insurgents came over the mountain passes from Pakistan and assaulted the Afghan observation post. Pakistani military observation posts to the east and southeast, at distances of a quarter and half mile, provided supporting fire of heavy machine guns and rocket propelled grenades. [EMPHASIS MINE]
Jones' book is rife with stories like the one above; stories of Afghan and American forces coming under attack from Pakistani army and Frontier Corps forces along the Af/Pak border. These stories are too common to ignore and are echoed by Amhed Rashid and David Killcullen. I think its time to begin to think about - not the next war, that one is apparently being scheduled with Iran - but the war after next. The war after we fail in Afghanistan and get attacked again. The war that will pit us directly against a nuclear armed south Asian state with 170 million citizens.
Pakistan is not America's ally. The sooner we deal with that reality the less painful the separation will be.
In the Graveyard of Empires, by Georgetown University professor Seth G. Jones, is both a short history of Afghanistan's tendency to destroy imperial invaders and a top-down analysis of American and NATO nation building, state building and counter insurgency techniques since 9/11. Graveyard is tight, well written volume packed with enough background information to be useful to a general audience but also enough in depth reporting - especially interviews with high ranking officials in the U.S., Afghan and Pakistani governments - to be of interest to serious researchers.
In the Graveyard of Cliches
When I first saw the title of Jone's book I winced at the thought of another armchair Alexander the Great trying to squeeze the tiniest drop of relevant advice about contemporary COIN from Kubla Kahn. Graveyard, however, quickly impressed me with its fast moving and easy narrative history of America's efforts to rebuild Afghan society with only a mercifully short - although mostly useless - side trip into the adventures of Alexander the Great and the Khans. Outside its brief allusions to ancient history, Graveyard is most tightly focused on Afghanistan's history from the mid 20th century to the present day, paying careful attention to the impact of the Soviet invasion, Pakistani intervention, Taliban/al Qaeda administration and Karzai/ISAF administration.
Although packed with information about Afghan and central and south Asian history, Graveyard is not primarily a history book but is instead an in depth analysis of America's post-9/11 Systems Administration efforts in both Afghanistan and south Asia. And Jones, like Rashid, focuses heavily on the opportunities lost during the period from the initial standing up of Karzai's government in 2002 until the legitimacy of the Afghan government began to collapse sometime in mid 2005. Like Rashid, Jones believes that a greater U.S. focus on Afghanistan - including more money and more troops - during this crucial period might have avoided the resurgence of the Taliban. As an aside, I've called that theory into question here, and although Jones lays out a strong case - pointing out, for example, that Afghanistan may be the most under-resourced sys admin effort sense the end of WWII - I'm still not 100% convinced that even more American troops would have helped. After all, absent the lessons learned about COIN in Iraq and the doctoral changes that occurred during Petraeus's and Co. post-OIF, pre-surge sojourn at Fort Leavenworth, American troops were given to (as Jones points out) heavy use of support fire and a 'door kicking' mentality WRT civilians that may have further fueled the insurgency.
Jones also pinpoints an American over focus on dealing with the nation-state of Afghanistan and under focus of engaging he Afghans on a tribal or district level. Jones makes a compelling case that the Taliban's horizontal organizational structure allows Talib commanders to exploit situationally specific tribal level grievances against Kabul in their quest to cleave the population away from the central government. Because the Taliban is fighting this war on the tribal level, Jones, argues, it follows that the U.S. must also focus on turning local tribes against the Taliban. Jones is long on strategy but short of specifics on how to do this, although he does endorse the Provincial Reconstruction Teams that were experimented with across 2008 and 09. It should be pointed out that in the Fall 2009 issue of Military Review Johnson and Mason wrote an article that was critical of PRT, arguing that provinces were a fairly modern construct in Afghan society and that the district - nor the province - was the building block of Afghan society and therefore engagement and reconstruction efforts should be aimed at that lower level. I discussed the PRTs in Moral Warfare in Southwest Asia.
Ultimately, Jones accurately diagnoses the regional issues at play in Afghanistan, especially WRT to Pakistan. And I fully agree with his read on the situation: there is no solution to Afghanistan that does not involve getting a buy-in from both India and Pakistan.
In conclusion, Graveyard of Empires is highly readable, informative and highly recommended to anyone who wants to know more about America's ongoing war in southwest Asia.
Read it Alone, or as Part of the Trilogy
Although its historical briefs provide more than enough background for a reader who is otherwise unfamiliar with either Afghan history or south Asian geo-politics, I think the reader would best be served by reading Graveyard as part of a 3 part series, with Steve Coll's Ghost Wars providing in depth background about Pakistan's anti-Soviet campaign and Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower and the Road to 9/11 providing the best narrative history of al Qaeda's rise and the fairly rapid melding of Mullah Omar's Quetta Shura Taliban and Bin Laden's "base" for global jihad.
One of the first problems Petraeus is going to have when take over Afghanistan is to set conditions which prevent a rerun of the dynamics that ruined Afghanistan across the 1990s.
Pakistan is presenting itself as the new viable partner for Afghanistan to President Hamid Karzai, who has soured on the Americans. Pakistani officials say they can deliver the network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, an ally of Al Qaeda who runs a major part of the insurgency in Afghanistan, into a power-sharing arrangement.
In addition, Afghan officials say, the Pakistanis are pushing various other proxies, with General Kayani personally offering to broker a deal with the Taliban leadership.
Washington has watched with some nervousness as General Kayani and Pakistan’s spy chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmad Shuja Pasha, shuttle between Islamabad and Kabul, telling Mr. Karzai that they agree with his assessment that the United States cannot win in Afghanistan, and that a postwar Afghanistan should incorporate the Haqqani network, a longtime Pakistani asset. In a sign of the shift in momentum, the two Pakistani officials were next scheduled to visit Kabul on Monday, according to Afghan TV.
Despite General McChrystal’s 11 visits to General Kayani in Islamabad in the past year, the Pakistanis have not been altogether forthcoming on details of the conversations in the last two months, making the Pakistani moves even more worrisome for the United States, said an American official involved in the administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan deliberations.
Translation: Hey Karzai, nice country you got there, be ashamed if something should exploit long standing ethic tensions happen to it. And Pakistan's support of the Pashtun insurgency (Taliban) is causing a lot of bad blood between ethnic groups, setting up a similar situation to the one the Soviets left behind in 1989:
The leaders of the country’s Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara communities, which make up close to half of Afghanistan’s population, are vowing to resist — and if necessary, fight — any deal that involves bringing members of the Taliban insurgency into a power-sharing arrangement with the government.
Alienated by discussions between President Karzai and the Pakistani military and intelligence officials, minority leaders are taking their first steps toward organizing against what they fear is Mr. Karzai’s long-held desire to restore the dominance of ethnic Pashtuns, who ruled the country for generations.
After the U.S. withdraws - and between the president's commitment to a July 2011 time-line and mounting U.S. casualties our withdraw is a near certainty - Afghanistan will suffer a similar fate to that of South Vietnam. Pakistan will play the role of both the Soviet Union and China as they fund, train and run logistics for whatever rough coalition of Taliban forces has the best chance of taking Kabul whole. Meanwhile, I expect the Karzai administration to continue to flounder through one scandal after another while they burn through whatever cash and equipment we leave when we go and ultimately share the fate of Dr. Najibullah at the hands of the Neo-Taliban.
So what can be done to avoid this outcome? How can Afghanistan be saved at this point? Here are a list of three possible options the Obama administration has right now:
1. Acquiesce to Pakistani control of Afghanistan, call it a victory and go home.
2. Acquiesce to Pakistani control of Afghanistan, announce that Pakistan has gotten what it wants and is now in control of Afghanistan and that any terrorist attacks from either Pakistani or Afghan territory will be considered a direct attack by the Pakistani military and will earn a nuclear response on Islamabad.
3. Work with Russia and India to rebuild the Northern Alliance, overthrow Karzai and hope that we can find an Uzbek or Tajik who will rule the Pashtuns with an iron fist.
4. Normalize relations with Iran.
My pick is options 3 and 4. One of the core advantages Pakistan has over the U.S. is that they are our primary route for getting supplies and troops into the country. This is because Pakistan has the best deep water port in the region. If we were to normalize relations with Iran, that would open up an entirely new route into Afghanistan would allow us to make life a lot harder on Pakistan, by declaring them a state sponsor of terror and assassinating every ISI or Pakistani Army agent we find in Afghanistan. We could also sponsor a U.N. security resolution demanding Pakistan acknowledge the Durand line as the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, thus making Pakistani incursions across the border an act of war.
The challenge at that point would be to find someone to rule Afghanistan. I would imagine we should be able to find a Tajik general who would be willing to ruthlessly rule over the Pashtuns - maybe to the point of cleansing a large percentage of them - with an iron fist. While this may sound like a cruel solution to a westerner, its probably the only way Afghanistan will ever be brought under control. And, not for nothing, but what's at stake is the safety and security of a large percentage of Afghans, because the Taliban is the worst outcome, especially for females living in Afghanistan. But the Taliban is a Pashtun insurgency, so if the Pashtuns aren't ready to turn against them they might have to share in their fate.
Background: The above video is an interview from Walter Cronkite where he discusses the moment he expressed on national T.V. what many Americans were feeling in 1968; the Vietnam war was a lost cause.
Perception versus Reality
Although Cronkite's malaise was brought on by the Tet Offensive, which he, inaccurately, gaged as a defeat of American and ROVN forces [1], the impact of his speech on the American public and political discourse would be difficult to overstate. Cronkite's weariness reflected both a larger popular zeitgeist as well as the default ant-war, anti-imperial, anti-expansion, anti-anything-people-in-the-Old-South-might-think-of-as-a-good-idea position of Greater New England [2]. Coupled with a disastrous accidental president - who lacked the strategic imagination God gave pistachio nuts - and a government wide penchant (left over from the New Deal and WWII) for engaging in pointless and damaging social experiments the weariness expressed by Cronkite contributed directly to the hemming in of Johnson's much more talented and imaginative successors. Eventually, the whole shooting match was brought to grinding halt by a domestic political scandal of Shakespearian proportions , absent which South Vietnam may continue to exist as a viable state in Southeast Asia [3].
Afghanistan and Vietnam
But without re-fighting Vietnam its important to consider what Cronkite said and how it relates to Afghanistan today.
To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.
Just as Vietnam was an honorable cause[4], so our endeavor in Afghanistan began as an honorable cause in the wake of 9/11. But just as in Vietnam, Afghanistan may be rapidly approaching a tipping point beyond which the continued commitment of American blood and treasure may become futile. I was a big advocate of doubling down on America's commitment in the fall of 2009:
I've made it clear that I believe Obama should support General McChrystal's recommendation and order a full on COIN strategy (based on what I heard at the COIN conference we need ~30 battalions - 30k troops) that both protects the population and begins embedding American forces with their Afghan counter-parts. But I'll admit there are plenty of risks, not the least of which is that the Afghan government could continue to be plagued with corruption and allegations of election fraud which would make it very difficult to counter the Taliban's argument that Karzi's regime is the corrupt tool of the imperialist west. It's also possible that Pakistan could continue to hedge between the U.S. and a Pashtun (read: Taliban) government in Afghanistan which would allow the ISI to continue to build their "farm team" for the coming war with India in Kashmir. Both AQ and the Taliban would love to see another Mumbai-style (or better yet 9/11) attack inside India that will be linked back to the ISI and force America to choose between the two south Asian states.
Knowing what I know now I stand by what I wrote in 2009. I thought then, and think now, that a victory in Afghanistan was worth bearing a tremendous burden. But when it came time to make a decision president Obama decided for a temporary surge and for a slightly longer time horizon over which the U.S. would begin a draw down. In retrospect, its possible that this solution actually represented the worst path America had to chose from, because in signaling our desire for a rapid exit we set off a later day "Great Game" to determine who gets what when we depart.
The Worst of Both Worlds
The United States is currently in the process of the "Afghanization" of the war, which Obama made a key part of the "surge" he approved last year. The problem is the process may not be going very well because Afghanistan is not an "Afghan" problem, but is instead a battlefield in the ongoing, low level war between India and Pakistan. Until we understand the regional issues at play in Afghanistan, and understand that we are currently backing the wrong horse both in Pakistan and in our "partner" in the Afghan government, we will be stuck with a deteriorating security situation in which the Taliban will out administer ISAF and Afghan government forces when they can and simply run out the clock when they cannot. Meanwhile, our quirky little ally -aka Pakistan - is making plans for the day we leave.
When he became president in 1969, Richard Nixon began a "Vietnamization" process which saw the U.S. hand over increasingly larger responsibility to the ARVN. As this process unfolded the U.S. also experienced greater and greater success against the V.C., which eventually saw the V.C. effectively broken as a serious military organization in by late 1969. [5] At the same time, the government in the South began to stand up in earnest, and, as I stated above, I believe South Vietnam had a real shot at turning into a viable state by the early 1970s. However, South Vietnam was to be done in by the situation in the region, which was not at all amiable to an American-friendly South Vietnam.
What I see in the offing in Afghanistan is exactly what happened in Vietnam, without the defeat of the insurgency. Because not only is America losing the war against the Taliban, but we are also not doing enough to create a regional partnership with a vested interest in Afghanistan's success. We are picking enemies and friends haphazardly, siding with the nuclear proliferating rouge state Pakistan, for example; yet creating tension with non-nuclear Iran over their alleged future nuclear ambitions. We are also stuck in a Cold War mindset of picking Takfiri friendly Pakistan over market and economic development friendly India.
After the U.S. withdraws - and between the president's commitment to a July 2011 time-line and mounting U.S. casualties our withdraw is a near certainty - Afghanistan will suffer a similar fate to that of South Vietnam. Pakistan will play the role of both the Soviet Union and China as they fund, train and run logistics for whatever rough coalition of Taliban forces has the best chance of taking Kabul whole. Meanwhile, I expect the Karzai administration to continue to flounder through one scandal after another while they burn through whatever cash and equipment we leave when we go and ultimately share the fate of Dr. Najibullah at the hands of the Neo-Taliban.
Dr. Najibullah's story is at least as illuminating about a potential future in Afghanistan as the ROVN's example. Najibullah's government, set up in the wake of the Soviet withdraw, proved itself to be remarkably resilient, surviving coup attempts and direct attacks by the mujihaden and eventually seeing some semblance of stability being achieved in Afghanistan's major cities. Ironically, Najibullah did the right thing (intellectually) by siding with India and it eventually cost him his life at the hands of the Pakistani paramilitaries Taliban. Though less notoriously pro-Indian than Najibullah, Karzai has proved plenty dangerous to the ISI and Frontier Corps Taliban and members of his administration have made no attempt to hide their disdain for Pakistan's behavior.
Planning to Fail in Afghanistan
All of this leaves the U.S. with only one option: we must plan for a world where we have failed in Afghanistan. The best plan would involve regionalizing a grand strategy for both helping secure and develop Afghanistan with India and China playing the role of key pillars. Unfortunately, I do not believe this will happen because whenever the president gets the key leaders (i.e. the leaders of India and China) in a room he wants to talk about either ManBearPig or Iran, neither of which has killed as many American troops as Pakistan the Taliban in Afghanistan. In any case, it seems that the Obama administration has decided to go for a 100% kinetic failsafe plan in the event we fail to secure Afghanistan. On an A-F grading scale, Obama's all kinetic plan B deserves a grade of C+. It's a passing grade, but we must take note of its complete lack of originality and also note that the plan answers only part of the question - security - while ignoring the far more important (in the long run) geo-political and economic questions at the heart of Afghan instability. Ultimately, Afghanistan is merely one battlefield in an ongoing war between globalizing Asia and Deobanists who wish to see the region thrown back into the 7th century.
My Walter Cronkite Moment
American forces arrived in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 while the rubble was still smoldering in NYC; this was an honorable thing to do. This was a "good war". But the results of our endeavors have failed to live up to the lofty heights of our best aspirations 9 years ago . Our troops have performed admirably, operating in the most austere conditions imaginable while upholding the military traditions of honor, courage and protecting those who cannot protect themselves. Our troops did not fail us; the civilian leaders failed them. Our leaders failed to provide the military a grand strategy worth the price the military paid in blood. Our leaders failed to fight the war on the fields of diplomacy and geo-politics with the ferocity and skill the troops brought to the war on the battlefield. And ultimately we have failed the Afghan people; failed to provide them with safety; failed to provide them with effective government; failed to provide them with economic opportunity.
And so today the questions about Afghanistan have moved beyond "failure" and "success" and have instead becomes a challenge to either "lose good" or "lose bad". We need to plan to fail, by creating a stronger regional coalition that will own Afghanistan when we leave or we must accept that Afghanistan will once again become a large irregular training base for the ISI and Pakistani army. As we wind down our presence in Afghanistan we have to bear in mind the tremendous sacrifice that has already been paid in blood and treasure for what seems to now to be a quixotic misadventure; we must do all we can to salvage a stable outcome for Afghanistan and the region while acknowledging that we have reached the point of diminishing return for our own presence in the region. To do less is to dishonor those who strove to build a future worth creating in Afghanistan.
[1] See: Sorley's A Better War for a fuller explanation of the positive post-Tet changes in America's efforts against both the V.C. and North Vietnam.
[2] For a brief on the anti-foreign proclivities of New England and the Upper Mid-West see Lind's Vietnam: A Necessary War.
[3] This is a bit of counter factual history based on the facts on the ground, as described in the two volumes referenced above, and assumes that South Vietnam would have been able to hold back the North in 1975 with American air and logistical support.
[4] Lind's (1996) argument in favor of Vietnam can be summed thusly: There is no strategic rationale for fighting the Cold War that does not demand we fight in Vietnam as well.
Here is my presentation from this year's "Capital University Symposium on Undergraduate Research". My presentation was entitled "Moral Warfare in Southwest Asia," and it was based on the paper I wrote this past winter by the same name.
In other news, I was also awarded the Kenneth J. Martin award for scholarship by a senior in political science. The award is a real honor because both the nominations and voting come from the department faculty, so I must have made a few fans in the last 4 years. I guess I can now call myself an award winning political scientist.
On December 1st, 2009 President Barack Obama recommitted the United States to winning the fight over the primary loyalties of the Afghan people. The most publicly debated piece of Obama’s decision involved whether or not send additional troops and how many to send. But the crises that exist and are exploited by the QST today in Afghanistan are as much a problem of strategy as resources. So while the 30,000 additional troops promised by the President at West Point this week could play a critical role securing Afghanistan, it will be the implementation, more than their raw numbers, that will determine success or failure. To that end here is my assessment of what must be done to tackle each of the Afghan crises and in so doing undermine the Taliban’s abilities to exploit weaknesses in Afghan society.
Fixing the security crisis: At the COIN conference hosted by the Marine Corps University nearly every military officer, active duty or retired, pointed to a lack of joint-ness both between civilian and military agencies and between the U.S. and our Afghan counterparts as a serious source of concern. So the first step in any strategy that will improve security must be an increased emphasis on unity of effort between civilian and military operations and Afghan and American operations.
The first obstacle to this sort of joint effort is to put aside the causality aversion that prevents American officers and NCOs from being embedded in Afghan National Army units. Partnering with local forces – really partnering – putting American and foreign forces in the same barracks with the same weapons eating the same chow and facing the same threats (Marine Corps University , 2009) – was one of the cornerstones of the success of the “surge” in Iraq (West, 2008; Kilcullen, 2009) and will be equally important in Afghanistan. This is the best way to train the officers and NCOs that will someday form the backbone of an independent Afghan army and having Afghan partners nearby is always helpful when conducting operations in populated areas.
Getting into populated areas must be another part of any successful strategy to improve security. 80% of the Afghan population lives in rural areas, but currently the coalition has their biggest presence in urban areas that are both geographically and culturally separate from the Afghan population (Johnson & Mason, 2009). It’s important to keep in mind that it was in urban areas such as Kabul that young students became convinced that Afghanistan – an agrarian, tribal society with a literacy rate in the low double digits – was ripe for conversion to Marxism. This offers a clue to how far removed from Afghanistan the urban areas can be. In short, we cannot protect the Afghan people nor help them fight back against the QST unless we are out where they are, in the rural areas.
The model for joint-ness suggested by Thomas Johnson and M. Chris Mason might offer the best hope for success. They propose the creation of 200 District Reconstruction Teams, which may seem like a large number but probably would have been possible even without the surge of troops. The DRTs would be composed of both civilian and military personal and partnered with Afghan forces and stationed throughout the country in rural areas. These DRTs would allow the Afghan forces to focus on patrolling the populated areas 24 hours a day while freeing up American forces to take offensive action against GT groups in the area and provide backup to the Afghans on patrol. Taking offensive action against the GT, ending the ‘free shots’ that the GT has been enjoying for too long must be a top priority (West, 2009). At the same time, USAID and State Department officials embedded with the DRTs can focus on local economic development and on finding jobs for some of the accidental guerillas that could otherwise find jobs with the QST (Johnson & Mason, 2009). The idea of buying off accidental guerillas is already being experimented with in Jalalabad, and early results appear hopeful (Filkins, Afghans Offer Jobs to Taliban Rank and File if They Defect, 2009 ).
When it comes to non-military police forces, the current national police force has many of the same problems as the military in terms of lack of training and discipline and is also considered extremely corrupt, to the point that most Afghans do not even want the police in their village (Marine Corps University , 2009; Moyar, 2009). Perhaps the best solution to this problem is to accept that there is unlikely to be much of a national police force for some time and turn focus to training local tribal militias to fight back against the QST. These militias provide both employment and honor for local residents and could reduce the temptation to become and accidental guerilla. As with the plan to buy off local fighters, the training and support of local militias is already being experimented with in select regions and is seeing positive results (Filkins, Afghan Militias Battle Taliban With Aid of U.S. , 2009).
Solving the crisis of legitimacy: Focusing on the district, versus nation-state or provincial level, aids the coalition in overcoming another crisis; the crisis of legitimacy. It may be time to accept that the Afghan people are going to find a primary identity with their tribe and in the local district for the foreseeable future, so America’s historical focus on the nation-state (read Karzai and his administration) will ultimately be for naught. As Steven Coll has recently observed in Foreign Policy Magazine, Afghanistan has been most successful with a weak central government and diverse regional power centers (Coll, 2009). The focus on the local level allows the U.S. to work with long held tribal traditions in Afghan society and could allow us to make progress without having to completely reboot Afghan identity, a task which neither the Red Army or the QST could accomplish with far harsher tactics than we would be willing to use.
Solving the crisis of trust, at home and abroad: President Obama probably did little to assuage fears of our eminent departure when he promised to begin withdrawing troops in 18 months (Gall, 2009). On the other hand, the president left himself plenty of wiggle room by phrasing July 2011 as the date the U.S. will “begin to transition out,” (Obama, 2009) rather than as a date certain to leave. In choosing his phrasing carefully, the President seems to understand both the crisis of trust in Southwest Asia and the potential political crisis at home. Already, members of the President’s party in the House are starting to turn against the war in Afghanistan (Karl, 2009). Mitigating the domestic political damage will be tricky, but the President must be prepared to define his mission clearly, forcefully and publicly – as he did in his December 1st speech – when other politicians question his intentions in Afghanistan. It’s worth noting that the President’s December 1st speech appears to have had the desired effect, because a recent CNN poll that 62% of Americans now favor the deployment of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (CNN, 2009).
When it comes to mitigating the crisis of trust in Pakistan, the U.S. would do well to focus on more than just the relationship between American and Pakistani security interests. Earlier this year Pakistan asked the President for greater economic connectivity between our two nations (Simon Denyer, 2009) and the President would do well to pursue that path. One of the great sources of mistrust between Pakistan and the U.S. results from Pakistan’s recognition that, in a hypothetical war between India and Pakistan, the U.S. would take India’s side because India and the U.S. enjoy hundreds of billions in trade and economic connectivity whereas trade between Pakistan and the U.S. is minuscule. So the President can promise to send x number of troops to Afghanistan and leave them there indefinitely as often as he likes, but until Pakistan becomes more integrated into the global economy they will continue to focus myopically on their unstable relationship with India and continue to hedge their relationship with America and their relationship with militants on their border with Afghanistan.
Conclusion: Known Unknowns and Hope Without Guarantees
When considering Southwest Asia and America’s future there it’s important to consider what Donald Rumsfeld used to call “known unknowns,” meaning situations which we think could happen but do not know where or when. These situations represent tremendous variables to everything I have written about the war in this paper, and they include a successful attack by QST forces upon Pakistani nuclear bases, a QST or AQ attack on the scale of 9/11 on India or China, an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and, perhaps most important, a major terrorist attack inside the U.S. Any one of these situations could significantly change both the stakes and the situation on the ground in Afghanistan and would require a readjustment of American strategy in the region. That being said, there are five main points American policy makers must consider if they wish to leave Afghanistan a stable country within the next half a decade or so:
1.Security efforts must be joint efforts, meaning they must involve both American and Afghan forces and both civilian and military personnel of both countries.
2.Securing the population is essential and that means the coalition must locate the labor near the problem, security forces must be permanently stationed in rural areas and as close to the population as possible.
3.The coalition must recognize traditional sources of authority in Afghan culture and work within these traditional boundaries as much as possible. Building an Afghanistan that does not respect the traditional tribal district or woleswali level of organization will prove as futile to the coalition as turning Afghanistan into a socialist utopia proved for the Soviets.
4.The coalition must make every effort to cleave the “accidental guerillas” from the true takfiri believers. To this end, payoffs, amnesties, and standing up local security militias should all be experimented with on a district level.
5.Security is 90% of the problem until it isn’t, and then it becomes 10% of the problem. So while security is an immediate and urgent problem putting Afghanistan on a sustainable pathway to stability will involve more than just killing bad guys and posting guards. To this end, the U.S. must include China in any plan that hopes to succeed, because the Chinese are already sinking billions in Afghanistan’s mining industry and even taking token steps to help with security force assistance (Page, 2009; MacWilliam, 2007).
In closing, I believe that Afghanistan remains a salvageable situation, but one which could still turn out very badly for the United States. In Lewis Sorley’s A Better War (1999) the author recounts a number of victories the U.S. experienced in Southeast Asia between 1968 and 1975, including the virtual destruction of Viet Cong and the repeated defeats of attempted North Vietnamese invasions of the South. But at the end, the U.S. simply could not maintain a domestic political consensus strong enough to continue to support the South. Vietnam is a powerful lesson of the need for a leader to remain focused on maintaining public support for operations overseas. And in understanding that sometimes we can do many things right and still wind up with a bad outcome.
President Obama appears to have made the right choice.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama met Monday evening with his national security team to finalize a plan to dispatch some 34,000 additional U.S. troops over the next year to what he's called "a war of necessity" in Afghanistan, U.S. officials told McClatchy.
This is excellent news. The number of troops appears to be less than McChrystal's initial recommendation, but other experts have suggested that 40,000 was on the high end of the estimate and there was a safe range that ran from 25,000 up. Plus, I'd imagine there a number of ways a number that high can be massaged with a few hundred more here and a couple thousand more there - call them "trainers", "support troops", whatever - this number provides the flexibility needed to win.
The above photo is from David Guttenfelder, a embedded journalist from the Denver Post. See more here
Barack Obama appears to have decided to roll the dice on a 2011 impeachment trial.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama does not plan to accept any of the Afghanistan war options presented by his national security team, pushing instead for revisions to clarify how and when U.S. troops would turn over responsibility to the Afghan government, a senior administration official said Wednesday.
Obama is still close to announcing his revamped war strategy — most likely shortly after he returns from a trip to Asia that ends on Nov. 19.
Two things strike me about the President's position:
1. He will never find the guarantees he is looking for; he will never achieve 100% certainty that any strategy will or will not work. America can do many things right and Afghanistan can still be a basket case in 10-15 years. Decades of effort, billions or dollars and 58,000 American lives added up to loss in South Vietnam, mostly because of a bungled burglary at the Watergate Hotel.
2. This is more disconcerting, for a supposed "international relations major" from Columbia University, the president is remarkably naive about the nature of governments in developing countries.
The idea that you are going to build a strong, corruption free government in Kabul from the top down is nonsensical. The Afghan's themselves pleaded with the U.S. to bring back the Afghan monarchy after we toppled the Taliban in 2002 but the U.S. insisted that Afghanistan should have national elections in which everyone would vote - a feat which the U.S. didn't even accomplish until the mid 1960s.
That's right, it took 180 years to achieve something of a broad based democracy in an English society (the U.S.) with only 4 distinct (but related and complimentary) regional cultures and long standing and broad based sense of national identity.
TL;DR: We had the best possible set of circumstances in which to build a democracy and it still took the better part of 2 centuries.
And not for nothing, but I find it odd that Obama wants to hold Karazi to higher standards (WRT corruption) than he holds Tim Geithner.
That being said, with the right COIN strategy the U.S. can focus on building up and connecting tribal authorities into some sort of patchwork tribal-state. And functioning tribes can provide legitimate authority that could connect into some sort of regional economic/security bloc.
But what Obama is doing here is ridiculous. He just keeps moving the goalpost and kicking the can down the road on making a decision at all. You don't want to commit to winning? Fine - that's stupid - but fine, bring the soldiers home. Otherwise, commit, give McChrystal the troops he requested and let him have a shot at winning this thing, or at least at losing good. But the status quo is unacceptable. Obama better pay attention, because current polling belies a coming Republican take over of - at least - the House.
And, Mr. President, you need to consider that Republicans are not at all squeamish about impeaching Democratic presidents and Clinton got it over sex with an intern when unemployment ~ 5%.
You are going to have a Republican majority, buttressed by Glen Beck and the Tea Baggers, who will be out for blood with an unemployment rate approaching 11% and you want to throw this war? Really? Going in big now, with the support of prominent Republicans in the House and Senate, inoculates you against the worst of their criticisms. Bucking your hand picked commander on the ground in the hope that Karzai will find religion on good government is a fools errand. Casualties are mounting and elites in the media are basically anti-American fellow travelers anyway, so the narrative can be easily won by the Taliban that we are losing and they are winning. But if you think the situation is ugly now just wait until 2011. You're going to have a primary challenge from your left. (And right? Watch Hillary) You're going to have a angry new majority in congress and you will have numbers in the mid to low 40s, if you're lucky.
TL;DR: You will be impeached. You might not be convicted. But you might be. And if CNN is showing us the last American Marine clinging to the skids of chopper as Kabul is overrun by the Taliban, you will have to resign.
President Obama, you are toying with my than your own career here, you are toying with American prestige. If the people who attacked us on 9/11 can get to run us out of Afghanistan it will invite more tests of our credibility. It will force allies to think twice about getting too close and it will force enemies to test our resolve elsewhere. It will destroy both the Leviathan and the burgeoning sys admin capability. It will sully the relationship between civilian and military leaders in Washington and create a level of mistrust and hand wringing by both the civilian and military establishments that will catapult us right back to the post-Vietnam era.
You were elected to bring change.
Change should not mean changing the clocks back to 1975.
When you took the oath of office America's reputation was damaged; we were feared but no longer repected.
If you continue on this course, if you keep doing what you're doing in Afghanistan and continue setting impossibly high standards of leadership on Afghanistan so you can avoid showing leadership in the United States, you will create a situation that is truly the worst of both worlds:
America will be neither feared nor respected.
And a world in which America is neither feared nor respected would be the biggest gamble of all.
It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.
Actually, we do have the NATO support and the domestic support, but, please, don't let being wrong stop you. Continue:
The U.S. surge in Iraq was militarily successful because it was preceded by an Iraqi uprising sparked by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict the pro-Al Qaeda thugs who had taken over Sunni towns and were imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle. The U.S. surge gave that movement vital assistance to grow. But the spark was lit by the Iraqis.
The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Pakistani decision to finally fight their own Taliban in Waziristan — because those Taliban were threatening the Pakistani middle class — were all examples of moderate, silent majorities acting on their own.
The surge was also successful because American soldiers and marines started living closer to the Iraqi population centers and because America "took the gloves off" when it came to Iranian special groups operating in country. Any serious analysis of the "surge" has to realize that there were so many factors that aligned for the surge to work it was ridiculous - and saying "the Iraqis did it first" just starts a chick/egg battle that could go on all night.
And WRT to the Green Revolution - wonder if the fact that Iran's neighbor (Iraq) has free and fair elections has anything at all to do with the Iranian people expecting their vote to count? And whose fault is it Iraq has elections?
What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return, the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics — everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after. Be patient.
Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue an exultant video.
And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy their Taliban, or be destroyed by them,
Afghanistan’s warlords will carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll get zapped by a drone.
My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world. China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.
Okay, first things fucking last - China wants the U.S. to win you dumb mother fucker. If you get off your ass and get the fuck out of Manhattan and go to Afghanistan - like other, better journalist , do - you'd notice that the Chinese wants to play a constructive role. I take that back - they don't want to they have to because a future worth creating for China means access to Afghan copper.
This morning after nonsense is playing with fire. Because the morning after Bin Laden declares victory America will begin an incredibly painful and destructive impeachment proceeding which will paralyze our nation for months if not years. And if the Taliban somehow beats the Pakistani army? Well, what about the morning after India's preemptive nuclear strike on a Taliban controlled Pakistan?
And through it all, American prestige will be ruined. It's like the line at the end of Charlie Wilson's War: "We always do this; we go in and we change the world, but then that ball - it keeps on bouncing." Our biggest problem in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is that what Friedman is suggesting is exactly what everyone expects the U.S. to do. It's why they hedge - because we've too often let that ball keep on bouncing - from turning our backs on our allies in Saigon in 1975 to walking away from Afghanistan the first time we drove the totalitarians out, the U.S. can always be counted on the go home as soon as the going gets tough because of people like Tom Friedman, and Bob Herbert and Eugene Robinson and the other anti-American leftists who have opposed every war since 1812.
The thing that I find most disconcerting about Friedman is that he is so widely read. Millions of Americans picked up (or clicked on) their copy of the New York Times today and saw Friedman's column and - although they don't know much about Afghanistan - are saying to themselves right now, "Hey, that makes a lot of sense! Let's pull out of Afghanistan!" Really Tom, you ought to be a bit more responsible with your analysis. Let's give Afghanistan at least 6 more months.
In conclusion, I believe Obama has one path on the economy and two paths on Afghanistan if he is going to seek reelection in 2012. On the economy, the most important factor will be putting America back to work, but he can win without achieving "full employment" so long as the the unemployment numbers are trending down by 2012. In Afghanistan, Obama can go big and long or go home, but the status quo both in terms of troop strength and strategy is unacceptable and will cost Obama the presidency in 2012 no matter what happens to the economy.
By a narrow 47 percent to 43 percent, respondents say they support increasing the troop level in Afghanistan, which is a reversal from last month, when 51 percent opposed the increase and 44 percent supported it.
In addition, as Republicans criticize President Barack Obama for waiting to announce his troop decision — former Vice President Dick Cheney recently accused him of “dithering” — 58 percent of poll respondents say they support delaying a decision until after Afghanistan’s Nov. 7 runoff election and after the country’s political situation becomes clearer.
“I am optimistic that he and his generals are taking some time to actually think through this,” said Andrew Maxwell of Los Angeles.
Yet the public is divided on what Obama and his generals should ultimately decide. Fifty-five percent say they would accept sending an additional 10,000 troops and training Afghanistan’s army and police; 46 percent favor not sending any more troops and focusing instead on attacking specific al-Qaida camps on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border; and 45 percent support withdrawing all U.S. troops from the country.
Just 43 percent support sending 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan — which is the recommendation of the top U.S. commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.
I predicted that withdraw would be more popular than staying the course (without a troop increase), and for what its worth it I appear to be off by a couple point - but - I stand by my belief that withdraw (would be be idiotic) would wind up being a wash in terms of public approval.
As to the exact numbers, 10,000 is way too small. I support sending 40,000 but I have it on good authority that 30 battalions - about 30,000 troops - would suffice. And David Killcullen has suggested 25,000.
With those numbers in mind, it seems the dangerous middle way lays between sending no troops and sending <25,000.
Barack Obama could learn a lot from Vince Vaughn in that scene.
Obama could learn the value of "doubling down" in Afghanistan.
Doubling down (i.e. approving McChrystal's request for 40k troops) isn't just about about a properly resourced COIN strategy anymore. Increasingly, Obama decision is about signaling to our allies in the region that we're serious about staying.
Even if Obama does end up making the correct decision on Afghanistan strategy (by which I mean adding troops, since counterinsurgency is manpower-intensive), the public agony over his deliberations may already have done incalculable damage. The Afghan people have survived three decades of war by hedging their bets. Now, watching a young and inexperienced American president appear to waiver on his commitment to their country, they are deciding, at the level of both the individual and the mass, whether to make their peace with the Taliban—even as the Taliban itself can only take solace and encouragement from Obama's public agonizing. Meanwhile, fundamentalist elements of the Pakistani military, opposed to the recent crackdown against local Taliban, are also taking heart from developments in Washington. This is how coups and revolutions get started, by the middle ranks sensing weakness in foreign support for their superiors.
Obama's wobbliness also has a corrosive effect on the Indians and the Iranians. India desperately needs a relatively secular Afghan regime in place to bolster Hindu India's geopolitical position against radical Islamdom, and while the country enjoyed an excellent relationship with bush, Obama's dithering is making it nervous. And Iran, in observing Washington's indecision, can only feel more secure in its creeping economic annexation of western Afghanistan. So, too, other allies far and wide—from the Middle East to East Asia, and Israel to Japan—will start to make decisions based on their understanding that Washington under Obama may not have their backs in a crisis. Again, the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Obama only plays to such fears.
On one hand, he wants to get tougher WRT the allocation of American aid (he wants to see it isn't used to build a big war force to fight India).
On the other hand, the president wants to offer a quid pro quo with greater economic connectivity to the U.S. in form of special economic zones within both Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This is an extremely good idea that will save lives, create jobs and grow the Core.
Unfortunately, the Democrats care more about appeasing their union overlords then they do about American grand strategy:
A bill sought by Obama to boost trade by establishing special economic zones in Pakistan and Afghanistan has stalled in the U.S. Senate, partly over concerns about labor standards as well as worries within the U.S. textile industry.
I am forced to conclude that Democrats in the senate do not care about winning in Afghanistan. If they cared about winning they would care about shrinking the Gap and growing the Core. They do not. And since they don't want to win but also don't have the balls to cut off all funding for the war and order the troops home, I am left with the only remaining logical conclusion: senate Democrats do not care about American soldiers.
If senate Democrats cared about American soldiers they would either give them the resources they need to win the war or bring them home.
Americans of all political inclinations should support Obama's plan to use a carrot and stick to bring Pakistan into the Core. This plan shows real grand strategic thinking from the Obama administration and will make America safer and wealthier.
Americans of all political inclinations should oppose the senate Democrats who will throw the U.S. military and the Pakistani people under the bus at the behest of their Big Labor masters who seek to create a worldwide Soviet Comintern.
I hope the check from the AFL-CIO was worth it you bozos.
Obama's natural instinct as a consensus builder is failing him here. I've made it clear that I support going long and big with enough troops to control the population, but I think a compromise (not enough troops to defend the population, enough troops to make easy targets) is the worst of all possible outcomes. If you don't want to commit to winning don't stick around; send in the Terminators and be done with it. Yes, that would be an incredibly stupid move from a grand strategic point of view. It would be incredibly ineffective - it would be the Powell doctrine on crystal-meth - it would cost lives in Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, India and Russia and it would have nothing to do with building a future worth creating. But continuing with the status quo is also extremely counter-productive and will cost American lives and prestige.
We need enough troops to build trust on the ground or our endeavor will fail. But if we are going to fail anyway we might as well minimize American casualties.
There is only one reason to stay in Afghanistan: to put Afghanistan on the glide path towards becoming a functioning member of the SCO. This is essential to our national security because expanding the Core and shrinking the Gap is imperative to our national security. We have to regionalize this conflict by making partners of China and India. And American troops have a key role to play in both protecting the population and training Afghan security forces in the mean time. And both of those jobs are manpower intensive.
LFP = Light Foot Print, meaning drones, CIA paramilitary operators and SOCOM
The above chart represents my guess, as of right now, about how the different scenarios will play out for both Obama's choice on Afghanistan and the economy. I've come up with three scenarios (good, bad and ugly) for each and handicapped Obama's reelection chances if each scenario comes to pass.
On the economy:
Three words: jobs jobs jobs.
As you can see, my ugly scenario involves us heading into approximately January/February 2012 with unemployment =/>10%. Under this scenario, Obama might as well step aside and give Hillary Clinton or Jim Webb a shot at the presidency, because he will be unable to even campaign. Also, he'll be able to do whatever he wants in Afghanistan and it and won't matter, because with an economy in that condition no one will be paying attention to Afghanistan. I find this scenario the least likely of the three.
My bad scenario has unemployment hovering somewhere between 6 and 10% basically for all of Obama's first term. My gut tells me we stay on the high side of that range, maybe an average of around 8.5% for Obama's whole first term. But the absolute unemployment rate probably matters less than the trend line in early 2012, and if the president can catch a couple of lucky breaks he could make the "morning in America" argument if unemployment is dropping from 8.5 or 9% in 2011 down to 7 or 8% in 2012. Indeed, after four years of suffering such a rapid drop will wind up looking very refreshing to most Americans.
In the bad (and most likely) scenario, the economy is just bad enough to make the race against (insert not-Palin here) competitive but just good enough to make reelection possible. In this scenario Afghanistan could matter a great deal if it is handled wrong. First, if Obama goes with my bad Afghan scenario and either completely withdraws or leaves behind just Spec Ops guys and killer robots, maybe, just maybe, the American people will be so sick of war and so happy with the relative economic gains that they will be willing to overlook the Republicans attack on Obama's "surrender"* to the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
What will not fly under any circumstances is the status quo "ugly" scenario that basically kicks the can down the road on the COIN vs. outsource-it-to-killer-robot decision and allows enough troops to stay in the country to provide decent targets to the Taliban but not enough to really protect the population. This is the situation we are in now and it is untenable, even if some bloggers think we have the option of waiting. My sources say we have to shift from "don't worry we're leaving" to "don't worry we're staying" or we will never build the kind of relationships we need to fight the Taliban.
Finally, I have an across the board "good scenario" in which unemployment drops back down the 2005-06 or mid to late 1990s levels. Under this scenario, Obama could win pretty handily even if he leaves Afghanistan to the Terminators and the Taliban and he will be almost unbeatable if he orders a successful "surge" style COIN strategy that stands up local militias to fight the Taliban all over the country.
I've made it clear that I believe Obama should support General McChrystal's recommendation and order a full on COIN strategy (based on what I heard at the COIN conference we need ~30 battalions - 30k troops) that both protects the population and begins embedding American forces with their Afghan counter-parts. But I'll admit there are plenty of risks, not the least of which is that the Afghan government could continue to be plagued with corruption and allegations of election fraud which would make it very difficult to counter the Taliban's argument that Karzi's regime is the corrupt tool of the imperialist west. It's also possible that Pakistan could continue to hedge between the U.S. and a Pashtun (read: Taliban) government in Afghanistan which would allow the ISI to continue to build their "farm team" for the coming war with India in Kashmir. Both AQ and the Taliban would love to see another Mumbai-style (or better yet 9/11) attack inside India that will be linked back to the ISI and force America to choose between the two south Asian states.
At home, the war appears to be loosing support but I say ignore the polls for the time being. The Republicans are basically in favor of increasing the troops in Afghanistan and that means that both Obama and whoever his opponent will be in 2012 will own this war (to see how this plays out in a national elections Google, Kerry, John: Voted for it before I voted against it). So unless Obama is worried that Cindy Sheehan and Micheal Moore are going to run against him, I don't think the negative polling on Afghanistan will have any real negative consequences if he decides to go with the high end of McChrystal's recommendation. In fact, Obama should be hoping for such a confrontation, because a public slap-down on Micheal Moore would probably boost Obama's approval among moderates and independents.
In conclusion, I believe Obama has one path on the economy and two paths on Afghanistan if he is going to seek reelection in 2012. On the economy, the most important factor will be putting America back to work, but he can win without achieving "full employment" so long as the the unemployment numbers are trending down by 2012. In Afghanistan, Obama can go big and long or go home, but the status quo both in terms of troop strength and strategy is unacceptable and will cost Obama the presidency in 2012 no matter what happens to the economy.
*This depends on who he runs against. I'll deal with this in another post.
Then, during the late nineteen-eighties, faced with a dilemma similar to that facing the United States, the Soviets tried to “Afghan-ize” their occupation, much as the U.S. proposes to do now. The built up Afghan forces, put them in the lead in combat, supplied them with sophisticated weapons, and, ultimately, decided to withdraw. This strategy actually worked reasonably well for a while, although the government only controlled the major cities, never the countryside. But the factional and tribal splits within the Army persisted, defections were chronic, and a civil war among the insurgents also played out within the Army, ensuring that when the Soviet Union fell apart, and supplies halted, the Army too would crack up and dissolve en masse. (I happened to be in Kabul when this happened, in 1992. On a single day, thousands and thousands of soldiers and policemen took off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes, and went home.)
Finally, during the mid-nineteen-nineties, a fragmented and internally feuding Kabul government, in which Karzai was a participant for a time, tried to build up national forces to hold off the Taliban, but splits within the Kabul coalitions caused important militias and sections of the security forces to defect to the Taliban. The Taliban took Kabul in 1996 as much by exploiting Kabul’s political disarray as by military conquest. The history of the Afghan Army since 1970 is one in which the Army has never actually been defeated in the field, but has literally dissolved for lack of political glue on several occasions.
The first point he misses in this post, but does deal with in a post he made a few days later, is that the U.S. was actively working against the Afghan (or Soviet puppet, depending on your point of view) government right up through the early 1990s. The weapons and training given by both the U.S. and Pakistan intelligence services went a long way in bringing down the Afghan government.
Ironically, another point he makes in the second post is that the American effort to stabilize Afghanistan, after we decided to stop funding the insurgency, was only an, at best, half hearted effort (I think Bush 41 was a dud; complete lack of strategic imagination on a number of issues; handled the Soviet collapse well).
With all of this in mind it stands to reason that we are in a much better position then the Soviets were for the following reasons:
#1. There is no super power supporting the Taliban today. In fact, both India and China seem to be playing a constructive role. And of the U.S. is committed (for now..)
#2. The Pakistanis have a very different view of Taliban than they did of the Mujahadeen.
To expound a bit on point #1, the world has really changed since the 1980s. Back then India was a basket case, China was a less developed country, the Soviets were still the Big Bad and the U.S. wanted a good relationship with Pakistan to hedge against an Indian/Soviet alliance and as a nice place to spy on China and Russia. By the mid 90s we decided we cared about Pakistan's bomb and slapped them with a nonsensical sancations regime that would last until the 2001 and we decided we didn't care at all about Afghanistan.
Today its all changed. China is a growing economic power that needs two things, resources and regional stability, and a stable Afghanistan may just help them achieve both. India is economically joined-at the hip to both China and the United States and we aren't going anywhere when it comes to South and Central Asia because of our relationships with those two countries.
Pakistan, which has oscillated back and forth on being a basket case, is a less sure ally today then they were in our proxy war against the Soviets but they are clearly scared to death of the Taliban, and, unlike during the 1990s, we've completely forsaken the notion that Pakistan is somehow sovereign and we run raids into the Swat valley with alacrity.
In conclusion, we are not rerunning the Soviet mistakes on Afghanistan. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was opposed by the whole world; the U.S. invasion is currently supported by 41 countries. The Soviet army wasn't much better than the Afghan army; with tales of widspread desertion and drug use among Soviet conscripts its a wonder they were able to hold out as long as they did. The U.S., on the other hand, has a large and extremely well trained volunteer force that has a great deal of experience dealing with COIN missions in the last few years.
