Endgame

Suddenly, it’s all about endgame in AfPak.  The death of Osama bin Laden has precipitated a small avalanche of writing about how to get out.  James Traub writes about leaving with honor. Karl Inderfurth and Chinmaya Gharekhan suggest a regional political agreement would help the U.S. extract itself.  Shuja Nawaz foresees the possibility of U.S.-Pakistani cooperation against the Haqqani group, provided Islamabad and Kabul can reach a political accommodation and the sorry state of relations between Washington and Islamabad does not derail things.

A lot of this strikes me as wishful thinking.  The U.S. can of course withdraw from Afghanistan as planned by the end of 2014.  The question is, what will it leave behind?  Can we expect the Afghan government to maintain itself?  Will the Taliban take over large portions of its territory?  Will they return to hosting al Qaeda?  Will U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan leave Pakistan exposed to infiltration and possible takeover by extremists with a safe haven in Afghanistan?  What kind of relationship will we maintain with both Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Dick Holbrooke’s heirs (literal and figurative) are portraying him as saying that it is Pakistan that really counts, not Afghanistan.  Those who worry about nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation have long felt that way.

Nothing about the Pakistani state gives me confidence in its ability to meet the challenges it will face once the U.S. is out of Afghanistan.  Yesterday’s report in the Wall Street Journal about the Pakistani military’s dodgy billing for its role in the war on terror suggests that we are being robbed by the people who are supposed to be helping protect us, from threats they themselves have nurtured.  It doesn’t get much worse than $70 million for air defense radar to protect against an enemy that doesn’t have air assets (and what was the radar looking at during the raid on Abbottabad?).  The civilian side of the Pakistani state is widely believed to be just as mendacious.

It is also hard to be optimistic about the Afghan state.  While the American military sees signs of tangible progress, especially in the south, efforts to improve governance lag at all levels while the country’s main bank has fallen victim to fraud.  Anthony Cordesman argues that the metrics available are not even suitable to measuring progress on “hold” and “build.”

So what do we do?  The Administration argues for continuing engagement.  In Afghanistan, that is a given until the end of 2014.  Savvy experts like Dennis Kux see Pakistan and the U.S. as condemned to a perpetual series of strategic disconnects, but nevertheless bound together by inevitable mutual interests. In this view, our interest is making sure Pakistan is not taken over by extremists.  Theirs is in extracting as much military and civilian assistance as possible.  The U.S. Congress will want to subject both to some real scrutiny in this difficult budget year, but my guess is that they won’t want to risk shutting it off.

The trouble is that the bilateral approach gives Pakistan incentive to keep the extremist threat alive.  It would seem to me preferable to recast Pakistan not as a bilateral problem but rather as a regional one.  In this perspective, issues like the Pakistan/Afghanistan border (the Durand line), Kashmir, Pakistan/India relations more generally and the Pakistan/China relationship become more important.  The U.S. is not a main protagonist on many of these issues, but rather plays a supportive role.  This is where the Century Foundation (Pickering/Brahimi) report on negotiating peace got it right:  any settlement in Afghanistan will require a regional approach.

The same is true for Pakistan.  Inderfurth and Gharekhan are right.  Pakistan faces what it regards as “existential” threats, mainly from India.  It is those fears that drive its nuclear policy as well as its posture on Afghanistan.  The United States cannot allay those fears, but it can help to nudge Pakistan, India, China and Afghanistan into a regional effort to resolve some of the existential threats and shift all concerned in the direction of exploiting their economic opportunities, which have serious potential to incentivate resolution of the political and security issues and encourage the building of stronger states in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.