Day: June 22, 2011
Have your cake and eat it too
The President went for the bigger, faster drawdown option in his speech this evening. I commented on The World.
He has tried hard to limit the mission, but it is still an open question whether the Afghans will be ready to take over security responsibility for the country by 2014. He showed no sign that he believes their governance will improve, and he made only passing reference to the economy. Nation-building, he said, is what we should do in the United States. That pretty much sinks the civilian side of the Afghanistan effort, except for “the political settlement.” That I suppose is whatever comes out of the reconciliation efforts with the Taliban.
The President was keen in Iraq on the idea that a timeline would get the Iraqis to stand up to their responsibilities, a strategy that I think worked. So was Leon Panetta during the Iraq Study Group. It looks to me as if they are trying to reproduce that (relative) success, just as they tried to reproduce the (relative) success of the surge. The difference is on the Afghan side of the equation–Kabul seems a lot less ready to take over, and less able to get ready to take over, than Baghdad ever did.
Of course the withdrawal announced tonight is only of the “surge” troops and would leave about 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, twice the number there at the beginning of the Administration. So the President is getting his cake and eating it too. He is offering the Congress (and the American people) a bigger and faster drawdown than anticipated while keeping a substantial number of troops in Afghanistan, albeit fewer than Petraeus, Mullen and Gates seem to have wanted. But they get to decide who comes home first–you bet it won’t be anyone they think particularly useful.
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It’s the mission, smarty
Foreign policy eyes and ears will be on the President’s Afghanistan speech tonight. But I fear the President will focus where the press points: on the size of the troop drawdown. Important though it may be, that is not the fundamental issue. The key thing is defining the mission end-state, as I and others have already pointed out.
Why is this so important? Because it is the mission that determines the number of troops (and civilians). If you only want to kill Al Qaeda, you don’t need many civilians and the troops you need are not regular infantry but rather special forces. If you want to stabilize Afghanistan and build up the state there so that it can continue to keep Al Qaeda out, that is an entirely different mission requiring lots of civilians and substantial numbers of regular army and marines to “clear, hold and build.” And many years.
The President has been consistently ambiguous on the counter-insurgency mission. His emphasis is always on counter-terrorism (killing Al Qaeda), with the occasional coda mentioning stability but without clarity about the end-state. This is not a small issue. It is the heart of the matter, as it determines how much personpower, years, blood and treasure we will have to invest. And that in turn determines the “opportunity costs,” that is what we’ll have to give up in order to achieve our goals in Afghanistan.
President Obama is no dummy. He understands perfectly well that the mission defines the requirements. If I had to bet, he would keep the focus tonight mainly on counter-terrorism, mentioning counter-insurgency in the context of ensuring regional stability. After all, the main problem with leaving Afghanistan before it can defend itself is that militants will begin to use it to attack Pakistan, a big and important country with a substantial nuclear arsenal.
He’ll say yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, but our job is not done. We need to ensure that Al Qaeda cannot return to Afghanistan and that the region is stable, so that never again will extremists harbored there attack the United States. Enabling Afghanistan to defend itself is in the U.S. interest, he’ll argue.
My colleagues in the Twittersphere will snigger and say that it is our very presence in Afghanistan that attracts extremists and enables their recruiting. That is not an argument that can win in a world still governed by Bacevich’s Washington Rules.
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