The Afghanistan war’s last casualty

Steve Clemons has noted how the Afghanistan war, once a magnet for the best and the brightest, has been left to Joe Biden’s lonely ingenuity:

Biden is the right guy to help Obama to deliver the political outcome in Afghanistan that we need to get to. Biden has thought through strategies to deal with components of the Taliban, understands the vital role Pakistan must play, gets the strategic gaming that is also part of the package and which would no doubt involve India, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps China and Russia.

Clemons doesn’t even mention the highly competent Marc Grossman, who replaced Richard Holbrooke as special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. I guess he is just chopped liver.

It is easy to see why the power players are abandoning the Afghanistan account. There isn’t much upside left. President Karzai’s closest associates are being assassinated, the warlords are predominant, the drug trade is resurgent, the country’s biggest bank has failed due to blatant fraud and corruption, and the Americans are beginning to withdraw, with a target date of end of 2014 for full withdrawal.

It’s hardly worth mentioning that USAID and the U.S. Embassy of which it is a part are at odds, or that GAO thinks better accountability for assistance money is required.  Except those are perennial problems that go unnoticed when things are improving.

With Osama bin Laden dead and Al Qaeda diminished, the only remaining justification for the U.S. to spend over $100 billion per year on the war in Afghanistan is the prospect that it might one day harbor extremists who would destabilize Pakistan, a nuclear weapons state whose dicey political and economic situation is more likely to worsen than improve.  That’s a threat worth worrying about, but it’s hypothetical rather than imminent.

So the United States is suing for peace, trying to arrange an end to the Afghanistan war that is short of ignominious:  peace with honor, or at least a minimum of dignity.  This will mean accepting a Taliban role in Afghanistan’s future governance–that’s what getting them off the UN’s terrorist lists portends.  It will also mean continuing to aid Pakistan, even if Islamabad steals a good part of our money and fails to do a lot of what we would like.  As Dennis Kux notes in a recent piece for the Real Instituto Elcano, that kind of muddling through with Pakistan has been going on for decades.  Why should it stop now?  The foreign policy experts are betting it won’t, despite serious bilateral frictions.

I’m not so sure, but the reasons have more to do with the dueling over the debt and deficit than foreign policy.  The United States is in no position to continue spending over $100 billion per year in Afghanistan, but so far we’ve done it because that’s what we’ve locked ourselves into.  Those few extra billion (it looks like under $5 billion per year) for Pakistan’s military and economy may not seem like much in the scheme of things, but the Tea Party won’t see it that way.  Aid to Israel is sacrosanct even in the Tea Party, but aid to a Pakistani government and military that can’t see its way to helping us get Al Qaeda is not.

So either we abandon Pakistan because we get tired of having our money stolen, or we continue the aid but leave Pakistan at the mercy of whatever arrangements we are able to make on the Afghan side of the border before we leave in 2014.  One way or the other, Pakistan will be the Afghanistan war’s last casualty.