Tag: Afghanistan
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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Afghanistan decision time, again
Douglas Ollivant at foreignpolicy.com is asking the right questions:
What are our national interests in Afghanistan? Which of those are vital?
How much are we willing to pay for them (money, blood, institutional focus)?
What other costs does our policy in Afghanistan incur (e.g., reduced leverage in Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan due to reliance on supply lines through their territory)?
What are the opportunity costs? How might our goals be accomplished in other ways?
Is our policy sustainable to some sort of completion?
And what — if anything — do we owe to the people of Afghanistan who have sided with the NATO effort?
None of these questions is about numbers of troops or about the timeline for withdrawal, which is what the press focuses most attention on. But the troop decision depends on the answers to these prior questions: what do you want them to do, how much will it cost (important to include the opportunity costs, as Ollivant does), and how long will it take?
The New York Times offers at least some insight into possible answers to the first question. If, as President Obama has said many times, our primary objective in Afghanistan is to rid it of al Qaeda, then the mission we need to continue is a counter-terrorism one (find them and kill them) that likely requires relatively few troops. Vice President Biden and a goodly number of members of Congress will line up on that side.
The problem is “gone today, back tomorrow.” If we leave Afghanistan a weak state unable to control its territory, there is every reason to think that al Qaeda will come back. That’s why there has long been a state-building, counter-insurgency component to the mission, though the President has never made it clear what end-state he is seeking to achieve when it comes to governance in Afghanistan. That’s not surprising considering the challenges, currently epitomized by failure of the country’s largest bank. But we could just as easily make reference to the country’s thriving drug trade and endemic corruption. If we stay, and if building the Afghan state is part of the mission, we are going to need to get more precise about what we are trying to accomplish.
Why should we care how Afghanistan is governed? The one-word answer is “Pakistan.” If al Qaeda or other extremists re-establish themselves in Afghanistan, there is every reason to expect them to attack Pakistan, an already fragile state with a large and growing nuclear arsenal. As Trudy Rubin explains in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this is a major reason for continuing the counter-insurgency and statebuilding effort in Afghanistan and presumably explains why outgoing Secretary of Defense Gates seems confident that the President will resist domestic political pressure to reduce troops rapidly.
None of this makes staying in Afghanistan look attractive. As the American ambassador has made clear, President Karzai’s harsh criticism of the American and NATO efforts in his country is taking a toll, as are the mounting costs of the war. I find it hard to fault people who would prefer to get out quickly (my wife has been on that side of the argument for a couple of years now), even if my brain tells me having to return to Afghanistan would be worse than staying.
The one thing I would ask is this: if we are going to stay to stabilize Afghanistan and build its state to the point that it can fight al Qaeda and other militants on its own, we need to be honest about how long it is going to take and how much it is going to cost. The projected date for turning over security in the whole country to the Afghans, 2014, is looking far too soon, even if Washington remains willing to pay Kabul’s security bills. I’ve seen something of “stabilization” in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and I’ve studied it elsewhere. My guess is that we’ll be there at least 10 more years in significant numbers if we want to get a half-decent job done. That’s another trillion dollars, more or less. Even among friends, that’s a lot of money, and a lot of other opportunities foregone.
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Memorial Day for all
I spent my high school years marching in the Memorial Day parade in New Rochelle, New York and have never lost respect for those who serve and make sacrifices in uniform. Even as an anti-war protester in the Vietnam era, I thought denigration of those in uniform heinous, not to mention counterproductive.
It is impossible to feel anything but pride and gratitude to those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Kosovo, Bosnia, Panama and Somalia during the previous decade. Nor will I forget my Memorial Day visit to the American cemetery in Nettuno accompanying Defense Secretary Les Aspin in the early 1990s, or my visit to the Florence cemetery the next year. These extraordinarily manicured places are the ultimate in peaceful. It is unimaginable what their inhabitants endured. No matter what we say during the speechifying on Memorial Day, there is little glory in what the troops do and a whole lot of hard work, dedication, professionalism and horror.
That said, it is a mistake to forget those who serve out of uniform, as we habitually do. Numbers are hard to come by, but a quick internet search suggests that at at least 1000 U.S. civilians have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. They come in many different varieties: journalists, policemen, judges, private security guards, agriculturalists, local government experts, computer geeks, engineers, relief and development workers, trainers, spies, diplomats and who knows what else. I think of these people as our “pinstripe soldiers,” even if most of them don’t in fact wear pinstripes. But they are a key component of building the states that we hope will some day redeem the sacrifices they and their uniformed comrades have endured.
I spend my working hours worrying about how to improve the performance of the pinstripe soldiers, but that should not reduce by one iota appreciation for them. These are people who sometimes go places before they are safe enough for the troops, and they stay long after the troops are withdrawn. I hope my readers will add a minute to their Memorial Day reflections for those who serve in mufti. And count the many non-Americans who support our people also in your appreciation.
PS: I wrote this yesterday and this morning found Marc Chretien’s piece in the Washington Post arguing that civilian government employees who work in war zones should be eligible for burial at Arlington. It’s not a cause I’d have invented, but he has my support.
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Afghanistan matters
I find it hard to give full credit to what David Ignatius perceives as “positive signs” in Afghanistan. There have been too many false reports in the past. But at the same time I find it hard to credit Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s pessimism and the notion, which she shares with Ignatius, that Osama bin Laden’s death somehow changes the picture dramatically:
What the Senator and the columnist share, along with most of the speakers at the CAP event, is a desire to escape Afghanistan as quickly and as harmlessly as possible.
I understand the impulse. It has already been a long and expensive slog. But what we leave behind in Afghanistan matters.
It matters not only because Afghanistan once harbored Al Qaeda, but also because the very people who today have safe haven in Pakistan might some day have safe haven in Afghanistan, from which they would be attacking a fragile nuclear weapons state. We can rely on the Northern Alliance forces that resisted the Taliban in the past to continue to do so, but they had no luck in retaking territory from the Taliban until the Americans weighed in on their side.
So Afghanistan matters because Pakistan matters. That should not however be a formula for eternal commitment of 100,000 American troops. It does mean that we should be using the time between now and the end of 2014, when President Obama has promised to turn over security entirely to the Afghans, to make a serious effort to enable the Afghan state. In state-building terms, 2014 is tomorrow, so I don’t really expect enormous progress.
But there will be no progress at all if we spend the next three years quarreling among ourselves about whether to stay that long or not. We should debate, yes, and set some goals that are realistic. But then we need to get on with serious business.
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A right-minded but (mostly) forgettable speech
It is hard for me to knock a speech whose most frequently occurring words are “region” “must,” “change,” “people,” and “rights.” There has to be something to appreciate there. The President was particularly good on Tunisia and Egypt, supporting completion of their transitions to democracy and offering economic help, mainly through debt forgiveness, trade and investment. He was better on Bahrain than I might have expected, underlining that the destruction of Shia mosques there is unacceptable (thank you Roy Gutman for your reporting on that!).
On Syria, he was so-so, appealing once again for Bashar al Assad to lead reform (fat chance) or step aside (fat chance of that too). But that is farther than Obama has gone in the past. He gave President Saleh of Yemen a push toward the exit, but it did not seem to have any real force behind it.
The President was overoptimistic on both Afghanistan and Iraq, claiming we have broken the momentum of the insurgency in the former and established multiethnic and nonsectarian government in the latter. Both may happen, but they aren’t consolidated achievements yet.
On Israel/Palestine, the President took something like Shimon Peres’ approach: focus for now on defining Palestine’s territory and ensuring Israel’s security, solve Jerusalem and refugee return later. Rhetorical support for Israel was strong, as was opposition to the Palestinian effort to get the UN General Assembly to approve statehood. But there was really nothing new. That might be the best he can do for the moment, which is not propitious.
No mention of Saudi Arabia. A bit of talk about Iranian hypocrisy in providing assistance to Syria in repressing demonstrators, but no clarion call for rebellion there. Strong on women’s rights, inter-religious dialogue and rejection of political violence. Big throughout on self-determination (Palestinians take note), values as a focus for American policy in addition to interests, universal rights and strengthening the economic underpinnings of political transition.
A right-minded but I am afraid forgettable speech.
PS: I did not anticipate when I wrote this piece quickly this afternoon the furor that has erupted over the President’s endorsement of the ’67 borders of Israel as the basis for negotiations and eventual land swaps. It is still a bit hard for me to see what other basis there would be in a “land for peace” deal, but I take the point that this is the first time an American president has endorsed an idea that many of us take for granted. Those who object need to explain what other basis there might be for the territorial solution, other than “making the land whole.”
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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.
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