Tag: Afghanistan
Beyond DADT and New START
As New START heads for ratification and the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell gets signed, I am feeling the need to explain why I’ve devoted so little time to both, even though my Twitter feed talks about little else.
In my way of thinking, both New START and DADT are peripheral to the main war and peace issues of our time. Even though New START was bought with a giant increase in funding for modernization of U.S. nuclear weapons, far more than even proponents of modernization envisaged at the beginning of the process, it can be argued that without the treaty efforts to strengthen the nonproliferation regime through measures like a cut-off in production of fissile material would be harder. It can also be argued that eliminating DADT will grow the pool of competent people interested in entering the U.S. military and eliminate a hypocritical restriction unworthy of a country dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.
But these are indirect arguments, secondary effects that do not deal directly with the main war and peace issues of our day. People are fighting and dying in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Somalia–if peacebuilding efforts are not handled well more will die. Iran poses a serious challenge to American goals in the Middle East, with consequences for friends and allies as well as ourselves. The United States faces difficult choices: are we right to devote so many troops and so much money to Iraq and Afghanistan, or should we be paying more attention to Yemen and Somalia, or Iran? Will our beefed up diplomatic efforts in Sudan avoid catastrophe there after the January 9 referendum on independence for the South? There are real trade-offs among the conflict issues of our day, with life and death consequences for real people.
Let me be clear: I support repeal of DADT as well as ratification of New START. These are good things that respectively improve America’s record of consistency with its own ideals and increase the prospects for controlling proliferation of nuclear weapons. But they are mainly about us: our foolish discrimination against people who want to serve the nation, our nuclear weapons and their modernization.
The Administration should not rest on these laurels, important and deserved as they are. There is a dangerous world beyond DADT and New START that needs American attention.
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A (very) long war in Afghanistan
Fred and Kim Kagan offer today in the Washington Post a vigorous defense of the Obama Administration’s strategy in Afghanistan. They argue that there have been significant military gains, that progress can continue even without full Pakistani cooperation against Al Qaeda and Taliban safe havens in Quetta and Waziristan, and that we have to worry not only about military success but also about “stability and legitimacy of the political order” at the local level when transitioning security responsibilities to the Afghans. They rightly see efforts to strengthen local and central governance not as “mission creep” but as necessary components of the overall counter-insurgency strategy. They also argue that we need an Afghanistan that will continue to host American forces on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, presumably for as long as there is a threat from Pakistan-based enemies.
Let’s be clear: this is a formula for an even longer war than currently planned, one that the President is not fully committed to, as the Kagans implicitly recognize. We are very far from Afghanistan acquiring the kind of local and central governance required–we have barely begun, even after nine long years of war, to think about strengthening provincial governance, and the national government can at best be described as spotty. It will be more than several years before many Afghan provincial governments, and important Kabul ministries, will be able to prioritize and execute projects that benefit citizens in ways that make them think twice before helping a cousin who happens to be in league with the Taliban or a local drug/war lord.
The problem as I see it is that we have deployed nowhere near the civilian capabilities required to help the Afghans establish even half decent governance in areas the Taliban contest. The problem is not money. Andrew Exum has made it eminently clear that there is too much money flowing, often into the wrong pockets, at the moment. The problem is the one the UN has been studying lately: we don’t have enough civilians with the talents, training and protection required to enable them to help build institutions.
Afghanistan is a particularly difficult state-building environment, because of widespread illiteracy and poverty, the unsafe and insecure environment, miserable infrastructure and deeply entrenched poppy economy.
Ahmed Rashid usefully reminds us
…the key question for General Petraeus is not how many Taliban he kills, but whether the bare bones of an Afghan state—army, police, bureaucracy—which have been neglected so badly in the past nine years, can be set up by 2014. Moreover, can Afghan leaders, including the President, win the trust of a people who have put up with insecurity, gross corruption, and poor governance for many years?
Moreover, keeping U.S. troops along the Durand line indefinitely could make the task even more difficult, as it provides a rallying point for those Afghans who resent the American presence (not to mention that it might be as readily outflanked in Yemen and Somalia as the Maginot line was in Belgium). Only if we are willing to face up to the substantial human resources required to meet the state-building challenge should we try. The alternative, a deal with the Taliban, starts looking good if you think we don’t have what it takes.
PS: To their credit, and the Washington Post’s, the Kagans are described in today’s paper as “independent military analysts who have conducted research for commanders in Afghanistan.” Precisely what this means is unclear, but it is certainly better than the past practice of not mentioning when op/ed writers have worked for the military, as many have done. It is hard to find a Washington thinktanker who hasn’t accepted at least a trip to Iraq or Afghanistan funded by the Defense Department (present company excepted–but caveat emptor–I’ve been at least 10 times to Baghdad and once to Kabul on tickets provided by the United States Institute of Peace, sometimes bought with money provided by the State Department).
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No real Afpak strategy review
Okay, now I get it. There is nothing more than the five-page “overview” being released from the Administration’s Afpak strategy review.
This is disreputable, even if it tells us more than any 100-page tome about how badly things are going. Yes, there is a fairly recent progress report to the Congress (bless them for requiring it!), and the intel materials have leaked all over the New York Times. But to give the public nothing on the legitimacy of the Karzai government? Nothing on negotiations with the Taliban? Precious little on Pakistan’s support, or lack of support, for going after Al Qaeda and the Taliban? Nothing on progress in particular communities in promoting local governance and economic development?
Silence tells us most of what we need to know. But what should be said about those who commented yesterday on the five pages as if it was the whole thing? Maybe nothing, as that too speaks for itself.
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Has anyone really read the Afghanistan report?
I’ve been hoping all day to offer analysis of the Afghanistan strategy review, but I can’t find the full text. That hasn’t stopped anyone else.
So far as I can tell, everyone is commenting on the five-page “overview” as if they’ve read the whole thing. The Washington Post tells you it hasn’t seen the whole report. PBS Newshour doesn’t make any claims, but doesn’t post the whole report, so I’ve reached my own conclusion. Democracy Arsenal claims to have read the thing, but then says nothing that hints at content beyond the five pages. So I thought I should say a few words on why it is not a good idea to comment based on an overview.
The overview is 80 per cent spin. The higher ups in the U.S. Government don’t do a lot of rummaging around in paragraph 178 of a report, but they do look at what is more commonly called the “executive summary.” And they make sure it says what they want it to say, whatever is in the report. Then they get that five pager out to the press and commentators (some of them get it earlier than others of course) in the often justified hope that they can keep the news coverage on side.
The most important part of any government report is what it does not say. You can’t really tell that from the summary, overview or whatever you want to call it. But I’ll guess: judging from this “overview,” it says nothing about corruption and lack of legitimacy of the Karzai government; it says relatively little about local governance and economic development; it says little about lack of cooperation from Pakistan or negotiations with the Taliban.
I don’t really see how a strategy review can be useful (except for PR purposes) without dealing with those issues, so I’m inclined to give this one a failing grade, without having seen it. But that wouldn’t be fair, would it? Maybe we should all withhold judgment and give ourselves some time to read the whole thing, calmly and thoughtfully.
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Afghanistan: love it and leave it
National Security Network Executive Director Heather Hurlburt and General Paul Eaton in Politico today offer a very sensible eight points of broad agreement among recent reports on Afghanistan. As I was about to have a look through them to determine where they agreed and disagreed, I find this timely and useful.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is busy leading the effort to make news of supposed differences between the intelligence community and the military on how successful the Afghanistan “surge” is. This is silly, as the author of the article acknowledges in the fine print: the cut-off date for the intel assessment is earlier than for the military assessment, and in any event intel analysts are paid to anticipate problems while military people are paid to solve them.
Eaton and Hurlburt (caveat emptor: she is married to my first cousin once removed) are playing the better game, even if they fail to deal with my favorite question: is Karzai worth it? Their eight points add up to this: however successful the military “surge,” we need to negotiate a way out (with all deliberate speed, as the Supreme Court would say) with support from the neighbors, having done what we can to improve local governance, revive the economy and train the Afghan security forces, thus leaving behind a regime that will not harbor transnational terrorists.
They talk about “political progress,” but it is unclear what they mean by it. Maybe this is code for President Karzai cleaning up his, and his government’s act, or maybe it is progress in the reconciliation department, which is the label generally given to efforts to bring the Taliban in from the cold. Or maybe it also covers efforts to get Pakistan to take stronger action against the Taliban. Hurlburt and Eaton accept the judgment of several of the reports that failure to make progress should lead to quicker withdrawal and conversion to a counter-terrorist (i.e. kill the terrorists from afar) rather than a counter-insurgency (i.e. protect and serve the population up close) effort.
At this point, I don’t see any chance that the Administration will change its timeline, which will begin turnover of security responsibilities to the Afghans next July and aim to complete the process by the end of 2014. The NATO decision boxed us in to that schedule, which is what the Administration presumably wanted. It seems to have had the great virtue of removing Afghanistan from the domestic political debate, which is no place for rational discourse and decisionmaking these days.
What we could use now–tomorrow’s publication of the Administration “review” would be a good moment to start–is an honest assessment of where we stand on the main factors to which Hurlburt and Eaton point: negotiations with the Taliban, cooperation by Afghanistan’s neighbors, strengthening of local governance and the economy, buildup of the Afghan security forces. A bit on why Karzai merits $120 billion per year and the lives of American soldiers and civilians would be useful too.
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Stay the course, smartly
Center for a New American Security (CNAS) has broken the monotony of reports recommending early withdrawal from Afghanistan. Its Responsible Transition: Securing U.S. Interests in Afghanistan Beyond 2011, takes as given the Administration’s time line: start of the turnover to Afghan security forces in July 2011, completion by the end of 2014. It also imagines a continuing substantial counter-terrorism and support presence (25-35,000 troops) beyond that date.
This is the most forward-leaning of the recent reports on Afghanistan, and it is likely correct in regarding the July 2011 and 2014 dates as locked in by the recent NATO Summit. Its definition of vital U.S. interests is not markedly different from those others have put forward: preventing Al Qaeda from regrouping and attacking the U.S. as well as stabilizing Pakistan. It attempts
to craft an effective middle ground between large unsustainable expeditionary force commitments that would sap the long-term power of the United States and “offshore” minimalist strategies that would fail to disrupt, dismantle and defeat transnational terror groups.
The emphasis is mainly on the military side, but it also focuses on politics, commending the ongoing refocus away from support for the government in Kabul and towards more support for local governance and implicitly viewing President Karzai as a problem rather than a solution. The text gets notably vague when the issue of preventing corruption and dealing with warlords at the local level comes up, and how the local focus will be sustained when drawdown starts is not at all clear. As the Iraq precedent shows, once the U.S. military starts withdrawing the civilians go too.
The report’s treatment of Pakistan is robust. It recommends significant toughening of the diplomatic message and a reduced but long term commitment in Afghanistan aimed at convincing the Pakistanis that they will have to do more about the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or the U.S. will do it for them. The Pakistanis, no longer believing that the Americans are leaving soon, will then have less need to hedge their bets by allowing the Taliban to continue operating and more incentive to crack down so that the Americans don’t come calling.
This is a “stay the course” report, but one that pays serious attention to resource limits. But will we maintain even 25-35,000 troops indefinitely in Afghanistan? Will the Afghans want them there?
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