Tag: Afghanistan
The world is slowing down again
The world is slowing down again, after the sprint from Thanksgiving. This time I’m sure it’s not just me: no cars on the way downtown today, even though there were traffic jams on the Beltway. I hope it helps the economy.
Here is my quick assessment of where things stand as we head into Christmas/New Year:
- Sudan: independence referendum is on track for January 9-15. People (read “people in the know, more or less, whom I’ve talked to”) seem confident the North will accept the results. Still no agreement on Abyei, which could be lost to the South, or on the many post-referendum issues (oil, citizenship, debt, border demarcation, etc.), which will be negotiated in the six-month transition period.
- Iraq: Maliki met the 30-day deadline by presenting his ministers to parliament Tuesday, with some temporary placeholders in important national security slots. No one but me seems happy with the motley crew, but now let’s see if they can govern effectively.
- Afghanistan: President Karzai objects to the September parliamentary election results, which returned fewer of his favorites than he would like, but has agreed that parliament will meet January 20. We’ll see. The Obama Administration strategy review was little more than a sham–we’re in this war until 2014, when VP Biden says we’re out come hell or high water.
- Palestine/Israel: no more hang up on the settlement freeze, which Washington abandoned. Both parties are pursuing their “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement”: Israel is building, Palestine has received a spate of recognitions.
- Koreas: After indulging in an artillery barrage against a South Korean island, North Korea has turned down the volume, but there is no real progress on the issues.
- Iran: Ahmedinejad fired his foreign minister and brought in the MIT-educated atomic energy chief, who knows his stuff. Sanctions are biting and the regime is abolishing subsidies to cope. Americans and Europeans hope rising gasoline prices will generate popular pressure on the regime. Little sign of that so far. Next P5+1 meeting in late January.
- Lebanon: bracing for the Special Tribunal verdict (still!), with Tehran backing Hizbollah in denouncing the whole process.
- Egypt: voted in unfree and unfair elections that won’t even do much good for President Mubarak.
- Balkans: Kosovo elections marred by ballot stuffing, causing reruns in some municipalities January 9. A Swiss opponent of Kosovo independence accused Prime Minister Thaci of heinous crimes. Montenegrin PM Djukanovic resigned, Croatia arrested its own former PM, Bosnia is having trouble forming a government. Mladic of course still at large.
- Burma: Aung San Suu Kyi still moving cautiously. I guess when you’ve been under house arrest that long a bit of caution is in order.
The earth was spinning pretty fast for President Obama until today. He got a big new stimulus package (in the guise of tax cuts), repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (if you don’t know what that is, don’t ask and I won’t tell), ratification of New START (that’s when you have too many nuclear weapons and need an agreement with Russia to allow you to get rid of some while giving in to upgrading others), food safety regulation, and health benefits as well as compensation for the 9/11 rescue and cleanup crews. Former New York City Mayor Giuliani, probably frightened they would hand the $4.2 billion bill to him, was notably off in Paris promoting an Iranian group that has made its way onto the U.S. government list of terrorist organizations.
The president lost two battles: a few of the rich get to keep a lot of money even though the government needs it more than they do, and kids brought illegally to the U.S. through no fault of their own don’t get to stay just because they want to go to college or serve in the armed forces. I guess you can tell whose side I’m on.
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Vanden Heuvel beats Boot but war will continue
I find it hard to imagine that any objective person reading Katrina vanden Heuvel on the costs of the Afghanistan war and Max Boot on the need to give General Petraeus a chance today would come out in favor of continuing the war for four more years, at great cost in money and lives. Boot’s Iraq analogy is stretched to the breaking point, as Nir Rosen made clear in spades yesterday. Vanden Heuvel’s enumeration of the opportunity costs is daunting.
This does not mean that vanden Heuvel is going to win the argument. Beyond Vice President Biden’s promise to be out of Afghanistan by 2014 “come hell or high water,” I detect no push in the Administration for accelerating withdrawal. As vanden Heuvel herself notes, the current time line enables the President to appease both hawks (with the continuing commitment) and doves (with the promised drawdown). Removing the Afghanistan war as a partisan issue, and a divisive one among Democrats, during the 2012 presidential campaign no doubt counts as a big plus for the Administration.
Vanden Heuvel goes wildly off track in appealing to John Kerry to put the wooden stake in the heart of the Afghanistan war, as Senator William Fulbright to the Vietnam war. Kerry has nowhere near the prestige of Fulbright; if anything, a move against the war by Kerry would be seen as one more dovish maneuver by the anti-Vietnam war protester (don’t get the wrong impression: I was one too). To get the U.S. to accelerate the withdrawal from Afghanistan would require a clarion call from a Republican hawk. Little chance of that.
Instead what we need to do is make the most of what military gains Petraeus manages over the next four years by increasing the civilian effort, establishing in at least some parts of the country enough legitimate Afghan governing authority to block reentry of Al Qaeda into communities as we withdraw, and continuing the effort to reintegrate individual Taliban and to negotiate an overall political reconciliation.
There is unlikely to be victory in Afghanistan, but there needn’t be defeat either.
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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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