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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.

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?

Another moment of truth

International Crisis Group has put out its latest on Afghanistan, offering a definitive answer to the question of whether Karzai is worth it:

Any plan that fails to deal with the decay in Kabul will not succeed. President Hamid Karzai no longer enjoys the legitimacy and popularity
he once had and he has subsequently lost his ability to stitch together lasting political deals.

This is followed by a well-documented litany of failures in areas directly relevant to whether the mission as a whole can succeed.

But ICG then somehow manages to turn 180 degrees and recommend, in a backhanded sort of way, engagement rather than exit:

Overcoming the trust deficit between the Afghan government, the Afghan people and the international community will rely on more concerted efforts to increase political representation, to expand access to justice and to confront corruption.

This amounts to no more than wishing it weren’t so–if it wanted to be listened to, ICG would have done better to go where its analysis points: drawdown, presumably on the currently agreed NATO schedule.

PS:  Later in the day, the New York Times added fuel to the fire with a report on high level corruption in Afghanistan.