Tag: Al Qaeda
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.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
Off the deep end
So much is being written so quickly about a Norwegian whose name I don’t care to remember it is very difficult to keep up. But if you have time for only one piece, for the moment I’d recommend Spencer Ackerman’s. I don’t like the title, so I won’t repeat it, but it does a good job of showing the parallels between extremist thoughts on both sides of the Western/Muslim divide. And the accompanying video expounding the Norwegian’s appeal for a new crusade against multiculturalism and Islam is worth browsing. Also worth a mention, Blake Hounshell’s quick account of what the Norwegian killer was trying to accomplish. And if you are a glutton for punishment, try Reidar Visser, who has the virtue of commenting also on the Norwegian political context.
There will be a temptation to treat the Norwegian incident as a one-off, pretty much the way we’ve treated Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City attack. Isn’t most terrorism today Islamic? The answer is no, as demonstrated in Islam 101’s now aging post from January 2010 on terrorism in the U.S. and Europe. In Europe, most terrorism is associated with separatists (Basque, Corsican and Irish principally). In the U.S., it appears Latino, leftist and Jewish terrorist incidents were more numerous than Islamic ones, at least until 2005.
Nevertheless, Jennifer Rubin–having already made the mistake of suggesting that Al Qaeda was responsible for the Norwegian events–acknowledges that mistake and goes on to compound it:
That the suspect here is a blond Norwegian does not support the proposition that we can rest easy with regard to the panoply of threats we face or that homeland security, intelligence and traditional military can be pruned back. To the contrary, the world remains very dangerous because very bad people will do horrendous things. There are many more jihadists than blond Norwegians out to kill Americans, and we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West.
I can agree that “we should keep our eye on the systemic and far more potent threats that stem from an ideological war with the West,” but many of them come from nationalists, racists, and Islamophobes, something the American right is loath to acknowledge. It might cut altogether too close to the bone.
The happy fact is that a privileged elite is being dethroned from power in many countries by people who don’t think power, privilege or even citizenship should derive from the color of one’s skin, gender, sexuality, position on abortion rights or the vehemence of one’s devotion to Christianity. There are losers in that process of democratization. Some of them are going to go off the deep end. We need to be far more attentive to the violent risks they pose than we have been so far.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
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.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
How do you say serendipity in Arabic?
Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh has gone to Saudi Arabia for medical treatment, due to injuries suffered Friday in an attack by rebellious tribal forces on the presidential palace. This is an extraordinary bit of good luck for Yemen, but the country will need a lot more serendipity if this story is to end well.
Vice President Abd Al-Rab Mansur Hadi, in office since 1994, is the constitutional successor. Who knows what he will do, but the right thing is to implement the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) agreement that Saleh never signed. It calls for an opposition-led government of national unity to prepare free and fair elections. If the attack on the palace leads in this direction, without further violence, we can all thank our lucky stars (and the Saudi princes who fund Yemeni bigwigs).
What could go wrong? Just about everything: tribes or the protesters could refuse to go along, someone in the military could try to seize power, Saleh’s family and cronies could balk, the Vice President could decide to crack down hard on the protesters, the Saudis could decide to back someone else, Saleh could try to return to Yemen…my imagination runs amuck. Yemen is one of the most fragile states on earth, more like neighboring Somalia than like the GCC rich guys who live on the other side of the Arabian peninsula. Its oil and water are running low, the population is very poor and very young, it faces an insurgency in the north and a secessionist movement in the south, and its institutions are weak enough to attract Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to take up residence.
That abused word, stability, is what Yemen needs now. A constitutional succession that follows the path outlined by the GCC is likely to be the best deal on offer. Anything else bodes ill not only for Yemenis but also for the United States. Can we get lucky again?
PS: I took down the video originally posted with this, because it was starting up automatically.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
A brighter view of the Arab spring
I wrote yesterday about the pessimistic views of the Arab spring prevalent among experts at a Harvard/Carnegie Endowment event. They know a whole lot more about the Middle East than I do–that’s why I go to their events and write them up. But I think they are overly pessimistic. Why?
First, because I’ve seen things come out all right. I am not just talking South Africa, where admittedly Nelson Mandela’s leadership and stature counted for a lot, as did F.W. de Klerk’s. I am not seeing any Mandelas or de Klerks in the Middle East. Nor do there seem to be any Vaclav Havels or Lech Walesas. But in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia protest leaderships that were notably lacking in vision and stature had at least temporary success and left their countries better off than they would otherwise have been.
Second, because it seems to me the protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Yemen have shown a combination of nonviolent restraint and persistence that is laudable, and likely to lead in good directions. I am less convinced of the wisdom of the demonstrators in Libya and Bahrain, where it seems to me they fell victim to the temptations of violence and recalcitrance, respectively. But the Libyan Transitional Council shows at least some signs of promise. We’ll see if the Bahrainis can do better in the next “dialogue” phase.
Third, because I have more confidence in a bottom-up process than a top-down one. Here I disagree with Marwan Muasher, who explicitly prefers to see top-down reform. I don’t really know any place where that has worked terribly well in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, though obviously there are leaders like Gorbachev (or de Klerk for that matter) who made the process easier than it might otherwise have been. But people have to want democracy and freedom–it really can’t be given to them.
Nor do I think the consequences of the Arab spring will be quite as negative for U.S. interests as many of the experts say. Middle Eastern leaders who have to be more responsive to public opinion may be more supportive of the Palestinians, but they would be foolish to take their countries to war when the people they lead are looking for prosperity. So, okay, we’ll get Egypt opening the border with Gaza, but closing it was an approach that wasn’t worth a damn anyway. Hamas is likely to need to cut its margins on smuggled goods when they can enter more freely. Maybe an open border will serve American purposes better than the closed one.
I admit that it is hard to see how Yemen comes out of this anything but a basket case, which is where it was headed under Saleh anyway. Certainly it will be a while before any future government in Sanaa gets a grip on the provinces. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula may have a field day in the meanwhile, but they don’t appear so far to have been particularly effective at exploiting the chaos.
That said, the Arab spring is not about American interests, which will have to take a back seat for a while throughout the Middle East. It is however about American values. We should be happy to see them spreading among young Arabs willing to demand their rights. Let’s see where things go before we get too pessimistic.
Share this, I'll really appreciate it:
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.
RSS - Posts
