Tag: United States
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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See event writeups: Pristina prepares for negotiations with Belgrade
See event writeups, please.
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Both protest too much, methinks
…a plea for a foreign solution to regional problems is a cop-out, not a serious request for action.
That may be, but the Iranians are clearly concerned, with Ahmedinejad claiming that the diploleaks are an American plot that will not affect Tehran’s “legal” relationships with other countries:
Iran is far from loving the leaks, as the headline of Chas’ piece suggests, and is doing its best to discredit them. Ahmedinejad and Chas protest too much for me to believe that they are not concerned that the leaks have lowered the barrier to military action.
But for the moment, military action is not at the top of the agenda. Covert action (the computer worm Stuxnet and assassinations of Iranian scientists being the most visible components) appears to be slowing Iranian technological progress.
While expectations are low, the P5+1 (Permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany) meeting with Iran Monday and Tuesday in Geneva is the best diplomatic bet for a deal that would allow Iran to enrich uranium but limit the amount and extent of the product. Have we ever done better than this with countries that have stepped back from bomb making? We shouldn’t expect more from Iran.
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The Iranian enrichment gambit gets more explicit
This is from a BBC interview, as reported by Foreign Policy: Hillary Clinton says
We’ve told them that they are entitled to the peaceful use of civil nuclear energy, but they haven’t yet restored the confidence of the international community to the extent where the international community would feel comfortable allowing them to enrich. They can enrich uranium at some future date once they have demonstrated that they can do so in a responsible manner in accordance with international obligations.
In diplospeak, she is clearly floating the idea that there might be a deal if Iran will agree not to enrich too much. This is published under a headline that reads Clinton on Iran: The regime is on the ropes. Nice cover for a soft message to Tehran.
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Conditionality is easier said than done
The big idea behind the Brookings Unfinished Business: An American Strategy for
Iraq Moving Forward report published yesterday is conditionality:
As long as Iraq’s leaders are moving their country in the direction that serves American interests, the United States can and should remain willing to help the Iraqis generously.
Otherwise, we should take our assistance elsewhere:
If Iraq’s leaders are not willing or able to act in a manner consistent with good governance, the rule of law, and the need for national reconciliation, then the risks to Iraq’s future stability are so grave that they should cause the U.S. government to reevaluate its level of commitment to the U.S.-Iraqi partnership and the resources it is willing to invest in it.
Let us consider what this might mean. Take for example the last nine months of negotiations to form a new government: was Allawi correct in concluding that the election results legally dictated that he be asked to form a government because he won a larger number of seats in parliament? Or was Maliki constitutionally correct in claiming that his larger post-election coalition should be asked first? Conditionality could have required that the Americans make a judgment on this issue and behave accordingly. Wisely, the Americans largely stayed out of it. Had they been required to decide who was acting in accordance with the rule of law and who not, they’d have put themselves in the middle of the then most sensitive issues in Iraqi politics, to no serious purpose.
Likewise with de-Ba’athification: the Americans argued vigorously in private against the decision to exclude candidates in the March elections because of their alleged affiliations with the Ba’ath party, but ultimately they failed. What if that failure had required a cut-off of assistance? How would that have improved the situation? Would it have served our purposes to make the transfer of military equipment to Iraq contingent on former Ba’athists being allowed to run in the elections?
Unfinished Business argues that “virtually all” American assistance should be subject to strict conditionality based on U.S. objectives. Really? Whether we bring Iraqis to the U.S. for university education should depend on what? On whether the Iraqi police are conforming to international human rights standards? On whether Iraqi schools are teaching tolerance? On whether Christians are being mistreated in Baghdad? Has the history of Congressionally imposed conditionality not taught us something about how complex, illogical and even bizarre the procedure can be?
Or consider the “benchmarks” the Bush Administration negotiated with (or imposed on) Iraq in late 2006/early 2007. They were thought to be vital to ending sectarian strife in Iraq. Many have still not been met. But sectarian strife has declined dramatically. Would we have been wise to reduce military assistance because the benchmarks were not met?
In Baghdad in 2008, I asked a major Sunni politician whether he was concerned about one of the benchmarks, the oil law, which in Washington was thought to be vital to the Sunnis in order to ensure their fair share of oil revenue. Fresh from a meeting in which the American Ambassador had berated him on the need to pass it, he replied, “no,” that was an American issue rather than an Iraqi one. He wasn’t at all concerned with guaranteeing the Sunni share of oil revenue, which was already reliably flowing to the provinces according to population, but he was concerned that an oil law passed too early would give little money to the central government and too much to the provinces. The benchmark was thoroughly misconceived.
I am 100 per cent with the authors of Unfinished Business when they argue that U.S. commitments to Iraq, in particular the military ones, should serve U.S. interests. But if that is the case, there won’t be much we can use as leverage without scoring an own-goal. Conditionality is easier said than done. It is not good strategy when your own vital interests are at stake, and it would be better to use it sparingly and tactically.
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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.
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