March 2009: Those were the days
Remember way back when, in March 2009, when everyone was so pleased and excited that the Obama administration had announced its “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” As Mary Hopkin once sang:
Those were the days my friend
We thought they’d never end
We’d sing and dance forever and a day
We’d live the life we choose
We’d fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way.
It has been less than two months but the “strategy” is not looking so hot. Right now, policymakers charged with implementing it are probably reaching for an entire bottle of Jack Daniels, as opposed to the glass or two of wine in Hopkin’s song, as they contemplate the AfPak area of operations.
Consider a few news items from just the past week.
Over half a million people have fled the fighting in Pakistan’s Valley, bringing the total number of displaced since August to one million as 125,000 Pakistan soldiers fight a reported 4,000 Taliban militants there. Even assuming the Pakistani military is committed to the fight, something it has promised before but not followed through on, it is unclear whether it will succeed. Pakistanis in the area say the Taliban had so far held on to every neighborhood they had seized in the previous days and months. Witnesses said Friday that the insurgents remained in control of Mingora, the district capital, and many parts of the districts of Buner and Lower Dir.
And, if the Pakistani military does not decisively destroy the Taliban there that will put them far too close for comfort to various Pakistani nuclear facilities. As Leonard Spector Deputy Director of the Monterey Institute’s James Martin Center for Nonproliferation wrote:
Taliban fighters will surely be emboldened to probe into government-controlled areas closer to the capital and to several key nuclear sites. Given their enormous political and military salience, the nuclear sites would be particularly appealing targets. Whether government forces would fare any better in protecting these locations than in the Swat Valley would be hard to predict. If a site were overrun, local physical protection measures would mean little.
U.S. military and intelligence officials worry that Taliban forces pushed out of Afghanistan by reinforced U.S. troops this summer will flow unimpeded into Pakistan, as they did during U.S. operations in Afghanistan in 2001.
Gen. David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, said in an interview that Pakistan has become the nerve center of al Qaeda’s global operations, allowing the terror group to re-establish its organizational structure and build stronger ties to al Qaeda offshoots in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, North Africa and parts of Europe.
And mark the word of Bruce Reidel, the retired CIA expert on South Asia, who chaired the special interagency committee that developed President Obama’s policy strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He said in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations “the situation remains dire” in the region, and particularly in Pakistan. He says “there is a real possibility of a jihadist state emerging in Pakistan sometime in the future. And that has to be one of the worst nightmares American foreign policy could have to deal with.”
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the situation, while not hopeless, is certainly difficult. As Bing West noted in the Wall Street Journal:
As long as Pakistan is a sanctuary, U.S. forces here will be on the strategic defensive, no matter how skillful their military tactics. We can’t stay forever. The basic question is: How to consolidate the battlefield gains? That depends upon how the mission is defined. President Barack Obama has avoided promising to build a vibrant democratic nation. “The achievable goal,” he said recently, “is to make sure it [Afghanistan] is not a safe haven for terrorists.” Such a minimalist policy can be achieved in one of two ways.
The first is to apply the classic counterinsurgency model: After the military push the enemy from a populated area, the police take over, while government appointees provide honest governance and basic services. This approach pursues the expensive nation-building that Mr. Obama has not endorsed. It requires thousands of additional police trainers and hundreds of civilian advisers in the districts. These advisers also serve as watchdogs against corruption, acting as a shadow government to restrain officials prone to skimming and payoffs. It’s a sound approach that is slow and expensive.
The second option is to expand the role of the Afghan army to act as the facilitators and watchdogs of governance. Today, American commanders like Capt. Howell routinely participate in shuras or councils. They can gradually hand off such governance-related tasks to Afghan officers.
Either way, key to eventual Afghan success will be the support and cooperation of its people. And they are less likely to give it when they are being killed by U.S. weapons, even if inadvertently. United States officials acknowledged last Thursday for the first time that at least some of what might be 100 civilian deaths in western Afghanistan had been caused by American bombs.
On the bright side, following the timeless wisdom, that one should always follow the money trail if you really want to know what is happening, Afghanistan war funding surpasses the outlay for Iraq for the first time in next year’s proposed Pentagon budget. The $130 billion in war funds that are part of the fiscal 2010 budget request includes $65 billion for Afghanistan operations and $61 billion for Iraq. For 2009, $87 billion was requested for Iraq and $47 billion for Afghanistan.
However, even silver linings have their clouds. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and military officials said last Thursday that U.S. troops are being rushed to Afghanistan without the equipment they need to fight an emboldened Taliban.
It’s going to take more than 60 days to fix a problem that has been neglected for over 6 years! This seems typical of the American drive-through-fast-food-give-it-to-me-now-let’s-hurry-up-and-get-this-done-so-the-kids-can-get-home-for-the-holidays mentality. We should have never committed forces to Afghanistan without realizing that we would be there for an entire generation. Just as you cannot gauge the success of the economic stimulus on the economy by looking at one week on the stock market, you cannot gauge a Af/Pak strategy by looking at one week on the Af/Pak border.
Gates has actually been clear and so has Patraus that this whole region is ‘going to get worse before it gets better.’ Specifically the issue now between Pak forces and the Talibs is something that should have happened years ago. It’s certainly poor timing that it is happening now instead of 5 years ago but postponing this confrontation further is not the solution. The Paks have a lot of work to do on their side of the border and it appears they may have found their spine in recent weeks.
You are correct certainly that the innocent loss of life is in direct opposition with our message of ‘we are here to help’. More will have to be done to minimize civilian casualties but at the same time the solution is not military in any case. Yet, even if Coalition forces were able to only kill Taliban surgically without any innocent loss of life this will not achieve anything if there is not an overwhelming push on the reconstruction side of the equation. This continues to be the U.S.’s central downfall in strategic execution. All any security strategy is ever designed to do is to provide a bubble in which something better can be built or done to convince the populace that a new way can be taken forward. The ‘civilian surge’ is what is lacking here and that should frankly be the focus of the media and intelligent commentators such as yourself.
I hear some making a case to just pull out of Afghanistan by those who don’t want to be committed to doing the job and taking the bad with the good. (I don’t agree with it, but I hear people making the case). But if you agree that it’s in our interest to stay and see it through then you cannot look at success/failure through a 60-90 filter. If you support the strategy I think you need to give it sufficient time to work before you can say it is a failed (or failing) strategy.
Just one man’s opinion.
Comment on May 12, 2009 @ 3:33 am
Thanks for the comment Jake.
Of course, I agree that one can’t judge the success of a “strategy” in less than 2 months. More importantly, I am reminded of the old axiom, no strategy, or plan, survives first contact with the enemy.
My main point was to try and dispel all the hoopla we were seeing back in March about when the Obama administration first announced its “strategy.”
The situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has worsened far more quickly than anyone in the administration anticipated, or at least publicly acknowledged. The fact that Gen. McKiernan in Afghanistan is now being replaced is just one sign of this.
I do believe people like Gates and understand this. But it is up to President Obama to make the case far more clearly. Sad to say but thus far the Bush administration was probably more candid on the long term challenge that Afghanistan was going to be. They probably were not as candid on Pakistan, but then its looking the other way re Musharaff helped worsen the situation, so it is understandable they would not mention that very much.
All that is just a way to say I never wrote the strategy is “failing.” But I am pretty sure that it will have to be modified significantly. Maybe Lee Hamilton and Jim Baker can chair a future ASG (Afghan Study Group).
I also believe the American public is still focused on Iraq, understandably so, but they are going to have to start engaging with Afghanistan and Pakistan to a far greater degree.
Comment on May 12, 2009 @ 5:14 am
We are pretty good at forming committees and groups to assess our blunders. I suppose that is a symptom of an open society and a living and breathing democracy. Too bad we are not equally as good at learning from the mistakes from previous forays into nation building.
These things always come down to expectations and the Bush admin sold the world on a vision for what the Afghan people would get in the end. What they will ultimately inherit will be far from that vision. Changing CG’s might help around the edges but again this kind of fix plays to the American propensity for ‘quick fixes’ and I don’t put a lot of stock into it other than this new guy is probably and old pal of Patreus’s and he wants to staff his team with ‘his guys’.
Time will tell. It will be ironic if we clean up the AStan at the expense of Pakistan descending into chaos. See PM Zardari’s interview last week on Meet the Press. Very interesting and pointed comments he made about the snake pit that the U.S. has created in the region going back to the middle 80′s.
Comment on May 12, 2009 @ 5:38 am
Yes, we can form study groups as easy as Chrysler can declare bankruptcy. But a better question is how often do policymakers actually take heed of the recommendations in said reports? Not nearly enough.
I agree that McKiernan probably did as much as anyone could under the circumstances. And I’m not sure his replacement is without his own baggage. It looks like he was okay with people under him carrying out torture, though I doubt many, if any, in the Obama administration will point that out.
Comment on May 12, 2009 @ 9:54 am