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| Afghanistan |
| Five Flawed Assumptions of Obama's Afghan Surge |
| 2009-12-16 |
| President Obama knows that the Afghan war is going badly, but he insists that the specter of an al-Qaeda comeback makes Afghanistan a "war of necessity." So he has ordered some 30,000 new troops to the front, hoping to hold the line enough that Afghan forces can be built up to eventually take over the mission from the U.S. It may sound like a limited goal, after the sweeping visions of democracy promised during the Bush years. But even that relatively modest strategy is based on some very questionable assumptions. Here are five of them: The Al-Qaeda Threat Requires a Ground War Obama made the threat of al-Qaeda's returning on the back of a Taliban victory the primary rationale for escalating the war in Afghanistan. But as many have pointed out, al-Qaeda doesn't need sanctuaries in order to plot terrorist attacks, and its leadership core is based in the neighboring tribal areas of Pakistan — which means that 100,000 U.S. troops are now being committed to a mission whose goal is to prevent a few hundred men from re-establishing a base of operations. And then there's the problem that having masses of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for whatever reason, inevitably creates a nationalist backlash that fuels the insurgency — a problem that Defense Secretary Robert Gates had noted early in the debate. The fact that the Taliban is now effectively in control of as much as half of the country eight years after being routed by the U.S.-led invasion is a sign that the local population is at least more tolerant of an insurgency against foreign forces. Expanding the ground war may not solve this problem. As University of Michigan historian Juan Cole wrote last week, "The U.S. counter-insurgency plan assumes that Pashtun villagers dislike and fear the Taliban, and just need to be protected from them so as to stop the politics of intimidation. But what if the villagers are cousins of the Taliban and would rather support their clansmen than white Christian foreigners?" Afghan Security Forces Can Be Trained to Take Over the Mission The centerpiece of Obama's exit strategy is the training of Afghan security forces to take responsibility for fighting the Taliban, just as Iraqi forces have taken charge of security in Iraq. But Afghanistan is nothing like Iraq, and training may not be the decisive issue: although the U.S. has officially trained 94,000 Afghan soldiers, there's no sign of an effective Afghan security force capable of fighting the Taliban. Desertion rates are high — 1 in 4 soldiers trained last year, by some accounts. So are rates of drug addiction. Most important, the most effective elements of the military are dominated by ethnic Tajiks, which does little to help win support of the Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group and the one among which the insurgency is based. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan had no powerful army or strong state before the U.S. went in — nor does it have the oil wealth that allows Iraq to pay for its own armed forces. There's also the question of whether they'll be willing to fight the Taliban on behalf of a foreign-backed government. President Karzai Can Be an Effective Partner Aside from the serious allegations of ballot fraud in the recent vote, the bigger legitimacy problem in Hamid Karzai's re-election was that only 1 in 4 registered voters actually turned out on election day. In the absence of any credible alternative, Washington will use Karzai's dependence on the West for funding and security to pressure him to deliver the sort of governance that can win popular support. But Karzai's government is widely seen as corrupt, ineffective and a tool in the hands of a foreign invader, and Afghans are mostly gloomy about the prospects for reforming it. While Karzai could be forced to respond to some egregious cases of corruption, his instinct will be to continue to use the power of patronage to broker local support. Corruption and nepotism may be just as much as a symptom of the weakness of the central government as its cause. Even in the times of greatest stability, Afghanistan has been governed from the center via a loose consensus among powerful regional and ethnic leaderships. Karzai might, in fact, have been governing the way a leader without a major national political base of his own deems it necessary to survive in a post-U.S. Afghanistan. And putting his government under stronger Western tutelage risks further undermining his legitimacy in the eyes of many of his own people. Signaling a U.S. Departure Date Creates Leverage Some critics suggest that by announcing July 2011 as the target date to begin a troop drawdown, President Obama has encouraged the Taliban to simply wait out the Americans. Supporters counter that by declaring that the U.S. commitment is finite, the President is forcing Karzai and the Pakistanis to take more responsibility for fighting the Taliban. That debate may be missing the point: everyone in the region is already acting on the assumption that the U.S. presence is temporary, knowing that America can't sustain a permanent occupation. One reason Karzai has made common cause with some notorious thugs is that he feels the need to have some muscle behind him when the U.S. goes. The Pakistanis, for their part, want to ensure that the U.S. leaves on the basis of a deal with the Taliban that replaces the present government, which is too close to India for Islamabad's comfort. And the Taliban — like any indigenous insurgency confronting a foreign military — knows that time is on its side. Pakistan Shares the U.S.'s Goals The Obama Administration has stressed that its Afghan plan can't work unless Pakistan shuts down Taliban safe havens on its side of the border. But Pakistan has declined to do so, because its key decision makers — the military leadership — don't share the U.S. view of the conflict in Afghanistan. Months of cajoling and exhortation by U.S. officials have failed to shake the Pakistani view that the country's prime security challenge is its lifelong conflict with India rather than the threat of Taliban extremism, and the Pakistani military sees the Karzai government as being under Indian sway. As a result, Pakistan's large-scale military offensives against the Taliban have been confined to those who challenge the authority of the Pakistani state; those who use Pakistan as a base from which to launch attacks in Afghanistan have been largely unmolested. While U.S. officials decry the distinction between the Afghan and Pakistani Talibans, Pakistan's generals believe that their domestic Taliban insurgency will stop only once the Americans have left Afghanistan. But they want the U.S. to leave in an orderly fashion, on the basis of a political settlement: a deal negotiated with the Taliban that sees the Karzai government replaced or remade in a new arrangement that gives Pakistan-aligned Pashtuns far greater power. |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #14 My analysis is the opposite of tw's. The Northern Alliance would fight the Pushtun's to a more or less stable truce or stalemate roughly along ethnic territorial lines. The Pushtun would then use their stable rear (now in Afghanistan) to attack Pakistan and that would inevitably collapse the Pakistan state or result in a Taliban takeover. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2009-12-16 20:48 |
| #13 Steve is on the money. Although, I would add the NA was no nastier than the Taliban and probably less. It's worrying that the Burg's brains trust can see this while the powers that be can't. And at root the problem is the Left can't admit that Bush was right about Iraq and they were, and continue to be, wrong about Afghanistan. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2009-12-16 20:37 |
| #12 May this little allegory add to my masters understanding. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-12-16 15:40 |
| #11 I think TW has nicely summarized the situation in 2 paragraphs. Quitting, while tempting, is no solution. I hope the strategies of Gen McChrystal work as a lot of blood and treasure are invested in them. But sitting there like a lump (defensive positions, pushed back on our heels) was not working, resembled Basra. |
| Posted by: tipover 2009-12-16 14:40 |
| #10 Steve throw in a Phoenix Program and I think you have got it pretty much covered. |
| Posted by: tipper 2009-12-16 12:26 |
| #9 Our objective in 2001 was to destroy the Taliban as a hosting government and to render Al Qaeda homeless so they could not continue to train the next generation of terrorists and plan the next round of terror attacks. In this we succeeded. However, Pakistan has stepped up to the plate as host, now that what they view as their backyard has been taken from them. How are we to leave the region until that situation is rectified? We are already seeing attacks and major attempted attacks around the world including in the U.S., planned and sourced by Pakistani terror groups with connections (whether current or former) to Pakistan's ISI, which means ultimately members of the armed forces senior officers. So long as we remain active in Afghanistan, Pakistan's internal situation will remain stirred up, until they actually realize that supporting terror proxies is not acceptable... or until between Talibs, etc and the army they break enough of their own country that they quit out of sheer exhaustion. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-12-16 12:19 |
#8 The goal in late 2001 - 2002 was to destroy al-Qaeda, break the control of the Taliban over the country, and ensure that Afghanistan couldn't be used as a base to plan and conduct terrorist operations against us. All of which we did. And to insure that Afghanistan not be a base again, you have to look to Pakistan and the frontier areas where the disease starts. Annnnnd, you have to look to the financiers and take them out or put the fear of God into them, which we did not do on the scale required. |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2009-12-16 10:23 |
| #7 Steve's take is right on target. |
| Posted by: Whiskey Mike 2009-12-16 10:11 |
| #6 I am not, and have not, been convinced that a large-scale operation in Afghanistan is required to meet our needs. I absolutely support our guys and want them to have everything they need. If McChrystal says he needs more, I bow to his judgment; give him more. But I am not convinced. The goal in late 2001 - 2002 was to destroy al-Qaeda, break the control of the Taliban over the country, and ensure that Afghanistan couldn't be used as a base to plan and conduct terrorist operations against us. All of which we did. Mission accomplished, to borrow a phrase. We then got sucked into the problem of rebuilding Afghanistan, on the understandable premise that we had to do something to prevent someone else (the Taliban, the Paks, but I repeat myself) from filling the void when we pulled out. With respect to Dubya whom I continue to admire, that's where we went wrong. The plan of the Army of Steve would have been different: we would have turned to the people of the Northern Alliance (e.g., Dostum), as nasty as they were, handed them the keys to the place and said "here, it's yours." We would have funded and supplied them to keep the Pashtuns in their natural pecking order and keep the Talibs from getting strong. We would have kept an air support unit in the north (around Mosur-al-Sharif, say) and in the west (e.g., Herat) with helicopters and perhaps some A-10s on call to support the Northern Alliance. It would have been tricky because of the danger of being sucked into the petty squabbles of the region. But it would have had the virtues of being low-maintenance and being completely within the goals of our original strategy -- keep al Qaeda out. In time the press would forget all about Afghanistan, the Northern Alliance would build something (or not), the Pashtuns would be a ward of Pakistan which would suit the ISI, and al-Qaeda, every time they stuck their heads up, would be bombed. Now we have the surge. Okay, as I said, I support the guys and I'll support McChrystal. But I think we have a high-maintenance solution to what is a low-maintenance problem. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2009-12-16 10:02 |
| #5 I didn't get very far in this opinion piece. Here is where I stopped, "The fact that the Taliban is now effectively in control of as much as half of the country eight years after being routed by the U.S.-led invasion is a sign that the local population is at least more tolerant of an insurgency against foreign forces." This is a non sequitur. What if the Taliban control (which is mostly rural) is due to the local population being too weak to fight them. In that case, the surge is the only way to break the Taliban hold. |
| Posted by: lord garth 2009-12-16 09:19 |
| #4 Parabellum: 1) AQ probably does require a ground war, but as stated, not (just) in A'stan. 2) Afghans might possibly, eventually be able to take over the mission, but nothing shown in their history to-date gives me confidence. 3) Karzai - probably the best we can do, which again gives no confidence (were Ky, etc. any improvement over Diem?) 4) Defined departure date creates leverage - for the other side. 5) Pakistan clearly does not share US goals. So, all five assumptions are indeed flawed. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2009-12-16 08:41 |
| #3 1. B.S., it absolutely does. 2. Racist. 3. Doesn't matter, we can replace him at any time. 4. It absolutely does! 5. Got one out of five right! Yay Time! |
| Posted by: Parabellum 2009-12-16 08:15 |
| #2 Juan Cole? You are quoting Juan Cole? That just gave the article away. |
| Posted by: Angleton9 2009-12-16 08:14 |
| #1 Has Karzai seen the Ghost of President Diem yet? |
| Posted by: Don Vito Anginegum8261 2009-12-16 07:20 |