Robert Blackwill, who was Condolezza Rice's deputy as National Security Adviser in 2003 to 2004, will use a speech at the International Institute of Strategic Studies think tank in London on Monday to call on President Barack Obama to make drastratic changes in the war's objectives. He told The Daily Telegraph that the surge of forces launched last year to stabilise Afghanistan was "high likely" to fail and that the death toll in the conflict was too high a price to pay.
"The Taliban are winning, we are losing," he said. "They have high morale and want to continue the insurgency. Plan A is going to fail. We need a Plan B
"Let the Taliban control the Pashtun south and east, the American and allied price for preventing that is far too high."
I'm sympathetic to a point. However, Mr. Blackwell ignores two important problems with his position:
First, that the Taliban would somehow limit themselves to a 'Pashtunistan', preferring instead a 'Greater Pashtunistan'. After all, the Talibunnies tried to seize the whole country in the civil war of the 1990s. Why wouldn't they try again?
Second, that a majority of the Pashtuns want the Taliban ruling them. That's certainly not true. When we've talked about walling off Pashtunistan in the past (fence, moats, crocodiles, sharks with frickin' lasers on their heads, etc) it was in the guise of a Pashtun people ruled by their crazy elders -- crazy but not genocidal. The Taliban are so extreme that a majority of Pashtuns don't want them. That ought to count for something. |
Mr Blackwill said that there had been a decade of "innumerable errors" in the Western approach to Afghanistan. Most notably American policy shifted after the atttacks on September 11, 2001 from expelling al Qaeda from its Afghan sanctuaries to crushing the Taliban and installing a democratic government in Kabul.
The result was that America now had 1,000 soldiers deployed for every one of the estimated 100 al Qaeda operatives now believed to be based in Afghanistan and was hemorraging $100 billion a year on the conflict.
| Except that the real problem for Afghanistan are the Afghan Taliban groups, who are considerably more numerous than the few Al Qaeda operatives based in Afghanistan. Also, the Afghan Talibs are based in Pakistan, just like their Pakistan Taliban comrades in arms. Finally, I'm not sure US$100 billion/year is a lot to pay to keep the fight over there instead of planting IEDs along Highway 1. It may not seem fair to the Afghans, of course, but really they could be considered Patient Zero of this little pandemic. |
Mr Blackwill believes the US should only seek to defend those areas dominated by Afghanistan's Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities by pulling out of bases in the south. By accepting that the Taliban would overrun Kandahar and other big population centres, the US would threaten the Taliban only if it allowed al Qa'eda to reform or if the movement started to encroach northwards.
| What if they only cut noses off women? What if they only enslaved women? What if they only killed religious minorities? |
| That would then be their problem. But the Taliban have been coordinating with other terror groups to cross-train and export terror around the world. This is not merely a local problem that can be walled off. Not, at any rate, so long as Pakistan has international airports, and cell phone and internet access. |
"How many people really believe that Kandahar is central to Western civilisation. We did not got to Afghanistan to control Kandahar," he said. "Our preference at the time of the attack was for the Taliban to give up al Qaeda not to change the regime.
| True. But they didn't, and so we had to adjust our preferences to accommodate independent reality |
.Mr Obama himself and the administration say what we are trying to do in Afghanistan is to destroy al Qaeda."
| The problem in that line of reasoning for Mr. Blackwell is that a Taliban-ruled Pashtunistan would almost certainly allow al-Qaeda free rein. It would serve as a base to destabilize the Sindh, Balochi and Punjabi regions of Pakistan. It would train terrorists to attack India -- and perhaps the U.S. That's what they did before; that's what they'd do again. |
| Since when is what President Obama claims to want a valid measure of what is wise and prudent? |
Alongside misdirected strategy, the "utter corruption" of the government of President Hamid Karzai had eclipsed Nato's hopes to keeping the Taliban at bay after its defeat in late 2001.
| Karzai's certainly corrupt -- if Mr. Blackwell would please identify an honest and yet influential man in Afghanistan, we'd be happy to work with said person. |
In contrast to Mr Blackwill's view that Afghanistan's army and police could not be made ready to control the whole country, Liam Fox, the Defence Secretary, said the forces would assume responsibility by 2015.
"If we were to leave before 2015, a point at which on current progress we expect to have achieved our security aims, it would be a shot in the arm to violent jihadists everywhere, re-energising violent radical and extremist Islamists," he said. "It would send a signal that we did not have the moral resolve and the political fortitude to see through what we ourselves have described as national security imperative."
| There is most certainly that. |
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