Afghanistan Thoughts
The subject of Obama’s Afghanistan policy merits a far longer and more detailed post than you’re going to get from me at the moment, but I’d like to work through a couple of stray thoughts.
(1) Kashmir is not the solution. Barnett Rubin and Ahmed Rashid are both deeply knowledgeable about Afghanistan. Unfortunately, they are, as far as I can tell, the chief purveyors of the “go broad” approach — i.e., solve Kashmir to solve Afghanistan.
A first step could be the establishment of a contact group on the region authorized by the UN Security Council. This contact group, including the five permanent members and perhaps others (NATO, Saudi Arabia), could promote dialogue between India and Pakistan about their respective interests in Afghanistan and about finding a solution to the Kashmir dispute; seek a long-term political vision for the future of the FATA from the Pakistani government, perhaps one involving integrating the FATA into Pakistan’s provinces, as proposed by several Pakistani political parties; move Afghanistan and Pakistan toward discussions on the Durand Line and other frontier issues; involve Moscow in the region’s stabilization so that Afghanistan does not become a test of wills between the United States and Russia, as Georgia has become; provide guarantees to Tehran that the U.S.-NATO commitment to Afghanistan is not a threat to Iran; and ensure that China’s interests and role are brought to bear in international discussions on Afghanistan.
Daniel Larison has done an excellent job of outlining why this approach will prove counterproductive. It will give the Pakistanis the wrong incentives (why cut a deal for nothing when you can hold out for an American bribe?), it will undermine behind-the-scenes state-to-state negotiations, it will raise (it already has raised) hackles among sovereignty-obsessed Indians, making an already difficult process harder than it needs to be. The Bush Administration was wise to leave Kashmir to be handled bilaterally. The Obama Administration will soon learn the same thing.
(2) Troop numbers aren’t the central issue. This should be obvious, so I won’t go into much detail. The U.S. and Afghanistan need a new strategy. Canadian and Dutch forces are leaving very soon, which means the U.S. will have to take ownership of some of the most violent territory in the country. More troops won’t fix a broken strategy. We’ve actually been increasing the number of troops in Afghanistan, and we’ll no doubt keep doing so, but it’s no panacea. Fortunately, there are three reviews of Afghanistan policy that are happening right now, including H.R. McMaster’s CENTCOM review that will hopefully yield some useful answers.
(3) The ANA is the solution. That’s pretty blunt, but it’s true. The ANA is a highly effective fighting force. It is far too small. Afghanistan has real ethnic cleavages, but, as a wise man explained to me, they are not comparable to Iraq’s sectarian ur-cleavage. Scaling up the ANA strikes me as the right place to invest serious resources.
I have to go meet someone really soon. Damn. We haven’t discussed Pakistan, or Michael Crowley’s comprehensive piece on Obama’s Afghanistan options. I will revisit.
Scaling up the ANA means you’ll probably have more units that look like the Afghan National Police, which have generally done a horrible job. And I’m not convinced the ANA is as effective as you say. They may be able to fight reasonably well, but can they perform the necessary counterinsurgency activities effectively? And although Afghanistan’s ethnic cleavages may not be as pronounced as Iraq, having Hazaras or Tajiks in Helmand, Uruzgan, or Kandahar still has some similarities to putting Kurds in Anbar – they’re not liked and they don’t speak the language. ANA units are supposed to be mixed-ethnicity, so any unit will probably have at least have some people who can’t speak Pashto – maybe not a huge problem, but an issue nonetheless.
I’m surprised your post treats Afghanistan solely as a military issue. It seems to me the politics is just as important – Rubin’s <i>Fragmentation of Afghanistan</i> details the failure of the pre-Communist Afghan state to have any meaningful connection to the lives of Afghans, relying on foreign support: a situation echoed in the 80s under Communist rule, and being echoed now (in the 90s there was, of course, essentially no state, until the Taliban secured power with ISI support). Karzai’s government’s legitimacy continues to fall, as does support for foreign troops, but there doesn’t seem to be a credible political alternative for the next election. Maybe you can’t have legitimacy without security, but you also can’t have security with legitimacy. It seems to me that one political route is to buy off potential Taliban recruits through a massive jobs program that would make the Awakening movement look small.
And how do you deal with opium? I’m partial to the Senlis proposal of purchasing the opium crop to produce painkillers, but I’ve heard from some smart people that under current conditions (corruption, lack of security) it isn’t operationally feasible.
— Zak · Dec 11, 04:18 PM · #
I agree with Larison about the unwiseness of Obama’s speech thus far on Kashmir and with you on how explicit linkage of Afghanistan to kashmir can only hurt the Afghan cause — but that said I suspect the Afghan misson is fundamentally bitched in the presence of rising tensions between India and Pakistan. So pursuing calm in Kashmir as a prereq for Afghan peacemaking may be futile, but then you may either have to hope for a rapprochement, or give up in Afghanistan.
It isn’t obvious to me why “troop numbers aren’t the central issue.” (I mean, except in the sense that the sort of stimulus-response “The surge worked in Iraq so now let’s do it in Afghanistan” argument is obviously goofy.) I’d like to have enough troops on the ground that troop numbers aren’t the central issue but there’s a not-terrible argument that a decent counterinsurgency strategy will require more troops than we can field. Saying that, well, sure, what we need is a strategy that’s less troop-intensive and so the “central problem” is obviously with the strategy, not the troop levels, is at best circular.
— Sanjay · Dec 11, 05:01 PM · #