Monday
Dec082008
One to Watch: UK-US Divide on Afghanistan?
Monday, December 8, 2008 at 10:09
The latest news from the Afghanistan-Pakistan theatre is of an attack by insurgents --- probably Pakistani, rather than Afghan --- on a Peshawar warehouse, destroying 150 NATO trucks. Meanwhile, there is high-profile comment, spectacularly missing the point, from Robert Kaplan ("our best strategy is, as difficult and trite as it sounds, to be at all places at once"). The following may be of significance:
Juxtapose two stories from Sunday: "British army officers are in face-to-face negotiations with former Taliban enemies" with "Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul".
For context, you can add the comment of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2004, "The Afghans and NATO countries must recognize that no strategy can succeed or endure if it is drawn up in isolation from the country's core political issues." And set that against the latest US initiative, reported by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post today, "The U.S. Army is looking to private contractors to provide armed security guards to protect Forward Operating Bases in seven provinces in southern Afghanistan."
It may well be that the Obama Administration has a strategy for "engagement" in Afghanistan, not just with the increasingly precarious central Government, but with opposition groups who are usually clustered under the umbrella term "Taliban". If it doesn't, however, I suspect that --- as the Pakistan spillover from the Afghan conflict overtakes it in crisis intensity --- America's allies are going to agitate for a political alternative to more troops and more mercenaries.
Juxtapose two stories from Sunday: "British army officers are in face-to-face negotiations with former Taliban enemies" with "Most of the additional American troops arriving in Afghanistan early next year will be deployed near the capital, Kabul".
For context, you can add the comment of Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN Special Representative in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2004, "The Afghans and NATO countries must recognize that no strategy can succeed or endure if it is drawn up in isolation from the country's core political issues." And set that against the latest US initiative, reported by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post today, "The U.S. Army is looking to private contractors to provide armed security guards to protect Forward Operating Bases in seven provinces in southern Afghanistan."
It may well be that the Obama Administration has a strategy for "engagement" in Afghanistan, not just with the increasingly precarious central Government, but with opposition groups who are usually clustered under the umbrella term "Taliban". If it doesn't, however, I suspect that --- as the Pakistan spillover from the Afghan conflict overtakes it in crisis intensity --- America's allies are going to agitate for a political alternative to more troops and more mercenaries.
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