Mr Obama's War? Waiting for the US Strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan

Related Post: Afghanistan - Former Taliban Ready for Talks with US

So what is the Obama Administration's new approach to American intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Really. What is it?

Administration officials had set up the media this week for a dramatic re-launch of the US strategy, based on a series of reports for the President. The latest study, headed by Obama campaign advisor and former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, was on Obama's desk on Monday. US envoy Richard Holbrooke was holding forth for the media and briefing NATO members; less publicly, CIA Director Leon Panetta was visiting Pakistan. The President was telling 60 Minutes on Sunday night, "What we're looking for is a comprehensive strategy. And there's gotta be an exit strategy."

This spinning, however, does not add up to a new approach. For Afghanistan, there is still no detail on US troop levels, American non-military programmes, the contributions from Washington's allies. And for Pakistan, which Obama's people are now putting as Number One Crisis, there is no sense of how the expansion of missile strikes and covert operations matches up to a political approach, either towards the "sanctuaries" in the Northwest Frontier Provinces or towards the central Government in Islamabad.

What we have gotten instead from the US is vacuous cheerleading posing as "analysis". Jim Hoagland on The Washington Post wrote a love letter to "Gen. David Petraeus and diplomat Richard Holbrooke [who] are as smart as they come". Even worse, commentators like Jackson Diehl of The Washington Post and David Brooks of The New York Times have been treated to a Grand Tour of US bases in Afghanistan so they can parrot the words of American military commanders, "Over time this will work -- it has worked over and over again through history" (Diehl) and "When you put more boots on the ground, you not only augment your army’s firing power, you give it the capacity to experiment". (Brooks)

This puffery should be set aside for the leaked ideas coming out in British newspapers. The outgoing US ambassador in Afghanistan, William Wood, tells The Observer that "America would be prepared to discuss the establishment of a political party, or even election candidates representing the Taliban, as part of a political strategy that would sit alongside reinforced military efforts". The Times writes of an American approach linking economic aid, a build-up of Afghan security forces and police, and a crack-down on heroin production.

Most striking, sources tell The Guardian, "The US and its European allies are ­preparing to plant a high-profile figure in the heart of the Kabul government in a direct challenge to the Afghan president." Expecting that President Hamid Karzai will win re-election in August, despite its best efforts to build up a rival candidate, the US will insist on a "Chief Executive" or "Prime Minister".

The US strategy on Afghanistan and Pakistan --- really, what is it?

Mr Obama's War: Playing for Time in Afghanistan

Related Post: Transcript of President Obama’s Interview with New York Times

President Obama gave a 35-minute exclusive interview to The New York Times on Friday. On the economy, it's an essential read. On foreign policy, the Times made a complete hash of its exclusive.

Despite Obama's attention to the economic crisis, the Times headlined, "Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of the Taliban", declaring:

President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.

That is quite a scoop. Although Secretary of Defense Robert Gates raised the possibilities of such talks, it has not arisen as part of the possible Obama strategy, especially amidst the attention to the sharp increase in US troops in Afghanistan.

Only problem? It's not close to what Obama said. Here's the exchange:

Q. Do you see a time when you might be willing to reach out to more moderate elements of the Taliban, to try to peel them away, towards reconciliation?

A. I don’t want to pre-judge the review that’s currently taking place. If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq.

There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region. But the situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex. You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, so figuring all that out is going to be a much more of a challenge.

So it was the Times, not Obama, that broached the possibility of engagement with the Taliban. And the President stonewalled: yes, there had been talks with former foes in Iraq but this approach could not be simply applied to Afghanistan.

Obama's clear signal, which the Times reporters missed, was that his investment was in the review being headed by US envoy Richard Holbrooke and Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution. As we've noted, that review followed Obama's refusal to accept fully the approach --- based on three earlier reviews --- proposed by the US military.

The President may have seized the political initiative in Washington, but in Kabul the immediate issue is President Hamid Karzai's bid to hold onto power. The Obama Administration has made a public commitment to a review which includes Afghan and Pakistani participation. And possibly most importantly, the first priority for Obama and his advisors right now is Pakistan. Obama told the Times reporters:

At the heart of a new Afghanistan policy is going to be a smarter Pakistan policy. As long as you’ve got safe havens in these border regions that the Pakistani government can’t control or reach, in effective ways, we’re going to continue to see vulnerability on the afghan side of the border. And so it’s very important for us to reach out to the Pakistani government, and work with them more effectively.

The explanation for the misleading headline in the Times is an easy one. Helene Cooper, one of the two reporters writing up the interview, has a "Week in Review" piece in today's paper, "Dreaming of Splitting the Taliban". The article is based on the opinions of think-tank experts and a "European diplomat", but it has no input from an Administration official. No problem: Cooper just stuck the theme of his Week in Review analysis on top of the Obama interview, twisting the President into the inside source for the piece.

Even if the concept of talking to the moderate Taliban is one that should be supported, that's lazy journalism. So toss aside the Times fluff, keep your eyes for the moment on Pakistan, and wait --- possibly until the NATO summit at the start of April --- for a real story on an Obama strategy in Afghanistan.

Mr Obama's War: The Spin is...It's Not Afghanistan. It's Pakistan.

Related Post: Pakistan Military, Prime Minister Act Against Zardari

We've found an intriguing article in Time, "The Afghanistan Problem: Can Obama Avoid a Quagmire?", valuable not as much for Joe Klein's analysis as for the inside information fed to him.

The immediate impression is of an Administration effort to build up the urgency of the Afghanistan crisis. So we get a glance at the first, "pretty alarming" meeting on the country, held three days after Obama's Inauguration. Of course, the President "was extremely cool and in control", rather than screaming wildly or crying in the corner, "but some people, especially political aides like Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod who hadn't been briefed on the situation, walked out of that meeting stunned". To sum up, from another participant, "Holy s***."

No spin surprises there, but then we get good stuff. Such as that General David Petraeus, the mastermind heading US Central Command, is pissed off he didn't get his way on policy. Trashing Obama's decision not to accept the recommendations from Petraeus' review, one of the General's acolytes complains about the meetings, "You had people from the Department of Agriculture weighing in. There were too many cooks. The end result was lowest-common-denominator stuff. The usual Petraeus acuity wasn't there."

Obama's people threw the criticism right back at Petraeus, praising instead another study by General Douglas Lute, the Bush Administration's "war czar", which was "very skeptical about the Pakistani army's willingness to fight the Taliban and equally critical of the Karzai government in Afghanistan" They added, however, that the report "didn't provide much detail about what to do next".

So the President has commissioned another review, headed by US envoy Richard Holbrooke and Bruce Riedel, who was his campaign advisor on South Asia and is now outside the Administration in the Brookings Institution.

And here's the stinger. Even though that review isn't due until end of review, its conclusions (or what Obama's officials will spin as its conclusions) are already being leaked:

Afghanistan pales in comparison to the problems in Pakistan. Our primary goal has to be to shut down the al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens on the Pakistan side of the border. If that can be accomplished, then the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes manageable.

Klein gets a bit fuzzy at this point, primarily because the Administration is still fuzzy on what a Pakistan-first effort means. It can throw in the $1.5 billion/year authorised by Congress, running over five years, in economic aid, but officials are unsure how to distribute the money to have any effect. (It is irrelevant, of course, that Pakistan has a President who was charged/convicted in various countries with corruption.)

So what to do? This paragraph offers the most enlightening, but most disturbing, scenario:

"We have to re-establish close personal relationships with the army," said a senior member of the National Security Council, who was involved in an intense series of meetings with the Pakistani military leadership during the first week of March. "We have to be sure they're on the same page as we are. Based on what I saw, they aren't yet."

So, does this mean that the Pakistani military is kicking up a fuss about the US missile strikes and proposed American strategy in the Northwest Frontier Provinces? Or does this farther, with Washington envisaging a Pakistani military running Islamabad's policy, either behind the scenes or quite openly after toppling President Zardari?

Watch this space.

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