Two-Step Analysis of Mr Obama's War Plan: Step Two in Afghanistan

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There's a cold reality in today's Obama Administration war plan, with its projection of Pakistan as Crisis Number One. Yet there's also a bit of magic: in its presentation of Crisis Number Two in Afghanistan, the Administration has given the media two marvellous diversions.

AFGHANISTAN: THE HOLE IN THE MIDDLE

The first diversion is the headline of 4000 US trainers for Afghan security forces. This will enable the Administration to proclaim that its plan is to ensure Afghanistan can protect and police itself, offering the long-term prospect of a drawdown of American forces. In reality, however, this token deployment will do little to confront the immediate situation with the insurgency.

It does, however, allow Obama and Co., after the showdown compromise with the military earlier this year over troop increases, to show that it is still committed to "tough love" in Afghanistan. The commanders have gotten most of the 30,000 extra troops they wanted, and the Administration is making it well-known that this is not an "exit strategy".

The second bit of magic is the proclamation that the Administration, focusing on the threat of Al Qa'eda, is moving away from the Bush strategy of "democracy promotion" in Afghanistan. This is --- let me see if I can find the right academic word here --- rubbish.

The Bush Administration, beyond its surface proclamations of "liberation" after the fall of the Taliban, never saw spread of democracy as the mission in Afghanistan. Once it had installed the "right" leader in Hamid Karzai (yes, I know the obvious irony, given today's situation), the Bushmen --- as any examination of their approach to "nation-building" will establish in about two second --- just wanted a military presence to keep the Taliban in check while they moved on to their top goal of knocking off Saddam Hussein.

How, then, to read this convenient fiction? It has less to do with the strategy against the Afghan insurgency and more to do with the American strategy vis-a-vis the Government in Kabul and, beyond that, some folks in Pakistan.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that there is nothing in the advance spin on the Obama plan on possible talks with "former" insurgents, even though this has been in the wind for some time. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held out the prospect last year, and it has been conflated with the Iraq precedent of the magical "surge" and linking up with Sunni groups.

But who is to talk to these "former" insurgents or "moderate" Taliban, given that is unlikely that these groups will go into direct discussions with the US? One possibility is that President Karzai could set himself up as the interlocutor --- indeed, he has been pressing for this for some time --- but Washington no longer trusts their former front-man. Another possibility is that the negotiations could go via Pakistan, but that is even more problematic. A former CIA official spelled it out for Time magazine:

[Pakistani contacts with] people we regard as enemies are not so much trying to aid them against America as preparing for a future when Americans and NATO are no longer in Afghanistan.

But the US doesn't want to get out of Afghanistan, at least not in the near-future, so it needs a "reliable" political centre to hold together its strategy.

And that is precisely what it does not have. The Karzai Administration is not to be trusted, but Washington has no successor lined up (thus its very "un-democratic" admission that Karzai will win re-election, whether that comes in April or August, and there really should be a "Chief Executive" or "Prime Minister" to offset him). The US has given up on NATO, since European countries will not increase their military investment, which rules out another external lever (if there was any prospect it might work) for change in Kabul.

So Washington is stuck putting more troops into Afghanistan with no strategy to underpin the commitment.
The alternative is to start striking agreements with local political leaders --- again under whatever label you want to give them --- but the US is not even in the lead position in those manoeuvres. Iran, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and of course Pakistan can claim more of a foothold in various parts of Afghanistan. Perhaps more importantly, the illusion that the US can control a local movement --- the greatest magic trick of all, carried out in Petraeus Wonderland in Iraq from 2007 --- looks shaky here.

Of course, this reading may be premature. It may all come clear, without smoke and mirrors, when Hillary Clinton addresses the international summit in The Hague next week. But the more I look at this, the more it seems to a leak put out by the Obama Administration in January: if they could put in some troops, it would buy time. And then --- somewhere, somehow, much later --- they might figure out what to do.

Figuring out what to do, however, seems to be a solution via the elimination of the Pakistan "safe havens". If that is true, then more than seven years after 9-11, the magic isn't that Afghanistan is no longer to be a "democracy". The magic is that it has become sideshow.

It's a very expensive, very destructive sideshow, of course, but it's still a supporting act for the main event being set up across the border.

Why a US "Surge" Won't Work in Afghanistan

Speaking at the Royal Institute of International Affairs last Wednesday, Rory Stewart offered an incisive examination of the difficulties with a military-first approach to Afghanistan. The following extract is taken from The Times of London:

The situation in Afghanistan is somewhat aggravating and a little surreal. We have been there now for seven years - but I don't know if the British Government knows why. Do we have a policy? Or are we simply waiting to discover what the Obama Administration wishes to do and go along with it?

This year the US is expected to spend more than $50 billion on military and civilian aid. We are talking big sums but we don't have a clear account of what we are doing.

When the US invaded in 2001, its objective was to ensure that al-Qaeda could never again build training camps in Afghanistan. That was achieved with relative ease and with a limited number of special forces and intelligence operatives.

By 2002 we were beginning to talk about development. We launched national solidarity programmes, gave money to villages. But over the next two years it became fashionable in policymaking circles in Britain and the US to say that there was no point in focusing on Afghanistan as an arena for counter-terrorism or a recipient of charity - we should be building a state.

This was when Britain and Nato decided to deploy more troops. Britain has increased the numbers in Helmand province from 250 to 5,000. The belief then was that they were there to help state-building, not to fight the Taleban, which was why John Reid, the Defence Secretary, said to much mockery that he “hoped that the British troops would return without a shot fired”. There was little sign then of any overt Taleban presence, and it was relatively safe for Westerners to travel through Helmand.

I sat down in Kabul with a senior member of the British Embassy and the Number 2 of the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan in 2005 and asked: “Why are you deploying British troops to Helmand?”

They said: “To improve economic development, to improve governance and eliminate corruption, to improve road security and, in particular, to deal with the narcotics problem.”

I said: “You'll provoke an insurgency”. They replied: “No, you're traumatised by Iraq. Opinion polls show that in Helmand British and American troops are very popular.” I asked: “What type of timeframe are you looking at to see improvements?” They said six months.

I had just come from Iraq, where I had been an administrator of a province in the south and I said: “This is nonsense; will you write on a piece of paper that these are the kinds of improvements you're going to see, and if you don't see them, will you agree not to say: ‘We didn't have enough troops or enough helicopters' or ‘We are where we are, it is too humiliating to withdraw'. Will you accept that if these improvements don't come in six months the policy was wrong?” They agreed.

From that moment on, I have become increasingly frustrated. A Taleban insurgency has exploded but policymakers will not acknowledge that their original objectives have not been achieved. Instead, they blame implementation, the type of helicopters or previous commanders. Now policymakers have moved on from development, state-building and counter-insurgency to “preserving the credibility of Nato” and regional stability: “We are in Afghanistan to hold Pakistan together.”

Enter General Petraeus and his surge of 17,000 troops. There is good evidence that by deploying a further 30,000 troops “King David” turned the situation around in Iraq. I was in Baghdad this month, and walked streets I would not have been able to walk three years ago. I was not wearing a helmet, nobody was shooting or throwing rocks at me. So can General Petraeus conclude that by deploying more troops to Afghanistan he will be able to pull off the same thing?

There are two different accounts of what he hopes to do by deploying more troops in Afghanistan. One is straight from the counter-insurgency manual: clear/hold/build. Clear out the Taleban, secure populated areas and allow the forces of sustainable economic development to flourish, good governance to come and the Afghan police and security services to back us so we can go home.

The more cynical explanation is that the surge is an attempt to whack the Taleban round the head because they will not negotiate unless they are hurting. This is, broadly speaking, what Henry Kissinger believed of the Vietcong in 1968. The US increased troop numbers to drive them to the table to make concessions.
Neither approach will work. The Afghan groups do not resemble the Vietcong or the Sunni tribal groups in Iraq. The Shia-run Government in Baghdad could cut a deal with the Sunni groups because they are both relatively powerful and coherent factions backed by mass politics. Go to any southern Iraqi town and you will find a man in a buttoned-up shirt without a tie who says: “I am the head of this party” and who can mobilise thousands.

Go to a town in Afghanistan and ask who is in charge and you find six or seven figures with varying sorts of power - perhaps a tribal chief, maybe the police chief or sub-district commander. They do not have mass movements behind them. When we talk about driving the Taleban to the table, we forget that these groups are more insubstantial and fragmented than we acknowledge. The Kabul Government lacks political depth or legitimacy; the Taleban is elusive.

But I'm not a radical pessimist. Being realistic about our limitations does not mean that Britain must accept the status of a third-rate power. We can achieve many things in Afghanistan that are worthwhile for us and for the Afghans. We have made serious progress in education, health and rural development; Afghans are asking for simple things such as roads, electricity and irrigation and we have the skills to provide them. We should focus on the progressive, pro-Western centre and north, rather than pouring almost all our resources into the insurgency zones of the south and the east where schools are often destroyed as soon as they are built.

We need a much lighter military footprint. We cannot afford to keep 80,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan for a decade. US and European voters won't support it, it is an extravagant distraction from more important strategic priorities, including Pakistan and as long as we are seen as an occupying power, there will be Afghans who want to fight us.

We should plan now to reduce the size of our military commitment and decide what we can do with fewer troops. This does not mean abandoning Afghanistan entirely. The US and its allies should use special forces and intelligence operatives to ensure that al-Qaeda never again finds Afghanistan a safe and comfortable environment in which to establish training camps. Even a few thousand international troops and US air support would be a serious deterrent to civil war. But most importantly we must continue to provide generous long-term financial support to the Afghan Government and its military.

Policymakers are now more cautious about Afghanistan and say that their only objective is stability.
But even this is implausible. Pakistan is 20 years ahead of Afghanistan on almost every indicator and is yet to achieve the kind of stability we dream of in Afghanistan. Instead, we must think in terms of containing and managing a difficult, poor and unstable country without sinking too much into this difficult task. We must husband our resources for the many other crises already erupting - from the British banking sector to Pakistan.

There are many small simple things we can do to help Afghan society. All require us to forge a long-term engagement with the country. But such a policy is only possible if we reduce our investment in money and troops and develop a lighter, more affordable and ultimately more sustainable relationship with Afghanistan.

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: Pakistan Military, Prime Minister Act Against Zardari

Related Post: The Spin is…It’s Not Afghanistan. It’s Pakistan.

Hours after we asked, "[Is] Washington envisaging a Pakistani military running Islamabad’s policy, either behind the scenes or quite openly after toppling President Zardari?", the Asia Times offers a short-term answer:

Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani (pictured with US General David Petraeus)....met President Asif Ali Zardari for the first time this week --- actually twice --- after returning from Washington, where he had met with senior officials. As a result, a planned crackdown against opposition parties has been shelved.

The newspaper reports that the Punjab Assembly will be reopened; it had been closed after the disqualification of the Chief Minister, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's brother Shahbaz. And, after pressure from Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani, Zardari has given up on a plan for mobile law courts. Opposition parties feared these could be used to punish their activists during protests in forthcoming weeks.

The article continues:

On Thursday, Kiani discussed the situation at a meeting with the corps commanders - the heads of the regional army groups - and shared Washington's concerns about governance in Pakistan....This military intervention - and Gillani getting closer to the army - coincides with a drop in Zardari's popularity within his own Pakistan People's Party, the lead party in the ruling coalition.

So, does this mean Zardari is a dead President walking? This is the provocative conclusion of the report:

Although Kiani has become more active, neither the Americans nor the Pakistan army actually wants to change horses in mid-stream. Yet the country is becoming less and less governable under the present arrangement, and quick action is required.

This does not necessarily mean getting rid of Zardari, but he could well be forced to make further concessions to his political rival, former premier and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, by giving him a share of power. If Zardari does not do this, the military's hand could be forced.

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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