Mr Biden's War? An Afghanistan-Pakistan Strategy from 2007

Latest Post: Mr Obama’s War for/on Pakistan-Afghanistan - Holes in the Middle
Related Post: Two-Step Analysis of Mr Obama’s War Plan: Step Two in Afghanistan
Related Post: Two-Step Analysis of Mr Obama’s War Plan: Step One in Pakistan

Josh Mull is working on the idea that the Obama Administration's strategy on Pakistan and Afghanistan, to be unveiled later today, draws substantially from proposals put forth by now-Vice President Joe Biden almost 18 months ago.

As a Presidential candidate in November 2007, Biden gave a talk at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire on "re-engaging America in the world". His demonstration of US leadership (others in the world might not like us, but they recognise that we are the country that can make a difference) focused on a solution for the internal difficulties in Pakistan, linked to an escalation of the US military intervention in Afghanistan. Biden, in particular, offered a mix of American "soft power", reaching out to the Pakistani people, while emphasizing good governance and finding a way forward with Pakistan's military.

While I think the US plan in it specifics will look far different from Biden's 2007 conception, the general tenet of "engaging" with Pakistan while stepping up the Afghan campaign --- as well as the (superficial) mix of military and "soft power" programmes --- does underlay this Obama strategy.

Have a listen and see what you think.

Did the US Avert a Coup in Pakistan? No.

And now an enlightening tale of the Internet and how to substitute an exaggeration for the real story:

This morning there are stories flying around the Web that Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, may have stopped a military coup in Pakistan through a series of phone call to General Ashfaq Pervez Kiani, through a series of phone calls.

It is being reported by more reliable sources like Al Jazeera that Kiani and President Asif Ali Zardari have clashed in the last 24 hours, but Mullen didn't intervene to stop a military takeover. Here's how the rumour, and distortion, started.

On Thursday night, Mullen was interviewed by Charlie Rose of the US Public Broadcasting System. Here's the video and transcript of the key exchange in the discussion:

CHARLIE ROSE: But you see reports today of increasing strife between Zardari, the leader of Pakistan, and his opposition, worrying some people that it might become Musharraf all over again.

MICHAEL MULLEN: Sure. We’re watching -- obviously watching this lawyers march very carefully. And I’ve been engaged from the standpoint of understanding what’s going on there, and I know that there are people are concerned that this could degenerate into a situation that could very possibly generate a crisis, which may cause actions to be taken on the part of the military.

I don’t think that possibility is out there as a high probability right now, but certainly it’s a concern. And I’ve interacted with my counterpart in Pakistan upwards of 10 times. I mean, I’ve been with him
upwards of 10 times over the last year, and he is committed to a civilian government. He’s committed to the democracy that’s there. In my view, the last thing in the world he wants to do is become -- is take over as President Musharraf did.

CHARLIE ROSE: He wants to stay out of politics?

MICHAEL MULLEN: He does want to stay out of politics. He also -- he wants to do the right thing for Pakistan. And he’s in a very, very tough spot. He also knows his country well, and so obviously he’s paying a lot of attention to this as well, as we all are. And I’m just hopeful that this doesn’t turn into another crisis in Pakistan.

This is straightforward: those pushing the "coup" question have turned Mullen's 10 exchanges with Kiani over the last year, which include recent meetings in Washington and Kabul, into 10 phone calls from Mullen to Kiani in recent days. Those discussions were on broader military matters, notably the handling of the insurgency in the Northwest Frontier Provinces.

The US Government does not want a coup in the middle of this crisis. If Washington thinks Zardari is too damaging to stay in power, then it will look for his replacement, but at a quieter time and a less dramatic process.

If those jumping to coup conclusions had listened to the next section of Mullen's interview, they would have gotten to the real heart of the story:

CHARLIE ROSE: How do you get the army chief of staff, Kiyani, to take those military forces and use them not in anticipation of conflict with India, but more in pursuit of forces that want to destabilize Pakistan?

MICHAEL MULLEN: Well, first of all, he recognizes that he has an extremist threat in Pakistan. They’ve lost many, many citizens. And in fact, there’s -- if you look at the suicide bombings which have occurred over the last year or so, they’ve actually moved towards -- and a couple of them have actually occurred in Islamabad. So he recognizes there’s a serious extremist terrorist threat inside his country, and in fact his forces have fought very hard this year up in Bajaur, which is in Mohmand, up on the western border.

Clearly, the Mumbai attacks in India put him in a position where he had to focus more on the Indian border, and he has. I mean, he’s a chief who’s got threats coming from both directions. It’s very important -- and I give President Musharraf and Prime Minister Singh a lot of credit - because they actually detentioned [sic] that border during President Musharraf’s time, and in fact the tourism started to flourish, there was trade which started to flourish across that border, and all that got suspended with the Mumbai attacks.

So General Kiyani knows what he has to do. He needs to move more troops to the west and he needs to train them in counterinsurgency.

There you have it. As Josh Mull has noted on this site, the Obama Administration wants to keep the Pakistani military focused on the "sanctuary" in the northwest and wants the Pakistani Government firmly behind Pakistani, US, and joint operations there. There should be no conflict with India distracting from that effort.

And --- here is the point of the US policy towards the Long March --- there should be no distraction of domestic politics from that overriding objective. So Washington's efforts over the last few days have been not to topple Zardari but to get the President to back off from a showdown with political rivals like Nawaz Sharif and to be careful in his handling of the lawyers' movement.

If Zardari continues to see political and judicial opponents as Public Enemies Number One, and thus loses the plot on the approach to the "real" insurgency, then he may have to go.

But not now.

Mr Obama's Doctrine: Josh Mull on US Grand Strategy in Pakistan and Beyond

Related Post: Mr Obama's War - Pakistan Insurgency "Unites" (You Heard It Here First)

"The 'Obama Doctrine' looks something like this: the United States will continue to use its military power as its premier tool in international affairs and may even act preemptively. However, it will not  do so on issues it deems outside of reasonable American national security concerns, and it will act only with support and cooperation from the international community. To put it frankly, this is something like a cross between 'walk softly and carry a big stick' and the Buddy System. While still violent, imperial, and aggressive, it is a marked departure from the so-called Bush Doctrine and even the Global War on Terror."

Yesterday Scott Lucas, in “Mr. Obama's War: The Fantasy of the Pakistan Sanctuaries”, analysed US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' appearance on Meet the Press, pointing out the cognitive dissonance in Gates' assertion that the US understands safe havens in Pakistan because it has previously used those same Pakistani safe havens so effectively. Lucas also raises some very interesting questions, particularly over Gates' apparent non-answer to the question of the consequences for Pakistan of the US campaign. This is my attempt to answer those questions, as well as a proposal to parse out a broader US “grand strategy” from Gates' appearance.

Host David Gregory asked Gates on Sunday, “The trouble and consequences of jihadists making significant gains in either Afghanistan or Pakistan is perhaps more acute in Pakistan given its nuclear potential. True?” In reply, Gates' offered this:

Well, as long as we’re in Afghanistan and as long as the Afghan government has the support of dozens and dozens of countries who are providing military support, civilian support in addition to us, we are providing a level of stability in Afghanistan that at least prevents it from being a safe haven from which plots against the United States and the Europeans and others can be, can be put together.

The key is this: Gates isn't answering the question about Pakistan to David Gregory. He's answering the question about Pakistan directly to the Pakistanis.

I decoded Gates' reply as: "Well, as long as I can go on a Sunday morning Prime Time talk show and say 9/11, Taliban, and Osama bin Laden and as long as my Commander-in-Chief can draw crowds of 200,000 screaming Europeans, Pakistan can suck it up and deal with whatever we want to do, including destabilizing or overthrowing their corrupt government and/or stealing or destroying their illegal nuclear weapons, which by the way, I already have the authority to do from a little thing called the Lugar-Obama bill to secure weapons of mass destruction."

In short, it's not the responsibility of the Secretary of Defense to keep Pakistan stable, it is his responsibility to attack extremist safe havens in Pakistan in order to prevent a catastrophic terrorist attack against the US, Canada, or the European Union. President Obama, and by extension the plans of his Secretary of Defense, enjoys bipartisan political support as well as stable international credibility. Accordingly the US will act, as Lucas said in his article, as if “there are no consequences whatsoever for the internal Pakistani situation" or, more appropriately, without regard to these consequences.

But there is more we can glean from Secretary Gates' interview than it appears. Beyond the purposes Lucas pointed out --- pitching Obama's Iraq withdrawal plan and articulating US Afghanistan policy --- it's possible Gates was offering us, and the international audience, insight into the broader strategic calculations of the United States, particularly the role of the Department of Defense and US military power abroad.

President Obama has shown himself to be somewhat of a Centrist, if only in regard to his desire to hear from all sides of an argument or debate. One thing all foreign policy and national security analysts, from the Conservative "Fall of Rome" crowd to the Realist "Second World" types all the way to the Neoconservative "Team America" folks, can agree on is this: the United States of America is now and will continue to be Earth's preeminent military force, at least for the foreseeable future.

There is a saying amongst foreign policy elites:  "Who has the world's largest air force after the US Air Force? The US Army."

With Pakistan, Gates is essentially saying that, as long as the US, Canada, and Europe are threatened by extremist attacks from Afghanistan and Pakistan, the US will continue to act aggressively with its military force. It will do so in any manner and on any territory of its choosing, provided it has the support and cooperation of Europe and NATO (whose members will suffer from terrorism long before the US).

What's absent is any mention of India, which implies the support of India in Afghanistan and protection from Pakistan-launched, "Mumbai-style" attacks are not part of the US calculation. ("Your problem, not ours.")

It may seem like Gates casually forgot to mention India and Mumbai in his response on Pakistan. After all, "AfPak" is an extremely complicated subject, and it's easy to leave things out or get things mixed up. At least, that will be the talking point if this becomes an issue. However, we know two things: first, India and Pakistan are inextricably linked together in any strategic calculus, and second, that this wasn't just a casual visit to Meet the Press by Bob Gates. It was the public coming-out ceremony for George W. Bush's former and now President Obama's current Secretary of Defense, civilian leader of the United States Military.

The importance of this public appearance can't be understated. It was not necessarily designed for the domestic audience of NBC viewers, but rather was aimed at a more global audience and, directly, to the Pakistanis. This is what makes the apparently deliberate absence of India from the “AfPak” equation so significant. The absence, the answer, and the entire interview together could lead us to presume that Gates is articulating the prototype for what will later be called “the Obama Doctrine”.

The “Obama Doctrine” looks something like this: the United States will continue to use its military power as its premier tool in international affairs and may even act preemptively. However, it will not  do so on issues it deems outside of reasonable American national security concerns, and it will act only with support and cooperation from the international community. To put it frankly, this is something like a cross between “walk softly and carry a big stick” and the Buddy System. While still violent, imperial, and aggressive, it is a marked departure from the so-called Bush Doctrine and even the Global War on Terror.

The India-Pakistan and Kashmir and Bangladesh) conflict is the perfect illustration. Under the old rules of the Bush Doctrine, the response to something like the Mumbai attacks might be airstrikes, special forces, or some other combination of clandestine military force. Under the “Obama Doctrine”, the Defense Department under Gates, and thus the US military, are not responsible for the India-Pakistan conflict. Rather this would fall under the portfolios of US Attorney General Eric Holder and his FBI as well US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her cadres of ambassadors and envoys,with support and cooperation from that throbbing heart of diplomacy in Brussels (the European Union), law enforcement agents with Interpol and NATO, and the mediation and oversight of the United Nations.

Obviously it's an extreme departure from George W Bush's radical Napoleonic-cum-Bolshevik strategy of the Global War on Terror, but that doesn't necessarily mean the “Obama Doctrine” will turn out any more successfully than the Bush Doctrine. In fact, the strategy is brimming with vulnerabilities.

The US may be the most powerful military, it is not the only military on the planet. In the fall of 2007 as civil unrest was broiling in Pakistan under General Pervez Musharraf, then-Senator now Vice President Joe Biden campaigned in the Democratic Party primaries on a promise to pull strategic military aid from Pakistan, that is weapons used against India, to pressure Pakistan to focus on the insurgency rather than more ethereal, strategic conflicts. In response, however, the Chinese offered to sell Pakistan a new fleet of MiG fighter jets, similar to the American planes Biden was threatening to withdraw. Now, as then, there is a constant danger that any diplomatic “sticks” threatened by the US can simply be neutralized by other international actors willing to take its place.

Furthermore there is the problem caused by the global financial meltdown and the massive economic depressions it is causing. While Secretary Gates may have it in his authority to bomb Pakistani safe havens as well as police the Straits of Malacca, the United States may not ultimately be able to afford the high price of imperialism. And if the US is forced to cut back on its imperalist designs, it will create some extremely uncomfortable strategic questions for policy makers. For example, what is the higher priority between preventing a bus bombing in London or preventing a missile exchange between Korea and Japan when you can't afford both?

So we don't end on such a morbid tone, let me point out that this prototypical “Obama Doctrine” has some very powerful advantages over the Bush Doctrine, the Global War on Terror, and the so-called Long War/Great Game theories. The most important advantage is that it is absolutely conscious of and constructed on the idea of a “Multi-Polar” world. Even though the US seeks to dominate international affairs, it acknowledges and plans for the participation of other actors, states, or non-states. By allowing for participation, it allows for competition, and as President Obama displays with his choice of Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State, competition has both winners and losers who can still join together for a common purpose. There is no absolute victory or defeat of good and evil, but rather a competition among partners.

Mr Obama's War: Pakistan Insurgency "Unites" (You Heard It Here First)

Related Post: Mr Obama’s Doctrine - Josh Mull on US Grand Strategy in Pakistan and Beyond

Enduring America, 23 February: "The Asia Times reports, in the aftermath of the local cease-fire between the Pakistani Governments and groups in the Northwest Frontier Provice, 'A mujahideen shura (Shura Ittehad al-Mujahideen) council was formed this weekend due to the personal efforts of Sirajuddin Haqqani.'"

The Guardian, 3 March: "Three rival Pakistani Taliban groups have agreed to form a united front against international forces in Afghanistan in a move likely to intensify the insurgency just as thousands of extra US soldiers begin pouring into the country as part of Barack Obama's surge plan. The Guardian has learned that three of the most powerful warlords in the region have settled their differences and come together under a grouping calling itself Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen, or Council of United Holy Warriors."

The Guardian may be getting to the story a bit late but at least, unlike most media in the "West", it has noted a significant development.

And, to give reporter Saeed Shah further credit, the article picks up on the equally important "other half" of the story: "The unity among the militants comes after a call by Mullah Omar, the cleric who leads the Afghan Taliban, telling Pakistani militants to stop fighting at home in order to join the battle to 'liberate Afghanistan from the occupation forces'."

No doubt Josh Mull, who has posted essential blogs for Enduring America on the Pakistani insurgency, can go a bit further than the simple call-and-response narrative. As he has noted, the "Taliban" is now a coalition of forces, some of whom have moved beyond Mullah Omar, and Pakistani local insurgents have their own motives for offering to hold fire at home and fighting abroad.

Still the essential question is now put: are the manoeuvres between the insurgent groups and the Pakistani Government for cease-fires and local deals going to free up these forces to wage an even more intense campaign against the US and its "Obama Doctrine" not just in Pakistan but across the border?