The Paradox of Our Afghan Strategy

I missed this when it circulated amongst the foreign ministers at the Munich Security Conference  two weeks ago.   Good thing for that subscription to the New York Review of Books, I say!

Go ahead and read Ahmed Rashid’s brief essay.  I’m sipping the crap coffee my wife now makes me drink, that horrible poop puddle confected of hot water inexplicably jetted into a plastic tub of pre-ground joe in defiance of the natural laws and the will of God.

Blech.  Who would create such a gadget?  I might as well slurp java from the urinal.

OK, you’re back!  Want some coffee?

The first thing that probably popped out for you is this salient fact:

In a summer offensive the Taliban can still mobilize some 25,000 fighters — the same figure they had in the 2005–6 campaigns. Taliban survival is directly linked to the sanctuary, support, and logistics they receive in neighboring Pakistan from various elements in that country.

Lahore’s Rashid  not only knows the Taliban, but he easily can find the Pakistani elites who can tell him how many guerrillas the militias shall mobilize for war this summer.

Keep that in mind when you hear unattributed nonsense from kick-the-can-down-the-road strategists who say the Taliban allegedly have been soundly defeated in the south and east of Afghanistan.  My ass.

If they want to prove otherwise, our  generals, dissembling diplomats and perfidious politicos can release the classified battlefield reports on the COIN effort in Afghanistan.  They won’t, I suggest, because they know that the data won’t back up their overly optimistic fibs to the American people.

We’re left with the possibility – so says Rashid – that the COINerrific ink spots spreading across Afghanistan, the night raids designed to fracture the cadre of the various Taliban militias and the drone assassination program on the other side of the Durand Line to swidden the insurgents’ hierarchy have achieved only a modest attrition of the enemy.

Just as in Vietnam, the enemy made up their losses faster than we could kill or capture them.  Or, at least, they’ve made up enough of their losses to remain a potent force within east and south Afghanistan.

So long as Pakistan offers safe harbor to many (but not all) of the Taliban the center of gravity shall remain there, not in Afghanistan.  That’s why the U.S. and Hamid Karzai’s kleptocracy shouldn’t be talking merely to the Quetta Shura but also to the Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Only Islamabad can end the war or tamp it down to a relatively bloodless peace, a point Rashid makes very well even if our State Department often doesn’t.

Rashid gets the strategic paradox right:  Despite his public rhetoric, Karzai desperately needs the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan, guaranteeing not only his government’s survival but his personal safety as our pocket-picking puppet.  So he’s angling to force the U.S. into a long-term military commitment — at least a stay with enough air power, logistical lift and trainers to keep his nascent army vaguely persuasive as an extension of the “state.”

With our republic long tired of this war and the increasingly maudlin lies bandied about to sell it, Washington wants to creep out of  Kabul by 2014 – or sooner if  SecDef  Leon Panetta has his way.  That will let the 325,000 men of the Afghan security forces fight for their own future.  The Taliban, playing also to Afghan sentiments that reach across the ethnic divisions, would rather that we leave sooner rather than later and that’s going to be a sticking point during any talks, according to Rashid:

Karzai will find it impossible to conclude both a security agreement with the US and a reconciliation agreement with the Taliban. The two aims are mutually exclusive.

Rashid is quite right that Taliban leaders can’t go back to their tens of thousands of fighters and say that they’ve reached accommodation with the U.S., allowing western troops to keep ruthlessly killing them far more efficiently than Afghan troops ever will.    He’s also spot on when he points out that Washington’s exit strategy isn’t a political solution for the region and it shouldn’t be sold as one.

But Rashid also gets some things a bit wrong.  Not the facts, mind you, only the tone.

For example, he needs to mention why the U.S. finally had to set a date to leave Afghanistan.

Even worse than our former allies in Saigon four decades ago, Afghanistan’s political and military bosses are wholly dependent on the U.S. for survival.  The Mayor of Kabul’s “government” can’t rule very far outside of the capital, and even within the city its security forces have demonstrated a haplessness when it comes to either stopping or ending quickly dramatic terror events that play out across the urban skyline.

Unsustainable war spending and dope dealing now comprise nearly all of Afghanistan’s overheating economy.  Unfortunately, the U.S. and other major industrial nations are responsible for both, and our spending on heroin and the aid we sluice into the rentier state also prop up the guerrillas we’re battling.

Kabul’s chiefs won’t prepare themselves sufficiently for a post-ISAF future without doing those things we (inexplicably) believe that they must do to succeed – work alongside us to craft a somewhat competent security force, govern effectively to build popular legitimacy for the Karzai regime (ibid), end the endemic corruption and absorb the many warlords into a political and defense structure that guarantees the Afghan state instead of undermining it — goals impossible to achieve so long as we continue to treat with tolerance Karzai’s Kabul as our wastrel heirs.

Either Afghanistan’s “government” shall need to change its priorities — which is what we seem to be asking after nearly a decade of building it — or we’ll have to modify our policy goals, shrinking our lofty expectations for the Karzai kleptocracy as we decrease the size and strength of our mission to pivot to far more pressing security needs elsewhere.

Rashid’s absolutely right that our timed departure doesn’t create a political end state but that’s the only way we can prod Karzai to do what must be done after more than a decade of support from the U.S. and our allies.  Many of them are leaving the coalition  because either  this long war has broken their tiny ground forces or public disapproval has made continuing its prosecution increasingly untenable.

Rashid also is right that peace can be achieved  only if there’s a regional concord that will prevent Afghanistan from returning to its previous anarchy, which really was a proxy war for rivals in a bad neighborhood: “China,Russia, the five Central Asian republics,Pakistan and Iran… are against any long-term presence of US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014.  No regional non-interference guarantees will be given by these states if the US retains bases.”

But that’s also not telling the whole story.  We’ve been trying to reach a regional political agreement on Afghanistan for several years now and we’re apparently no closer to its adoption so we should be realistic about the odds of achieving it.

We can’t dally forever on this, even if India wants U.S. forces to remain within Afghanistan.  As we inch away from Kabul we should concede that India will fill the vacuum, serving many of our interests along the way.  We also should admit that it will be impossible to prevent Iran, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan from clandestinely aiding their own ethnic surrogates inside Afghanistan, just as Pakistan won’t quit its support to various Taliban militias with long ties to Islamabad.

Please tell me what will guarantee their non-interference.  UN blue helmets and a firm handshake with Hillary Clinton?

The larger question, of course, is whether this should matter one way or the other.  It’s perhaps cold-hearted, but I fail to see how America’s interests are harmed by Afghanistan failing to become the democratic, free market state we project as our Hindu Kush fantasy.  So long as others indirectly help ensure that our interests are preserved, so what?

I also can’t fathom Rashid’s stern advice to Islamabad.  He says that Pakistan should take part in the talks, let the Taliban travel freely to Qatar, free the Taliban prisoners held by Islamabad and give the militias “a deadline for reaching a settlement with Karzai, leaving Pakistan, and returning to Afghanistan.”

I agree with much of this and obviously so does Pakistan.  The Taliban will enjoy unfettered travel to Qatar, where they’re setting up their diplomatic headquarters.  But I’d qualify some of the other points Rashid made.

First, the U.S. shouldn’t even be talking to the Taliban.  Yet.

I propose that the Director of National Intelligence, LTG (ret.) James Clapper, hold a summit with  Pakistan’s ISI and India’s Research & Analysis Wing because they, to a large extent, shall become the guarantors of Afghanistan’s future and we might wish to hear what they say on the matter before we gab with a bunch of armed goat herders.

What sort of post-2014 Afghanistan are ISI and RAW willing to live with?  Until we have that answer, what’s the point of talking to the second-stringers?

Next, I can’t for the life of me figure out why Pakistan would do our bidding and set an eviction deadline for the Taliban militias currently working with them.  If they’re convinced that they’re going to win this war why would they scuttle it?  Because they feel particularly clement toward Washington today?

There seems to be this odd assumption that states, even fragile ones armed with nuclear warheads, should toil incessantly to harm their own interests and serve ours or those of the peace-loving international “community,” which is to say NGOs and other professional do-gooders.

And I’d add that so far as India and Pakistan are concerned, their regional defense policies, including aid to proxies in wars beyond their borders, also address domestic political concerns.  You say “FATA” or “Afghanistan” and I might just as easily blurt out “Kashmir” or “Balochistan.”

There’s a reason why Pakistan has aimed its own Pathan troublemakers westward toward Kabul for decades.  So, also, the fact that Islamabad considers its Manichean struggle with India and its restive Balochistan to be more pressing issues than Afghanistan, except when our drones do something particularly untoward or our SEALs kill a terrorist mastermind inexplicably housed in Pakistan’s version of West Point.

There’s also the brutal reality that Pakistan doesn’t seem to incarcerate the sorts of Taliban who remain the friends of ISI, only those who don’t bend to the agency’s will.   How many Haqqani operatives are behind bars?

Exactly.

Pakistan also has absolutely no reason to stop supporting the various Taliban fighting the U.S. and Kabul.  Not so long as they are seen to be winning – or, at least, not losing too badly, which is much the same thing in a long insurgency.   How does abandoning these militias aid Islamabad’s broader political goals against India and the U.S.?

I can’t figure it out.

Rashid might be correct that if Pakistan took these steps Islamabad would quicken the rush to peace.  But prove to me that ISI — or the rest of Pakistan — wants peace.

War has been quite profitable for Pakistan’s elites.  The war has sapped American power and Washington’s desire to intervene elsewhere on the globe.  Rather than boot ISI from power, the war appears to have emboldened the agency and positioned it and China well for a post-American future in South Asia.

Pray tell me again why Pakistan should do otherwise than what Pakistan has done so well?

For a completely different take:  Friend of the Line of Departure Dr. Joe Collins makes his case at SWJ.   Also worth your time.  Even if he’s wrong.

Tags: Afghanistan, Ahmed, Pakistan, Taliban