Afghanistan Options Unsatisfactory, Pres. Seeks Winning Strategy
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Related subjects: Afghanistan, Asia / Pacific, J.E. Robertson, Obama administration, Security & Surveillance, U.S. news, U.S. Politics Comments Off
Last week, the United States’ ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Lt.-Gen. Karl Eikenberry, warned against sending any additional troops to Afghanistan in support of the corrupt system of government headed by Hamid Karzai, who appears to have rigged the recent presidential election that returned him to power. Investigative reporter and Afghanistan specialist Peter Bergen has told CNN the comment is “seismic”, but warned a delay based on waiting for the Afghan government to become less corrupt could mean years without effective resolution of security conditions there.
Pres. Barack Obama has reportedly rejected four proposed strategies for stepping up the war effort in Afghanistan, believing them to be insufficient in terms of both a timetable and an exit strategy. A White House spokesperson has said the president does not want exorbitant costs or an open-ended commitment.
Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said he believes Pres. Obama’s demanding and deliberative approach to strategizing for Afghanistan is rooted in lessons learned from the presidency of John F. Kennedy, who was misled by advisors, both regarding the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile
crisis, and learned that security issues of such complexity required deeper research and deliberative review.
While Pres. Obama’s rivals accuse him of “dithering”, taking too long to decide while doing nothing meaningful to review and strategize, Obama has demanded a comprehensive review to determine both what led to such a flawed policy in Afghanistan through 2008 and has urged military commanders to chart a more intelligent, better informed and workable course toward success and ultimately withdrawal. Military and political strategists agree it would be very ill-conceived policy to learn nothing from Lyndon Johnson’s failure to perceive the looming quagmire as he boldly escalated his predecessor’s Vietnam operations.
Obama faces an undesirable situation to say the least: success in the Afghan counterinsurgency may be crucial to American security, as Obama has suggested, but no reliable strategy for winning has yet been presented by military commanders, 8 years of war has not improved conditions there, and the public is withdrawing moral support and turnin increasingly pessimistic about chances for success there.
It may be necessary and advisable to escalate the US force presence, if only to prevent Afghanistan from disintegrating or being taken over by the Taliban, but even so, there may be little hope of securing the nation’s long-term strategic objectives with further fighting. If that’s the case, how do you convince the American people to keep up the war effort, sacrifice more lives and keep spending exorbitant sums, in the midst of a lingering economic crisis?
The president, far from “dithering”, is demanding that the uniform and civilian military leadership produce a new, more viable strategy for winning the war and keeping the peace in Afghanistan, and that requires sorting through nearly a decade of confused objectives and questionable policy, better classified as wishful thinking than military tactical planning.
In all the to-do about Gen. McChrystal’s demand (40,000 more soldiers) versus Gen. Eikenberry’s admonishment (send no more troops to help Karzai’s corrupt regime), the name Petraeus has been largely left to the margins of debate. Gen. Petraeus, fresh off his apparent success in reducing tribal violence in Iraq, Petraeus was elevated to the command of CentCom, allowing him to oversee both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and to bring fresh, advanced counterinsurgency strategy to Afghanistan.
The problem with the expectations placed on Gen. Petraeus regarding Afghanistan is that his best work on counterinsurgency related to more urbanized environments and relies on intensive efforts at community building, a radically more challenging endeavor in remote and forbidding expanses of Afghanistan, where tribal and village culture has long been semi-nomadic or intensely suspicious of outside influence.
Crafting a viable military strategy for establishing a viable multiethnic 21st-century democracy free of the organizational vices and civic abuses o the Taliban or of the warlord system they emerged to replace, requires something more than repeating wishfully the approach used elsewhere and something far more costly, time-consuming and complex than sending 40,000 new troops.
Pres. Obama is working with the leading military and political minds available to craft not just an “executive decision”, not just a “war policy”, but a strategy capable of achieving the many parallel goals necessary to count as success on Afghanistan: overwhelm and undermine the Taliban and al-Qaeda-linked insurgency, build sustainable bases of civic community and civilian infrastructure, establish a government of the people which all competing factions will accept as legitimate, protect the civilian population, especially women, from random acts of violence, and withdraw without spending another trillion dollars on war or losing thousands of lives.
UPDATE, 18 November 2009, 10:23 EST: Transparency International has released its Corruption Perceptions Index for 2009, which lists Afghanistan as the second most corrupt nation in the world, of the 180 nations surveyed. Only Somalia, which has no effective national government and where piracy is the largest single source of economic activity, is considered more corrupt. This means it is imperative that any plan to send forces to Afghanistan be contingent upon ensuring that the political leadership can be honest brokers, responsive to international concerns.
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