Costs of War: Attempting the Impossible

US President Barack Obama’s external page pledge to use all the elements of US national power and to build an international coalition of Afghanistan’s neighbors to guarantee its security is part of the welcome emergence of a foreign policy not based overwhelmingly on the use or threat of military force. His declaration that US policy is focused on a single goal - destroying the command and control structure that al-Qaida has built in its mountainous border sanctuary - is refreshing in its moral and strategic clarity.

But the hard fact remains that so intertwined have al-Qaida and its Pakistani affiliates become with what is left of tribal society in the border regions that defeating them will mean imposing a military defeat on fierce Pashtun warriors.

Ahmed Rashid, one of the foremost experts on the region, external page has pointed out that in many semi-autonomous tribal areas of Pakistan, and their ungovernable Afghan counterparts, years of war and insurgency that has displaced civilian populations - and the systematic murder of any local leaders who oppose extremism - mean that there is “literally no one there” except the extremists and the military.

Some of these local extremist leaders can be bought off - the much-touted Iraq model - and Afghans themselves are fond of quoting a proverb which says that, though an Afghan’s loyalty is not for sale, it can be rented.

On the international stage, Obama wants to form a "Contact Group" of “all who should have a stake in the security of the region - our NATO allies and other partners, but also the Central Asian states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China.”

This new approach could yield progress on issues of common concern like narcotics and weapons trafficking, but there is a lot of diplomatic ground to cover.

Karl F Inderfurth, former president Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Afghanistan from 1997-2001, and his more-or-less successor for the Bush administration, James Dobbins, external page argue that the long-term future of Afghanistan requires working with its neighbors to establish it as a permanently neutral state - a sort of central Asian Switzerland.

But in the meantime, they acknowledge, the US military - and whichever of its allies Obama can muster at the forthcoming NATO summit - is in for some hard fighting.

Analyst Peter Bergen, whose enormous expertise on Afghanistan makes his perennial optimism even more impressive, says that the country’s reputation as “the graveyard of empires” is undeserved.

“Plenty of conquerors have subdued Afghanistan,” he wrote in the external page New York Times, citing the early 13th century depredations of the Mongols, and the Mughal conquest of 1504.

He points out that the famous defeat the British suffered in 1842 was reversed more than 30 years later, and notes that even the comparison with the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is shaky because the US-backed extremist militias that fought the Russian army had 10 times as many men under arms as the Taliban do today - 200,000 as opposed to 20,000 - and state of the art anti-aircraft missiles and other lethal technology supplied by the US.

“Afghanistan is no longer the graveyard of any empire. Rather, it just might become the model of a somewhat stable Central Asian state,” he concludes.

The problem, which Bergen himself identified in an earlier external page piece for CNN, is that the key to success for any counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan lies across the border.

“Pakistan's government must be a stronger partner in destroying these safe havens, and we must isolate al-Qaida from the Pakistani people,” said Obama, adding these steps were “indispensable to our efforts in Afghanistan, which will see no end to violence if insurgents move freely back and forth across the border.”

“The [Pakistani] government's ability to destroy these safe havens is tied to its own strength and security,” he concluded.
But what is the Pakistani plan? Where is their Petraeus? The evidence on the ground - where the federal government seems bent on continuing its failed strategy of making peace deals with indigenous Taliban - is not encouraging.

Bergen external page argues that they have no plan. “The deepest difficulty is that neither the Pakistani military nor political establishment have articulated to themselves or to their own people the plan they have to rid the country of its jiihadist militants, which were once clients of the Pakistani state, but have now increasingly turned against it.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates directly, albeit very gently, addressed the choice Pakistan will have to make.
“The Pakistanis have had contacts with these people for a long time,” he told external page Fox News Sunday of the jihadist groups now in control in the tribal areas, “I think, partly as a hedge against what might happen in Afghanistan if we were to walk away.”

“What we need to do,” he continued, “is try to help the Pakistanis understand these groups are now an existential threat to them, and that we will be there as a steadfast ally for Pakistan, that they can count on us and that they don't need that hedge.”

There has been no public acknowledgment from Pakistan that such a strategic choice has been made.

Indeed, a cynic would detect elements of a take-the-money-and-run strategy in Pakistani President Asif Ali Zadari’s reaction to the plan in a external page speech to a special joint session of parliament laying out the government’s agenda. Zardari highlighted hopes to get US and international aid to fund “Internal security, infrastructure development and poverty alleviation.”

“The US president’s new approach represents a positive change. It is an endorsement of our call for economic and social uplift as a means to fight extremism,” he said, welcoming the US$1.5 billion US aid package Obama backed.
The danger is that all kinds of bad US aid and worse US policy will get sucked into Pakistan by the strategic vacuum there.

In echoes of the militia strategy used by the US military in Iraq and now being practiced on their behalf by the Afghan government, Zardari told parliament that a “national Counter Terrorism Authority has been set up,” and that a 20,000-strong special force of “additional police” would be recruited in each province “with special equipment and special pay package.”

And the White House external page policy paper on the new strategy urges the “urgent” development of “a strategic communications strategy to counter the terror information campaign [...] as a top priority to improve the image of the United States and its allies.

“The strategic communications plan - including electronic media, telecom, and radio - shall include options on how best to counter the propaganda that is key to the enemy's terror campaign,” the White House Interagency Policy Group concludes.

Perhaps controversially, they state that US strategic communication “has proved successful in Iraq [where the US military has made a significant effort in this area.]”

Although Obama promised benchmarks, metrics by which the success or failure of his strategy could be judged going forward, his officials were a little unspecific about the details.

“We will develop benchmarks across the board,” Bruce Riedel of the White House National Security Council told external page reporters. “Some of these are fairly obvious, like levels of violence, levels of casualties, periodicity of suicide bombings both in Afghanistan and Pakistan [...]. There are going to be other ones about moving against corruption” and expanding Afghan security forces, Riedel said. But he stressed: “The benchmarks process is not something that's locked in stone today. It's something that we're only at the beginning phase of starting to work on.”

Recognizing that the really insoluble elements of the problem lie over the border, at least one veteran player is already stressing the need for the US to have a plan to win in Afghanistan alone if need be.

“I disagree with some administration statements that we can’t make progress in Afghanistan without success on the Pakistan side of the border,” external page said Democratic chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Carl Levin of Michigan - diplomatically avoiding mentioning the president by name.

“While I welcome the new focus on Pakistan, both economically and militarily, I am skeptical that the Pakistanis will secure their border …[...]. That’s why, although Afghanistan’s future is surely impacted by events in Pakistan, it should not be tied too tightly to Pakistan’s governmental decisions or be dependent upon them.”