Obama Administration Faces Grim Specifics on Afghan Policy

[BanglaBhoot]

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 3, 2009; 6:05 PM

As President Obama prepares to formally authorize the April deployment of two additional combat brigades to Afghanistan, perhaps as early as this week, no issue other than the U.S. economy appears as bleak to his administration as the seven-year Afghan war and the regional challenges that surround it.

A flurry of post-inauguration activity -- presidential meetings with top diplomatic and military officials, the appointment of a high-level Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy and the start of a White House-led strategic review -- was designed to show forward motion and resolve, senior administration officials said.

But newly installed officials describe a situation on the ground that is far more precarious than they had anticipated, along with U.S. government departments that are poorly organized to implement the strategic outline that Obama presented last week to his National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

With a 60-day deadline, tied to an April 3 NATO summit, Obama has called for a more regional outlook and a more narrowly focused Afghanistan policy that sets priorities among counterinsurgency and development goals. "The president . . . wants to hear from the uniformed leadership and civilian advisers as to what the situation is and their thoughts as to the way forward," a senior administration official said. "But he has also given pretty direct guidance."

The problem confronting the administration is how to fill in Obama's broad strokes while fighting a war that, by all accounts, is going badly. "It could take quite a long time to look at all the various aspects of this," the senior official said. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates predicted last week that the war will be "a long slog" with an uncertain outcome. Richard C. Holbrooke, the new Afghanistan-Pakistan envoy, who left Tuesday for his first visit to the region, expects to spend weeks gathering information before he has much advice to give.

Meanwhile, the senior official acknowledged, "the world moves, obviously."

The two new U.S. brigades are set to arrive in Afghanistan in late April, with another planned to depart in August. But even with what is expected to be more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops this year -- bringing the U.S.-NATO total in Afghanistan to nearly 90,000 -- the international force will be insufficient to secure much of the country.

With the spring combat season near, the Taliban has rapidly increased its sophistication and reach. Neither the money nor the manpower is currently available to train and maintain an Afghan National Army that is expected to begin taking over security missions. Afghan elections are scheduled for summer, but U.S. officials see few viable alternatives to the ineffectual president, Hamid Karzai. Efforts to stem cultivation of opium poppies and the narcotics trade that lines Taliban and government pockets have made little discernible progress.

Nearly $60 billion ($32 billion of it from the United States) has already been spent on reconstruction programs in Afghanistan -- more than during five years of failed reconstruction in Iraq -- but such efforts remain "fragmented" and "lack coherence," according to U.S. government auditors. "I fear there are major weaknesses in strategy," retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Fields, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said in a report released Friday.

Across the border in Pakistan, meanwhile, U.S. military officials are anxiously eyeing a map on which extremist gains are rapidly spreading eastward, toward major population centers, as the Taliban and al-Qaeda solidify their hold on the western frontier and form alliances with domestic terrorists. Islamabad's relations with neighboring India, a fellow nuclear power, remain tense after November's terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Officials described Obama's overall approach to what the administration calls "Af-Pak" as a refusal to be rushed, using words such as "rigor" and "restraint." "We know we're going to get [criticism] for taking our time," said a senior official, one of several in the administration and the military who would discuss the issue only on the condition of anonymity.

While acknowledging the difficulties that the Bush administration faced, Obama officials dismiss the first seven years of Afghanistan war policy, when that conflict took a back seat to the war in Iraq, as reactive, ad hoc and without what one called "a very keen sense of what the goal was."

Obama has ordered up a plan for diplomatic outreach to Iran and others in the region. Afghanistan and Pakistan are to be treated as a single theater of war and diplomacy, even as stability becomes a higher priority than democracy in Afghanistan and as the U.S. relationship with Pakistan is expanded and deepened.

The administration will also seek a new compact with hesitant European and other partners in the war effort, promising new leadership and focus and expecting more resources and commitment. And Obama wants to get beyond the lip service long paid to balance and coordination between the U.S. diplomatic and military services.

Senior administration officials described their approach to Pakistan -- as a major U.S. partner under serious threat of internal collapse -- as fundamentally different from the Bush administration's focus on the country as a Taliban and al-Qaeda "platform" for attacks in Afghanistan and beyond. But the officials acknowledged that a comprehensive Pakistan policy will take time and money. The administration will seek early congressional action on a "rebalanced" assistance program -- introduced in the Senate last summer by then-Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. and co-sponsored by then-Sen. Obama -- that will triple economic aid and condition military assistance with benchmarks for progress in combating extremists.

The president will get little pushback on his broad goals from the military or civilian leaders. A newly completed review by the Joint Chiefs of Staff echoes his call for a broader approach to the region and better-defined objectives in Afghanistan. "We need a comprehensive strategy, not just the military side," Adm. Michael Mullen, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said in an interview Monday. "What has to be different is how we approach the future."

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. Central Command chief whose military responsibilities stretch from the Mediterranean to Pakistan, is compiling strategic recommendations based on reports from his own team of dozens of military and civilian experts. Although less immediately concerned about the fine points of a comprehensive new strategy than the need to move quickly to secure Afghan population centers, Petraeus has already visited central Asian states bordering Afghanistan and supports more extensive diplomatic outreach. He has ordered the Afghanistan-Pakistan portion of his Centcom review to be completed by next week, when it, too, will be given to the White House.

Holbrooke, who reports directly to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, was said to be appalled not only at the walls that still separate military and civilian efforts but also at compartmentalization within the department itself, where separate task forces deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Provincial Reconstruction Teams that are on the front lines of U.S. assistance in Afghanistan are run and still largely staffed by the military.

Obama's deadline for a new overall strategy, set at a Jan. 23 meeting of the National Security Council, coincides with the NATO summit at which he will "come face to face" with allies "looking at him for his perspective on where he's taking the U.S. effort," a senior official said.

National security adviser James L. Jones is in charge of the effort, aided by Lt. Gen. Douglas E. Lute. Lute has been retained in the post of White House coordinator for Afghanistan and Iraq that he occupied in the Bush administration, to ensure that "we were not going to drop any balls," an official said.

"The policies will change -- that's the purpose of the reviews," he said, "but the mechanisms had to be in place" for ongoing operations. "This wasn't coming into office in 1993, when the world was a much calmer place. We've got two active wars and 200,000 people serving overseas. . . . It's very hard in a transition from the outside to know what is moving."

To keep the balls in play, the official said, "it makes sense to think about tranches of decisions that have to be reached" sooner rather than later on the road toward a comprehensive new strategy.

The administration has already given a green light to continuing CIA-operated attacks by unmanned Predator aircraft against "high-value" al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in western Pakistan. The Pakistani government has agreed to the strikes, despite overwhelming public disapproval. But after the first Obama-authorized Predator attack last week, Pakistani officials said, Islamabad complained in a private diplomatic note that U.S. intelligence was bad and that civilians were the primary casualties.

Officials would not comment on whether Obama has reissued a covert action "finding," signed by President George W. Bush last summer, that authorized ground raids into Pakistan by military Special Operations units working with the CIA. There has been no known ground operation since September, however, and the advisability of such raids is a point of disagreement between Petraeus -- who considers any tactical gain on the ground to be not worth the strategic risk of a massive popular backlash in Pakistan -- and the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Meanwhile, the approach of the warm weather "fighting season" in Afghanistan imposes its own decision deadlines. "I worry a great deal about how much time we have," Mullen said. Additional U.S. and NATO efforts this spring may be able to hold the line against new Taliban advancement, but "if you're just staying flat," he said, "the situation is getting worse."

washingtonpost.com

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Iraq, a war we are winning; Afghanistan, a war we can't win

As the Obama administration continues its reviews of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, the president seems committed thus far to fulfilling his campaign promise: withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq and shift them to Afghanistan (as many as 30,000 troops perhaps). If he goes forward with this, Obama may pull the plug on a war we're winning to concentrate on a war we cannot win.

To suggest that gains in Iraq are fragile and could yet unravel is not to deny there has been enormous progress. The surge worked (despite candidate Obama's dissembling on this count). Upping the ante by sending an additional 40,000 U.S. troops to Iraq when Iraqis believed we were willing to fail not only increased our ability to impose our will, but it succeeded in changing the political dynamic inside Iraq. Iraqis began making brave political choices, culminating in Prime Minister Maliki's move to control Basra. This looks to have been the turning point of the war.

Why the surge succeeded merits careful attention from the Obama administration as it develops its strategy for Afghanistan. The additional troops were unquestionably important. Equally important, though, was a strategy focused on partnering with Iraqis to build their capacity and put them at the front of the fight. Preventing attacks in Iraq increasingly became the responsibility of the Iraq government and the Iraqi security forces. To the credit of politicians and soldiers alike, Iraqis stepped up and did the hard work, and provisional electoral returns this week strongly suggest Prime Minister Maliki and also the Sunni parties are reaping the rewards of bringing security.

But -- as with Afghanistan -- the outcome was not in our ability to control. The use of force can break things and kill people, and by those means can sometimes compel political choices. But political choices are a second-order effect of military power, and they depend fundamentally on the enemy and on our Afghan partners.

The central problem impeding success in Afghanistan is the Afghans themselves. One does not see an opening up of the political system (there are no political parties, by presidential decree) or a burgeoning of civil society, which are the bedrock of democratic governance. Despite having five years to prepare for the May presidential election, the government of Afghanistan has postponed it. I actually had an Afghan tell me "what you call corruption, we call the economy." In the seven years it has had enormous international assistance, Afghanistan has not succeeded, and they are still expecting the international community to fix their problems.

A surge of troops and a counterinsurgency strategy carefully calibrated to Afghanistan's circumstances will undoubtedly help us to succeed in Afghanistan. But as in Iraq and other nation-building enterprises, we cannot succeed unless the Afghans succeed, militarily and politically. And thus far, the odds of this happening appear pretty low -- low enough that we should rethink whether robbing Iraq to pay Afghanistan is really the best policy.

Iraq, a war we are winning; Afghanistan, a war we can't win By Kori Schake | Shadow Government

 

[BanglaBhoot]

'Finish the job' in Afghanistan? Where do we begin?

Obama faces a complex, perilous situation in which it's no longer clear what the 'job' is, or what it will take to 'finish' it.

Rosa Brooks

February 5, 2009

Is it finally time to "finish the job" in Afghanistan?

In October 2002, Barack Obama -- then a relatively obscure Illinois state senator -- made a speech against the Iraq war. "I don't oppose all wars," he told a Chicago crowd in words that soon became famous. "What I am opposed to is a dumb war. ... You want a fight, President Bush? Let's finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Qaeda."

As Obama moved to the U.S. Senate in 2005, and then on to the presidential campaign trail, the pledge to "finish the job" in Afghanistan became a central part of his foreign policy platform.

As politics, it was effective. But as policy, it no longer looks like such a no-brainer.

That's not because Obama is wrong when he insists that we ignore Afghanistan at our peril. If Afghanistan implodes and becomes a haven for Al Qaeda again, U.S. and global security will be threatened.

And if the violence in Afghanistan continues to spill over into nuclear-armed Pakistan and triggers the collapse of that country's fragile civilian government, the dangers are even greater.

The problem with "finishing the job" in Afghanistan is that it's no longer entirely clear what the "job" is, or what it would mean to "finish" it.

As the Bush administration rushed to war in Iraq, Afghanistan became America's orphaned war. U.S. troops in Afghanistan struggled to get resources, equipment and the attention of policymakers. Planned reconstruction projects languished, and early military gains began to erode. Afghan civilian support slipped. With too few ground troops, the U.S.-led coalition began to rely more and more on close air support (in 2005, there were 7,421 close air support missions; in 2008, there were 19,603). But the increase in aerial bombing dramatically increased unintended civilian deaths (bombs don't discriminate between terrorists and children). Civilian support eroded further.

As NATO redoubled its efforts to drive the Taliban and Al Qaeda from the Afghan mountains, militants operating in Afghanistan took refuge in neighboring Pakistan's ungoverned border regions. From there, they increasingly staged cross-border raids into Afghanistan, disrupted NATO supply lines between Pakistan and Afghanistan and carried out attacks on targets linked to the unpopular Pakistani government.

As a result, the U.S. war in Afghanistan gradually bled over into Pakistan. The U.S. has responded to militant attacks from within Pakistan with intermittent airstrikes against targets in Pakistani territory, but these have also caused unintended civilian deaths, increasingly radicalizing the Pakistani population and further jeopardizing the future of Pakistan's shaky secular civilian government.

So at this point, how we "finish the job" in Afghanistan isn't clear anymore.

Send more troops to Afghanistan, as President Obama intends to do? With more and more of Afghanistan falling back under the control of the Taliban, additional troops are clearly necessary in the short term just to protect major population centers from Taliban predation. More ground troops will also reduce the need for close air support, which will help minimize civilian casualties.

But without a broader strategy, extra troops alone won't help in the long run. Eradicating the Taliban and Al Qaeda from Afghanistan does the United States little good if Pakistan (with its nuclear prizes) solidifies as the new staging area for regional and global terrorism. But the U.S. can't add a full-scale war in Pakistan to the two wars we've already got.

In the longer run, a better strategy would be to deny the militants the popular support they need to survive, by helping both the Afghans and the Pakistani people get the roads, schools and economic and governance infrastructure they need. But there's a chicken-and-egg problem: A military solution won't work without substantial investment in the civilian sector, but civilian reconstruction projects can't get done in the midst of terrible insecurity.

In 2002, "finishing the job" in Afghanistan would have been a (relatively) feasible plan. Today, just keeping Afghanistan and Pakistan from sliding jointly into chaos will require a comprehensive approach, melding military and development strategies and addressing the broader regional dynamics at play. (Pakistan's long-simmering tensions with India reduce its willingness to put serious resources into counter- terrorism, for instance, while U.S. tensions with Russia and Iran reduce opportunities for regional cooperation.)

But that doesn't mean the administration won't be able to make progress in Afghanistan. Obama is doing what he should in these first weeks, calling for a comprehensive strategy review and listening to experts whose views differ.

Meanwhile, probably the best thing his team can do is finish off the "finish the job" metaphor. We're nowhere close to finishing, and there's no single "job." Restoring stability in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be a long, multifaceted process involving many players in addition to the U.S. -- and that process is just getting started.

'Finish the job' in Afghanistan? Where do we begin? - Los Angeles Times

 

[BanglaBhoot]

What Are We Doing in Afghanistan?We're still figuring that out.

By Fred Kaplan

Posted Thursday, Feb. 5, 2009, at 6:59 PM ET

Not long ago, Afghanistan was known as "the good war." Now some are calling it "Obama's Vietnam." Both tags exaggerate. Across hundreds of years of sorrowful history, no war in Afghanistan has ever been good. And Vietnam was different in so many ways that parallels with the war against the Taliban tend to muddy more than clarify. (Ho Chi Minh was the legitimate leader of a unified polity, the United States violated international law by blocking countrywide elections, U.S. troop levels grew to 500,000 at their peak, etc.)

But the specter of Vietnam does, or should, haunt us in one compelling sense: the reasonable fear that we are about to step into a bigger, thicker pile of mud—a more all-enveloping quagmire, if you will—than the first step of escalation might suggest.

Unlike those who got us into Vietnam, today's top officials—including President Barack Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates—at least see the specter. Both have emphasized that their goals in Afghanistan are limited; daydreams of turning the place into a democratic republic—"some central Asian Valhalla," as Gates snorted in recent hearings—are over. Gates further stated at those hearings, before the Senate armed services committee, that he would endorse his commanders' request for three additional brigades—but that he'd be "deeply skeptical" of subsequent requests for more. The fighting needs to be done mainly by Afghan troops, he said, adding that if the Afghan people begin to see it as an American war, "we will go the way of other imperial occupiers."

This is reassuring. However, even "limited" goals can justify a vast military expansion.

For instance, Obama and Gates have said that their "strategic objective" is to keep Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists who threaten the United States or destabilize the region.

However, military commanders need to translate that strategic objective into an "operational goal," and there are many, very different ways to do that—each requiring different levels of troops performing very different missions.

Some argue that the best way is to step up attacks on Taliban and al-Qaida forces directly, as—or perhaps before—they cross the border from Pakistan. Others say it's better to stop chasing terrorists all over the countryside and instead to protect the Afghan population, provide basic services, and build their trust. But since resources are limited, which segments of the population do you protect—those in the cities, where most of the people live, or in the villages, where the Taliban have made their deepest incursions?

President Obama has talked of sending three extra brigades to Afghanistan. That means about 12,000 combat troops. Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, talks of deploying 30,000 extra troops—doubling the 30,000 we have there now.

These numbers sound far apart, but they're not. Obama's three brigades would also require "enablers"—military jargon for the personnel who enable the combat brigades to fight. They would include an aviation brigade (already in place), a division headquarters, a support brigade, military police, medics, military engineers (to build the expanded barracks and bases), and so on. Add all this into the mix, and you get 30,000 extra troops. Obama and Mullen are talking about the same troop boost.

How did they come up with this number? This is where the cause for worry begins. It didn't come from any assessment of how many troops are needed for a particular mission. No decisions about a specific mission—an operational goal—have yet been made.

The request for three brigades stems from one fact and one fact only: That's how many brigades will be available this year, as more troops pull out of Iraq.

It's a number based on what we have, not on what we need. It has no substantive rationale.

There soon will be a rationale, and it may well be the product of systematic thinking. Three "strategic reviews" of Afghanistan are currently in the works, due to be finished this month—one by the National Security Council, one by the Pentagon's Joint Staff, one by Gen. David Petraeus' staff and advisers at U.S. Central Command. (Petraeus' review encompasses Afghanistan, Iraq, and the surrounding region.)

Each review is being conducted separately, but they are all dealing with the same questions: Given the president's strategic objective, what are the operational goals, and how much do we need—how many forces, of what kind, doing what, for how long, at what cost—to succeed?

Judging from press accounts and from my own conversations with officials and advisers involved in these reviews, a consensus seems to be developing that—in the medium to long term—we should put most of our efforts into a counterinsurgency campaign, along the lines of Gen. Petraeus' field manual on the subject. This conforms to the school of thought that the best way to defeat insurgents is not to chase them here and there, but to protect the Afghan population and help build loyalty to the government.

However, there are widely differing views—both between and within the review teams—over what to do in the short term (as well as over how long the short term might last). The problem, widely acknowledged, is that a certain level of security has to be attained before a full-blown counterinsurgency campaign can work—and that many Afghan cities, villages, and roads haven't reached that level.

When asked what missions the three extra brigades will perform, one Pentagon official said, "All of the missions." Some troops will chase terrorists, some will protect the population, some will train the Afghan army. … But three extra brigades—which, again, is all we can muster in the next year—aren't enough to do all that. (Some officials say that the NATO allies have agreed to up their efforts a bit, now that the popular Obama has replaced the much-loathed Bush, but they're unlikely to muster more than a few thousand troops—perhaps a brigade's worth. The allies could help more in other ways, for instance, in special forces, government administration, and training police. Bush never made such requests; perhaps Obama will.)

So, choices will have to be made. The Joint Staff seems to be pushing for a more intense short-term drive to beat back Taliban guerrillas coming across the Pakistani border. The extra U.S. ground troops would make it possible to do that without relying so heavily on airstrikes, which have unavoidably inflicted civilian casualties, which have only driven more people—Afghans and Pakistanis—into the arms of the Taliban.

Analysts on other review teams advocate putting the extra effort into protecting the population or guarding roads—to bolster the impression, among the Afghan population, that they can trust their government (and its allies) to provide security and that, therefore, they don't need to turn to the Taliban as an alternative.

David Kilcullen, one of the leading counterinsurgency analysts and author of the forthcoming book The Accidental Guerrilla, was a key adviser to Petraeus in Iraq and, for a while, to Condoleezza Rice in Bush's State Department. Appearing on Thursday before the Senate foreign relations committee, Kilcullen—a firm supporter of the basic objective in Afghanistan—emphasized that there were risks and caveats in all these approaches.

The critical "short term," to Kilcullen's mind, is very short indeed—between now and Afghanistan's presidential elections, scheduled for this coming August. "If we fail to stabilize Afghanistan this year," he told the committee, "there will be no future."

To stabilize Afghanistan this year, he went on, "we need to refocus the military and police on a single crucial task: protecting the population in advance of the elections," so that, whoever wins, their result "restores the government's legitimacy and with it the credibility of the international effort."

There aren't enough troops to protect the entire population. So, Kilcullen and others are trying to calculate where we could place the smallest number of troops to protect the largest percentage of the Afghan people. This is a challenge; census data in Afghanistan are sparse and unreliable. But certainly it means putting more troops in the cities—living among the people, setting up patrols (joint teams of NATO troops, Afghan soldiers, and Afghan police), building trust, getting intelligence.

Can this be done in time? Kilcullen makes no claims of certainty. He does express certainty, however, that the alternative approach—simply chasing terrorists—"won't work." Afghanistan, he noted, is a sovereign state. Why would its people tolerate being used "as little more than a launch pad for strikes against al-Qaida, while doing little to alleviate poverty, institute the rule of law, or improve health and education?"

But here's the rub. Assuming Kilcullen's approach works and the elections go well, the war will have only just begun.

"We need to be honest about how long it will take … and how much it will cost," Kilcullen said. His estimates: 10-15 years, $2 billion per month just for the extra 30,000 troops, still more for help with development and governance.

Stephen Biddle, an analyst with the Council on Foreign Relations and an adviser on the Central Command's strategic review, said in a phone interview on Wednesday that the time and expense might be reduced if we negotiate with nonideological elements and allies of the Taliban. We could, for instance, tell some provincial warlord that if he abandons the Taliban and joins the fight against them, he can become the governor of the province and enjoy certain prerogatives. (And if he doesn't agree, we will destroy him and all his followers.) This is a delicate task; the sticks and carrots have to be designed specifically for each warlord; and of course there is no negotiating with hard-core Taliban.

Gen. Petraeus, too, has spoken several times of the need to strike deals with the "reconcilable" Taliban—in part because they can't all be killed or captured, no matter how many troops the West sends, in part because that's simply how most wars of this sort end.

But others are skeptical of these scenarios. In the past centuries of wars, the British, then the Russians, then the Americans have succeeded in turning some warlord or the other to their side—then watched as he shifts sides again a few weeks later, because he's been offered a better deal or to avenge the death of a relative or for no discernible reason.

Then there's the ultimate consideration: Even if everything goes splendidly in Afghanistan, it will count for naught unless the Taliban and al-Qaida are neutralized in neighboring Pakistan—a turbulent state that has nuclear weapons. There isn't much the United States can do about that problem militarily; it's a diplomatic puzzle to be worked out with other powers in the region. Gen. Petraeus will have a role to play in this; so, even more, will special envoy Richard Holbrooke. The issue of how many troops should do what in Afghanistan will be, by comparison, a sideshow—albeit an expensive, and perhaps a necessary, one.

How expensive and how necessary? This is where President Obama will have to make the decision—and then make the case before the public. If, in the spirit of open government, he goes on television and says, in line with Kilcullen's estimate, "We need to spend tens of billions of dollars a year for the next decade or two to keep Afghanistan stable," he'd better be able to make the case that we have some chance of succeeding—and that we'll face serious dangers if we don't. If he can't make that case at the outset, he shouldn't jump in.

We're still figuring out our goals in Afghanistan. That's a good thing. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

 

[BanglaBhoot]

Deja vu in Kabul

Naysayers call Afghanistan a hopeless quagmire. Isn't that what they said about Iraq?

By Max Boot

February 7, 2009

For years, opponents of the Iraq war claimed it was an unwinnable waste of resources that wasn't worth fighting anyway. The real war against terrorists, they argued, should be waged in Afghanistan. But now that Iraq has made heartening progress and we are finally sending more troops to Afghanistan, the critics are applying to Afghanistan the same arguments they once used in favor of partial or total withdrawal from Iraq.

Afghanistan, we are told, is a hopeless quagmire. A Newsweek cover story screams "Obama's Vietnam." Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University writes, "Afghanistan will be a sinkhole, consuming resources neither the U.S. military nor the U.S. government can afford to waste."

Skeptics, including many in uniform, contend that we need to downsize our goals in Afghanistan. Establishing a functioning democracy, they say, is too ambitious in an underdeveloped Muslim country with little sense of nationhood. According to the Associated Press, a Joint Chiefs of Staff report advises "squeezing Taliban and Al Qaeda sanctuaries inside neighboring Pakistan while deemphasizing longer-term goals for bolstering democracy."

But don't worry, the naysayers assert, we can still achieve our core objectives in Afghanistan. George Friedman, of the private intelligence firm Stratfor, opines in the New York Times that Afghanistan requires "intelligence, and special operations forces and air power that can take advantage of that intelligence. Fighting terrorists requires identifying and destroying small, dispersed targets. We would need far fewer forces for such a mission than the number that are now deployed."

It is striking the extent to which the arguments now being made about Afghanistan were previously made -- and discredited -- in the case of Iraq. The only thing we haven't heard yet is a proposal to dismember Afghanistan into mini-states. But with Joe Biden in the White House, we can expect that brainstorm to pop up soon.

Is it quixotic to try to build democracy in Afghanistan? The same thing was said of Iraq. It is true that holding elections wasn't a magic elixir there. But once the security situation started to improve, Iraq's political process began to function and competing factions started to solve problems with handshakes rather than bombs.

The latest provincial elections delivered a strong showing for centrist, secular candidates -- a far cry from the sort of extremists (Hamas, for example) that are thought to be favored in Middle Eastern voting. In the long run, democracy in Iraq is likely to strengthen stability. That's just as well, because installing a "Saddam Lite" strongman was never a serious option. Most Iraqis would not have put up with it.

Nor would Afghans stand for a strongman "solution." In a 2007 poll conducted by the Asia Foundation, 85% agreed that "democracy may have its problems, but it is better than any other form of government." In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, there is no practical alternative to supporting the democratic process if we want to create a government with legitimacy, the sine qua non for defeating any insurgency.

What about the argument that we don't need more troops in Afghanistan? Can't a handful of special operations forces prevent a takeover by extremists? We tried that in Iraq. From 2003 to 2006, U.S. troops withdrew to large bases while the Joint Special Operations Command carried out strikes on targets such as Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab Zarqawi. That turned into a game of whack-a-mole. As top-level terrorists were going down, new ones were popping up and the war was being lost.

The war effort was turned around by an increase in U.S. and Iraqi troop numbers and by the decision to push U.S. troops into outposts in population centers. Ordinary Iraqis could *** out terrorists, secure in the knowledge that they would be protected from retaliation. Whether in Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else, only counterinsurgents who live among the people can acquire the knowledge to identify insurgents.

The Bush administration lost sight of that basic truth because leaders from Donald Rumsfeld on down feared that increasing troop numbers would stoke resentment of foreign occupation. Similar concerns are expressed today about Afghanistan by Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. He recently told Congress: "My worry is that the Afghans come to see us as part of the problem, rather than ... the solution. And then we are lost."

But in Iraq, the "surge" was welcomed by a populace concerned above all by pervasive insecurity. The same thing is likely to happen in Afghanistan as U.S. troop numbers rise. In both nations, nothing feeds anti-Americanism more than concerns that U.S. troops aren't doing enough to impose law and order.

This is not meant to minimize the difficulties in Afghanistan or exaggerate the similarities with Iraq. Afghanistan is a larger and poorer country with more difficult terrain and fewer resources of its own. It also has more porous borders with a much larger problem of terrorist infiltration. And it is a much more difficult place to keep a large military force supplied. But we should not exaggerate the difficulties either. According to the Brookings Institution, civilian casualties in Afghanistan last year (1,445) were a fraction of the casualties in Iraq at the height of the fighting. Fom July 2006 to September 2007, at least 2,000 Iraqis were dying each month.

Keep in mind that until fairly recently, the conventional wisdom was that we had already won in Afghanistan and could never win in Iraq. Now we hear the reverse, but the new zeitgeist is no sounder than the old. We can win in Afghanistan, as we are now winning in Iraq.

The key is for policymakers to ignore the naysayers. They will get louder over time, because, just as in Iraq, a surge in the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan will inevitably bring about a short-term spike in casualties. But if President Obama doesn't lose his nerve, the odds are that a classic counterinsurgency strategy, supported by adequate troop levels, can turn around another failing war effort.

Max Boot is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to Opinion. He is the author, most recently, of "War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today."

Deja vu in Kabul - Los Angeles Times

 

[idune]

It is worth reading about the person, Richard Holbrooke, his style and techniques he deploy for American policy. He will be formulating US policy and and strategy on Pakistan-Afghanistan. According to report Obama has given 60days to Holbrooke to formulate assessment and understanding on Pakistan. Hope Pakistan is reading him and his move to prepare for future face off.



Back on world stage, a larger-than-life Holbrooke - International Herald Tribune