Barack Obama has outlined his policy for withdrawing troops from Iraq and redeploying some to Afghanistan. This is worth reviewing and then revisiting a year from now; I think a phased redeployment such as he suggests is the best way to get us out.
Also, yes, Maliki did not use the word withdrawal in his statement. However, Maliki's own office used the word when they transcribed his speech, and it was their version that was publicized. If that somehow bothers you, I suggest to you that you need to take a step back. And then a step forward. And then a step back. And then you're doing the Cha-Cha.
7.14.2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
But I do have to agree with GFT here that Afghanistan is also a quagmire historically, and the mission there is even less well defined than the one in Iraq. Is it nation-building? Anti-drug? Fight the Taliban? In Afghanistan, those three are often in conflict with one another. As the Powell Doctrine states, what's our exit strategy?
I also think that unless the plan is to invade Pakistan, keeping up this perpetual border war with the Taliban is way too similar to the situation we faced with the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Vietnam, where our opponents have a safe haven to regroup and refit that we can't venture into or attack.
Afghanistan seems to have all the ethnic divisions and hostile neighbors of Iraq, with few of the natural resources needed for nation-building.
It's a fair point. Let's set out our goals, then:
1) Eradicate the Taliban in Afghanistan, forcing them to become a Pakistani regional problem; perhaps a more crowded presence in the tribal regions will convince the Pakistani Intel forces that funded the Taliban in the first place that it's in their better interests to initiate a new purge.
2) Capture or kill the rest of AQ in Afghanistan. See 1) for pointers and possible cooperative angles.
Then jet. Leave the nation-building to UN coalitions.
The problem as I see it is that the Pakistani government regards anything that happens in the mountains as not really their problem, so long as it doesn't involve India. Also, a strong, stable Afghanistan is seen as *not* in their interests; keeping it weak as a potential client state is. In that regard, the ISI and the Taliban have shared interests.
I think the answer may be to finally tell the Pakistanis "if you won't take care of the problem, we will." Unfortunately this would involve heavy mountain fighting in unfriendly territory, and it runs the real risk of tipping the fragile Pakistani political system over to the hypernationalists and Islamists (which is why I assume Bush hasn't gone forward that way). But, as long as the Taliban can regroup across the border, we'll never be able to knock them out in Afghanistan. And the devil only knows what AQ is cooking up in their camps in the tribal region.
The long-term answer is some kind of political compromise(s) between the Taliban, the local warlords, and the national government. The UN could have a role then; their peacekeepers are good at keeping people apart who want to be kept apart, but that's about it. However, I think it much more likely that before that happens AQ will get lucky in one of their assassination attempts on Karzai and the national government collapses. The history of central government in Afghanistan isn't promising.
Messy situation, but it seems like Afghanistan, Haiti, and Somalia always are. If I had an easy answer, I could probably find a job at the State Department. 8)
Since the ISI are the goons who funded and armed the Taliban in the first place, your assessment of their shared interests is dead on. Rather than pursuing an invasion of the mountainous regions of Pakistan (Kipling had some choice things to say about that), we would do better to pull all support from our unhelpful ally, Musharraf. As long as we write him blank checks, he will continue to do as he likes; if we jerk the leash a bit, he'll choke up.
This, in fact, should be our longterm policy in the region (and a model for our foreign policy in general): stop supporting repressive dictators, whether they're our economic buddies (House of Saud) or our lip-service buddies (Musharraf, on the War on Terror). The enemy of our enemy is NOT always (or even often) our friend. The clever follow-up question, of course, is does that include the old Northern Alliance warlords. Good question.
Bear in mind that the "fragile" Pakistani democratic process has consistently elected moderates, not hard-line conservatives. Outside of the tribal regions, Pakistan actually really likes being a secular Islamic state, and the army remains a huge check against radical or reactionary Islam getting a toe-hold. It's when you get up into those mountains to the West that things get hairy.
Your idea of a peace with the Taliban is intriguing, but they've made it pretty clear over and over again that they're not interested in detente, let along a treaty. And given their propensity for presenting wreathes of grenades to Afghani heroes, well.
Post a Comment