It seems almost elementary that the governments of Pakistan and the United States both have a vested interest in extending Islamabad’s authority over the whole of its country, a point David Ignatius makes today:

Here’s the cold, hard truth: U.S. success in Afghanistan depends on Pakistan gaining sovereignty over the tribal belt. If the insurgents can continue to maintain their havens in North Waziristan and other tribal areas, then President Obama’s surge of troops in Afghanistan will fail. It’s that simple.

It’s not that simple, but extending the Pakistani government’s writ is certainly a core element to any hope of securing Afghanistan.  A safe base of operation across the border in Pakistan would allow al Qaeda’s senior leadership room to incubate in hopes of re-spreading its wings in a larger Taliban-protected region.

But just a handful of pages away in your trusty Washington Post illuminates just how difficult that challenge will be:

Pakistan’s Supreme Court nullified on Wednesday a controversial deal that had given President Asif Ali Zardari and thousands of other government officials amnesty from prosecution on corruption charges, a decision likely to further weaken Zardari’s shaky hold on power.

The ruling could open the door to additional legal challenges against Zardari. Although he still has immunity from prosecution under the constitution, opponents plan to contest that by arguing that Zardari is technically ineligible for the presidency. …

But Zardari’s ability to make decisions about the level of Pakistani cooperation with the United States has been compromised by his struggle to simply hold on to his job — a task likely to be made more difficult by the court ruling.

There are essentially three legs of power in the Pakistani government — the military and intelligence services are the largest center of gravity, followed by the courts and then the civilian leadership.   Rivalries between all three are intense to say the least, a dissection of which could occupy an entire encyclopedic volume, never mind the rest of this short blog post.  And even though the military isn’t mentioned in the WaPo’s article, it almost goes without saying that the generals would be fine if Zardari fell from power.

The point is that as long as these communities’ main focus is a struggle for power, the White House will never get them to pay primary attention to internal security.  And even if you could, each power-base has reasons (some better than others) to turn a blind eye to the Taliban lodged in Pakistan’s hinterland.

The situation isn’t hopeless… yet.  Despite long-standing suspicions of civilian President Zardari’s corruption (hey, the guy wasn’t called “Mr. 10 Percent” for nothing), he is the legitimately elected leader and was allowed to return to Pakistan - with his late-wife Benazir Bhutto - in an amnesty deal reached with ex-President Pervez Musharraf.  Therefore, the US should stand by Pakistan’s nascent democracy and support Zaradari, without making him look like an American puppet.

Then the US government should work on aligning the military under Pakistan’s civilian leadership.  Congress tried this by conditioning aid on just such a goal in October.  Guess what?  It didn’t go over so well with Pakistan’s generals.  Back to the drawing board.

Crossposted at The Progressive Fix.

Stephen Hadley, George Bush’s former National Security Advisor, has set forth some rather appalling revisionist history in this morning’s Washington Post.  Though he supports Obama’s surge, he effectively tries to wash his hands of any culpability of the entire Afghanistan mess.  Sorry Mr. Hadley, but that just won’t fly.

Hadley believes that everything was going just swimmingly until mid-2006, when those darned Pakistanis went and screwed the whole thing up:

As to security, the U.N. Security Council authorized an international military force in December 2001, put it under NATO command in August 2003 and expanded its writ to all of Afghanistan in October 2003. Afghan army and police forces were being recruited, trained and equipped. Most of the country was free of violence.

But in 2006, the situation deteriorated. Suicide bombings and attacks using improvised explosive devices spiked. Corruption and poppy production grew dramatically, and the central government failed to establish an effective presence in the provinces. The planned Afghan security force was simply too small to handle the escalating violence.

In September 2006, Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan embarked on a series of well-intentioned but ill-fated deals intended to entice local tribes to support the government in Kabul. The tribes were supposed to expel al-Qaeda and end Taliban attacks in exchange for economic assistance and the withdrawal of Pakistani troops. Instead, these badly executed agreements strengthened the terrorist havens.

Then, Hadley explains, Bush’s buddy Pervez Musharraf went and had himself a little constitutional crisis, which really put the well-meaning and allegedly competent Bush administration behind the 8-ball:

Then Pakistan plunged into an 18-month political crisis, beginning in March 2007 when President Pervez Musharraf fired the country’s chief justice and ending with Musharraf’s resignation in August 2008. Consumed by political chaos, Pakistan could only watch as al-Qaeda terrorists and their Taliban allies launched attacks not only in Afghanistan but also in Pakistan — including the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Some argue that America could not respond to the deteriorating situation because its attention and its troops were all focused on Iraq. Yet despite troop demands for Iraq, President George W. Bush and our coalition allies launched a “quiet surge” in Afghanistan to meet the new challenge.

See?  Isn’t it amazing how well the Bush administration handled everything and we just never knew about it?

Spare me.  What Hadley chooses to selectively ignore is his administration’s failure to capitalize on Afghanistan’s relative calm in the 2001-2006 timeframe.  True, the initial Afghaninstan war plan was successfully executed, and violence was significantly down (compared to, say 2009 levels) across the country.

But instead of literally building on that initial military success by focusing on enduring security, infrastructure, and civil service capacities, Hadley shares direct responsibility for diverting America’s attention to a war of choice in Iraq launched under thin pretexts.  In the process, billions of dollars and countless man-hours at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House (inclinding Mr. Hadley’s NSC) that should have been spent stabilized Afghanistan in 2003, were shifted westward.

The 10,000 additional troops that Hadley crows about later in the article are an embarrassingly weak and tardy prescription for an aggressive viral problem that was getting out of hand.

Too little, too late, Mr. Hadley.  You should be ashamed.

Sometimes you write something that no one wants.  Hey, it happens.

I wrote this piece for publication on September 11th, but I didn’t write it with enough lead time to submit to more than two papers.  They both rejected me, and I couldn’t send it out again before this morning.

That’s okay, because I’m putting it here.  My message is simple - a lot of people aren’t comfortable with the war in Afghanistan, but let’s remember why we’re there.

___________________________

On the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, many Americans are questioning if the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan is still worth the effort. As much as Americans would like to put Afghanistan behind us, we can’t just yet. We have to remember why we’re there: to make sure a massive terrorist attack never happens again on American soil.

On August 20, Afghanistan went to the polls in the second presidential election since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom. Though weeks later, the votes are still being counted, incumbent Afghan President Hamid Karzai is still favored for re-election. In power since 2001, he has been a difficult partner for the United States. His government is corrupt from top to bottom, Afghanistan’s security forces remain weak, and Taliban-sponsored violence continues to rise. Meanwhile, Karzai has cut questionable deals with regional Afghan warlords in return for their electoral support.

The situation is frustrating. Nearly eight years after President Bush first announced Operation Enduring Freedom, news should be better than this, right? Many think so: according to a recent CNN poll, 54 percent of Americans no longer support the war. President Obama’s biggest foreign policy challenge this year could be convincing Americans that Afghanistan remains vital to our security.

Falling support at home may be due to mixed messages about the war. As recently as December 2008, President Bush said that America’s goal was to “help Afghanistan’s young democracy grow and thrive.” Since taking office, President Obama has scaled back America’s objectives in the region, focusing on denying al Qaeda the safe haven it needs to attack the United States.

But at the same time, President Obama is requesting more resources for Afghanistan. This may be where the frustration lies: Twenty thousand additional troops, a new “civilian surge” of non-military government workers, and $2.2 billion in aid sure doesn’t sound like the president is narrowing America’s objectives.

In part, President Obama is making up for the failings of his predecessor. Distracted by Iraq, President Bush critically underfunded and understaffed America’s mission in Afghanistan, limiting the prospects for lasting American security. It’s tragic but unfortunately true that some of our soldiers’ and diplomats’ hard work since 2001 has been squandered.

Achieving even President Obama’s more modest goals is a massive task, one that now spans Afghanistan as well as Pakistan, the Taliban’s second home. The president’s goals demand more resources than have ever been allocated to the region. Denying al Qaeda a safe haven means stamping the Taliban—al Qaeda’s patrons—out of Afghanistan’s government forever. Defeating the Taliban is no simple task: we must beat them militarily on their home turf while protecting the local population. Finally, America must support stable, if not quite democratic, central and local Afghan governments to ensure the Taliban never rules again.

Unfortunately, while al Qaeda has been weakened since 2001, it could still reconstitute its ability to strike America. And no American would ever want that.

This massive re-emphasis on Afghanistan will be temporary if given the time to be done correctly. President Obama knows that finishing the job now and doing it right would stop al Qaeda for good and keep America from ever returning to the region.

There’s no guarantee that we’ll ultimately achieve President Obama’s goal. However, the good news is that the United States has the right team in Afghanistan. Led by General Stanley McChrystal, a specialist in counter-insurgency warfare, the best qualified individuals are now in place for the first time in the history of Operation Enduring Freedom to attain America’s objectives.

The missing ingredient is a patient American population giving the plan time to succeed, even in the midst of long-standing frustration with the war.

Who knew that George Will was such a defeatist.  His column today in the Washington Post advocates for a steady drawdown, saying we should use only counter-terrorism measures in the future.

Here’s the key question he - like so many on the left and right of this debate - is missing:  What do we do after the next terrorist attack on American soil?  Do we go back?

The fact of the matter is that a counter-terrorism approach to Afghanistan and Pakistan is only as good as our intelligence.  And our intelligence services - though highly professional and much better than on September 10, 2001 - will never, ever be able to track absolutely everything.

So, are we willing to run the risk of a next attack, or are we willing to stick it out and help create a secure environment that will never permit plotting to go on?

The following is a post from Milton Wilkins.

In an interview Friday morning with NPR, Andrew Bacevich made a claim that many commentators have been suggesting for some time: that our strategy and objectives in Afghanistan are fundamentally misguided. While Bacevich has made valid points, his increasingly-popular alternative to the current doctrine similarly provides no guarantee of success.

Our current strategy - “population-centric” counterinsurgency, or COIN - entails flooding population centers with troops as a means of convincing locals that they can be protected from brutal insurgents if they cooperate with coalition forces, while providing NATO with intelligence and refusing the Taliban refuge. Beyond this, COIN entails directly hiring local proxies and gaining the people’s respect and trust through nation-building efforts.

Afghanistan presents enormous problems for this model. The country is 1.5 times larger than Iraq, its populace massive and extremely dispersed, with few “population centers” to be found, not to mention a largely non-existent infrastructure. There is growing consensus that the current 100,000 troop force is far too small for this mission. Finally, accountable, centralized government remains elusive while its own forces remain underprepared, depriving the doctrine of a prerequisite for ultimate success. That is assuming, of course, that we even know what progress would look like.

Bacevich’s alternative to the COIN doctrine, and one that has generally become increasingly popular, is a “pure counterterrorism” approach. Its supporters would have us abandon our fight against most of the Taliban, pull most of our forces out of the country, escalate the use of drones, and focus on the “real enemy:” Al Qaeda, now rooted in Pakistan. Insofar as Afghan tribal militants are concerned, the goal is to pay for their cooperation and punish those harboring Al Qaeda through air campaigns. To Bacevich, Afghanistan’s fate is irrelevant as long as we continue to disrupt Al Qaeda’s infrastructure with tribalism and targeted killing.

The central flaw of this approach – which we have actually been using for most of the last seven years – concerns intelligence. The goal of population-centrism is gaining intelligence, and without men on the ground vetting and protecting an army of informants, it will prove incredibly difficult to ascertain who is actually cooperating with us against Al Qaeda. Without this method of providing reliable HUMINT, disloyal proxies could trick us into striking local rivals or communities with no hostile presence; similar patterns have emerged in Iraq and plagued our efforts in Vietnam.

Such misfires would incur blowback by creating more terrorists while making Afghans doubt our ability to effectively locate the militants, critically undermining the value of our threat to only punish harborers and thereby discouraging tribes from cooperating with us in the first place. Even our more accurate drone strikes have alienated Afghans with the collateral damage they’ve caused, and relying on them more with worse intelligence could quickly see the costs outweigh the benefits.

The point is taken that our current doctrine is costly, complicated and troubled, as members of Gen. McChrystal’s review team have openly admitted; however, Bacevich and the “counterterrorists” offer us lower costs with no surefire benefit.

Milton Wilkins is a former PPI intern. The views expressed here are his own.

There was a moment - however fleeting - when we thought that an Obama victory last November would re-energize Europe’s commitment to Af-Pak.  After all, Europeans have an obvious national interest in contributing - countless plots (both realized and failed) have had a direct connection there.  Europe’s leaders should have been able to sell their electorates on even a modest increase in contribution.

The Obama team talked a lot on the campaign trail about getting the Europeans to help out (and yours truly even wrote a column about how to go about this, when I encouraged Obama to give a speaking tour of Europe and move public opinion on the issue).  But then he went to there after assuming office, and learned that when the Germans said “nine”, it was in reference to whether they would send troops, not how many brigades.

That’s why I was encouraged by Shada Islam’s article in Europe World, which offers several suggestions about why and how Europe can still contribute at this late stage:

The time is now over for reflection, consultation and for sitting on the fence. European governments had been vocal in their criticism of U.S. policy towards Afghanistan during the Bush Administration, and their advice was ignored. With President Obama, Europeans have an opportunity to partner with the U.S. in seeking solutions to the challenges of AfPak.

To do so, they must pay more attention to both Afghanistan and Pakistan. …

There is much room for improvement in the EU’s trade and aid ties with Pakistan. EU aid to Pakistan, stuck at €500m since 1976, is a fraction of the $10bn dollars in U.S. aid that Pakistan has received since 2001, and which has been easily overshadowed by the new commitments being made by the Obama Administration. Europe’s trade relations are also uneasy.

The EU is Pakistan’s largest trading partner, with EU imports mainly of textiles and clothing currently valued at about €3.5bn a year. But a spate of EU anti-dumping investigations, and the removal of Pakistan from the EU’s special duty-free scheme for developing countries, coupled with Brussels’ reluctance to start negotiations on a free trade agreement with Islamabad, have strained the trading relationship. …

The EU has a role to play in helping Pakistan’s increasingly dynamic civil society groups. The focus should be on ensuring media independence and providing support for groups that advocate human rights, including the protection of women, children and support for marginalised communities. EU encouragement for promoting Pakistan’s long-standing Sufi traditions would also help counter the spread of the cruel Taliban interpretation of Islam. …

A more targeted approach that is centered on winning hearts and minds should focus on bringing development to the arid and mountainous northern regions. …

European governments must lose no time in doing their AfPak homework. This doesn’t just mean putting both Afghanistan and Pakistan higher on the agenda; EU countries should coordinate and where possible, consolidate their programmes, policies and representations. It’s not what national policymakers like to hear, but Europe’s failure to do so will sour transatlantic relations and also put the brake on crucial steps towards expanding the EU’s global outreach.

Just because you can’t send more troops, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t help out.

The Presidential election in Afghanistan is but one week away. Failing a last minute surge by ex-Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah, Hamid Karzai should secure another term, and quite possibly avoid a second round run-off.

No matter who emerges as Afghanistan’s next president, his writ upon inauguration will not extend much farther than the outskirts of the capital city, Kabul.  It’s clear that despite a new commanding officer (General Stanley McChrystal), two strategy reviews (one mandated from the White House, another by McChrystal), a plus-up of troops, a recalibrated poppy policy, and a “civilian surge” of US government workers, questions abound from both foreign policy elites and Main Street about whether Afghanistan is worth it. Simply put, both the public and policy wonks alike are weary of eight years of war and are questioning the Obama administration’s massive new investment.

Are we throwing good money after bad?  What do we hope to accomplish, and when can we hope to accomplish it by?

Eight years on, the mission in Afghanistan is wearing thin with the public.  To state the obvious, here’s where it gets dicey.

The administration’s efforts are vastly hampered by the differing perceptions of “success”.  The American public perceives success - like in Iraq - as a decrease in violence.  Check out the graph below (prepared by the PPI’s stalwart Communications Assistant Steven Chlapecka) that compares increasing public approval of the Iraq war to the lowered body count.  Pretty dramatic, huh?

Bear in mind that this was the trend even though “the surge” - as detailed in Tom Ricks’ The Gamble - was actually a failure, in that it didn’t facilitate political breathing space necessary for Shiite/Sunni “reconciliation”.  But the public saw less death, and that was good enough.

The White House defines any semblance of success in Afghanistan in a vastly more complex manner, centered around a goal of a “secure America”, not “decreased violence”.  Word came last week about a series of “nine objectives” that the Nation Security Council is establishing, which are focused on denying al Qaeda a safe-haven.  Implicitly, they demand a much greater American commitment (read: nation building) than just temporary peace.

Therefore, the administration’s challenge is more than simply rolling out (and then achieving) new metrics  for success.  Numbers can be fudged, and there’s a good chance the public won’t care about anything beyond casualty rates anyway.

The clock is ticking.  Gen. McChrystal and SecDef Bob Gates have played for one year to prove their strategy is working, under the assumption that progress by this point next year will buy more time with the public.  But even that’s a tough sell - one year from now will be in the middle of mid-term elections, and calling for an Afghan wrap up is likely to be a crowd-pleaser.

That’s why this year - and a dedicated, competent Afghan president - is so critical.  The pressure to leave may be too great in twelve months to accomplish much more.