The Realist

Even as the Pakistani army fights and dies in South Waziristan in their most determined attempt yet to reshape the militant-spawning region, the Obama administration is giving us an object example of how not to plan and execute a war strategy in Afghanistan.  When you’re taking lessons in the political will needed to combat the Taliban from the Pakistani army, it might just be time to throw in the towel altogether.

It’s important to remember, briefly, now we got to the situation we are now in.  America invaded Afghanistan in 2001, and then quickly turned its attention to Iraq.  The Bush administration did not put sufficient resources into Afghanistan to achieve its desired goals; it seems it did not even put in enough resources to forestall eventual defeat.  As the situation in Iraq improved and that in Afghanistan deteriorated, Bush dispatched 7,000 more U.S. troops to the latter country in 2008.  He also launched a policy review, the result of which was kept from the media at the request of the incoming Obama administration (its existence was definitely talked about in the media at the time though, because I remember reading about it).

Then Obama came into office.  It has been his war since January, 2009, although on any given day you might he persuaded by the way he talks that it just landed in his in-tray courtesy of Dubya yesterday.  In March, Obama announced that after a “careful review” he had a “comprehensive new strategy for Afghanistan” which involved dispatching 21,000 more troops and switching to a population-centric counterinsurgency approach that was like the one which worked during the surge in Iraq.  The new plan was similar in its broad outlines to the outcome of the review launched by the Bush administration – hardly surprising, given that the two administrations had the same defence secretary.  Obama’s liberal base opposed the strategy, but Republicans were united in their praise for the president.

As 2009 progressed, Western forces launched a bloody campaign to recapture parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan that had fallen under Taliban control – this was the first part of Obama’s “comprehensive new strategy”.  This resulted in dozens of Western casualties, but dealt a blow to the Taliban.  Little else changed in Afghanistan during 2009.  The Taliban failed to disrupt the Afghan presidential election to any appreciable degree, and electoral fraud was of an expected scale, if perhaps slightly towards the high end.  After the initial gains of the summer offensive, General Stanley McChrystal, who was hand-picked by Obama to carry out the new strategy, told Obama that he needed more troops to hold the ground he had captured and capture more.

This was by no means a surprise.  When the strategy was unveiled in March, it was clear to every informed observer that more troops would be needed.  And, we reasoned, Obama would not be announcing his commitment to the new strategy unless he was going to be willing to eventually resource it properly as well.  The staggering of the troop surges were, we thought (we hoped), dictated by the availability of troops and the need to placate his liberal base.

I did not expect to be sat here on 25 October, more than a month into another, completely new ”strategy review”, with Obama having rejected the full implementation of his March strategy as apparently too politically costly at home.  I did not expect to be listening to Obama administration saying that their new policy review was “asking questions that have never been asked” because the Bush administration never asked them, raising profound questions about their own March review and the previous ten months they’ve spent in charge of this war.  I did not expect to have the administration’s internal divisions openly revealed, even flaunted, in the newspapers every day, as if they represented some sort of strength through diversity rather than a dangerous signal to the enemy that Washington is not committed to defeating him.

I will seek to avoid the personal and political attacks that I could launch on the administration after ten months of such undilted dithering and cowardly refusal to take responsibility for the war and the future of South Asia.  Let us consider it purely as a strategic question.  The minimum U.S. goal in Afghanistan is to prevent the country from becoming the base of the international jihadi movement as it was in the late 1990s.

In March, the administration accepted a counterinsurgency strategy which would decouple the Afghan people from the Taliban as the only way of making this happen.  It implicitly rejected all other options, which it is now re-considering.  These options include a dramatic drawdown and a shift to targeting al-Qaeda from outside of the theatre and a new focus on training the Afghan army (the “counter-terror” or “Biden” option), a dramatic new troop surge to do counter-insurgency properly in key areas of the country (the “McCrystal” option) and an ill-defined “middle” option which will likely not give McChrystal all the troops he wants but hope for a broadly similar outcome.

The important thing to realize about the Biden option is that it amounts to a managed retreat, with an attempt to minimize the costs of failure.  This becomes apparent when you consider that everything in the Biden option – the stepped up drone attacks, increased training of the Afghan army – is completely compatible with other, more aggressive strategies.  The Biden option is a subset of the other options; an enhanced counterinsurgency strategy will also include increased drone attacks and training of the Afghans.  The Biden strategy does not have any unique selling point and does not do anything that the other options don’t.  It simply calls for a withdrawal and hopes we can manage the ensuing chaos.  There are numerous reasons to be profoundly sceptical about this plan, and we must realize that it amounts to a pre-emptive admission of defeat.  We can’t win, says the Biden option, so why bother?

The other options, from the middle option to the McChrystal one, require more troops.  What they hold in common is they require the fundamental reshaping of the political reality in Afghanistan to one that is not amenable to the Taliban; that is the point of victory in war, imposing your political reality on the enemy.  The reshaping requires that the Afghan people, who still do not have a favourable view of the Taliban on the whole, believe that the U.S. is committed to defeating the extremists; otherwise they will have to reach an accomodation with them.  It is this reshaping that the Biden strategy says is impossible, and hence does not call for us to attempt.  But if we are to attempt it, we need more troops, and we need a greater commitment to our goals than the enemy has.  This is why Obama’s hesitation over his commitment to this outcome, and his hesitation over sending more troops as soon as possible, is so incredibly damaging.  But really, as he himself acknowledged in March and since, there is no alternative.  He needs to embrace it, and fast.

There is no path to victory that does not involve the commitment of more troops.  Every day that these troops are not dispatched is a day in which the situation for the Afghan government and NATO deteriorates.  There is no strategic benefit in delay, and there are plenty of costs.  Obama’s drawn out seminar sessions might be appropriate if there wasn’t already a strategy already in place, but there is: the man that Obama put in charge of a war plan that Obama himself approved says he can win this war with more resources, and yet the White House acts as if it just stumbled into Afghanistan yesterday.

This long process is designed as a balm to his liberal base – look how learned and careful and un-Bush-like we are, it soothes – but it is much more of a balm to the Taliban.  They have the momentum.  They have the committment.  They have the Afghan people scared.  They have Obama scared as well.  And unless Obama moves to decisively turn all of this around, and unless he does it very soon, they will win.  It is criminal for the administration to play politics with this war, and to ask American, NATO and Pakistani soldiers to die for a conflict to which the civilian leadership is not committed.  America’s allies will vote with their feet soon enough; America’s soldiers will simply die, along with many Afghans, until eventually Obama will have to decide whether to fight this war properly or abandon the country altogether.  He could take that decision now rather than later.  But he won’t.