Elements of Obama’s Afghanistan plan are now leaking out at a steady rate. I’m not going to slam the plan until I hear it from the president’s mouth, and he might be more convincing than the early reports. I do have one quibble with what I’ve read so far. It comes at the end of this:
[British Prime Minister Gordon] Brown said that the strategy calls for “transfer of lead security responsibility to the Afghans — district by district, province by province — with the first districts and provinces potentially being handed over during the next year,” depending on “the Afghans being ready.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said that transferring security responsibility for specific Afghan areas will be “a big part of what you’ll hear the president talk about tomorrow.”
Allied governments have pressed Karzai to remove warlords and cronies from senior government positions. Over the next nine months, Brown said, the Afghan president “will be expected to implement . . . far-reaching reforms to ensure that, from now on, all 400 provinces and districts have a governor appointed on merit, free from corruption, with clearly defined roles, skills and resources.”
It’s not as if Hamid Karzai is some sadistic sociopath like Saddam Hussein. He hasn’t appointed warlords to prominent positions because he is fond of warlordism. The decision to use warlords is necessitated by the need to otherwise, you know, make war on them. You can’t fix an endemic problem like that by issuing lectures about merit and ‘clearly defined roles.’ When I hear bullshit like that coming from the British Prime Minister, I am not instilled with great confidence. Yes, it is a worthy goal. But I don’t see it working out quite the way they hope.
Steve Coll does not successfully obviate the problem of making a strawman argument by labeling it as such. He assumes a resurgent Taliban in the wake of an American withdrawal and then talks about the consequences. But the first question is not what what would happen if the Taliban are resurgent; the first question is whether the Taliban would be resurgent. Or, more properly, are there ways from preventing a resurgency of the Taliban short of escalating our troop levels?
Do we need to sit in Afghanistan as if it were Okinawa in order to manage the potential for another India-Pakistan War? If so, is there any prospect that we’ll stop getting shot at at some point?
What we definitely can’t do is something that is so costly in dollars and lives that it isn’t sustainable. Coll doesn’t address that.
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Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in remarks to business executives in New York, stressed that the administration’s strategy is to go after not just the al-Qaida terror network but also the Taliban militants allied with it in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“As long as Afghanistan and Pakistan struggle to control their borders and extend their sovereignty to all their territory, the door is open to bad actors, and the result can be an environment in which terrorist groups thrive.”
U.S. military cross-border operations from Afghanistan into Pakistan have become increasingly overt and unilateral since the spring. More than a tactical shift, these operations are meant to address the strategic problem of Pakistan’s lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where Taliban fighters from Afghanistan rest, recuperate and resupply and where other jihadists mount a growing Islamist insurgency in Pakistan.
REMINISCENT OF VIET CONG SANCTUARIES
… developing and implementing a new strategy for Afghanistan. This strategy will have to address the situation in Pakistan, where FATA sanctuaries for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are reminiscent of North Vietnamese army sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
High in the Hindu Kush MountainsAfghan-Pakistani Border map
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."in the NYT:
We have no leadership.
A direct miss. It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to tell yet another nation full of war-weary people that NATO and the US consider their country a basket-case. We’ve decided on a plan we’re calling the ‘cash equivalent’: pass out a few billions shrink-wrapped on pallets like the Viceroy of Iraq, declare the ‘war’ over, and pull our people out.
After all, that’s truly the ‘American Way’.
I supported the original invasion back in 2001.
But this is just deeply, deeply immoral.
In the end, no matter what, Afghanistan will never be able independently to afford a substantial army and police force ‘to keep the peace’. What are its resources? Poppies? The U.S and the rest of the world and especially the U.S. will be paying big amounts of money to the Afghan government for as long as they intend to support it. Before the money even stops Afghanistan will have reverted to its own ways, and all the lives and money thrown by the U.S. into such a snake pit will have been completely wasted. They are already. A tragedy will unfold tonight. Just that Obama et al. decided to have the speech set at West Point shows how insecure the man is and desperate for approval of the military. The Oval Office wasn’t good enough for the commander and chief. You might say its the people’s office. No, he has to go fawning all over a crowd of fawning cadets. Disgusting, Mr Obama, get some conviction.