False choices in Afghanistan
By C. Christine Fair, January 11, 2011
Tuesday, January 11, 2011 - 1:14 PM
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ISLAMABAD -- Advocates of the current U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan deploy false choices and flawed assumptions to defend the status quo. Proponents of "staying the course" delegitimize the pursuit of better options for ending this deadly nine-year war by reducing the debate to a dubious binary: maintain a long-term counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign against the Taliban or leave Afghanistan after ignominiously "cutting and running." It is time to reframe this public discourse over the costly status quo and consider a new way forward.
Vice President Joe Biden, who is currently in Afghanistan and headed to Pakistan shortly, has argued, among others, that a policy of "Counterterrorism Plus" will more effectively secure genuine U.S. security objectives. He's right.
This approach calls for a much smaller deployment of forces that would focus upon al-Qaeda, including continued drone attacks on al-Qaeda and international militants both in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas. Proponents of such a plan argue for continuing the training mission of Afghan National Security Forces with a dedicated focus upon sustainability as well as continued and long-term initiatives to develop civilian capacity in the Afghan government. Obviously, this implies a sustained -- albeit a different and perhaps smaller -- U.S. presence in Afghanistan. This is not "cut and run."
As a proponent of some variant of a "Counterterrorism Plus" approach, I argue that the U.S. enemies are al-Qaeda and international terrorist groups -- not the largely parochial Afghan Taliban. Clearly, the United States must deny al-Qaeda access to Afghanistan. However, U.S. intelligence officials note that this goal largely has been accomplished: only 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives are presently in Afghanistan with many more in Pakistan. Yet Washington must work to ensure that Afghanistan does not again become an al-Qaeda sanctuary.
Abandoning the current aggressive COIN effort in favor of an approach targeting terrorists rather than Taliban insurgents would also be welcomed by many Afghans. Polls show that Afghans are increasingly disapproving in their assessment of both the presence and performance of U.S. and NATO forces in their country. Afghan President Hamid Karzai himself requested the United States to decrease the intensity of the conflict and "reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life." Contrary to COIN proponents who argue that abandoning COIN will degrade U.S. intelligence about al-Qaeda, intelligence is just as likely to improve as Afghans, who dislike al-Qaeda, may be more open to sharing information when the disliked COIN effort is scaled back and abandoned.
Washington must continue development assistance, investing in Afghan governance capacity and strengthening the Afghan National Security Forces while working vigorously to redress corruption in the Afghan government and in the donor community. To succeed, Washington will need to secure a strategic partnership with Afghanistan that permits the United States to maintain a critical presence in Regional Commands East and South to effectively operate against al-Qaeda and other international terrorists ensconced along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Karzai is likely to accede to such a partnership. He wants the COIN campaign to end, but he needs U.S. assistance, fears al-Qaeda, and resents the sanctuaries in Pakistan.
This course of action hinges upon several assumptions that are routinely rebuffed by COIN proponents who have little empirical evidence for their own claims. Each merits genuine debate.
First, today's Taliban -- a confederation of local commanders -- differ from the Taliban of September 10, 2001. The mid-level leadership has been consistently eliminated and replaced. Many of these new commanders were teenagers when Mullah Omar consolidated his organization. Pakistan recognizes that the erstwhile Quetta Shura is a declining asset, that it has little control over this new generation and thus, is struggling to control this emergent "Neo-Taliban."
COIN's proponents ignore these realities and rehearse the Taliban's refusal to hand over Osama bin Laden some nine years ago. However, other regional experts with decades of experience there believe that many -- by no means all -- Taliban-allied commanders would negotiate away ties with al-Qaeda with an appropriate process of reconciliation. Contrary to popular opinion, al-Qaeda is not present throughout Afghanistan; rather, it is generally rooted in the northern provinces of Kunar and Nuristan and is far removed from the Taliban in the southern provinces of Helmand and Kandahar. Those who remain committed to violence would become targets of the invigorated counterterrorism campaign.
Second, this option implicitly assumes that some sort of reconciliation with the Taliban is inevitable if not necessary. While Washington opposes this, it is an exclusively Afghan domestic affair. Washington's only legitimate interest is precluding a return of al-Qaeda. Afghans have an inalienable right to decide their future -- even if it includes actors that are deemed reprehensible elsewhere.
Third, a "counterterrorism plus" strategy assumes that the Taliban -- despite their increasingly global Islamist rhetoric -- remain focused upon Afghanistan and ousting foreigners and are less threatening to U.S. and international security than the raft of Islamist militants based in Pakistan, which are tied to international terrorism. The logistical dependence upon Pakistan to supply the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan limits the U.S.'s ability to demand that Pakistan abandon groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and the al-Qaeda-linked Haqqani network.
Fourth, this counterterrorism approach repudiates the conventional wisdoms about the "successes in Iraq" and the much-lauded surge there. While history alone will tell whether Iraq has in fact been a "success," scholars are increasingly interrogating the common wisdom that these ostensible successes in Iraq were due to the surge and General David Petraeus' COIN strategy rather than critical internal changes in Iraqi politics.
More fundamentally, the assumptions of Petraeus' COIN doctrine simply may not apply to Afghanistan where there are no functional line ministries, where the insurgents are rural and cannot easily be extricated from the local population, and where the insurgents are interlaced with families who may disapprove of their relatives' activities but do not want them dead.
Some skeptics of this proposed way forward predictably will deploy the "women's rights" or "human rights" cards to reject such a policy on the basis of the Taliban's appalling savagery. They have a point. But the U.S. and NATO have cultivated shady allies across Afghanistan for purely instrumental purposes, including warlords, drug traffickers, and other unsavory characters whose own records on these same issues are equally repugnant.
The values of a counterterrorism plus strategy are manifold. First, it decreases the loss of American life and treasure as well as many more Afghan lives. Second, reducing the combat operations will likely increase the amount and quality of intelligence that will better enable the fight against al-Qaeda and other international terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Third, it will temper a powerful narrative of jihadis everywhere that the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is an occupation force. Fourth and perhaps most importantly, it will relieve the U.S. dependence upon Pakistan to sustain the war, freeing up U.S. national power to focus upon the international terrorists there. The Obama administration must reject these prevailing false choices and get down to the business of defining a new and better way forward.
C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University and the author of Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States.
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Al Qaeda & Taliban - peas of the same pod
Ms. Fair’s diagnosis itself separating Al Qaeda from Taliban is false - Al Qaeda, Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban - all three are peas of the same pod.
US has been deliberately ignoring Taliban’s Pakistani connections in fueling and sustaining Afghan insurgency as reported by Matt Waldman in ‘The sun in the sky‘ on 6/13/2010, corroborated by WikiLeaks leaks on 7/25/2010 and then further corroborated by Chris Alexander, Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005 and Deputy Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Afghanistan from 2005 until 2009 in his article on 7/30/2010 titled ‘The huge scale of Pakistan‘s complicity‘.
As Afghan President Karzai told a news conference in Kabul on 7/29/2010 after WikiLeaks leaks, “The time has come for our international allies to know that the war against terrorism is not in Afghanistan’s homes and villages. But rather this war is in the sanctuaries, funding centers and training places of terrorism which are in Pakistan. Our international allies have the ability to destroy these Pakistani sanctuaries, but the question is why they are not doing it?“
Even Afghanistan’s national security advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta has asked a similar question in a Washington Post article on 8/23/2010: “While we are losing dozens of men and women to terrorist attacks every day, the terrorists’ main mentor (Pakistan) continues to receive billions of dollars in aid and assistance. How is this fundamental contradiction justified? Despite facing a growing domestic terror threat, Pakistan “continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda. Dismantling the terrorist infrastructure “requires confronting the state of Pakistan that still sees terrorism as a strategic asset and foreign policy tool”.
All American officers in southern Afghanistan know that they can not prevail in the ongoing military operations, unless Taliban strongholds across the Durand Line in North Waziristan and Baluchistan are neutralized. Adm Mullen and Gen Patraeus evidently do not want to acknowledge that hard options have to be considered if their soldiers are not to die at the hands of radicals, armed and trained across the Durand Line.
But for some diabolical reason, Gates, Mullen, Petraeus & Company has split the Taliban into the Afghan and Pakistani parts even though they are two peas of the same pod. The US military is going after the Pakistani Taliban, while it encourages the Pakistani intelligence to continue to shelter the entire top Afghan Taliban leadership in Baluchistan province. Mullah Muhammad Omar and other members of the Taliban's inner shura (council) have been ensconced for years in the Quetta area.
As General McChrystal reported in his assessment of August, 2009 to the President: ‘The Quetta Shura Taliban (QST) based in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, is the No. 1 threat to US/NATO mission in Afghanistan. At the operational level, the Quetta Shura conducts a formal campaign review each winter, after which Mullah Mohammed Omar (Afghan Taliban Chief) announces his guidance and intent for the coming year‘.
However US drones have targeted militants in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), but not the Afghan Taliban leadership operating with impunity from Baluchistan. US ground-commando raids also have spared the Afghan Taliban's command-and-control network in Baluchistan.
Thus US military itself is responsible for the continuing death of US/NATO soldiers in Afghanistan by not attacking Mullah Omar’s QST headquarters in Baluchistan.
I liked your information, but there are a couple things I wonder how true they are.
There are different groups of Taliban, maybe not so much Afghan vs, Pakistani, but in how entangled they are with AQ. Not all are so intertwined, and Afghans do, resent to some degree Pakistani influence in their land.
I also don't trust much what wikileaks reveals. Karzia has been having a lot of talks with the ISI, who have many reasons to not want extremists to win in Afghanistan and then in Pakistan. The ISI have had some 300 casualties fighting the extremists, and the Pakistani army has lost thousands.
A also don't think anyone knows where Mullah Omar is, or think that it would be easy to just bomb the sanctuaries more than what the drones are now doing.
Thanks
Ms. Christine Fair's this piece is more researched and realistic than the one she wrote last time. That write up superficially suggested that Obama administration was targeting Iran knowing the origin of terrorism was Pakistan. Knowing she had lived in Lahore, Pakistan, and she knows so much about that part of the world, including the language, I felt one of her students had used her name in getting that article published after hurriedly drafting it.
How to cry fire while being eminently faie as Prof. Fair?
The cost to America of killing one Afghan suspected of being a Taliban is extraordinary and the gain to the Taliban enormous in that one killed creates ten more to avenge the Jihadi "martyred." Prof. Fair is a lone voice of reason that might sound hollow were it not for Wikilieaks’ piercing of the Pentagon’s self-protective shroud of secrecy. The Pentagon continues to imprison truth and emanate an endless incoming on us bombardment of stupid lies. Normally, I would ask of myself as of others that less rhetorical flourish be used—to be, instead, as reasoned as Prof. Fair. But I've seen our current predicament too often before in too many places not to be utterly agitated by all this because History has told us over and over again of the consequences. Our COIN/PR generals will fade into their post-pension corporate slots but America will never cease to suffer the wounds their misrepresentation of their incompetence is inflicting on our children. What Wall Street did to America’s wealth the generals are doing to America's remaining shreds of greatness.
We cannot continue to substitute ordnance for brains. Our military mediocrities in command are fighting for their jobs and reputations more than for national interest. Where really is our “enemy”? binLaden sought to destroy our economy but never would have dared dream he could ever achieve the damage our Wall Streeters did with sheer larceny and greed. Since 9/11 we had more Americans killed on the home front by other insane Americans than by any Jihadis sneaking into the USA. "Security" has become the only thing we don't buy from China and so those who want well paying jobs and bonuses but couldn’t make it to Wall Street have been raping the Treasury in a blinding synthetic cloud of fear of terrorism which they generate.
Petraeus is the most egregious abuser of American blood and treasure and Obama is criminal through his permissiveness, allowing this self-styled PR bully to box him into the concept that MORE IS BETTER.
It is regretful that Petraeus recognized his personal limitations and chose to make his mark in the military rather than on Wall Street; for no matter how much of a heist he might have achieved there it is no match for the deep chronic injury he is inflicting on America as chief of a cabal that is bullying the President into compliance with his surges while hiding from the public the effects of his incompetence. By incompetence I mean his repeat of all the dumbest Vietnam tactics, despite the fact that he did a PhD Thesis on the Vietnam War. Therein he emphasized that PR POLITICS are at issue and, when in command, he sought to avoid the national impatience that ended Vietnam so badly misrepresenting what his surges ultimately do for our security. Thus, to this day, he has managed to force a new President to support the very Karzai regime he categorized as a "criminal syndicate, imposing it on the Afghans" and treating every Afghan that opposes that "government in a box" as a Taliban "terrorist."
Nothing is more dangerous than a self-serving mediocrity in command able to impose a never ending war in order to hide his incompetence. Were my own child under his command I would be tolerated by others for my vitriol. But the fact is that it is "MY" kids fighting and dying pointlessly under his command because as an American I deem ALL our soldiers as MY kids and cannot allow that anything be done with them that I would not allow to be done with the kids I parented.
After Petraeus tells the truth or is out and all MY kids come home, I will be very glad to write retrospective articles as dispassionate as Prof. Fair does and as I write in my own scientific endeavors. I read everything from every side which I can find so I really am in no way blind to the Petraeus perspective. But the current of fear that is generated and exploited by "terrorism" professionals-- as was fear by anti-Communism professionals-- drains the blood and wealth out of America so I feel compelled by the acute urgency threatening America’s very survival to speak unequivocally to power in the hope that we might break the "SECRET" barrier and then and only then engage in real debate so that we can all feel that the American people are truly considering all the policies and consequences of these policies. After reading, at the very least, all of Woodward's books on Bush and his Afghan/Iraq "War on Terror," Woodward’s OBAMA'S WAR book I consider a clear signal that what we need now is not a treatise on the heat and light energy differential between Afghanistan and Main Street USA but must instead just shout, "FIRE1 FIRE! FIRE!" to get my neighbors dismissing Petraeus's war on grounds that "it isn't my son that must go fight under his command but volunteers that no one forced to join-up so let them do the job they're paid to do," to begin to ask themselves if they would willingly send their sons to follow Petraeus.
It is clear that it's gone far beyond "Petraeus betrayed us," evident by merely reading the writings of Prof. Fair. By refusing to connect the dots because it might upset us, it's gotten to be that we Americans and Obama are betraying the children who patriotically volunteered to defend us. Once people realize that, then we can sit together and dispassionately seek solutions modeled by the erudite style of Prof. Fair.
May/June 2013
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