Is the Hawks' Af/Pak Strategy Changing Again?

By Steve Hynd

Petraeus and McChrystal still want more troops for nation-building in Afghanistan, but there are signs that the Very Serious People are about to change horses midstream again and advocate an Iraq-style papering over the cracks before declaring victory and rushing for the exits. It has become obvious that neither the public nor many Democratic lawmakers support escalation of the eight year occupation, with only the neocons seriously supporting doubling down on an American decades-long presence. So the new plan is to instead concentrate on a rapid increase of Afghan security forces - both police and army - followed by withdrawal.

The Germans like this plan, which in their version envisions withdrawal starting in 2013, and are likely to push it at the summit called by European members of the alliance. The UK will almost certainly agree, since Brown is under severe pressure from both his own Left and the conservative Right to find an exit somehow. John Nagl, president of the neoliberal interventionist mothership - the CNAS think tank which has provided so many of Obama's foreign policy team - likes the plan too. Or at least sees the domestic political advantages of preferring it to troop escalation. And where CNAS leads the Obama administration tends to follow.

You'd think that any shorter timeline to full withdrawal would make an anti-occupation bod like me happy, wouldn't you? "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the possible" and all that political claptrap, right? But no - for one thing, best management practise has always been "if you don't keep asking for exactly what you want, you've no chance of getting it". For another, I'm entirely unconvinced that such a halfway-house plan is any better for either the Afghan people or American interests than a decades long occupation would be.

Essentially, "they will stand up so we can stand down" was the plan in Iraq too, and most accept that the reconciliation that was supposed to follow that surge failed to materialize. Instead, we papered temporarily over Iraq's factional cracks and made a face-saving deal with the strongman of the moment, enabling the U.S. and its allies to head for the exits. Now, violence is on the increase there and the various factions are manouvering for advantage in advance of what they expect to be the next phase of Iraq's multi-sided civil war - Arabs v Kurds, Sunni v Shia, various Shia factions v other Shia etc. Iraqi security forces are heavily factionalised - militias in a national uniform - and can only be expected to make that civil war bloodier still when it comes. That, in turn, will destabilise the entire region to the detrement of American national interest.

Any plan to withdraw under cover of mere numbers of Afghan security forces holds the same danger of simply adding more well-equipped militiamen to an eventual Afghan civil war too, only with bells on. I know it looks better to "do an Iraq" but it isn't really. There would be less havoc, in the long term, from a simple withdrawal, but that won't make the politicians, generals and think-tankers look good - so that's what we won't get.

Update: Col Gian Gentile gets it. He writes that the whole idea we could ever nation-build at gunpoint in Afghanistan is predicated "on the flawed understanding produced by the Iraq Triumph Narrative that underpins current hopes for Astan: It worked in Iraq because we said so, so listen to us, try harder, give us just a bit more, and we can make it work in Afghanistan."

He continues:

The question about the efficacy of nation building in Afghanistan is important for strategy because it is the underlying and supremely powerful belief that we can make it work that continues to push us down the present operational path of population centric Coin that we are on. Sometimes it does seem that �wicked� tactical and operational problems in a place like Afghanistan requires not necessarily more experts and �scary smart� army officers to tackle them, but clear, astute, and resolute thinking about strategy and national interests.

Just like the coherent and logical thought that General (ret) Krulak displayed in his very recent letter to George Will on strategy, national interests, and Afghanistan.

"Papering over the cracks" is a poor compromise and shouldn't be accepted.