Kristoff - Former Spooks Say Af/Pak Escalation An "Historic Mistake"

By Steve Hynd

Nicholas Kristoff adds more fuel to the growing debate over the Obama administration's plans for Afghanistan:

President Obama has already dispatched an additional 21,000 American troops to Afghanistan and soon will decide whether to send thousands more. That would be a fateful decision for his presidency, and a group of former intelligence officials and other experts is now reluctantly going public to warn that more troops would be a historic mistake.

The group�s concern � dead right, in my view � is that sending more American troops into ethnic Pashtun areas in the Afghan south may only galvanize local people to back the Taliban in repelling the infidels.

�Our policy makers do not understand that the very presence of our forces in the Pashtun areas is the problem,� the group said in a statement to me. �The more troops we put in, the greater the opposition. We do not mitigate the opposition by increasing troop levels, but rather we increase the opposition and prove to the Pashtuns that the Taliban are correct.

�The basic ignorance by our leadership is going to cause the deaths of many fine American troops with no positive outcome,� the statement said.

The group includes Howard Hart, a former Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Pakistan; David Miller, a former ambassador and National Security Council official; William J. Olson, a counterinsurgency scholar at the National Defense University; and another C.I.A. veteran who does not want his name published but who spent 12 years in the region, was station chief in Kabul at the time the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and later headed the C.I.A.�s Counterterrorism Center.

�We share a concern that the country is driving over a cliff,� Mr. Miller said.

Kristoff explicitly endorses the alternative strategy put forward by British regional expert Rory Stewart.

The solution is neither to pull out of Afghanistan nor to double down. Rather, we need to continue our presence with a lighter military footprint, limited to training the Afghan forces and helping them hold major cities, and ensuring that Al Qaeda does not regroup. We must also invest more in education and agriculture development, for that is a way over time to peel Pashtuns away from the Taliban.

This would be a muddled, imperfect strategy with frustratingly modest goals, but it would be sustainable politically and militarily. And it does not require heavy investments of American and Afghan blood.

Stewart himself has described the current people-centric COIN plan as akin to asking whether it's worth wearing a seatbelt while driving your car off a cliff. The solution, he says, is to not drive off the cliff in the first place. That is, not to have a heavy-presence, decades long, occupation of Pashtun lands.