The Real Metric For Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

The neocons are rallying to Obama's defense over mounting dissent about his benchmark-free stratergy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And as usual with neocon arguments, your attention has to be on the excluded middle. Over at RealClearWorld, conservative writer Greg Scoblete demolishes Fred "Let's Surge Again" Kagan by pointing out what isn't there. It's a short, succinct post and I hope he doesn't mind if I quote it in full.

Jennifer Rubin says critics of the war in Afghanistan "have an obligation to step forward with a credible alternative for waging that war or with a scenario by which we could avoid a calamity in Pakistan without victory in Afghanistan."

Well, wait. Shouldn't the proponents of nation building in Afghanistan provide evidence that the stability of Pakistan would indeed be in danger should the United States reduce its military footprint? Rubin sites an op-ed in the WSJ from Frederick Kagan arguing that we have to nation build in Afghanistan for the sake of Pakistani stability. But none of what Kagan writes seems to point toward a complete breakdown of Pakistan. Here's what we know:

1. Pakistani territory is home to a sizable Taliban presence which, despite a stepped up insurgency, has been unable to overthrow the government. Indeed, the Pakistani government continues to support the Taliban (at least Afghan elements of the movement) as a hedge.

2. For all of Washington's professed worry about Pakistan, it seems Pakistan is at least equally if not more concerned with India. Shouldn't that count for something in our calculus?

3. When Afghanistan collapsed in the 1990s, as Kagan argues, Pakistan itself didn't collapse from the instability. It stepped in and propped up its favored side. Those ties continue to this day. Why such a thing wouldn't happen again is never really addressed.

Again, what the proponents of nation building in Afghanistan have to address is how building a stable Afghanistan, with all the costs that entails, prevents international jihadists from launching terrorist attacks against the United States. That is the metric for this mission.

The notion that the U.S. has to continue to occupy Afghanistan entirely because it cannot realistically invade and occupy Pakistan is, on the face of it, absurd. Yet that's the excluded middle in every argument which involves a continued presence there to head off some mythical overthrow of Pakistan by Al Qaeda and the Taliban or to fight those groups in their safe havens in Pakistan. 

Pakistan has a real army, the world's fifth largest, with tanks and attack aircraft and artillery - AQ and the Taliban don't. Pakistan has mostly refused to mount massive operations against these groups because it sees them as useful, both now and in the future, as proxies against a very real threat of Indian strategic encirclement. But whenever such groups get too uppity the Pakistani military has shown itself more than able to reel them back in by the traditionally most effective COIN methods: ethnic cleansing and repression. The notion that they might overthrow a military that also directly controls over half the national economy and the final levers of political power is ludicrous.

The Taliban and AQ's safe havens in Pakistan continue to exist at the will of the Pakistani military, not despite it. The notion that the U.S. and its allies can dismantle those safe havens from a neighbouring country against the will of the Pakistani military is likewise ludicrous. It would take an invasion to do it by force of arms, and that's simply not going to happen. "We'll fight them over there so we don't have to fight them here" has run up against it's definitive counter-example. Nation-building a stable Afghanistan won't touch those safe havens in the slightest. In fact, it will give the Pakistani military and its intelligence agencies even more cause to back those groups as useful proxies against India and its strategic allies in the West. The solution to that part of the region's Gordian Knot, if one exists at all, lies in diplomatically defusing the competing geopolitical interests of China, the West, and their regional allies Pakistan and India - not in escalating our military presence.

Nor will nation-building in Afghanistan, be it ever so successful, touch the safe havens of international jihadists in Yemen or Somalia, touch their funders in Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations or touch their decentralized franchise operatives working in the suburbs of Western cities. The same holds true for nation-building in Iraq, just as it always has.

The limited objective of stopping Al Qaeda, which is focussed upon the "far enemy" in the West, from establishing safe havens anew in Afghanistan can be accomplished by a minimal Western military presence and injections of well-directed Western civilian aid. The objective of preventing the re-establishment of the Afghan Taliban - which is focussed on the "near enemy" of the narco-warlords of the old Northern Alliance who now comprise the bulk of the Afghan government - is impossible with any amount of foreign occupation and really isn't our business to begin with.

There is no rationale for long-term, massive nation-building-at-gunpoint in Afghanistan that doesn't rely on missing out all the most important parts of the argument. There is no basic metric for the mission.