Leveraging Karzai And Outflanking Obama

By Steve Hynd

Mother Jones' David Corn, live-tweeting the White House presser as always, has just reported that Gibbs has refused to be drawn on specific anti-corruption measures the U.S. will demand of Hamid Karzai, saying only that the U.S. Embassy in Kabul was working on the matter.

The trouble with the Embassy working on it is that the folk there don't have the authority to do the only thing that could conceivably have any effect - announce a withdrawal timetable.

Michael Cohen nails it:

[A] shout out to Spencer for finding this precious quote from an administration official in another Times story:

�We�re going to know in the next three to six months whether he�s doing anything differently � whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn�t lose troops as fast as we train them."

Adorable! Meanwhile before those 3-6 months are up this Administration will have likely decided to send even more troops to Afghanistan (i.e. exactly what Karzai wants us to do) basically erasing whatever leverage we have left over the guy to "seriously address" corruption. Why does anyone in this Administration - after watching Karzai steal an election and play the US and NATO like a fiddle - think he will do anything seriously different going forward, especially when we've offered no indication that we intend to cut him or Afghanistan loose?

Perhaps this should lead to  a recognition that we simply don't have the host country support to do an actual counter-insurgency. I mean if this isn't an indication that those feverish dreams of COIN dancing in the heads of policymakers are have little basis in reality then I give up. How can you fight an counter-insurgency when not only is the Afghan government illegitimate, and incompetent, but seemingly impervious to real NATO and US persuasion?

In the end, It seems to me that if you want to get Karzai's attention the best place to start would be to show him you're actually serious about changing course if change isn't forthcoming.  And along those lines we have one piece of leverage that we can use - the number of American soldiers that we are willing to throw into the fire on behalf of this government. It's about time we used it. It's about the only card we have left.

Meanwhile, FOX News has an op-ed that suggests conservatives have found a way to outflank Obama on AfPak policy for political ends, rather than sticking to "staying the course". Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland, an alumni of the Nixon Ford and Reagan national security teams, takes the recent conservative hawk meme that Pakistan is now the "central front" in the War On (Some) Terror (TM) a step further and announces that the U.S. should dump Afghanistan entirely. Her argument is that the $20 billion or so it would cost to fund McChrystal's escalation would be far better spent on Pakistan aid.

Some of her argument is decidedly iffy:

as much as Afghanistan�s President Karzai has been a disappointment to American interests, Pakistan�s President Zardari has been an unexpected surprise. Previous Pakistani leaders paid lip service to defeating Islamic militants within their country. They played us like a fiddle: pledging their support, taking our aid, and sitting on their hands.

President Asif Ali Zardari has proved to be a leader willing leader willing to take the fight to the Taliban and its Al Qaeda allies. Zardari has transferred crack Army troops from the Indian border to the Afghan border. He�s cleared the Taliban out of the Swat Valley. He�s fighting a serious battle in South Waziristan and has plans to move into North Waziristan. Unlike his predecessor Musharaff, Zardari has come to realize that it�s either him or them, especially after Taliban extremists murdered his wife Benazir Bhutto.

Rather than prop up a corrupt and incompetent President Karzai in a country where Al Qaeda is no more, we should instead give President Zardari all the assistance he needs so that his forces can defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda. He has many flaws, but at least he�s willing to fight.

Saying that Zardari is better than Karzai is really more like comparing leprosy to the plague, it's comparing two very bad things. The former is almost equally as corrupt and spineless as the latter. But the actual argument isn't as important as the final position, for conservatives. We've seen a similiar process in the UK, where conservatives have been moving to outflank Brown by being more Afghan-skeptical. The truth is there's at least as much political calculation as concern for national security going on - and the irony is that conservatives are using much the same flanking manouver as Obama did for the win in the 2008 election, when he compared Iraq to Afghanistan.

Still, the notion that $20 billion a year would do better work bribing Zardari and Kayani than providing a surge in Afghanistan isn't a ludicrous one. It would make Kerry-Lugar look like chump change and might even be enough to overcome China's influence in Pakistan, which helps keep Pakistan's military on its chosen path of sponsoring proxies for regional feuds.

(A big hat tip to @davidmacdougall for a discussion on Twitter that informed a big chunk of this post)