Exum's Imperialist Hubris Goes Mainstream With VSP's.

By Steve Hynd

Back at the beginning of May, Andrew Exum of the CNAS thinktank wrote a paper calling for a coherent U.S. political strategy in Afghanistan.

This report notes that America's counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan has focused more on waging war at the operational and tactical levels at the expense of the strategic and political levels.

�In the end, by having so vocally and materially committed to the Karzai regime, the United States and its allies are tied to its successes and failures. The goal, then, should be to maximize the former and minimize the latter through focused application of U.S. leverage,� writes CNAS Fellow and author Andrew Exum.  �Designing a political campaign minimizes the role luck plays in whether the United States and its allies are successful.�

Given that CNAS is the modern mothership for neoliberal interventionists and the premier breeding tank for Obama administration national security officials, it was inevitable that this idea would go mainstream with the Very Serious People.

The Obama administration is focused on meeting its July 2011 deadline to begin withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, but it has no political strategy to help stabilize the country, current and former U.S. officials and other experts are warning.

The failure to articulate what a post-American Afghanistan should look like and devise a political path for achieving it is a major obstacle to success for the U.S. military-led counter-insurgency campaign that's underway, these officials and experts said.

McClatchy's piece today cites Bush-era political advisor in Iraq and Ambassador to Afghanistan Ronald E. Neumann as well as "all war, all the time" think-tanker Michael Semple saying that the lack of such a plan leads to "strategic confusion" and that, of course, we shouldn't ever talk about timelines or definite withdrawal dates.

Yet the problems with such a US devised and imposed political strategy are blindingly obvious.

Firstly, shouldn't the COIN gurus have thought of all this years ago if they were going to do it at all? Isn't this indicative of yet another massive failure of the process of translating counterinsurgency theory, so pretty on paper, into practical reality? And if they've failed so eggregiously, why should we trust them to fix the failure now?

Secondly, what moral or legal right does the US now have to dictate the political path of a supposedly sovereign nation? An externally imposed plan will only work to bolster insurgents' arguments that Afghanistan is an occupied nation and that the occupiers will not ever leave unless they are kicked out forcibly.

Thirdly, how is imposing this strategy supposed to work if the Afghans don't like it? What's the leverage? The U.S. isn't going to shut of the money flow, nor withdraw if it doesn't get its way. It seems the only way such an external strategy could be imposed is literally at gunpoint. That really would put the seal on accusations of Imperialism and bolster the insurgency!

This idea is like calling for locking the doors on a barn after the horses have all fled.

Isn't it time we tried the strategy from Iraq, where the blindingly obvious realization was that Iraqis would take ownership of their own nation the instant they knew for a fact they wouldn't have the U.S. to prop them up forever? Thus, the declaration of a definite withdrawal date and a timetable to get everyone there.