Center for American Progress Re-Embraces It's Iraq Logic For Afghanistan

By Steve Hynd

It's been eight months since I wrote that the Center for American Progress wasn't applying its logic on Iraq to Afghanistan, but CAP seems to have belatedly caught up with itself in a new memo today by Caroline Wadhams and Colin Cookson. The bold emphasis is mine.

The upcoming international conference in Kabul scheduled for July 20 offers the Afghan government an opportunity to present development and political reform plans to the international community. It also offers the NATO/ISAF contributing countries a chance to present clearer plans for how they will support these efforts and the eventual transfer of security responsibilities to the Afghan government. Serious political reforms that focus on institutionalizing public participation and the checks and balances that enforce government accountability are needed for this transfer to be successful.

This document outlines key political reforms international donors should look for when evaluating Karzai government proposals at the Kabul conference and in its performance beyond. The Obama administration should prioritize the following reforms in exchange for continued international support up to and beyond July 2011, when the United States will begin to withdraw some of its forces:

• Increased Afghan representation in government to strengthen its legitimacy as a governing body with input from all Afghans�not just a closed presidential clique


• Decentralization of authorities to ameliorate Kabul�s overcentralization of control and resulting lack of responsiveness to local concerns


• Greater checks and balances within government to introduce measures of real accountability


• A commitment to transparent and inclusive reconciliation and power-sharing


• A commitment to domestic revenues and self-sustainability that will help ensure the state�s long-term survival

To be sure, the international community does not possess unlimited leverage over Afghan actors� behavior and cannot expect to dictate a new balance of power in the country without meeting resistance. But the United States does�through the Obama administration�s renewed commitment and by virtue of its role as Afghanistan�s largest single donor of both aid and combat power�hold levers that should be focused on these reforms. If the Afghan government and its international partners can�t seriously resolve the conflict�s political drivers no amount of large-scale military investment will alter the course of the conflict.

This complements CAP's writing on Iraq from 2007:

The current strategy is exactly what Al Qaeda wants�the United States distracted and pinned down by internal conflicts and trapped in a quagmire that has become the perfect rallying cry and recruitment tool for Al Qaeda. The United States has no good options given the strategic and tactical mistakes made, but simply staying the course with an indefinite military presence is not advancing U.S. interests.

...The fundamental premise of the surge strategy�that leaders will make key decisions to advance their country�s political transition and national reconciliation�is at best misguided and clearly unworkable.

...The �no end in sight� strategy fosters a culture of dependency among Iraqis by propping up certain members of the national government without fundamentally changing political dynamics. It does so at the cost of grinding down the strength of U.S. ground forces, as the readiness of these forces continues to decline.

It seems CAP has now committed itself to arguing that there's enough of a similiarity to the American situation in both nations that arguments for a timetabled withdrawal from Afghanistan cannot be blithely dismissed.

And, by re-embracing it's own logic now, CAP can do a valuable service in prematurely defusing the coming pro-surge spin cycle which will inevitably be mounted by the Pentagon and COIN-loving think tanks. The next review of strategy in Afghanistan is due in December - a time when violence there is always at an annual low because the weather simply prevents movement. A reduction in violence is written into the script.

But what we know about insurgencies from Northern Ireland to Malaysia is that violence is always used to cynically manipulate the political process towards a set of aims, and that only by providing a political solution acceptable enough to all parties can violence be ended. That's largely what's happened, for now and in a fragile fashion, in Iraq. As the current Belfast riots show, there are always die-hards who won't accept a political process and who will persist until replaced by a new generation - but most who lead an insurgency do so with an idea of what would comprise an acceptable aset of conditions for them ending it. Those conditions are amenable to negotiation, but not to force short of ethnic cleansing.