Joe Klein Has No Clue

By Steve Hynd

This week's TIME has a piece by veteran fan of armed interventions, Joe Klein, risably entitled "What it will take to finish the job in Afghanistan". It's worth a read as an example of how the U.S. hasn't a blessed clue how to accomplish any such thing, being a precis of the conventional wisdom from Pentagon and Beltway that points up the strawmen, dubious premises, internal contradictions and faulty logic. You won't know whether to laugh or cry.

The short version of Klein's piece is that "what it will take" is more of the same stuff that's failed so badly so far: nation building at gunpoint and an occupation that never ends (as no-one from Beltway or Pentagon has yet come up with a plan that doesn't involve about 30,000 US troops there in perpetuity), all because we're occupying the nation next door to where the real problem is.

For me, the very worst part comes at the foot of page one.

"But even if Afghanistan can be stabilized militarily by Election Day in 2012 � an enormous if � the situation could quickly unravel if the government of President Hamid Karzai remains as corrupt and incompetent as it is now and if Afghanistan's neighbors India and Pakistan continue to see it as a pawn in their never ending enmity."

He's absolutely right but fails to note that those two unravellers - Karzai's corruption and Indo/Pak emnity - are as certain as night following day and there's bugger all the U.S. can now realistically do about either of them.

This really is the elephant in the room: everyone knows it and everyone says it but no-one on the pro-war side of the debate is ready to face up to what it plainly means: any plan whatsoever to "finish the job" in Afghanistan is fucked (Yes, Tommy, properly fucked).

I figure the Beltway and Pentagon crowds might be ready to face the elephant by August, when their surge's Freidman Unit runs out and they're still no closer to being able to say the word "progress" without crossing fingers behind their backs. Still, I won't hold my breath. We're now in a Lokking Glass world where the ANA being 90% non-Pashtun, "in effect a larger version of the old Northern Alliance", is something Klein thinks is worth celebrating!

And then there's this, the bit worth crying over:

Holbrooke believed tensions could not be reduced without a diplomatic solution. He wanted to cap his long career with a final haggle � this one with the Taliban themselves, leading to a peace conference celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Bonn accord, which established the Karzai government in December 2001. He was at odds with Petraeus about that. The general was looking for something closer to a surrender than a negotiation from the Taliban, and his remains the default position in the Obama Administration.

Well yeah - this was always the only way to do anything even remotely close to "finishing the job". But Obama wouldn't back Holbrooke with the authority he needed over Saint Pet and now Holbrooke's gone. Veteran diplomat Thomas Pickering was, according to Klein, offered Holbrooke's shoes to step into and flat refused. I'm not at all surprised.

But with the "great peace conference" dead at Petreaus' behest, we're left with a tangle of cross-purposed tactics, no grand strategy, and an occupation which will last forever if it goes according to plan. This is the conventional wisdom as propounded by the Beltway set of very serious people.

And they call those of us who want a proper, timetabled, withdrawal plan "unserious"...