The Wonk Room

The Fruits Of ‘Dithering’ In Afghanistan

Given that the charge that President Obama is “dithering” on Afghanistan originated with former Vice President Dick Cheney, one can and should dismiss it out of hand as a transparent attempt to distract Americans from the fact that the Bush-Cheney administration vastly under-resourced the U.S.-led effort there for the last five years. But it’s also worth pointing out that, as it has conducted its deep review of options in Afghanistan, the president and his team haven’t simply been sitting around talking. They’ve been working with and encouraging and cajoling our partners in the Pakistan and Afghanistan government to step up and play a more positive role. And they’ve made it clear to both governments that a demonstrated willingness to do that will influence the president’s decision on U.S. troop and resource commitments to the effort.

On Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton again made it clear that Hamid Karzai’s government must do more to eliminate corruption if he wanted continued civilian aid from Washington. Government corruption at all levels has been a huge problem in Afghanistan, preventing the state from establishing any genuine legitimacy and powering the resentment that feeds the Taliban insurgency.

Yesterday, the government of Afghanistan “announced new anticorruption measures in response to pressure from Washington and its allies, unveiling a special task force that will investigate graft by senior officials”:

“This force will make sure no high-ranking official who is involved in corruption will go unpunished,” said Interior Minister Hanif Atmar, accompanied by the U.S. and British ambassadors to Kabul. The new body will get training and support from the European Union and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said.

The task force, which began operating in recent days, has netted three high-ranking government officials and charged them with stealing money meant for the families of policemen killed in the line of duty, said Amrullah Saleh, chief of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. He didn’t identify the detained men beyond saying that one of them was a general.

Obviously, simply creating a new anti-corruption unit and making some arrests isn’t the same as actually “fighting corruption,” but it’s a positive step. As with the Pakistan Army’s move against Taliban redoubts in Waziristan, a sustained commitment on the part of the Afghanistan will significantly impact the ability of the U.S.-led coalition to roll back the Taliban and stabilize the country. Karzai’s move is a welcome one, though, and should be recognized as the result of the successful use of American leverage by the Obama administration to elicit a positive change in behavior — as well as proof that the administration’s hawkish critics continue to be best ignored.

Holbrooke Emphasizes Agricultural Development In Afghanistan »

Today, the Center for American Progress hosted Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and ten members of his interagency team at a public event here in DC. Aside from his “we’ll know it when we see it” remark on success in Afghanistan, the most interesting thing about the Holbrooke team’s presentation was its emphasis on agricultural development.

Yesterday, I wrote about the importance of the opium crop and the plans to dramatically increase the Department of Agriculture’s presence in Afghanistan. But from what Holbrooke and others said today, it appears the main force of the United States’ counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan – beyond clearing locales of Taliban fighters – will be thrown behind rebuilding that country’s agricultural sector.

It was good to hear from Holbrooke himself that opium eradication efforts were futile and being phased out. Opium production is only a symptom of the much larger problems facing Afghanistan’s agricultural industry (such as it is) after decades of war. Since most Afghans rely on agriculture for their livelihood – 80 percent are involved in farming, herding, or some combination of the two – transitioning from an opium-based illicit agro-economy to a more sustainable and legal one will be critical if the United States is to have any success in Afghanistan.

The overall theory behind rebuilding the licit Afghan agricultural sector is relatively simple: help average Afghan farmers get back on their economic feet, and they’ll be more likely to support the Afghan government and less likely to acquiesce to Taliban rule. Of course security is a necessary component for such an effort, and it shouldn’t be out of sight and out of mind. It’s necessary if U.S. civilian personnel are to get “outside the wire” of security compounds, as Holbrooke pledged to do today. But rural development has long been a staple of counterinsurgency efforts in predominantly agricultural economies facing guerrilla wars. More »« Less

Pakistani Militant Leader’s Death A Tactical Victory, But Deeper Network Remains »

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, special assistant for national security at the Center for American Progress

If reports by Pakistani officials and at least two Taliban commanders are confirmed, the United States’ covert Predator drone campaign may have just scored a major hit in killing Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the militant group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). Pakistani and U.S. intelligence blame Mehsud for the December 2007 assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the September 2008 bombing of the Islamabad Marriot, and scores of other suicide and bomb attacks within the country. A late night strike Wednesday on the house of Mehsud’s father-in-law, which was initially reported to have killed his second wife and one other person, is now believed to have killed Pakistan’s most wanted terrorist leader as he was undergoing kidney treatments. It was the 28th recorded strike to have taken place during the Obama administration’s tenure.

Taliban leaders are reportedly gathering in a shura council to select a new leader to replace Mehsud as the head of the TTP. Contenders for the position reportedly include Hakimullah Mehsud (not a direct relation), a high-profile subcommander responsible for attacks on NATO supply lines through the Khyber Pass and the June 9th bombing of the Peshawar Pearl Continental; Waliur Rehman, a cousin of Baitullah’s who serves as a deputy to Bajaur commander Faqir Mohammad and who Mehsud is said to have favored as a replacement; and Azmatullah Mehsud, another Baitullah Mehsud relation said to sit on the TTP leadership council.

Under Baitullah Mehsud’s leadership, the umbrella Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan network established links between local militant commanders across Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and into the Northwest Frontier Province, transcending tribal boundaries and eliminating rivals who resisted his efforts to consolidate power. (See this CAP interactive map for profiles of some of the major militant figures and their linkages.) Commanders Sirajuddin Haqqani and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who participated in the December 2007 council that established Baitullah Mehsud as TTP’s leader but who remain organizationally independent, will likely play an important role in shaping the organization’s future and the broader Taliban movement in Pakistan’s northwest. Foreign Al Qaeda operatives are also believed to play background roles as facilitators between the various Pakistani militant groups, including Punjab sectarian and Kashmir-focused terror outfits, as well as serving as conduits to international donors based in the Persian Gulf. More »« Less

How Corruption Eats Away At The Counterinsurgency Effort In Afghanistan »

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

The most intractable enemy the United States faces in Afghanistan isn’t the Taliban — it’s the corruption apparently endemic to all levels of the Afghan government. As the New York Times reported yesterday, President Obama’s plan to send 4,000 paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to train Afghan security forces is endangered by corruption that threatens the entire international enterprise in Central Asia.

As reporter Richard Oppel, Jr. wrote, “better policing may be impossible for Afghanistan unless government officials at all levels stop cannibalizing their civil administration and police force for a quick profit.” Corruption eats away at the counterinsurgency effort as it erodes the legitimacy of all levels of government. The system of corruption perpetuates itself, as mid-level politicians and security officers look to recoup the $50,000 they shell out in bribes to obtain their positions by demanding bribes for their own services. In all, it creates a security and justice system that is unfair, uncertain, and unjust.

As the departing police chief in Ghazni province told Oppel, “this is the reason no one accepts the rule of law, because the government is not going by the rule of law.” If the U.S.-backed government can’t obey its own rules in the face of individual avarice, ordinary Afghans will understandably wonder why they should stick up for the Kabul government in the face of Taliban intimidation. First Sgt. John Strain, the senior NCO of the police training team in Ghazni, put the state of affairs stark perspective: “The corruption here is a bigger threat to a stable government than the Taliban.” More »« Less

Brose: Neocons Are Just Alright »

Writing at Foreign Policy’s Shadow Government, former Bush administration speechwriter Christian Brose has some fun with yesterday’s Foreign Policy Initiative inaugural event on Afghanistan:

All that you suspect is true. Bill Kristol, wearing a Viking helmet and a bone through his nose, exhorted the participants to invade Chad, just because. He may have listed other countries, but he was speaking in tongues and war whoops half the time, and my Neo-con-to-English translation kept dropping out. Bob Kagan followed, bare-chested (as usual), in full war paint, banging the Mayflower china with a combat boot, shouting that America needed to put 10 million men under arms to extend its hegemony (benevolent, of course) into the Arctic, shouting something about the road to Moscow leading through the North Pole.

I saw this with my own eyes, people.

If only. It would have been a lot more exciting, that’s for sure. As it was, the conference was a pretty staid affair. Some might even call it a love-fest.

Actually, according to my notes, Bob Kagan did, in fact, call the event “a bipartisan love-fest.” As I wrote yesterday, that was really the point of the whole exercise — to re-introduce neoconservative ideas into the foreign policy conversation by filing off all of its rough edges and revolutionary claims in a slick bipartisan package.

Brose takes the familiar tack of broadly accusing the neocons’ critics of conspiracy-mongering. I don’t think I’ve ever promulgated a conspiracy theory of neoconservatism — I recognize that their faction, like most political factions, has both a private and a public aspect. (In specific reference, though, to the little sub-group of neocons that gathered around Ahmad Chalabi in the 1990’s and conspired — or, if you prefer, “strategized in private” — to install him as the new U.S.-and-Israel-friendly leader of Iraq, I think the term “cabal” is clearly appropriate.)

Brose claims that “the neo-cons are really championing tendencies in U.S. foreign policy that run much deeper in American life than the pockets of their advocacy shops.” I don’t completely disagree with this. I think there has historically been a military interventionist streak in U.S. foreign policy, though neoconservatism clearly represents an amped-up, stereoidal version of this. Where I would break with Brose is that I think this is something we need to more carefully guard against, rather than more vigorously indulge. More »« Less

Foreign Policy Initiative: Housebroken Neocons? »

Attending the Foreign Policy Initiative’s inaugural conference on Afghanistan today at the Mayflower Hotel, I was struck by how very little that was said was controversial. And that’s really the point — in the wake of Iraq debacle, for which the neocons are widely and rightly held responsible, it simply won’t do to bang the drum for American military maximalism. One has to be a bit slicker than that. And these guys are nothing if not slick.

As their website makes clear, FPI intends to re-brand and mainstream-ize neoconservatism as a “reasonable” and “moderate” — and of course “serious” — alternative to the rising tide of isolationist sentiment in American politics (the fact that no such tide of isolationist sentiment is rising in American politics is entirely beside the point.) This strategy was evidenced in the morning’s first panel, as Robert Kagan praised President Obama’s “gutsy and correct decision” on Afghanistan, but warned that “the United States is at a tipping point between desire to maintain extensive engagement in the world, as it has done since World War II, and the temptation to pull back…[Obama] has decided to maintain the commitment.”

This is a pretty obvious strawman (one that Kagan built more fully in this article last spring, arguing that American foreign policy has essentially always been neoconservative.) There is no real substantive argument for America “disengaging” from the world. There is, on the other hand, a real debate over the nature of that engagement, a debate that the neoconservatives have largely lost. No longer do we insist “with us or with the terrorists.” We now understand that international partnerships and multilateral institutions are key elements of America’s national security architecture. No longer do we insist that we are in a “global war on terror.” We now accept that we face a number of challenges from discrete groups and organizations, some of which work together, some of which compete with each other. No longer do we insist that “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it.” It is now broadly understood that we do negotiate with our enemies in order to gain strategic advantage over other enemies. Ten years ago, the sponsors of today’s event would have condemned all of this as “weakness.” Today it was simply accepted as wisdom.

More »« Less

Kristol: Accountability Is For Suckers

Appearing on CSPAN’s Washington Journal last Friday, Bill Kristol was confronted by a caller on his role and that of his magazine, The Weekly Standard, as the main ideological drivers behind the Iraq war. As Think Progress noted, Kristol showed absolutely no remorse for having been completely wrong in almost every particular about the war’s consequences for the United States, blithely asserting that “I think the war was right, and I think we’ve succeeded in the war.”

Watch it:

As I’ve written before, the Iraq war has “succeeded” only in the sense that we seem for now to have avoided the very worst imaginable outcome there. Though violence has declined from the catastrophic levels seen in 2006-7, Iraqi factions remain at odds over key political issues of the new Iraqi state, and as shown by the upsurge in violence between the Iraqi government and Sunni militias this weekend, remain prepared to resort to violence to press their claims.

Watching the video, I did get the distinct sense that, at some level, Kristol knows that he’s peddling snake oil, given the way that he quickly pivoted away from Iraq to argue that “in Afghanistan, incidentally, it’s President Obama who’s announcing the increase in troops today” — as if the further deployment of U.S. troops to that country was an affirmation of his ideas, rather than proof of their failure.

Kristol also protested that Obama’s plan “is not something he was forced into by the Weekly Standard or anyone else.” As with most of what comes out of Bill Kristol’s mouth, though, this is not entirely true. The main reason that President Obama has had to commit further troops and resources to Afghanistan is that President Bush failed to finish the job there. The reason he failed to finish the job is that he went and started a war in Iraq, aided and abetted by the trash journalism and shameless jingoism of Bill Kristol and The Weekly Standard. While The Weekly Standard didn’t “force” Obama to escalate in Afghanistan, they did play a central role in creating a situation wherein escalation is the least worst option. But Kristol is far less interested in honestly considering the costs of the Iraq debacle to American national security than he is in mitigating the costs to his own reputation, as he attempts to re-introduce his discredited ideology into the American political discourse.

Obama’s Cautious Approach To Afghanistan »

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, a research associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This morning, President Obama laid out his new strategy for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In addition to the 17,000 troops already announced, Obama will deploy a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to train and advise Afghan security forces – making the total increase in U.S. forces in Afghanistan roughly 21,000. These forces will be needed to improve the security situation, especially in southern and eastern Afghanistan, as weather improves and the fighting season begins.

But an increase in troops doesn’t equal an overall shift in strategy. President Obama’s speech focused less on the military aspects of the United States’ effort in Afghanistan and more on a comprehensive civil-political effort to improve basic services, accountability, and overall governance in order to defeat the hard-core Taliban and al Qaeda fighters at the heart of the insurgency. This emphasis on the civil and political sectors is a welcome development, and comes on top of previous news that there will be a substantial civilian “surge” in Afghanistan. Moreover, by my interpretation of Obama’s speech, training of Afghan security forces will be better integrated into the overall state-building effort rather than being simply treated as a cure-all for both governance and military problems of the insurgency.

At the same time, Obama’s new strategy suggests that the administration is attempting to give Karzai or his successor a decent shot at improving Afghanistan’s governance and political problems without sucking the United States into an endless military commitment. The emphasis on the civil-political and governance issues suggest that the new team recognizes that it is on those issues that the United States and its allies will succeed or fail in Afghanistan, as I argued earlier. More »« Less

Negotiating With Enemies: Now The CW

This part of President Obama’s Afghanistan speech deserves attention, if only because it’s one of so many things that conservatives used to condemn but now have become part of the conventional wisdom:

In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades, there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies. I have no illusions that this will be easy. In Iraq, we had success in reaching out to former adversaries to isolate and target al Qaeda. We must pursue a similar process in Afghanistan, while understanding that it is a very different country.

There is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated. But there are also those who have taken up arms because of coercion, or simply for a price. These Afghans must have the option to choose a different course. That is why we will work with local leaders, the Afghan government, and international partners to have a reconciliation process in every province. As their ranks dwindle, an enemy that has nothing to offer the Afghan people but terror and repression must be further isolated.

Compare this to Dick Cheney’s assertion (on behalf of President Bush) that “we don’t negotiate with evil; we defeat it,” in reference to North Korea — which, if you haven’t heard, is now threatening to test a new ballistic missile. In Iraq, not only did we negotiate with evil, we paid evil vast sums of money to change sides. And now we’re going to attempt something similar with Taliban elements in Afghanistan, as well as with Iran: Try various methods and inducements — some of which have been/will be derided by many conservatives as “appeasement” — to change the strategic calculations of some of our enemies in order to gain advantage against other, worse enemies.

As we continue to discuss and debate the way forward, in Afghanistan and elsewhere, it’s hugely important to remind people that this central insight — our enemies are not monolithic, they can be disaggregated — represents a resounding refutation of the neoconservative “war on terror” approach that characterized the Bush administration’s foreign policy in the years after 9/11. Clearly, there are terrorist networks that seek to do Americans harm, but they do not represent anything like a united “Islamofascist” front against the West, no “axis of evil” necessitating “with us or against us” ultimata. The fact that progressives have won this argument is, of course, small comfort when one considers the enormous costs incurred by the Bush administration in making our case.

Project For The Rehabilitation Of Neoconservatism

What do you do if your previous organization — and the ideology behind it — has become inextricably bound in the public’s imagination to one of the worst foreign policy blunders in American history? Obviously, shut it down, and start a new organization with a new name.

The Foreign Policy Initiative lists Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, and Dan Senor on its board of directors, so no prizes for guessing what they’re about (more power, less appeasement, stronger wills.) Kagan and Kristol need no introduction, they’re the Tick and Arthur of disastrously counterproductive military adventurism. Given the staggering costs in American blood, treasure, security, and reputation incurred by their boundless enthusiasm for blowing stuff up, you might think they’d have had the decency to retreat to a Tibetan monastery by now, but sadly no. The way it works in Washington is, if you’re willing to argue for more defense spending, you’ll always find someone willing to fund your think tank.

Dan Senor is less known to the general public, but familiar to those who’ve followed the Iraq debacle closely. From 2003 to 2004, Senor served as a Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman under Paul Bremer. After that smashing success, Senor returned to Washington, where, among other things, in September 2004 he helped write speeches for Iraqi interim prime minister Ayad Allawi’s U.S. visit, and then apparently went on television to praise those speeches as evidence of Bush’s accomplishments in Iraq.

On March 31, FPI holds its first public event, Afghanistan: Planning For Success, though, given the heavy representation of Iraq war advocates, I think a far better title would be Afghanistan: Dealing With The Huge Problems Created By Many Of The People On This Very Stage. The broad consensus among national security analysts and aid officials is that the diversion of troops and resources toward Iraq beginning in 2002 was one of the main reasons the Taliban and Al Qaeda were able to to re-establish themselves in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas, facilitating the collapse of the country back into insurgent warfare. Having failed to complete the mission in Afghanistan, Bush and the Iraq hawks handed the Obama administration a war that promises to be as difficult and costly as Iraq has been -– if not more. It’s deeply absurd that some of the people most responsible for the crisis in Afghanistan would now presume to tell us how to deal with it.

Cheney’s Iraq Fairy Tale Ignores Afghanistan

I think Ali and Yglesias say most of what needs to be said about Hague-bait Dick Cheney going on TV to engage in the same sort of fear-mongering that characterized his vice-presidency, but Cheney’s assertion that “we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do” in Iraq deserves some attention.

Cheney told CNN’s John King said that “if you hark back and look at the biggest threat we faced after 9/11, it was the idea of a rogue state or a terrorist-sponsoring state with weapons of mass destruction — say, nukes, for example — and providing those to terrorist organizations.”

What happened in Iraq is we’ve eliminated that possibility. We got rid of one of the worst dictators in the 20th century. We got rid of his government. There is no prospect that Iraq is going to become a place where once again they produce weapons of mass destruction or support terrorists.

I think this argument — thanks to the invasion of Iraq there is no prospect that Saddam will provide WMD he didn’t have to terrorists with whom he had no substantial relationship — is ridiculous enough even without even considering all of the other costs of the war, both in lives, dollars, as well as American security more broadly. Specifically, though, it seems like King missed a real opportunity here to ask about Afghanistan.

Afghanistan and Pakistan are casualties of the Iraq war. Unlike (pre-invasion) Iraq, the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 did and do operate in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unlike Iraq, Pakistan — which is increasingly threatened by an Islamic extremist insurgency — does possess nuclear weapons. There’s no question that, even in 2003, the situation in these two countries represented a far greater threat to the United States than did Iraq. And yet Bush and Cheney chose to invade Iraq, based upon the determination that, in Cheney’s words, “this is a war..”

Up until 9/11, it was treated as a law enforcement problem. You go find the bad guy, put him on trial, put him in jail. The FBI would go to Oklahoma City and find the identification tag off the truck and go find the guy that rented the truck and put him in jail.

Once you go into a wartime situation and it’s a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy. You go after the state sponsors of terror, places where they’ve got sanctuary.

We can see disastrous consequences of the conception of anti-terrorism that gave primacy to state sponsors over non-state actors: The Bush administration destroyed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and considered the job essentially finished, even though Osama bin Laden was allowed to escape. They secured the commitment of the unpopular Musharraf regime to fight terrorism, and checked that box. Then they turned to Iraq, leaving Pakistan and Afghanistan to fester. These costs are not theoretical.

The determination that we were in a war — while domestically politically advantageous — led to the Bush administration emphasizing military solutions to what is a primarily an intelligence and yes, law enforcement issue, at the expense of other tools of U.S. power. Moeover, by casting US anti-terrorism efforts as a “war,” Bush and Cheney helped affirm Al Qaeda’s status as the vanguard of the global Islamic resistance, needlessly forcing governments throughout the Islamic world into the politically difficult position of either supporting or rejecting that resistance.

As Congressman — and former Admiral — Joe Sestak told King later in the program, “The Bush administration may have created, after six, seven long years, some stability with Iraq, but they have not kept the most precious constitutional duty of the presidency in highest regard, which is to enhance the security of America.” To use one of Cheney’s favorite phrases, the fact is that when you strip away the tough talk and the ersatz gravitas, Bush and Cheney just weren’t up to the challenge of national security in the 21st century, which is why he now has to rely on a combination of unfalsifiable assertions and counterfactuals to argue for his administration’s success.

McCain Wakes Up To War In Afghanistan

Asked about Afghanistan back in November 2003, McCain stressed that Iraq was the more important effort, but that he thought that we would be able to “muddle through” in Afghanistan.

Watch it:

MCCAIN: I am concerned about it, but I’m not as concerned as I am about Iraq today — obviously, or I’d be talking about Afghanistan — but I believe that if Karzai can make the progress that he is making, that in the long term we may muddle through in Afghanistan.

Today, after he delivered a speech to the American Enterprise Institute on Afghanistan, I had an opportunity to ask Sen. McCain about this quote. Specifically, given the dire situation and very ambitious goals for Afghanistan which he had just described, how had his thinking changed? Why was “muddling through” no longer sufficient? In response, McCain accused me of taking his words out of context. You can decide for yourself.

In his remarks, Sen. McCain warned that “the scale of resources required to succeed will be enormous,” but that “we must win the war in Afghanistan.”

In McCain’s telling, “for a brief but critical window between late 2003 and early 2005, we were moving on the right path in Afghanistan,” but that “rather than building on these gains, we squandered them.”

Beginning in 2005, our integrated civil-military command structure was disassembled and replaced by a balkanized and dysfunctional arrangement. The integrated counterinsurgency strategy was replaced by a patchwork of different strategies, depending on the location and on which country’s troops were doing the fighting. And at a moment when many in Afghanistan and Pakistan continued to nurse doubts about America’s commitment in South Asia, the Pentagon announced its intention to withdraw 2,500 American combat troops from the theatre.

These decisions laid the groundwork for the situation we see in Afghanistan today. They also underscore why “lowering our goals” — both rhetorically and in practice — is precisely the wrong move today.

Much like his AEI hosts last week, McCain seemed unaware that the new Iraq strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus did, in fact, represent “lowering our goals” — in practice, if not rhetorically. As I noted in my review of Tom Ricks’ The Gamble, while President Bush and McCain continued to make grand claims about “victory” in Iraq, the military understood that the surge strategy represented a radical redefinition of the war’s aims. Rather than the creation of a “democratic ally in the heart of the Middle East,” the new goal was simply to avoid the complete collapse of Iraq. General Petraeus’ decision to ally with Sunni tribal elements — essentially putting large parts of the insurgency on the U.S. payroll — signified a recognition of this reality.

More importantly, however, McCain continues to ignore one of the most consequential decisions that laid the groundwork for the situation we see in Afghanistan today: The decision to invade Iraq. The redirection of U.S. attention and resources from Afghanistan to Iraq was probably the single most crucial factor in enabling the reconstitution of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and McCain himself was one of the most prominent advocates of that decision.

Throughout the presidential campaign, and continuing today, McCain has been quite pleased to take a big share of the credit for the Iraq surge, but none of the blame for his role in helping create the situation which required it. So it is with Afghanistan.

Knowing Where We Stand On Afghanistan

As last Friday’s Progress Report noted, and today’s underlines, President Obama has inherited a crisis in Afghanistan. The problems identified in the Center for American Progress’s December 2007 report still exist, and have gotten worse. There is a serious and growing debate within the progressive community over the U.S. and international mission in that country, and how best to complete that mission. While there are no easy answers, I think a couple of recent items might help to focus this discussion.

Dana Milbank has a very entertaining account of a presentation yesterday by Richard Perle, in which Perle attempted to absolve neoconservatism of any blame for George W. Bush’s foreign policy. From the accompanying video, it seems like everyone had a good laugh about it except Perle.

While it’s deeply gratifying to see a neoconservative ideologue like Perle attempting to distance himself from the staggering costs incurred by his ideas, we shouldn’t kid ourselves that neconservatism is a spent force. No matter how disastrous neoconservatism has proved in its actual application in the real world, no ideology which necessitates as much defense spending as neoconservatism does is ever really going to be allowed to “fail.”

Indeed, the day before Perle denied the existence of neoconservatism, across town at the American Enterprise Institute a panel of neoconservatives was proposing its application to the war in Afghanistan. Insisting that “there’s no good reason to think that we can’t succeed in Afghanistan if we set our minds to it,” Fred Kagan noted one of the ways in which “Afghanistan is different from Iraq.”

To take this issue of civilian casualties, I’d like to make a note. If you compare the damage that is done in Afghan cities and villages and towns, and the number of civilians that are wounded or killed in coalition attacks to the sort of damage that was done in Iraqi cities and villages and towns, “order of magnitude” doesn’t begin to describe it. If anyone has seen pictures of Ramadi or Fallujah, they looked like Stalingrad. Not a single building standing. Streets filled with rubble. Cities absolutely crushed.

The interesting thing is that when we were fighting those battles and doing that damage, on the whole the Iraqis were not bitching about collateral damage. You had nothing like the degree of upset about how many civilians were being injured and how much damage was being done to the infrastructure in Iraq at a much higher level of destruction than you have in Afghanistan at a much lower level of destruction.

I think there’s a cultural reason for that: Afghans don’t fight in their cities. Iraqis do. For good or ill, Iraqis expect to fight in their cities. That’s where the insurgents dug in, Saddam Hussein planned to dig in to the cities or lure us into an urban fight. It’s sort of understood that the battlefield is going to be there, that doesn’t mean that they don’t complain about it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a problem, but it does mean that when the insurgents dig in and we root them out, the Iraqis don’t on the whole say “darn it, you shouldn’t have blown up all of our houses.” They sort of accept that. Afghans do not.

Audio is here.

Given that Fred Kagan previously referred to widespread sectarian cleansing in Iraq as a “myth,” it’s not so surprising that he would dismiss complaints about the killing and maiming of civilians and the rubbling of entire neighborhoods as “bitching.” And it really doesn’t even need to be pointed out that what Kagan means by “setting our minds to it” is “have the will to kill huge amounts of people in order to achieve our goals.”

America, and Americans, are better than this. As we in the progressive community continue our debate over Afghanistan, and over national security more generally, it’s important for us to remember that. Neoconservatism is based in the idea that there’s no national security problem that can’t be overcome by the relentless application of the military force. Progressives understand that this is wrong, and that seeking international cooperation and consensus is a key force multiplier in the face of today’s challenges, of which Afghanistan is only one. Unlike conservatives, who only seem to locate a concern for human rights when they need an excuse to bomb someone, support for human rights is central to progressives’ worldview, which is why we support a conception of national security that encompasses real human security.

When the American people put Barack Obama in the White House, they rejected the base militarism and unilateralism of the last eight years, and they provided an opportunity for the emergence of a new consensus on national security. It’s important that progressives grasp this opportunity, and draw strength from our values as we develop ways to meet these challenges.

What Is The Mission In Afghanistan?

Our guest blogger is Peter Juul, Research Associate at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

This morning’s news that Defense Secretary Gates has delayed the decision to send an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan “until President Obama decides what force levels he wants” provides an opportunity to ask some important questions about the U.S. involvement there. Many here in the United States are calling on the Obama administration to “get Afghanistan right” by not “escalating” the war and instead wind down the U.S. presence. Others, like VetVoice blogger and Army veteran Brandon Friedman, have ably questioned the core assumptions of the withdrawal movement, and defend the Obama administration. But the entire debate has thus far danced around the central question that ought guide our policy in Afghanistan -– namely, what kind of war we are fighting.

No one on either side really seems to know what kind of war we are fighting with the Taliban. Is it an anti-foreign insurgency, as those who urge withdrawal appear to assume? Or do people acquiesce to the Taliban because the U.S.-supported Karzai government is horribly corrupt and incapable of providing basic services, as the Kandahar-based Sarah Chayes persuasively argues?

If it’s the latter -– and I think it probably is –- then the Obama administration needs to figure out whether or not we think the Afghan government –- under Karzai or someone else –- can provide reasonably clean, competent governance, or whether it’s feasible for the U.S. and NATO to just do it themselves. If they conclude so, then the Obama administration should put forward a much greater commitment in personnel (military and civilian) and resources than is currently on the table in order to provide the security that is necessary to help deliver public goods. If the Afghan government appears unredeemable -– as Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin suspects -– then there’s not much the United States or its partners can do. In this case, no amount of troops or resources will help and we should just pack up and leave.

If we do wind up concluding that any amount of effort toward better governance is futile, the United States should realize the consequences of pulling out. It likely means that the Taliban, thanks to the backing of their allies in the Pakistani security establishment, will at some point wind up back in power in Kabul. These Taliban will likely be more rigid and extreme than the predecessor regime we toppled in 2001. And it’s unlikely that this development will take the militant pressure off Pakistan; the radical fighters now sweeping through Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province will have a secure rear and ready ally across the border.

We must have a deeper and more vigorous debate over long-term goals and strategy in Afghanistan and the region. Sending 17,000 more troops there is akin to applying a tourniquet -– we need to stop the hemorrhaging before we can figure out what to do. It’s not leaping ahead into an “escalation”; it’s buying time.

Confronting The Governance Vacuum In Afghanistan »

Earlier today I attended an interesting Senate Foreign Relations Committee roundtable discussion on Afghanistan moderated by chairman Senator John Kerry. Participating were Ashraf Ghani, former Finance Minister of Afghanistan and chancellor of Kabul University; Sarah Chayes, a former NPR Correspondent who since 2002 has been been running an economic cooperative in Kandahar; James Dobbins, senior researcher at the RAND Corporation and former Special Envoy to the Afghan Resistance; and retired Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, former Australian Special Forces Commando, adviser to Gen. David Petraeus, and all around COIN big wheel.

Declaring the roundtable format a better way to have a conversation, probe and learn” about an issue, Sen. Kerry began the discussion by asking “What is the scope of the mission” in Afghanistan? “What can we accomplish?”

Ghani said that the main problem in Afghanistan right now is weakness of governance. He stressed that the problems that currently exist are to a large extent the result of a series of interventions in the country, from the Soviets in the 1980s, and U.S. and Arab support for the anti-Soviet mujahideen, all of which have contributed to the lack of functioning governance structures and institutions, which have in turn created what must be understood, he said, as a crisis. Chayes agreed with this, saying that official corruption is so bad right now that many women in her collective have told her that they would prefer living under the Taliban. Every citizen interaction with the government, Chayes said, involves some form of shakedown. “You have to bribe eight different people for the privilege of paying your electric bill,” which is less than six hours a day. “The international community is blamed for this,” she said, as many Afghans feel this government has been imposed upon them.

Largely concurring with the crisis diagnosis, Kilcullen insisted that it was “crunch time in Afghanistan,” noting that violence is up 543% in the last four years. “Afghanistan right now is Vietnam under Diem,” Kilcullen said, with the U.S. and NATO fighting a grinding counterinsurgency on behalf of a corrupt leadership with little public support. Kilcullen offered two options for a way forward. The first was a redoubled effort to prevent an Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan, protecting the Afghan population from the Taliban, narcotics, and misrule, and continuing to help build Afghan civil society. The second was to focus solely on preventing an Al Qaeda sanctuary in Afghanistan. The problem with this second option, Kilcullen said, is that “it just won’t work.” Any strategy that focused solely on rooting out terrorism without addressing the conditions that allow it to take root in the first place is bound to fail. What is needed is “a surge of political effort” to build legitimacy for Afghan political institutions. More »« Less

Afghan Defense Minister: ‘Major Increase’ In Foreign Fighters To Afghanistan

The New York Times’ John Burns reports on a statement by the Afghan Defense Minister that weakening of Al Qaeda in Iraq has resulted in “growing numbers of well-trained “foreign fighters” [going] to join the insurgency in Afghanistan instead.”

[Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak said] that the increased flow of insurgents from outside Afghanistan had contributed to the heightened intensity of the fighting here this year, which he described as the “worst” since the American-led forces toppled the Taliban government in 2001. American commanders have said that overall violence here has increased by 30 percent in the past year and have called for more troops.

The defense minister said that “the success of coalition forces in Iraq” had combined with developments in countries neighboring Afghanistan to cause “a major increase in the number of foreign fighters” coming to Afghanistan.

“There is no doubt that they are better equipped than before,” he said. “They are well trained, more sophisticated, and their coordination is much better.”

Back in February 2007, in testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, journalist Peter Bergen described how tactics used by Al Qaeda in Iraq had migrated to Afghanistan:

Suicide attacks, improvised explosive devices, and beheadings of hostages—all techniques al Qaeda perfected in Iraq—are being employed by the Taliban to strengthen their influence in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan. Hekmat Karzai, an Afghan national security expert, points out that suicide bombings were virtually unknown in Afghanistan until 2005, when there were 21 attacks. According to the U.S. military there were 139 such attacks in 2006. This exponentially rising number of suicide attacks is mirrored by other grim statistics—IED attacks in Afghanistan more than doubled from 783 in 2005 to 1,677 in 2006, and the number of “direct” attacks by insurgents using weapons against international forces tripled from 1,558 to 4,542 during the same time period. [...]

Luckily, for the moment, the suicide attackers in Afghanistan have not been nearly as deadly as those in Iraq. As one U.S. military official explained, almost all of the Taliban’s suicide bombers are “Pashtun country guys from Pakistan,” with little effective training.

According to Gen. Wardak, that moment seems now to have passed. Shockingly, it turns out that invading Iraq and transforming it into an open source laboratory for terrorism was not an effective anti-terrorism strategy.

For more on the growing crisis in Afghanistan, see last Friday’s Progress Report.

For more on the Iraq war’s disastrous consequences for the “war on terror,” see these previous posts.

Don’t Get Hypnotized By The Shiny New COIN

The Washington Post reported on September 20 that today’s Taliban in Afghanistan is “a larger, better armed and more confident militia” than it was even a year ago, “capable of mounting sustained military assaults. Its forces operate in virtually every province and control many districts in areas ringing the capital.”

That’s also the thrust of this story on General David Petraus in this morning’s NY Times. Seven years after the U.S. routed the Taliban — and five years after John McCain suggested that the U.S. could just “muddle through” there — Afghanistan is suffering under a growing and increasingly effective Taliban insurgency.

The main takeaway, however, is Petraeus’ downplaying the extent to which a counterinsurgency approach developed in Iraq may be transferable to Afghanistan:

“The first lesson, the first caution really, is that every situation like this is truly and absolutely unique, and has its own context and specifics and its own texture,” [Petraeus] said.

“Counterinsurgents have to understand that in as nuanced a manner as possible, and then with that kind of understanding try to craft a comprehensive approach to the problems.”

That’s a rule that also should be applied to the choice of whether and when to mount a counterinsurgency campaign, or whether to undertake adventures that may eventually require it.

This is also one way to read Defense Secretary Gates’ speech to the National Defense University on Monday. Gates scolded the defense establishment’s addiction to shiny new toys, which came at the expense of a proper understanding the war we were actually in, saying that “for every heroic and resourceful innovation by troops and commanders on the battlefield, there was some institutional shortcoming at the Pentagon that they had to overcome.”

Brandon Friedman, who participated in counterinsurgency operations in both theaters, praises “Gates’ view on how the U.S. military should be oriented“:

Remember, this guy faces a withering barrage of high-tech, high-dollar defense contractors on a daily basis. So credit where credit is due.

My only concern is that he addresses the failures in process, but never touches on the prudence of starting the war in Iraq in the first place–or any future wars for that matter. However, my hope is that this is because it’s simply not his job to formulate policy. As Defense Secretary, his job is to manage the military and implement those policies emanating from the White House and Capitol Hill.

I think the Secretary of Defense may have more input on policy than Friedman allows — certainly we saw this when the SecDef was allied with a powerful Vice-President under a boy king — but his point about the prudence of the Iraq war, and of future wars, is very sound. Having an effective military is important, of course, but it’s even more important that we have an executive branch that doesn’t go about using that military irresponsibly.

It’s good and necessary to criticize the shock and awe triumphalists who assured us that the beauty of our weapons would make Iraq a cakewalk. But as we appreciate our new counterinsurgency advances — and praise the commanders who developed and applied them — let’s make sure that ten years from now, some other SecDef doesn’t have to give a speech scolding the COIN triumphalists.

Violence Up On The Forgotten Front »

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at American Progress.

In the deadliest ground combat exchange between international forces and Afghanistan insurgents since the 2001 U.S. invasion, 10 members of an elite French paratroop unit were ambushed and killed in fighting with over a hundred Taliban fighters. Another 21 French soldiers were wounded in the battle, which took place only 30 miles east of Kabul. The French casualties coincided with another sustained Taliban attack, as a group of Taliban fighters launched waves of mortar and rocket attacks on Forward Operating Base Salerno, in eastern Khost province, as cover for attempted suicide bomb attacks by between 10 and 15 militants. On Monday, Afghanistan’s independence day, a suicide car bomber attempted to breach Salerno’s gates, killing at least a dozen Afghan laborers near the entrance.

The sophistication and scale of these attacks are another sign that the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating badly. This deterioration has been borne out in public opinion: a new CBS News/New York Times poll found that 58% of those surveyed believe the conflict in Afghanistan is going badly, compared to 28% who perceived it to be going well. Contrast that with the situation in 2003, when only 14% believed things were going badly and 76% thought they were going well, and it’s apparent how much has changed in the five years since the Bush administration diverted its attention to Iraq. 2008 is on track to surpass 2007 as the deadliest year in Afghanistan since military operations began there in 2001, and international coalition death tolls there have surpassed those in Iraq for the past two months, a trend likely to continue through August. More »« Less

John McCain Plays Catch-Up on Afghanistan »

Our guest blogger is Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

John McCain attempted to play catch-up on the issue of Afghanistan today, delivering a speech on national security (which the campaign had initially scheduled for later in the week) in response to a foreign policy address by Democratic candidate Barack Obama. McCain, who secured his party’s nomination three and a half months ago and touts himself as a candidate with strong national security bona fides, does not discuss Afghanistan or Pakistan – where top U.S. intelligence officials have repeatedly warned Al Qaeda is operating “safe havens” – under the “national security” section of his campaign website and has not issued any recent major statements on the region.

In a 2007 Foreign Affairs article outlining his foreign policy vision, McCain called for more NATO military forces, military trainers, and police mentors for the country, but stopped short of pledging any additional American forces and offered little in the way of specifics on how to deal with the associated challenges in Pakistan.

McCain attempted to shed that position in his speech today and acknowledged the reality that progressives have been arguing for several years now: Afghanistan has been under-resourced and neglected by this administration and needs a greater commitment of resources, troops, and policy-making attention in order to staunch the slow slide towards instability that has been plaguing the country since the Bush administration, McCain, and other conservative leaders took us to war in Iraq in 2003.

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Afghanistan Jailbreak Partially The Result Of An Under-Resourced International Effort »

Our guest bloggers are Caroline Wadhams, Senior Policy Analyst for National Security, and Colin Cookman, Special Assistant for National Security at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Taliban fighters in Afghanistan staged a massive jailbreak at Sarposa Prison in the southern city of Kandahar last Friday, breaching the gates with twin suicide car bombs and following on with a concerted rocket-and-machine gun assault that killed at least fifteen prison guards. By the time Canadian NATO forces arrived from their nearby base to bolster the Afghan police and army personnel, the facility was empty and the attackers had fled: as many as 1,200 prisoners, including between 350 and 400 Taliban fighters, are believed to have escaped. Thus far coalition and Afghan forces have been able to recapture only 20 former inmates, including seven Taliban, and another fifteen insurgents have been killed in the manhunt. Yesterday, freed militants and other Taliban forces reformed and took control of at least seven villages in the district of Arghandab, just 15 kilometers north of Kandahar, laying mines and preparing for a major confrontation with NATO and Afghan forces.

While the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal attempted to spin this incident into a harangue against the Supreme Court for its recent ruling closing off the quasi-legal black hole at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concerned observers would do better to look elsewhere for an explanation of this event. The fact is that international efforts in Afghanistan are under-resourced, the Afghan government is under-funded and lacks capacity, and its institutions like the Afghan police, who were responsible for security at the prison in Kandahar, are frequently corrupt and poorly trained. Furthermore, the United States has pursued a flawed policy in Pakistan since 2001, which has contributed to a growing safehaven in Pakistan for anti-Afghan insurgents. More »« Less