Scott recently raised some skepticism about the potential impact of the capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, former operational commander of the Afghan Taliban.

Today word is out that another high ranking Afghan Taliban was captured by the Pakistanis.  This time it was Mullah Abdul Salam, Governor of the so-called Afghan Shadow Government in the Province of Kunduz.

Add to this Jane Perlez’s brilliant piece last week in the New York Times and I think Pakistan’s strategy in the region begins to come into focus.

Perlez:

Pakistan has told the United States it wants a central role in resolving the Afghan war and has offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies, American and Pakistani officials said…What the Pakistanis can offer is their influence over the Taliban network of Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani, whose forces American commanders say are the most lethal battling American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

So after reading the (chai?) tea leaves on this one, here is my take:

The Pakistanis are making their move and want to make clear to the Americans (and NATO) that they are going to be the power broker in the post-occupation government of Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s military appears to be deploying its own version of a “reconcilables” vs. irreconcilables” COIN strategy with respect to the various anti-Western insurgent groups in Afghanistan and even their own tribal territories. The Pakistanis have (I think) decided which Afghan Taliban (the so-called Quetta Shura) are unable to be converted/dealt with and are turning them in.  This puts pressure on the Taliban left in Afghanistan ito make the deals that the Pakistanis are now going to push for and that President Karzai has previously said he is willing to make—in essence amnesty, payoffs, and probably government/military posts.

Furthermore, the Pakistani Army has taken on the southern Waziristan strongholds of the so-called Pakistani Taliban (Tehri-i-Taliban), allowing the US to assassinate (via drone) various leaders within the movement–first Beitullah Mehsud and more recently, Hakimullah Mehsud.

The Pakistanis, however, have a long standing (since the anti-Soviet jihad) relationship with the Haqqani network and the Hizb i Islami party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyr.

The Pakistanis seem to be playing good cop/bad cop with the Haqqanis, telling them that they (the Pakistanis) are the only thing holding back more drone attacks.  If the Haqqanis and the Hekmatyr forces see the Afghan Taliban leadership as increasingly vulnerable, maybe this brings them to the negotiating table.

The Pakistanis did not participate in the Bonn Conference negotiations which brought to power the Karzai government, a deal that was largely struck with the Iranians and the Indians – in other words, Pakistan’s two biggest regional rivals.  The Pakistanis now see a couple of things:

1. The occupation has failed and the new COIN strategy, however effective militarily, is too heavily dependent on the corrupt Karzai government to be long-lasting.

2. The Bonn Conference paradigm of Afghanistan (2001-2010) is also a failure: cf the rigged elections from last fall.

The Pakistanis now see their opening to force the US (and other regional actors) to accept a post-Bonn Afghanistan, which will not be a total return of power of the Taliban as in the 1990s but will include a number of anti-Western insurgent groups in the eventual governing structure.

It’s a shrewd if very dangerous game on the part of the Pakistani military–who in everything but name is now back to running the country, at least with respect to foreign policy.

To answer Scott’s skepticism, all of this again points to the fact that the US should just eliminate the middle man by ignoring the failed Afghan national government in favor of buying off local groups.   Scott suggests the Taliban are practicing a form of 4th generation warfare, complete with their own version of “winning hearts and minds.” Still, the Taliban continue to rely a strategy of body count terrorism—roadside and suicide bombs, etc.   I believe the Afghan Taliban are vulnerable to a joint US military “surge” plus a program of buying off and even deputizing various insurgents and/or tribal leaders (including whole swathes of former Taliban operatives), keeping up the pressure on Taliban leadership with assistance from the Pakistani military, and accepting the likelihood of amnesty for the Haqqanis and Hekmatyr in Afghanistan.

It won’t be a pretty situation but this would probably allow the US to keep a sufficient presence in the area to prevent al-Qaeda’s re-emergence.  This strategy would also allow the US and NATO to exit (I would guess) within the next two to two-and-a-half years.  A strategy of clear, hold, build, and hand over to the Afghan National Government, however, is a complete non-starter and would give plenty of time for the Afghan Taliban to re-group, hide out, and bide their time, while preventing any movement towards a deal with Haqqani and/or Hekmatyr and their forces.

The capture of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the Taliban’s Number 2 man, is, undoubtedly, good news for the Obama administration in its attempts to fend off claims of being soft on terror and the like. But, as per his usual adroitness, Juan Cole has a good post up pointing out why the capture might not be the good news for US efforts in Afghanistan that proponents might like to make it out as. What I took to be the most important snippet,

There are four groups typically but inaccurately referred to as Taliban among Pashtun dissidents. They include Mulla Umar’s original Taliban; the Haqqani Network founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, based in North Waziristan, which is now led by his son Siraj; the Islamic Party or Hizb-i Islami of Gulbaddin Hikmatyar based in Eastern Afghanistan; and the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or Taliban Movement of Pakistan, whose leader, Hakimullah Mahsud, was reported recently killed by a US drone strike). For Mullah Omar’s organization, based in Karachi and Quetta, to suffer a severe setback would probably not have a huge impact on the other three, which operate relatively independently. None of the others is actually Taliban in the sense of seminary students or graduates of madrasahs among the Afghan Pashtun refugees in Pakistan.

This news is certainly bad news for, as Cole calls them, the “Old Taliban”, but the situation in Afghanistan remains greatly more complicated and challenging than much of American foreign policy discourse at home let’s on. By and large, it seems that US foreign policy remains under Obama, as it certainly has under all preceeding presidents, to be the continutation of Cold War mentality by other means. Which is to say that the realities of fourth generation warfare continue to seem largely opaque to the US strategic focus and there persists this idea that if specific bad guys, be they Al Qaeda or the Taliban, are beaten then the rest of the chips will inevitably fall into place, or something to that effect. But as the National Security Archive notes, even “the bad guys” have caught on to the folly of this thinking,

The December 1998 Embassy cable mentioned above notes that Omar “maintains an idiosyncratic, almost obscurantist, leadership style,” making policy decisions, “but generally leav[ing] the day-to-day matters to his key lieutenants.” In order to ensure his deputies remain “off balance” and do “not grow overly comfortable in their positions, Omar also rotates Taliban officials from post-to-post, apparently at a whim.”

I mean, call me crazy, but I find it hard to believe that Mullah Omar and other top “Old Taliban” officials haven’t contemplated the possibility of a capture of this magnitude and factored a needed exit plan itno their already much more decentralized organizational structure. Part of the shift in fourth generational warfare, as I understand it, is to recognize that the battle ceases only to operate in an exclusive military theatre and stretches out across a far broader spectrum of foray. It is this realization that I continue failing to hear in most overtly militaristic US foreign policy articulations and a big part of what informs my skepticism about the eventual outcomes.

Which is not to say that military means don’t play any role in dealing with groups like the “Old Taliban” and the others with which US and other NATO forces are dealing in Afghanistan and elsewhere and it certainly isn’t to suggest that I have a nice, clean alternative to the overwhelming challenges in dealing with the myriads of groups intent on doing harm to what amounts to a way of life. Nor is it to say that I’m inclined to dismiss the importance of the potential shift in Pakistani willingness to work in a more coordinated and proactive fashion with American and NATO forces. But is to say that I’ll continue not jumping for joy over new like the capture of Baradar so long as it is apparent, as far as western foreign policy goes, war remains the primary continuation of politics by other means.

Here is Part 2 of last Sunday’s conversation between Chris and I. I’ve included about a minute of audio you’ve already heard to set the stage for where Chris goes. The audio is below the fold. [Read more →]

Daniel Larison takes a few lumps for resisting knee-jerk opposition to the war in Afghanistan.

It’s been a while since Chris and I jumped on Skype and rambled on for a while about the state of the world and associated topics, so we decided to remedy that fact last night. What follows is the first part (approximately 35 minutes) of our discussion about Obama’s decisions around Afghanistan, counter insurgency strategies, and American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East more generally.

Part 2 will follow in a day or two so as to break up what are usually hour plus conversations into smaller, bite sized chunks. Check out the audio below the fold. [Read more →]

Elrod at The Moderate Voice, writing in response to criticisms of Obama’s Afghanistan strategy for setting a withdrawal date, argues:  (h/t Matt Duss at WonkRoom):

Quite simply, the Taliban does not have the luxury of “waiting us out” for 18 months. If they survive that long then it is because we failed in our ground-level counterinsurgency policy, not because we telegraphed our intention not to stay indefinitely. And if they do try and lay low and wait us out, the Afghan army and government will have had that much more time to establish its legitimate control over the entirety of southern Afghanistan.

Duss adds:

If killing the enemy were the main goal, then their decision to hunker down and wait for the U.S. to begin leaving might be a problem. But as the main goal of the new COIN strategy in Afghanistan is to secure the population, build trust with local communities through effective delivery of services, all the while increasing Afghan capacity to continue doing those things when we leave, it’s really not. The Taliban “waiting us out” would just give the U.S. more time and space to make Afghanistan a more inhospitable place for the Taliban.

While I agree with both Elrod and Matt that the criticisms of a timeline for withdrawal are often misguided, their comeback has its own set of problems.

It’s true that while the COIN strategy is population-centric rather than enemy-centric, this strategy is still too focused on a nation-state as a self-contained territory.  The assumption being that if you get villagers on your side with better services and then train an army & police force to guard the country as we begin to leave, the Taliban will not find any willing hosts.

Of course, the Afghan Taliban themselves have a head start and have been perfecting their own form of population-centric (i.e. tribal or village-centric) insurgency these past few years.

To counter that trend, the US wants to initiate its own form of population-centric warfare.  This would entail a village by village strategy, but what is the relationship between the village-centric counter-insurgency and training a national army and police force?  Taking a population-centric strategy would lead to empowering local leaders to form tribal-based security outfits, but this will undoubtedly come at the expense of the national government’s influence, which to begin with doesn’t have much effective control outside of Kabul.  I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing as I’ve never been a fan of the state-building mission in Afghanistan, but there’s a zero-sum trade off between local militias and the country’s national government.

Max Weber defined the nation-state as having a monopoly on the means of legitimate force within its boundaries. At least in Afghanistan, population-centric counter-insurgency undermines that reality.   This is where (I think) Elrod’s response breaks down. The lack of centralized control undermines his last argument about the government (presumably via a national army) establishing “legitimate” sovereign control over the south of the country.  Of course, legitimate sovereign control assumes the modern Weberian nation-state as the prime locus of the country’s political identity.  [Read more →]

Scott’s recent post on President Obama’s decision re: Afghanistan is worth the read.  He makes a number of very interesting points, but I’m not quite sure I get this part.

Scott quotes the following from Kevin Drum:

There are two possible reasons for the speech being so unconvincing: either Obama doesn’t know how to deliver a good speech or else Obama isn’t really convinced himself.  But we know the former isn’t true, don’t we?  You can fill in the rest yourself.

Scott then adds:

If Kevin is right, and I think there is reason to believe that he is, then Obama, while not operating in the same cold and calculating fashion as a Karl Rove, has failed in his primary charge as Commander-in-Chief and the implications are potentially as disastrous as Rove, Cheney, and Bush’s soulless calculus was.

Channeling Freddie for a second, it is enragingly infuriating that the idea of actually saying, “This is not winnable, we need to find a responsible way of extricating ourselves,” was simply never an honestly considered option. The myopic sense of options and inability to overcome prideful hubris in American foreign policy is, perhaps, the greatest challenge facing the country if it is to really move into a constructive and proactive frame in the twenty-first century.

Kevin’s second proposal needs some expansion.  Let’s assume it is broadly correct as does Scott.  Why would Obama not have his heart into it?

One possible (counter)explanation is that Obama really couldn’t find any decision that he felt was the right one and he thought this decision was the least worst and he couldn’t hide that in his speech.  That would still fulfill Kevin’s theory as to why the speech fell flat without the need to piggyback a theory of politics over-riding true feelings on the war.

Another (possibly related) counter-argument would be that Obama brought forth a policy that he thought was the best compromise–and inherently therefore in part compromised–between the various members of his advisory panel.  We’ve learned that VP Biden signed on because Obama narrowed the focus to al-Qaeda and put more emphasis (arguably) on Pakistan than he did Afghanistan, as well as setting a date in 2011 for withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Secs. Gates and Clinton seem to have signed on because that date was open to some conditionality.  While National Security Adviser Jones seems to have found the ambiguity of the timeline conducive to getting both sides of this debate together.

A third version would go that Obama has (seriously and sincerely) thought the US should be fighting the war in Afghanistan for awhile now.  That accords with everything he’s said for basically the last 6 years.  But simply it’s too late in the game and Obama has realized he can’t fight it in the way he wished and yet at the same time he knows that if he starts extrication now it will be a bloodbath and he doesn’t want that on his hands.

Obama said during the campaign that on foreign policy he aligned with the realist school of George H.W. Bush.  He has been advised by Colin Powell and kept Bob Gates (a Bush I realist) as Sec. Def.  In fact this decision is a kind of mini-Powell Doctrine refracted through the lens of population-centric COIN popular in the military:  go in hard and heavy and then get out.  In some ways the past President Obama appears to be most emulating in foreign policy (so says Peter Beinart in a very sharp piece) is Richard Nixon, the arch-realist with his own version of an escalation-cum prelude to withdraw.

I don’t have a real way of knowing if any of those hypotheses are valid.  I’m just playing Devil’s Advocate for a moment.  But if any (or any combination) were to be correct, then I think they undermine Scott’s comparison to Rove, et. al.

But let’s examine this comparison Scott makes to the previous administration.  [Read more →]

Once again, I was listening to On Point, this time checking out their review of Obama’s Afghanistan speech with Robert Kaplan and John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer, who recently penned a critical piece on America’s involvement in Afghanistan for Foreign Policy, made a comment that immediately caught my attention. In response to a caller who voiced similar criticisms of Obama’s announcement, Mearsheimer said,

I think that the caller Tom is absolutely correct when he says that this talk was supremely political, it was all about domestic politics. Look, what’s going on here is that Obama is a smart man who understands that we can’t win in Afghanistan and that we can’t stay there for ten more years. It’s just politially not possible in the United States. At the same time, he understands that we can’t get out now because the Democrats would be punished by the Republicans greatly over time for cutting and running. Therefore, what he’s trying to do is finesse this, as Tom the caller said, “kick the can down the road.” That’s really what’s going on here.

This isn’t a serious formula for how to win in Afghanistan because nobody knows how to win in Afghanistan. We’ve been there for eight years and things are much worse than they were eight years ago. The idea that we’re going to stay there for another ten years, greatly increase the number of troops, and spend one hundred billion dollars a year given the unemployment and economic problems we have at home is unrealistic. So this is all a very sad situation and Obama is in a situation where he can’t win.

The implications here are pretty stunning, certainly enough to rock me back on my proverbial heels on my way into work this morning. In essence, if Mearsheimer’s analysis is accurate, then he’s applying the same basic analysis to Obama’s decision making with regards to Afghanistan as many have ascribed to Bush and the Rovian politics that dominated his eight years. Certainly Mearsheimer seems to be offering a much sympathetic condemnation to Obama when he says that the President, “is in a situation where he can’t win,” but the underlying motives present in the analysis are the same:you make decisions based not on what’s right or wrong, or on what seems the best course of action, or what your personal convictions are, but rather on what impact(s) your decision will have on the next election.

Of course, to a certain degree one can only say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” And there is some truth to that. Political decisions don’t happen in a vacuum and what the fallout of a particular decision might be electorally is present in the back of any elected representative’s mind, there’s no avoiding that. But to make a decision to delay the impacts of a challenge you’re facing until such a time as it has fewer potential negative ramifications on an election in which you have a stake that, at the same time, places  and additional thirty thousand soldier’s (one hundred thousand total) soldiers’ lives at risk seems as bald-faced and odious an example of realpolitik as one might imagine. And it is blatant enough that it seems like we ought not to throw our arms up and simply say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” [Read more →]

I was going to write a longer post on this, but one interesting consequence of Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan (a decision I support, however tentatively) is the ad hoc redrawing of foreign policy battle lines. So you now have a hawkish Republican congressman arguing for withdrawal/some variant of the Biden “counter-terrorism” strategy while the liberal Center for American Progress downplays any disagreement with the President’s renewed military commitment.

Damon Linker on appeals to common sense in American politics is worth reading, even if he overlooks the fact that like all rhetorical tropes, celebrating the intuition of the American people is a thoroughly bipartisan tendency (FDR: “The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails: admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”) But I wonder if something has changed since William Jennings Bryan or Roosevelt or even Reagan asked the electorate to ignore the received wisdom of eggheads in favor of their own instincts.

We live in an increasingly complex age. Instead of enhancing public discourse, the spread of information often overwhelms our ability to process new ideas. A few weeks ago, Freddie argued that the inherent complexity of the Afghanistan debate demonstrates the fallacy of empire-building in an egalitarian, democratic society, as the electorate simply isn’t equipped to parse the merits of occupation vs. withdrawal or counter-insurgency vs. counter-terrorism. His criticism is telling, but isn’t it equally true of just about every domestic policy dispute out there? If the electorate can’t handle the debate over Afghanistan, are voters really prepared to assess the likelihood of catastrophic global warming or the desirability of the health care public option?

I cringe whenever Mark Steyn or some other conservative bomb thrower takes the “Climategate” scandal as evidence of a world government conspiracy aimed at eradicating freedom. But I’m almost sympathetic to their credulous fans, who haven’t mastered the intricacies of climatology but do know there’s something awfully fishy about those leaked emails. The enduring popularity of the “death panels” myth is also symptomatic of reasonably informed voters who haven’t the time or inclination to read the latest think tank study grappling with an incredibly complex health care debate.

The divide between voters and policy-makers has been explored elsewhere and is probably an inevitable consequence of politics in any egalitarian democracy. But as society becomes more complex, so does policy-making, and the gulf between the electorate’s intuition and sophisticated expert analysis continues to grow. Perhaps the most significant example of this divide is the now-infamous bank bailout, which remains incredibly unpopular despite its near-unanimous support among political and financial elites.

Linker seems largely unconcerned by all this, and indeed is more worried by the prospect of “common sense” infecting a political platform than any disconnect between appeals to populism and actual policy. That voters should be reasonably well-equipped to make informed judgments, however, strikes me as pretty integral to the health of our democracy. In some cases, we may be able to avoid the problem of deliberation altogether (we could withdraw from Afghanistan, for example). Other circumstances make a clash between common sense and expert opinion almost inevitable. In the midst of a systemic economic crisis, we didn’t have the luxury of plugging our ears and ignoring the debate over the bank bailout. And with other, equally complex challenges looming on the horizon (health care, entitlement reform, climate change), the problem of democratic deliberation seems more pressing, not less.

If I had a solution to this dilemma, I probably wouldn’t be writing overlong blog posts. But I will offer one modest suggestion: In the wake of “Climategate” and a bank bailout dominated by financial insiders, the integrity and transparency of expert deliberation is more important than ever. On many issues, I am more than willing to defer to informed opinion. The pettiness revealed in the leaked climate emails and the borderline dishonesty of Bernanke and Paulsen in the midst of the economic crisis, however, makes it more difficult than ever to trust our governing institutions. I don’t want to rely solely on “common sense,” but given the choice, I’ll take my own intuitions over self-interested insiderism any day.

Jonah Goldberg (among others) seems offended by the fact that Obama blames the situation in Afghanistan on his predecessor. Blaming Bush may be evergreen for the Democrats, but in this case, it happens to be pretty darn accurate.

Peter Feaver writing in the Shadow Gov’t blog does an e-squat and drops a steaming pile of foreign policy cow manure.  But it’s worth reading insofar as it gives us a sense of Republican talking points in preparation for President Obama’s upcoming (Tuesday) Afghanistan policy announcement.

The entire piece is framed around whether or not Obama is really taking on his role of Commander in Chief, which needless to say (alright, I’ll say it anyway) is pretty stupid stuff.  It only goes downhill from there.

Here are Feaver’s bullet points (bullet points!), which list signs that Obama really is becoming an honest-to-God Commander in Chief (As opposed to whatever he’s been so far in office? WTF?):

• His follow-through on messaging is sustained and vigorous (and matched by a similar on-message effort by the senior White House staff and cabinet-level officials).
• He reaches out to Republicans, thanking them for their commitment to the war effort and promising to work with them. (If he really wants to show self-confidence, he might even say some kind words about President Bush and his courage as a war-time leader, but it is perhaps unreasonable to expect such a transcendently classy gesture at this stage.)
• He and his team describe the Afghan effort as a war to be won.
• He and his team sketch a vision of “success” in terms of achievable objectives. Any discussion of an “exit strategy” is similarly framed in terms of mission success.
• He and his team describe the American (and allied) troops who are fighting as heroes who are fighting to defend our freedoms against malevolent enemies that really do seek to do us harm.
• He thanks our troops as well as our allies, including our Afghan allies, for the sacrifices they are making and he promises them that on his watch he will do everything necessary to see that those sacrifices will be redeemed by seeing the war through to a successful conclusion.
• He levels with the American people about the costly road ahead, but explains why alternatives would be even costlier

Notice how many of these are built around emotion and rhetoric.

Obama should thank the troops for their sacrifices–and he’s done this on many occasions.  Unfortunately, I think Feaver’s misplaced his right-wing talking points.  I thought the line was to criticize Obama for being photoed while saluting dead soldiers. Obama should also thank Republicans?  What? Why? He should describe our soldiers as “heroes”—um, when does he not do this?

Another neocon classic–defining the fight as a “war to be won.”   Right, because that’s undoubtedly the only thing standing between us and victory.  Not, I don’t know, 30 years of war in Afghanistan, its status as just about the poorest and most violent country on the planet, its black markets in weapons and drugs, a terrorist sanctuary in Pakistan, its corrupt government, drug lords, war lords, and one of the most treacherous terrains imaginable for fighting an insurgency.

Forget all that, we just need some straightforward “messaging.”

In short, there are basically two intelligent points in there.

#4 Sketch a vision in terms of achievable objectives and #8 Be honest about the cost and make a case why the cost is worth it. These are just fairly rational, obvious points in my book.  If you are sending troops into a battle zone, you need to say you have a plan and why the risk is worth it.  Basically, everything else can be deleted or is so obviously going to happen (Is Obama really going to avoid calling our troops heroes?!) as to be unnecessary.

Feaver then follows up with a list of indicators that Obama is not really serious about being Commander in Chief.  Don’t bother asking how Feaver can get inside Obama’s head  and divine his inner feelings.  As you can imagine, these points are basically the opposite of list 1:  e.g. he calls the soldiers victims instead of heroes.

[Read more →]