Seeking Light at the End of the Afghan Tunnel

As they mark the anniversary of the armistice ending the war that was to end all wars, Britons this week are trying to make sense of the mounting casualties in the very current war in Afghanistan.  The complaint by the grieving mother of a dead soldier that prime minister Gordon Brown's hand-written but misspelt letter of condolence insulted her has put a personal face on the ebbing British public support for soldiering on there.  That erosion, in the largest foreign troop contributor there behind the United States, should be a caution for Barack Obama as he recalibrates America's own efforts in Afghanistan.

From July to October, the share of Britons opposing the country's participation in the military operation in Afghanistan grew from 53 to 59 percent.  In Canada, another country with troops fighting for the Kabul government in the south of Afghanistan, public support for Canada's military role fell in those same three months from 43 to 37 percent, with opposition rising to 56 percent.   Dutch opposition to continuing the Netherlands' combat participation past 2010 has risen to 70 percent. 

In the big NATO countries that have signed up for only peacekeeping and troop training, not combat against insurgents--France, Germany, and Italy--growing majorities call for their missions to wind down.  While the governments in all these countries seem agreed, for now, that none can unilaterally abandon a multilateral mission organized by NATO and authorized by the United Nations, the clock is ticking.  By the end of next year, the multiple national pressures will inevitably yield a collective NATO decision to start a phase-out.  American opinion will not be far behind.

After all, the Kabul government has already had eight years to set down roots and to mobilize Afghans against a comeback by the detested Taliban. 

Admittedly, most of those years were squandered by misguided policies of the Bush administration.  Its ideological idées fixes -- a U.N. "light footprint," aversion to peacekeeping, fragmented reconstruction, opposition to NATO command, denial of troops, and of course obsession with Iraq -- produced what James Dobbins calls "dysfunctional arrangements" that hobbled Kabul and invited a Taliban resurgence.  In his incisive book Descent into Chaos, Pakistani analyst Ahmed Rashid details an "Orwellian" policy process that "created a far bigger crisis in South and Central Asia than existed before 9/11."

Discouraging as the prospects now look in Afghanistan, it is possible that a non-extremist Afghanistan may still be salvaged from the wreckage.  President Obama is evidently opting for a salvage strategy requiring troop reinforcements-- McClatchy's Jon Landay reports by some 34,000 troops.  Obama would seek European buy-in through NATO.  After all, the re-set strategy cannot be just military, but will require major new investments in economic and social reconstruction--not just from the United States, but also from Europe and Japan.

If Obama is going to gamble on a military surge, however, he would do well to announce it as a clearly temporary reinforcement, a one-year insurance policy to cover assumption by Afghanistan's anti-Taliban majority of responsibility for their own security.  With Afghans' patience already said to be turning against the eight-year foreign military presence, Obama won't have a window more than a year.  Indeed, Afghan president Hamid Karzai--re-elected by only a plurality of the vote--would burnish his national credentials by publicly insisting on a two-year phase-out of foreign troops starting in January 2011. 

Conventional military thinking abhors firm deadlines for troop withdrawal, on the grounds that the enemy will calculate that it just has to wait out the foreign troops once the foreigners have advertised their departure date.  But the Taliban and their allies inside Pakistan already know that the foreigners will depart anyway.  Even if Obama wins a temporary reprieve from the American public on prosecuting the effort, demands will mount for an exit well before the first Democratic presidential primary in 2012.  Far better, it seems, to make a virtue of the inevitable and set the timeline, as one's own initiative, at the start.

Obama's other gamble in escalating the commitment to Kabul is that the additional cost--an estimated $50 billion more a year for war budgets already exceeding $100 billion--does not push precarious confidence in the U.S. treasury past the tipping point.  Wars notoriously cost money.  The conservative critics baying loudest for rapid military escalation are also the sharpest critics of stimulus deficits.  If a larger military and economic commitment to Afghanistan is necessary, Obama should perhaps condition it on a dedicated tax increase--perhaps on higher incomes, perhaps on gun sales--that would be phased out as the troops come home.

Whatever increased involvement in Afghanistan that Obama will propose and that the Congress will fund, it is essential that it not be a unilateral American adventure.  It needs to be calibrated to the capacity of existing allies to sustain their military contributions (almost certainly just a year or two), and it must engage the political and economic support of Afghanistan's neighbors. 

That includes Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, and of course the deeply schizophrenic Pakistan.  Whatever time Obama's strategic re-set buys for the Karzai coalition in Kabul, that time must also be devoted to building the international coalition and commitments in the wider region that strengthen the region's levees against an extremist tide.

Comments

[Sally McMillan]

President Obama's decision on Afghanistan will determine his status as a "war president" or, as we all hoped, a president who changes the world mindset towards peace. War is not the way to peace. Unfortunately, the military always want "to win" and Obama's advisors, for the most part, are of the old mindset. It's a tough spot to be in, but hopefully he'll listen to voices outside of Washington and have the courage to bring change we can believe in. That's why we elected him.