Let me first echo David Adesnik’s remarks on President Obama’s Afghanistan speech. The moral basis for action was clear from the beginning, and Obama proclaimed American supremacy with more robustness than he has ever done before.
The obvious point of debate is the 18 month withdrawal order. Adesnik rightly questions just how fast this withdrawal will take place. My sense is that the 18 month withdrawal point was more to placate Democrats in Congress who worry (rightly) about an open-ended commitment. Some Republicans – Alex Castellanos is making this very point right now on CNN – are suggesting that the 18 month timeline is connected to Obama’s own re-election. He offers no evidence for this claim and it comes across as a bit petty.
My own feelings on this threading of the needle are that it is both political – not partisan politics re: 2012 but concern that a Democratic Congress would actually revolt without an exit strategy – and strategic, in that we simply should not be dumping troops into Afghanistan with no limits.
The problem, however, is Karzai and local Afghan politics. While this is hardly a revolutionary observation, it begs the question: how will the Afghan government really pick up the slack in 2011? The notion that the Taliban would simply “wait us out” is not a very astute reading of insurgencies. Guerrilla forces, contrary to popular myth, do not sit idly by and strike when the calender turns a certain date. Guerrillas must work constantly to maintain their own morale and the support of the people they purport to represent. They can be defeated in five weeks or they can wait out 40 years; the decision of America to stick it out for years or withdraw in 18 months is largely irrelevant to that fate. What really matters is whether or not we are building a workable alliance with Pashtun tribal officials and the Pashtun people against the Taliban. If we are able to establish that alliance – as we did with the Anbar Awakening leadership in Iraq – then we will effectively eliminate the Taliban in short order. We did it in 2001 in seven weeks and we could do it again. But if we continue to make two new enemies for every one we kill, then the Taliban will be far stronger in 2011 than today. And then the 18 month withdrawal strategy will look like a humiliating defeat.
Afghanistan is not Iraq. The internal ethnic and sectarian and tribal differences within Iraq are far different than Afghanistan. But there is a common counter-insurgent policy at work and it requires the establishment of both ground-level military collaboration with anti-Taliban Pashtun commanders and, perhaps more importantly, massive economic investment to convince the dollar-a-day Taliban to switch sides as they did in 2001. Karzai is hopeless outside Kabul. The goal should be to give the Pashtuns in the south a sense that they have control over their own region; i.e. the Afghan Army is not simply the Tajik Northern Alliance run by a Pashtun figurehead. To do this, the Americans (and NATO) will have to engage with local leadership whom the seemingly well-informed CNN panel is convinced we have ignored up to now.