[Peace-discuss] Liberal support for O's Afghan killing

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Preempting a Progressive Split on Afghanistan
	National Security Network Report Seeks Common Liberal Ground
	By SPENCER ACKERMAN 2/18/09 12:05 PM

As the Obama administration spends the next two months reviewing strategy 
options for Afghanistan, a progressive organization is attempting to cobble 
together a liberal consensus around basic principles for the future of the 
seven-year-old war — thereby fending off a progressive split over Afghanistan 
early in the Obama administration’s term.

The National Security Network, an organization that seeks to bring together 
policymakers, experts and Democratic activists, plans to release a document, 
titled “Principles for an Afghanistan Strategy,” later today. Assembled in 
consultation with Afghanistan experts from the development, diplomatic and 
defense communities, the two-page document urges the Obama team to create “a 
comprehensive strategy that recognizes the limits of military power.” It is 
agnostic on the question of deploying additional troops for the war, and its 
drafters hope to reach out to progressives who object to military escalation. On 
Tuesday, the Obama team announced it would deploy 17,000 additional troops to 
Afghanistan.

“The ultimate goal here is for the Obama administration to come out with 
something 50-plus days from now that most people can live with,” explained 
National Security Network executive director Heather Hurlburt, referring to the 
progressive community. If a progressive consensus can be reached, Hurlburt said 
she planned on taking the consensus document to the Obama team’s review 
committee, which is headed by former CIA official Bruce Reidel, Undersecretary 
of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy and Richard Holbrooke, the special 
administration envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Mirroring the stated goals of the Obama team’s policy review, the National 
Security Network document seeks to address Afghanistan policy from the 
perspective of first-order concerns. It endorses the war, contending that 
“Afghanistan’s continuing deterioration would allow al-Qaeda central, which 
intelligence agencies identify as the greatest national security threat to the 
United States, to operate with impunity under a resurgent Taliban.” But the 
document also echoes recent recognitions by members of the Obama team, like 
Defense Secretary Bob Gates, that the war’s humanitarian and governance 
components “will be better served by a smaller-scale effort which can enable 
local, regional and non-governmental efforts than a massive one which cannot be 
sustained.”

As for the strategy to achieve those goals, the National Security Network urges 
the U.S. to support an effort to help the Afghanistan government “satisfy 
baseline economic and security requirements of its citizens” in order to win and 
hold popular allegiance. It supports “vigorous diplomacy” with all of 
Afghanistan’s allies “from India and Iran to Russia and the other Central Asian 
states”; tying Pakistan policy to Afghanistan policy; and to supplement military 
force by cracking down on both government corruption and the “stranglehold of 
the opium trade” which helps fund the insurgency.

Perhaps most controversially, the document endorses a counterinsurgency strategy 
against the Taliban-led coalition seeking to overthrow the U.S.-allied 
government in Kabul. Noting that counterinsurgencies are historically won by 
those who “outgovern …rather than outgun” their opponents, the National Security 
Network urges military leaders to make decisions “with an eye to meeting Afghan 
security concerns,” bolstering Afghan security forces and “phasing out tactics 
that have increased civilian casualties with questionable payoffs.” A United 
Nations report released this week found that civilian casualties have risen 
significantly in Afghanistan in 2008 , and over 60 percent of civilian 
casualties linked to U.S. military activities have been caused by airstrikes.
Hurlburt explained that consultations taking place over the past two weeks with 
experts rejected a strategy that focused narrowly on counterterrorism activities 
like specifically targeting Al Qaeda or Taliban leadership, out of fear that a 
strategy that neglected the concerns of the Afghan people wouldn’t work. “The 
counterinsurgency and development people together make the point the you can’t 
achieve your counterterrorism objectives without a modicum of government 
functionality,” she said. But what she said her “friends in the development 
community,” who urge a robust construction and humanitarian effort, “are not 
fully recognizing is how shallow the domestic pool of support is [for such 
efforts] at this point. That’s what the progressive advocacy community, like Get 
Afghanistan Right, understands.”

Get Afghanistan Right is a coalition of progressives that rejects military 
escalation in Afghanistan. Hurlburt said that she wanted to work out a sense 
from the “expert community” of what was achievable and realistic for Afghanistan 
before taking the document to “progressive advocacy” organizations like Get 
Afghanistan Right to secure buy in. She conceded that there would be 
disagreements that probably can’t be fully resolved.

“In my wildest dreams, if we could agree to disagree on troop numbers but get 
the other pieces right, and ask hard questions on those troop numbers” Hurlburt 
said she would consider the effort at consensus-building successful. “The other 
thing I’d really like to see is greater familiarization, so the expert community 
can see advocacy community has valid concerns, and the advocacy community can 
see the expert community are good people with serious concerns and not, to use 
an overused word, ‘war mongers.’”

Jason Rosenbaum, a blogger at the Seminal and a leader of Get Afghanistan Right, 
said he welcomed the National Security Network’s efforts. “We think there’s a 
lot of common ground among progressives on Afghanistan, especially when you get 
the around the question of the war-fighting part,” he said. “I would love to be 
on board that discussion as much as possible.” He said he considered “NSN an 
ally, and we consider VoteVets an ally in some senses,” referring to a 
progressive veterans’ organization that has pushed for an increase of troop 
levels in Afghanistan.

Get Afghanistan Right also released a statement of principles on Tuesday for the 
war, reacting to President Obama’s announced troop increase. “Without a clear 
strategy, benchmarks for success, and a plan to bring our troops home, this 
escalation will only prolong the American-led occupation — increasing 
anti-American sentiment throughout the region — while failing to make America 
any safer,” the organization wrote in a statement signed initially by 15 academics.

Hurlburt was optimistic that progressive consensus is possible. She said that 
the network’s role was “to turn down temperature of rhetoric enough to see the 
truths that the other [progressive] side is offering them.” And she called the 
Afghanistan strategy review a test for progressives. “This is a great experiment 
in asking, can the progressive community do a better job with these types of 
challenges than [it did] in 1993 or 1977 or whatever. We’ve never done this 
successfully as a community — shape war policy, and shape policy of own 
[progressive] governments when we manage to elect them.”

http://washingtonindependent.com/30597/group-aims-to-preempt-a-progressive-split-on-afghanistan