[Peace-discuss] Right baling on Obama's war

[C. G. Estabrook]

[There's a lot wrong with this, from beginning to end (e.g., why is Bacevich's 
example absurd?), mainly in its assumptions, but it shows how support for the 
administration's war is falling apart across the political spectrum.  --CGE]


	Myth v. Fact: Afghanistan
	Malou Innocent
	Foreign Policy Analyst at the Cato Institute.
	Posted: September 4, 2009 10:51 AM

While "Change" has been Barack Obama's mantra, as of late he has been channeling 
his predecessor.

"Afghanistan," according to Obama, "is a war of necessity... [And] If left 
unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which 
al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans."

President George W. Bush was adept at keeping the American public in an elevated 
state of panic. That tactic may be useful for advancing controversial policies. 
But if policymakers continue to downplay the drawbacks of our current course of 
action, America risks intensifying the region's powerful jihadist insurgency and 
entangling itself deeper into a tribal-based society it barely understands.

Americans must be told the truth about the war in Afghanistan. To understand the 
disadvantages of pursuing present policies, we must unpack the myths that war 
proponents use to justify staying the course.

Myth #1: Both al Qaeda and the Taliban Are Our Mortal Enemies

Given the magnitude of the atrocities unleashed on September 11th, removing both 
al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that sheltered the terrorist organization was 
appropriate. But eight years later, is waging a war against the Taliban a 
pressing national security interest? Not really.

The Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other guerilla-jihadi movements indigenous 
to this region have no shadowy global mission. In fact, what we are witnessing 
is a local and regional ethnic Pasthun population -- divided arbitrarily by a 
porous 1,500-mile border -- fighting against what they perceive to be a hostile 
occupation of their region. Prolonging our mission risks uniting these groups 
and making U.S. troops the primary target of their wrath.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, even if the Taliban were to reassert 
themselves amid a scaled down U.S. presence, it is not clear that the Taliban 
would again host al Qaeda. In The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, 
Lawrence Wright, staff writer for New Yorker magazine, found that before 9/11 
the Taliban was divided over whether to shelter Osama bin Laden. The terrorist 
financier wanted to attack Saudi Arabia's royal family, which, according to 
Wright, would have defied a pledge Taliban leader Mullah Omar made to Prince 
Turki al-Faisal, chief of Saudi intelligence (1977-2001), to keep bin Laden 
under control. The Taliban's reluctance to host al Qaeda's leader means it is 
not a foregone conclusion that the same group would provide shelter to the same 
organization whose protection led to their overthrow.

As the war in Afghanistan rages on, President Obama should be skeptical of 
suggestions that the defeat of al Qaeda depends upon a massive troop presence. 
Globally, the United States has degraded al Qaeda's ability to pull off another 
9/11 by employing operations that look a lot like police work. Most of the 
greatest successes scored against al Qaeda, such as the snatch-and-grab 
operations that netted Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, have not 
relied on large numbers of U.S. troops. Intelligence sharing and close 
cooperation with foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done 
more to round up suspected terrorists than blunt military force.

Myth # 2: We Must Remain in the Region to Protect Pakistan

The "Pakistan-is-imploding" meme that coursed through the Beltway like wildfire 
last spring was excessively alarmist.

First, the danger of militants seizing Pakistan's nuclear weapons remains highly 
unlikely. Pakistan has an elaborate command and control system in place that 
complies with strict Western standards, and the country's warheads, detonators, 
and missiles are not stored fully-assembled, but are scattered and physically 
separated throughout the country.

Second, average militants have no viable means of taking over a country of 172 
million people. The dominant political force within Pakistan is not radical 
fundamentalist Islam, but a desire for a sound economy and basic security. In 
fact, if the country were to be taken over by al Qaeda sympathizers, it would 
likely be because U.S. policies in both Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan are 
being exploited by militants to undermine public support for the government in 
Islamabad.

Third, policymakers have underestimated how greatly leaders in Islamabad fear 
the rise of pro-India government in Kabul. India inspires a sense of profound 
insecurity in Pakistan. For all of Washington's talk of the "Af-Pak" border, 
eighty percent of Pakistan's military still sits on the border with India, not 
Afghanistan. Pakistan's fear of India has existed for decades, and Pakistani 
military leaders are committed to securing "strategic depth" in Afghanistan, 
their regional backyard, and they do so to prevent India from establishing 
influence there and encircling Pakistan.

Finally, and most importantly, while America has a vital interest in ensuring 
Pakistan does not become weakened, its America's own policies that are pushing 
the conflict over the border and destabilizing the nuclear-armed country.

Airstrikes from unmanned drones are strengthening the very jihadist forces 
America seeks to defeat by allowing militants to exploit the popular resentment 
felt from the accidental killing of innocents. On August 12, the U.S. special 
envoy for the region, Richard Holbrooke, told an audience at the Center for 
American Progress that the porous border and its surrounding areas serve as a 
fertile recruiting ground for al Qaeda. One US military official, speaking on 
the condition of anonymity, called airstrikes from U.S. unmanned drones "a 
recruiting windfall for the Pakistani Taliban."

Citizens living outside the ungoverned tribal areas also detest drones. A recent 
poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan for Al-Jazeera found that a whopping 59 
percent believed the U.S. was the greatest threat to Pakistan.

If America's interests lie in ensuring the virus of anti-American radicalism 
does not infect the rest of the region, discontinuing policies that add more 
fuel to violent religious radicalism should be the first order of business.

Myth #3: Terrorists Dwell in Ungoverned Parts of the World

According to the president, our strategy is to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al 
Qaeda. Yet in order to accomplish that goal, the Obama administration believes 
we must create a functioning national state there. Why?

Beltway orthodoxy tells us that because extremists will emerge in ungoverned 
parts of the world and attack the United States, America must forcibly 
stabilize, liberalize, and democratize Afghanistan.

This thinking is flawed for several reasons.

First, the argument that America's security depends on rebuilding failed states 
ignores that terrorists can move to governed spaces. Rather than setting up in 
weak, ungoverned states, enemies can flourish in strong states because these 
countries have formally recognized governments with the sovereignty to reject 
foreign interference in their domestic affairs. This is one reason why 
terrorists find sanctuary across the border in Pakistan. [Note: 9/11 was planned 
in many other countries, Germany included].

Second, as my Cato colleagues Chris Preble and Justin Logan point out, there's 
reason to doubt whether state failure or poor governance in itself poses a threat.

Third, such an extraordinarily costly, open-ended military occupation gives 
Osama bin Laden and his ilk exactly what they want: America's all-volunteer 
military force is pressed to cope with two protracted irregular wars, we are 
inadvertently killing innocent civilians and our policies are recruiting 
militants to their cause.

Myth # 4: We Can Have a Successful Nation-Building Mission in Afghanistan

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps' Counterinsurgency Field Manual states, "Soldiers 
and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors rebuilding 
infrastructure and basic services." That sentiment is shared by many of the 
people informing administration policy.

Stephen Biddle, civilian advisor to General Stanley McChrystal, America's top 
commander in Afghanistan, said a critical requirement for the success in 
Afghanistan "is providing enough of an improvement in Afghan governance to 
enable the country to function without us."

But like many within the Obama administration, Biddle's advice is more goal than 
strategy.

First, Afghanistan has yet to demonstrate the capability to function as a 
cohesive, modern, nation state, with or without us -- and perhaps never will. 
Many tribes living in rural, isolated, and sparsely populated provinces have 
little interest cooperating with "foreigners," a relative term considering the 
limited contact many have with their country's own central government.

Second, arguments supporting a multi-decade commitment of "armed nation 
building" -- the words of another civilian advisor to the mission, Anthony 
Cordesman -- overlook whether such an ambitious project can be done within costs 
acceptable to the American public.

Our attempt to transform what is a deeply divided, poverty stricken, 
tribal-based society -- while our own country faces economic peril -- is nothing 
short of ludicrous, especially since even the limited goal of creating a 
self-sufficient, non-corrupt, stable electoral democracy would require a 
multi-decade commitment--and even then there'd be no assurance of success.

Myth #5: It's Altruistic to Help Afghans

This video at "Rethink Afghanistan" upends this myth, particularly on the issue 
of women's rights.

In addition, while it's understandable for the President and other elected 
leaders to empathize with the plight and suffering of others, why Afghanistan? 
What about Haiti? Or Congo? Or the dozens of other poverty-stricken countries 
around the world, and at that point does America stop nation-building?

As Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich argues:

     For those who, despite all this, still hanker to have a go at nation 
building, why start with Afghanistan? Why not first fix, say, Mexico? In terms 
of its importance to the United States, our southern neighbor...outranks 
Afghanistan by several orders of magnitude...Yet any politician calling for the 
commitment of sixty thousand U.S. troops to Mexico to secure those interests or 
acquit those moral obligations would be laughed out of Washington--and rightly 
so. Any pundit proposing that the United States assume responsibility for 
eliminating the corruption that is endemic in Mexican politics while 
establishing in Mexico City effective mechanisms of governance would have his 
license to pontificate revoked.

--

Over the past year, the mission in Afghanistan has shifted from the limited goal 
of taking down al Qaeda to a much broader counterinsurgency approach. Americans 
are now being told their troops must protect the villages of Afghanistan. 
Planning will always falls short of our expectations because we can't reliably 
predict the course of future events. As the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign 
Relations stated in an August 2009 report, "Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan is not a 
reconstruction project--it is a construction project, starting almost from 
scratch in a country that will probably remain poverty-stricken no matter how 
much the U.S. and the international community accomplish in the coming years."

Denying a sanctuary to terrorists who seek to attack the United States does not 
require Washington to pacify the entire country or sustain a long-term, 
large-scale military presence. Afghanistan does not have to be Obama's Vietnam, 
but whether it will be or not is entirely his decision.


[The Cato Institute will be hosting a forum "Should the United States Withdraw 
from Afghanistan?" on September 14th. If you would like to register or watch the 
forum live online, go to Cato's events page at www.cato.org/events]