By Shoshana Bryen
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Washington Post intoned on the front page, “Poll Finds Guarded Optimism on Obama’s Afghanistan Plan.” What plan? Plumbing the article, it turns out that support for the President on the issue has “plummeted” since the summer; more than half think “the war is not worth the cost”; and they are evenly split over whether the plan should include the higher number of troops mentioned in public reports or the lower. A slim majority does believe the President “will choose an Afghanistan strategy that will work.”
The Post failed to ask, “What is/what should be the goal of U.S. Afghanistan policy?”
The American and allied goal in the region should be to secure Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country with a fragile civilian government. While the Taliban has only been a secondary threat to the United States, providing the haven al Qaeda required to incubate and strike (the Taliban is a primary threat to Afghan women), a jihadist government in Pakistan would be a primary threat to India, to Israel and to American interests.
The United States cannot pursue jihadists inside Pakistan, or even discuss the possibility of the government losing control-it is an allied and very touchy country-so we pretend the conversation is about Afghanistan. The argument over “counterinsurgency vs. counterterrorism”-securing Afghanistan and providing political stability or standing off and just killing al Qaeda as we find them-is a red herring for the discussion we’re not having. The time the Obama Administration has taken to work this out while troops are on the ground fighting has been devastating.
In what finally appears to be a move toward the “counterterrorism” position generally favored by Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Clinton visited the talk shows last weekend and staked out the “just kill them” position:
“Our goal is to defeat Al Qaeda…We want to get the people who attacked us, and we want to prevent them and their syndicate of terrorism from posing a threat to us, our allies and our interests…we understand that the Afghans themselves need help in order to defend themselves against the Taliban. Those are mutually reinforcing missions, but our highest obligation is to the American people. It is to do everything we can to make sure that America is secure, that our allies, our interests around the world are protected.”
“We’re not interested in staying in Afghanistan. We have no long-term stake there.”
“This is not the prior days when people would come on your show and talk about how we were going to help the Afghans build a modern democracy and build a more functioning state and do all of those wonderful things…that could happen. But our primary focus is on the security of the United States of America.”
In other words: No long-term stake, no modernization, and no functioning state. We are in your country to bomb things and kill people that threaten us, not you. Oh, yes, those pesky Taliban-we’ll help you kill them while we’re there, but they’re your problem not our problem.
Aid?
“We’re not going to be providing any civilian aid to Afghanistan unless we have a certification that if it goes into the Afghan government in any form, that we’re going to have ministries that we can hold accountable.”
In other words: Only if you clean up your act, and don’t expect patience from us.
Pakistan?
“Well, I think, you know, we want to get al Qaeda, and we’re very clear about that, and we see it as part of our integrated strategy looking at Afghanistan and Pakistan as a theater in which we have to operate. We have made it clear to the Pakistanis, as well as to the Afghans and others, that we want to do everything we can to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda.”
In other words: Pakistan is no more than a front in the American war on al Qaeda.
Gone is war against terrorists and the states that harbor and support them. Gone is the broad understanding that weak countries can be taken over by terrorist forces that will use their resources to build bigger and better terrorist capabilities. (That’s why al Qaeda chose Afghanistan in the 1990s to begin with, and thought it could move to Iraq after we toppled the Taliban in 2001. That’s how Hezbollah moved into the government in Lebanon and how Hamas took over Gaza.) Gone appears to be the understanding that securing the civilian population and providing aid is the precursor to the stability that allows for political maturation and long-term moderation-which secures us better than bombs alone can do.
Who had those understandings? President Bush did as he pursued the surge in Iraq that has led to the decrease in violence and the political maturation that will see multiparty national elections proceeding on schedule in January. President Obama had it eight months ago. Formally presenting his first policy review in March, the President said:
I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That is the goal that must be achieved.
[We need] a dramatic increase in our civilian effort… to advance security, opportunity and justice-not just in Kabul, but also from the bottom up in the provinces-we need agricultural specialists and educators, engineers and lawyers. That’s how we can help the Afghan government serve its people and develop an economy …Make no mistake, our efforts will fail in Afghanistan and Pakistan if we don’t invest in their future.
JINSA does not necessarily support an increased American military presence in
Afghanistan. If the goal is really limited to killing al Qaeda operatives in other people’s countries, we can probably do it with UAVs as Vice President Biden prefers. But if the objective is Pakistan, its nuclear weapons and its future, the President was right back in March and all the ensuing delay has just made things more complicated and more deadly for our troops- for no reason.
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Bryen is special projects director for the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. (JINSA). Her column is sponsored by Waxie Sanitary Supply in memory of Morris Wax, longtime JINSA supporter and national board member.