The Obama Administration is undertaking an intense, high-profile deliberation over what to do next in Afghanistan. Accounts of this week’s White House meetings indicate a lively, open debate, punctuated by General Stanley McChrystal’s calls for increased troop levels, answered by skeptical questioning from Vice President Biden.
Some of this debate is being carried out in public. McChrystal repeated his points in a speech in London on Thursday, the day after the Washington Post ran a front-page story indicating that U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism operations had “significantly reduced” al Qaeda’s effectiveness. On Friday, McChrystal met with Obama briefly while the President was in Copenhagen.
If al Qaeda has indeed been weakened, the argument goes, why do we need to deploy more troops in Afghanistan? Can the U.S. devise a new strategy that would concede some role for some Taliban forces in Afghanistan, provided that they not frustrate our efforts to incapacitate al Qaeda?
By the same token, if the existing Karzai government in Kabul is so strongly called into question as a result of its corruption and the fraudulent conduct of recent elections, does the United States have a local partner in Afghanistan worthy of support? According to Peter Galbraith, former U.S. diplomat and until this week the second-ranking UN official in Afghanistan, the answer is no. Speaking today on CNN, Galbraith said McChrystal’s plan was “highly questionable” given the election fraud. “There is going to be a segment of the [Afghan] population that is not going to accept the authority of the government,” he told Wolf Blitzer.
Changing course now would have implications for U.S. policy throughout the region, including Pakistan and Iran, countries that have by turns aided or frustrated U.S. and NATO interventions in Afghanistan.
Neither Galbraith nor other experts on Southwest Asia, such as ex-US Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin, are criticizing Obama for stopping to take stock before making additional commitments. In fact, they welcome it as perhaps the last opportunity for the White House to get the policy right, faced with the prospect that further troop commitments could lead to a Vietnam-like quaqmire.
“Pakistan is still a feudal society,” Chamberlin told a group of bloggers in Washington last week. “The Taliban is very cleverly exploiting the current situation in Pakistan. The promises made in Swat have not been kept.”
Across the border, in Afghanistan, the situation is even worse. Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to the region, who witnessed first-hand the quicksand of America’s military engagement in Vietnam, must realize that the parallels are not comforting.
