The Long View In Afghanistan

Stratfor founder George Friedman reviews our thirty-year war in Afghanistan.  I am struck by the notion that what George Bush had been doing is a lot like what Biden was advocating last fall.  From Stratfor:

During the Bush administration, U.S. goals for Afghanistan were modest. First, the Americans intended to keep al Qaeda bottled up and to impose as much damage as possible on the group. Second, they intended to establish an Afghan government, regardless of how ineffective it might be, to serve as a symbolic core. Third, they planned very limited operations against the Taliban, which had regrouped and increasingly controlled the countryside. The Bush administration was basically in a holding operation in Afghanistan. It accepted that U.S. forces were neither going to be able to impose a political solution on Afghanistan nor create a coalition large enough control the country. U.S. strategy was extremely modest under Bush: to harass al Qaeda from bases in Afghanistan, maintain control of cities and logistics routes, and accept the limits of U.S. interests and power.

I don't think that is the strategy Bush articulated, but if you judge him by his actions, then maybe - in April 2008 Sec Def Gates was talking about a troop increase in Afghanistan in 2009, but numbers like 7,500 to 10,000 were being tossed around.

Let me excerpt from the section on Obama:

The Obama administration began with the premise that while the Iraq War was a mistake, the Afghan War had to be prosecuted. It reasoned that unlike Iraq, which had a tenuous connection to al Qaeda at best, Afghanistan was the group’s original base. He argued that Afghanistan therefore should be the focus of U.S. military operations. In doing so, he shifted a strategy that had been in place for 30 years by making U.S. forces the main combatants in the war.

However!

In analyzing this strategy, there is an obvious issue: While al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan in 2001, Afghanistan is no longer its primary base of operations. The group has shifted to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. As al Qaeda is thus not dependent on any one country for its operational base, denying it bases in Afghanistan does not address the reality of its dispersion. Securing Afghanistan, in other words, is no longer the solution to al Qaeda.

Obviously, Obama’s planners fully understood this. Therefore, sanctuary denial for al Qaeda had to be, at best, a secondary strategic goal. The primary strategic goal was to create an exit strategy for the United States based on a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and a resulting coalition government.

So it's back to the future:

Rather than trying to strengthen the Karzai government, the real strategy is to return to the historical principles of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan: alliance with indigenous forces. These indigenous forces would pursue strategies in the American interest for their own reasons, or because they are paid, and would be strong enough to stand up to the Taliban in a coalition. As CIA Director Leon Panetta put it this weekend, however, this is proving harder to do than expected.

The American strategy is, therefore, to maintain a sufficient force to shape the political evolution on the ground, and to use that force to motivate and intimidate while also using economic incentives to draw together a coalition in the countryside.

On the hokey-pokey surge/withdrawal plan announced by Obama:

Obama’s attempt to return to that track after first increasing U.S. forces to set the stage for the political settlement that will allow a U.S. withdrawal is hampered by the need to begin terminating the operation by 2011 (although there is no fixed termination date). It will be difficult to draw coalition partners into local structures when the foundation — U.S. protection — is withdrawing. Strengthening local forces by 2011 will be difficult. Moreover, the Taliban’s motivation to enter into talks is limited by the early withdrawal.

...Given the time frame the Obama administration’s grand strategy imposes, and given the capabilities of the Taliban, it is difficult to see how it will all work out. But the ultimate question is about the American obsession with Afghanistan. For 30 years, the United States has been involved in a country that is virtually inaccessible for the United States. Washington has allied itself with radical Islamists, fought against radical Islamists or tried to negotiate with radical Islamists. What the United States has never tried to do is impose a political solution through the direct application of American force. This is a new and radically different phase of America’s Afghan obsession. The questions are whether it will work and whether it is even worth it.

Worth it relative to what?

Comments

[JorgXMcKie]

Worth it toward the continued deification of Obama.

[FeFe]

Worth it to leaving our flank of a southern border (and Visas) wide open to invasion of their regions export of terrorists and drugs.

[Clarice]

I think it dangerous to poke sticks in hornets' nests and think you've got rid of them.

[narciso]

So Rumsfeld was right after all, fancy that, not this silly Biden ponce

[Neo]

“Economics is hard. Really hard. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly hard it is. I mean you may think doing the Sunday Times crossword is difficult, but that’s just peanuts to economics. And because it is so hard, people shouldn’t blithely go shooting their mouths off about it, and pretending like it’s so easy. In fact, we would all be better off if we just ignored these clowns.”

[J]

Soon after we had entered Iraq an npr show was on with an interview with a well-known Arab. He did not approve of the USA entering Iraq, however, he pointed out that when we entered Afghanistan, in the arab world, we achieved nothing. When we entered Iraq, all kinds of intel opened up for us and we got a lot of cooperation from the arab world.....they took us seriously. I'm pretty sure that under obama, no one is taking us seriously and I weep for the sacrifice of our soldiers.

[jimmyk]

I think it dangerous to poke sticks in hornets' nests and think you've got rid of them.

I was also thinking insects, but cockroaches, from this:

While al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan in 2001, Afghanistan is no longer its primary base of operations. The group has shifted to Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. As al Qaeda is thus not dependent on any one country for its operational base, denying it bases in Afghanistan does not address the reality of its dispersion.

If you go after cockroaches in one apartment, they migrate to another. Bush understood that you need to fumigate the entire building. Obama hasn't figured that out yet. In fact, he seems to think that if we are nice to the cockroaches they'll stop behaving like cockroaches.

[Sue]

These people better watch it or they will have Bush being the smartest guy in the room.

[fdcol63]

Hornets and wasps remain protcted in their nests.

Only by disturbing the nest can you force them out into the open where you can kill them.

Sure, they may become agitated and attack if they can while they are out of the nest, but you just have to remain persistent and kill them as quickly as you can.

Then destroy the nest so they can't return.

But you're right, poking it with a stick and then just running away accomplishes nothing.

Which is pretty much what Obama wants the US to do in Afghanistan.

[What message is Obama sending them?]

Do you remember, j, that someone back then made the point that we invaded Iraq in order to send a message to Saudi Arabia?
=================

[fdcol63]

How quickly everyone has forgotten the message that Libya got from Iraq.

And how quickly everyone has forgotten the $25k bonuses that Saddam was giving to shaheeds in the Palestinian Authority who were carrying out almost daily homicide bombings against buses and pizza parlors in Israel. That stopped.

[LouP]

For the life of me I cannot figure out how anyone would be presumptious enough to think that the Obama administration has any strategy on Afghanistan. I don't see any evidence of it - in fact, I see quite the opposite.

I don't think it's any more complicated than during the campaign the Dims bludgeoned Bush with the populist line that he was ignoring OBL, so Obama had to do something that looked macho in Afghanistan. Then about the time that Obama won the election, it became clear that the surge in Iraq was working after all - in fact an "unprecedented, historic" success. Not that Obama & Co. could ever admit it publically. But at this point, Obama wanted one of those, too. Heck of a stratgey!

[No, not Nigeria. Sweet tea land.]

fd, it is still highly mysterious to me why Dubya didn't crow about the Libya thing. It is my opinion that Saddam subcontracted his nuclear program to Khadaffi, using yellow cake from just over the southern border.
=========

[C'mon, cryptic; stop teasing.]

And Ames knew about it.
===========

[matt]

fdcol;

I didn't know Muslims hated pizza.We've got it all wrong.

No one has really written a credible history of the War on Terror as it is still evolving. What we knew to be true in 2001 morphed in later years. The presumed peace in Afghanistan and Iraq morphed into insurrection and jihad.

Libya was a big win, and the British population are still livid that the Scots released the Lockerbie bomber as a part of the peace process.Syria goe into the loss column, while with Iran, it was simply the early stages of the Islamo-fascist regime and the 9/11 bombings were so horrible they knew they were in the path of the blow back.

Once we started to become enmeshed in Iraq and Afghanistan, our enemies in Syria, Pakistan, and Iran began to see these theaters as low cost surrogates to weaken Gulliver and wage jihad on the cheap.

AQ is a franchise rather than a holistic movement. That is the mistake of many of our professionals. Some kook in Times Square visits uncle Rahim's madrassa in Pakistan and says he is AQ. There are no membership cards and secret handshakes. It is extremely cellular with only very limited funding and control from the center.

[Cecil Turner]

Lame analysis, totally failed on the following points: 1) The 1989-2001 period cannot be described as a US war in any realistic sense; 2) the reliance on indigenous forces for the 2001 invasion was due to logistics constraints, not time (nor is that a "strategy"); 3) there is no "grand strategic" imperative to rebuild our ground reserve (whatever that means).

Similarly, the analysis of strategic goals and methods is flawed to the point of being useless. StratFor might be useful for getting summaries of current events, but this analysis was a waste of time.

[Cecil Turner]

Meanwhile, this from Herschel Smith is well worth reading in its entirety:

The issue doesn’t pertain to whether there is such a thing as ROE, but whether Generals who should be talking strategy are issuing tactical directives to Lance Corporals and Sergeants in the field under fire and requiring approval of staff level officers a hundred miles away in order to bring combined arms to bear on the enemy. It has to do with micromanagement of the campaign. It’s simply something staff and flag level officers should not be doing. The campaign will be won or lost based on empowerment of the troops down the chain of command.

(H/T: Insty.)

[Thomas Esmond Knox]

"The Justice Department today announced that Najibullah Zazi, 24, a resident of Aurora, Colo., and legal permanent resident of the United States from Afghanistan, has been indicted in the Eastern District of New York on a charge of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction (explosive bombs) against persons or property in the United States."

No explosive bombs found in Iraq?

[John D]

I see Obama as recycling Nixon's strategy in Vietnam. A buildup with an increase of pressure on the enemy, this leading to "talks", a treaty of some kind without the support of our allies, Afghanization of the war, a withdrawal of support for our allies and no response when our allies are finally overun.

Same, same.