An incredibly junior foreign service officer has resigned over disagreement with our AfPak policy, prompting a high level scramble within the administration and a long feature in the Washington Post.

As I wrote in “While Obama Dithers,” a piece for New Atlanticist,

They’ve brought this on themselves.  Granted, President Obama inherited this war and his people may have fought it differently had they been in charge during the first seven years.  (An unlikely counterfactual, to be sure, since he was an unknown state senator at the time.) But it’s a fight he clamored for during the campaign, stressing it as “a war of necessity.” And he doubled down almost immediately, sending more troops and firing a well-respected four star commander to replace him with a counterinsurgency guru.  But now he’s dithering, signaling in the press that he’s lost confidence in the strategy and can’t make up his mind as to what to do now.

Yes, it’s complicated. There are a lot of unknowns and the number of American casualties is escalating.  But those men are dying while their commander-in-chief hems and haws, trying to decide whether to heed the expert advice of the general he hand-picked three months ago, do a 180 and go with a counter-terror strategy as preferred by Vice President Biden, or some politically expedient middle course.  Their public indecisiveness certainly isn’t doing much to bolster the resolve of the Matthew Kohs of the world, much less the young soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines being asked to risk their lives while they wait.

Much more at the link.

UPDATE: Alex Massey has published an excellent counterpoint, “Afghanistan: A Modest Case for Dithering,” that I’ve republished at New Atlanticist.

UPDATE II:  Kevin Drum shares my sense that this story is rather odd.

Hoh “already had a lot of frustration” after two months?  And he quit two months after that?  Unless Hoh is the fastest learner on the planet, that really doesn’t seem like enough time to get very far up the learning curve.

Otherwise, like me, he thinks Koh’s analysis has substantial merit.

When Thomas Friedman loses faith in a war, it’s time to give up.

It would be one thing if the people we were fighting with and for represented everything the Taliban did not: decency, respect for women’s rights and education, respect for the rule of law and democratic values and rejection of drug-dealing. But they do not. Too many in this Kabul government are just a different kind of bad. This has become a war between light black — Karzai & Co. — and dark black — Taliban Inc. And light black is simply not good enough to ask Americans to pay for with blood or treasure.

That’s about right, methinks.

The Guardian has come out against the current conduct of the war in Afghanistan:

The empty rhetoric has to stop. State-building from the ramp of a Chinook is a fantasy, a folie de grandeur. The war against militants will not be won by expanding the battle-space. The resolution to this “good war” will not come from Kabul alone, but will be dependent on every neighbouring country with a stake in the conflict. The directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence made a telling point to the New York Times yesterday when it warned that a push by US marines in southern Afghanistan would force militants into Baluchistan. We have to stop thinking of Helmand as the frontline in a war that ends on the streets of London or Manhattan, and start thinking of what the growing conflagration is doing to Afghanistan’s immediate neighbourhood. There are no good options after eight years of warfare, only least worst ones. We should stop pouring more oil on to this fire and start thinking of realistic outcomes. And we should be doing this now.

Hat tip: Steve Hynd

The Guardian is the first British newspaper to come out in opposition to current policies, a reversal of editorial position for the newspaper.

Steve Hynd also draws our attention to this alternative proposal from Rory Stewart, Ryan Family Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Carr Center on Human Rights Policy at Harvard:

The best Afghan policy would be to reduce the number of foreign troops from the current level of 90,000 to far fewer – perhaps 20,000. In that case, two distinct objectives would remain for the international community: development and counter-terrorism. Neither would amount to the building of an Afghan state. If the West believed it essential to exclude al-Qaida from Afghanistan, then they could do it with special forces. (They have done it successfully since 2001 and could continue indefinitely, though the result has only been to move bin Laden across the border.) At the same time the West should provide generous development assistance – not only to keep consent for the counter-terrorism operations, but as an end in itself.

A reduction in troop numbers and a turn away from state-building should not mean total withdrawal: good projects could continue to be undertaken in electricity, water, irrigation, health, education, agriculture, rural development and in other areas favoured by development agencies. We should not control and cannot predict the future of Afghanistan. It may in the future become more violent, or find a decentralised equilibrium or a new national unity, but if its communities continue to want to work with us, we can, over 30 years, encourage the more positive trends in Afghan society and help to contain the more negative.

Stewart is an authority on Afghan culture and society and has lived there and traveled extensively throughout the region, frequently on foot.

Stewart’s view sounds remarkably similar to my own. Counter-terrorism activities, including preventing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from resuming their control over Afghanistan, are consistent with our interests. A complete withdrawal from Afghanistan is not consistent with our interests. Counter-insurgency which requires the possibly unachievable objective of creating a coherent nation state in Afghanistan capable of preventing Al Qaeda and the Taliban from reasserting control over the country, the course on which we are now embarked, is not within our interests because it is probably outside our grasp. The more modest counter-terrorism activities can be accomplished with a signficantly smaller commitment of troops and other resources.

At the very least our policies with respect to Afghanistan deserve serious review. Such a review must go beyond campaign promises and sound bites and hold American interests as the yardstick against which our policies should be measured rather than Republican or Democratic interests or their effect on the next election campaign.

Hilzoy pronounces herself “happy as a clam” with President Obama’s speech yesterday on national security issues, with one glaring exception:

But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who’ve received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.

This was followed by a long list of caveats about “fair procedures,” “the rule of law,” and “checks and balances.” While applauding the caveats, Hilzoy nonetheless retorts:

Preventive detention????????

No. Wrong answer

If we don’t have enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we don’t have enough evidence to hold them. Period.

The power to detain people without filing criminal charges against them is a dictatorial power. It is inherently arbitrary. What is it that they are supposed to have done? If it is not a crime, why on earth not make it one? If it is a crime, and we have evidence that this person committed it, but that evidence was extracted under torture, then perhaps we need to remind ourselves of the fact that torture is unreliable. If we just don’t have enough evidence, that’s a problem, but it’s also a problem with detaining them in the first place. [all emphases original]

Were we talking about American citizens or even aliens captured on American soil, we’d be in agreement.  But we’re not.  These are people captured on the fields of battle of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Obama is quite right here:  “Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture — like other prisoners of war — must be prevented from attacking us again.”  It has long been established in international law that enemies captured on the field of battle are subject to detention through cessation of hostilities.

To be sure, the present conflict introduces a new murkiness.  We are not at war with a nation-state, so there is no one with whom to negotiate a definitive surrender or peace treaty.  Further, most of the combatants in detention are not privileged belligerents under the Geneva Conventions and other laws of war in that they wore no distinguishing uniforms or insignia, fought for no state, and were not part of a traditional resistance movement.   Many if not most are war criminals who hid amongst noncombatant civilians and/or used the cover of mosques, hospitals, and other protected sanctuaries as shields.

The problem with Guantanimo is not that we’re holding enemy combatants indefinitely but rather that we’ve flouted some of the rules of the Geneva Conventions, most notably in not establishing some minimal due process to allow people to present evidence that they’re not who we claim they are.   Additionally, we used “enhanced interrogation techniques” on a handful of captives that were quite probably torture and quite certainly a violation of the laws of war.  Obama, to his credit, has renounced all of these practices.

UPDATE: It’s worth noting, as Blake Hounshel and Chris Brose do, that they’d long since been abandoned by the Bush Administration, too.  Brose:

I don’t fear for America because of the policies Obama laid out today, because I agree with Jack Goldsmith that most of these policies are largely similar in their substance to where the Bush administration ended up, often as a result of shifts in its approach during the second term based on new facts that emerged and new perspectives that were gained. This is the irony of Cheney’s current position: Many of the policies he is arguing for now were in recent years rolled back by President Bush himself, or overturned by the Supreme Court. Closing Guantanamo is an exception, but it was Bush’s stated goal to do so, and people like Secretary Rice and John Bellinger and Matt Waxman worked tirelessly to do it. Closing it now, though difficult, is both right and necessary. So in all these ways, Cheney’s argument is with Bush as much as it is with Obama.

Quite right.   For all the talk of Cheney as the power behind the throne, he was increasingly an outlier in the administration whose counsel was taken but largely not followed.

Update (Alex Knapp): I am more inclined to agree with Kevin Drum than with Hilary Bok on this issue:

I appreciate the outrage, but this is a genuinely knotty problem. It was knotty under Bush and it remains knotty under Obama. For various reasons, some defensible and some not, Obama is right: there are almost certainly a small number of Guantanamo detainees who are (a) unquestionably terrorists and unquestionably still dedicated to fighting the United States, but (b) impossible to convict in any kind of normal proceeding.

At the same time, they aren’t American citizens. They were captured on a foreign battlefield, not U.S. soil. They are, essentially if not legally, prisoners of war in a war with no end. So what do we do?

One thing that I think we should not do is let the government say “trust us” on this. If there is evidence against particular detainees, then provide it. Then we can debate the legal channels. If the law needs to be changed, Obama can go to Congress. If it’s possible to extradite some of them because they have outstanding warrants in other nations, let’s look into that. I agree that this is a hard problem, and I also agree that the simple release of some terrorists puts Americans in danger, and that risk needs to be appreciated.

That said, there needs to be some kind of open, transparent process through which claims against such detainees can be evaluated and pains can be made to ensure that detainees that their detention continued are actually dangerous. We shouldn’t just take the President’s word on it. Not any President.

Update (James Joyner): I was about to append an update linking to Kevin’s post on this but noticed Alex already had.  I agree entirely with both of them on this matter.

“[I]f Pakistan collapses, the U.S. military is primed to enter the country and secure as many of those weapons as it can, according to U.S. officials,” report’s TIME’s Mark Thompson burying his lede three paragraphs into a story whose headline asks, “Does Pakistan’s Taliban Surge Raise a Nuclear Threat?”

As I explain in my New Atlanticist piece “U.S. Prepared to Secure Pakistani Nukes,” the answer is a qualified No.  Still, the fact that we’re even asking — and that our military is even considering the remote possibility of needing to do something about it — isn’t comforting.

Germany is concerned about the Taliban fighters nearing Pakistan’s Islamabad capital:

BERLIN, April 24 (Reuters) – Germany expressed concern on Friday at the advance of Taliban fighters towards Pakistan’s capital and urged the government in Islamabad to take decisive action to ensure the security situation did not deteriorate.

Taliban militants have pushed closer to the capital in recent days, vowing to impose their strict version of Islam across the nuclear-armed Muslim state.

Earlier this month, Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari signed a regulation imposing Islamic law in the northwestern Swat valley as part of a deal to end Taliban violence.

“We are following developments in Pakistan very closely and believe like our partners, that the advance of the Taliban … is worrying,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Andreas Peschke told reporters.

Peschke said the Taliban was still far from the capital and warned against overdramatising the situation, but added: “Nevertheless, the infiltration of armed fighters is at odds with the truce agreed with the militants. This is a situation that has to fill us with concern.”

It’s difficult for me to put into words my feelings about Germany’s concern. I wonder if Germany’s concern will be sufficient for the Germans actually to do something about the situation? Germany spends less than 2% of its GDP on its military, not really enough for it to project much power beyond its borders. That’s lower than France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, or Italy.

IMO Germany’s leadership has not done enough to create political support for German involvement in Afghanistan. That has resulted in restrictive rules of engagement on the part of Germany’s contingent in Afghanistan that has produced friction among the NATO membership over Germany’s role.

Germany has routinely been skeptical of U. S. efforts at preventing nuclear proliferation. German consultants, along with other European consultants, aided A. Q. Khan in developing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program (ibid.). German companies supplied some of the equipment used in the program.

I am deeply touched by Germany’s concern.

This morning Bill Roggio is reporting that the Pakistani government has moved paramilitary forces, potentially to oppose Taliban forces should they advance on the capital:

Islamabad officials have moved paramilitary forces to block a potential Taliban advance into the nation’s capital as US officials question Pakistan’s ability to stop the creeping insurgency.

Islamabad’s deputy commissioner and its senior police official said they are taking steps to counter the Taliban encroachment from the Northwest Frontier Province, Geo News reported. The Pakistan Rangers, a paramilitary force under the command of Pakistan’s Interior Ministry, have been deployed to the Margala hills on the northern outskirts of Islamabad. The deputy commissioner said the Taliban will not be able to cross through the Margala hills and into Islamabad.

The move to reinforce Islamabad comes just one day after Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the chief of the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam Fazl, an Islamist political party, said the Taliban are beginning to move into the districts of Haripur and Mansehra. Haripur directly borders Punjab province and Islamabad, and is close to two sensitive nuclear storage facilities.

Bill’s coverage of the situation in Pakistan has been uniformly good so I recommend you take a look at his several recent posts on the subject.

Meanwhile Pakistani venture capitalist and financier Mansoor Ijaz, in an op-ed in the Christian Science Monitor, proposes a “rescue plan” for Pakistan that has the following components:

• Redefine the Taliban as the foreign fighters, e.g. Tajik, Uzbek, Chechen, Afghans, etc. takfiris, in Pakistan.
• Convince specific far-left and far-right Pakistani politicians to jointly “declare all-out war on Taliban mercenaries”, presumably appealing to Pakistani nationalism and thereby creating political cover for the government to oppose the Taliban more vigorously.
• The U. S. would give the Pakistani government substantial military aid to prosecute the campaign.
• If the Pakistani military were to direct their attentions against Afghanistan or India, the U. S. would withdraw its support.
• U. S. civil aid would be increased and specifically dedicated to secular schools to oppose the Islamist schools being financed by the Saudis.

He concludes:

This plan, once set, would then be ratified by Pakistan’s National Security Council and Army corps commanders, and implemented.

If no plan is agreed upon, America walks out and previews its contingency plan for securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons on the front page of The New York Times.

Frankly, I think it’s too late to implement such a plan, I doubt that we have the acumen or leverage to involve ourselves in Pakistani domestic politics in such a manner, I question whether we should involve ourselves in Pakistani domestic politics even if we had the acumen or leverage, and I see little practical way of preventing whatever military aid we convey to the Pakistani military from falling into the hands of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

However, if the Taliban advances on Islamabad it may confront the Obama Administration with a truly serious dilemma: what is the U. S. willing to do to prevent Pakistan’s nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of the Pakistani Taliban and their Al Qaeda guests?

After several days of inflamed public debate following official confirmation that the United States government tortured suspected terrorists under specific authorization from the Bush administration, the inevitable pushback has begun.  Several reports now suggest that these extreme interrogation techniques had the desired effect, yielding valuable intelligence that saved lives.

The most interesting of these, alas, comes from CNS and is headlined “CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style Attack on Los Angeles.”

The Central Intelligence Agency told CNSNews.com today that it stands by the assertion made in a May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that the use of “enhanced techniques” of interrogation on al Qaeda leader Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) — including the use of waterboarding — caused KSM to reveal information that allowed the U.S. government to thwart a planned attack on Los Angeles.

[...]

According to the previously classified May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo that was released by President Barack Obama last week, the thwarted attack — which KSM called the “Second Wave”– planned “ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.”

Marc Thiessen, who “served in senior positions in the Pentagon and the White House from 2001 to 2009, most recently as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush,” takes to WaPo’s editorial pages to proclaim “The CIA’s Questioning Worked.”

In releasing highly classified documents on the CIA interrogation program last week, President Obama declared that the techniques used to question captured terrorists “did not make us safer.” This is patently false. The proof is in the memos Obama made public — in sections that have gone virtually unreported in the media.

[...]

Specifically, interrogation with enhanced techniques “led to the discovery of a KSM plot, the ‘Second Wave,’ ‘to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into’ a building in Los Angeles.” KSM later acknowledged before a military commission at Guantanamo Bay that the target was the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The memo explains that “information obtained from KSM also led to the capture of Riduan bin Isomuddin, better known as Hambali, and the discovery of the Guraba Cell, a 17-member Jemmah Islamiyah cell tasked with executing the ‘Second Wave.’ ” In other words, without enhanced interrogations, there could be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York.

The memo notes that “[i]nterrogations of [Abu] Zubaydah — again, once enhanced techniques were employed — furnished detailed information regarding al Qaeda’s ‘organizational structure, key operatives, and modus operandi’ and identified KSM as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.” This information helped the intelligence community plan the operation that captured KSM. It went on: “Zubaydah and KSM also supplied important information about al-Zarqawi and his network” in Iraq, which helped our operations against al-Qaeda in that country.

Peter Baker’s NYT report, “Banned Techniques Yielded ‘High Value Information,’ Memo Says,” is a bit less exciting.

President Obama’s national intelligence director told colleagues in a private memo last week that the harsh interrogation techniques banned by the White House did produce significant information that helped the nation in its struggle with terrorists.  “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al Qa’ida organization that was attacking this country,” Adm. Dennis C. Blair, the intelligence director, wrote in a memo to his staff last Thursday.

Admiral Blair sent his memo on the same day the administration publicly released secret Bush adminis

[...]

“I like to think I would not have approved those methods in the past,” he wrote, “but I do not fault those who made the decisions at that time, and I will absolutely defend those who carried out the interrogations within the orders they were given.”

[...]

“The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means,” Admiral Blair said in a written statement issued last night. “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”

The foiled LA attack has long been murmured about (Patrick Frey wrote about it in November 2007, for example).  It’s unclear from these reports how serious the plan was.  Certainly, we have seen reports of numerous “foiled” attacks that, upon closer scrutiny, appeared to be mere fantasies of incompetents.  Then again, we’re talking about the planner of the 9/11 attacks here.

But let’s take at face value that CIA interrogators managed to extract information that foiled a developed, 9/11 style attack, thereby saving, say, 3000 innocent American civilians.   Does that outweigh the moral and legal issues of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times?   I’d say it does.  It’s as close to the “ticking time bomb” scenario as we’re ever likely to get.

[UPDATE: Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that Timothy Noah examines the timeline and demonstrates we likely foiled the LA Towers plot months before KSM was captured! This doesn't necessarily obviate any of the other "high value information" but it would undermine the most impressive of the examples offered.]

Blair correctly notes that we may well have gotten this information using legal techniques.  Then again, we might not have.  These guys didn’t break before they were tortured.   Of course, we didn’t try very long if we managed to get in 183 waterboarding sessions during KSM’s first month in U.S. custody.  The most reliable forms of interrogation require establishing trust and can take weeks, if not months.

What we also don’t know is how much damage the fact that the world, including our enemies, know that we were torturing terrorist suspects did.   Blair wrote, “The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security.”   The first clause in that sentence is undeniable; the second is not.

In my recent interview with retired Ambassador Robert Oakley, he observed that, in Pakistan, “We’ve forgotten Rumsfeld’s question: ‘Are we creating more terrorists than we’re killing?’ And we probably are. The drones may be killing a lot of Taliban and al Qaeda but they’re alienating the tribesmen we need to win the war.”  Remember all the hostage beheadings, wherein the victims were dressed in Gitmo-style orange jumpsuits?  Would they have occurred had we not done this?  We don’t know.  How many people joined al Qaeda and the Taliban after these incidents became public, convinced that the United States really is as degenerate as the jihadists claimed we were?  We don’t know.

When I was being trained on this issue as a young cadet a quarter century ago, in addition to the legal and moral factors explaining why we must treat captured enemy combatants humanely — even risking our own lives and the accomplishment of our immediate mission to safeguard them — was a practical lesson:  The other guy was a hell of a lot more likely to surrender to you if he expected to be treated well.   Americans were more likely to keep fighting in Vietnam even against overwhelming odds because they knew they enemy would treat them as subhumans, whereas NVA and VC soldiers would surrender to us knowing they’d get three hots and a cot.   Certainly, that proved to be the case in both the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq; Saddam’s soldiers couldn’t throw their weapons down fast enough.

That’s not likely to be the case for some time now.

On Tuesday, Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud responded to a $5 million reward for his arrest by threatening terrorist attacks in America.  “You can’t imagine how we could avenge this threat inside Washington, inside the White House,” Reuters quoted him as saying.  Today, he’s claiming responsibility for yesterday’s shooting spree in Binghamton, New York.

The diminutive Mehsud is considered the prime suspect in the murder of Benazir Bhutto and he’s taken seriously.  But most are skeptical. of this latest claim.

U.S. officials were not immediately available for comment about Mehsud’s claim, but Pakistani security analysts dismissed it as a publicity stunt.  The New York Times quoted representative Maurice Hinchey, whose district includes the town of Binghamton in New York state where the shooting took place, as saying indications were the gunman was an immigrant from Vietnam.

I suppose anything’s possible but it strains credulity that a Pashtun tribal leader has a network that includes Vietnamese immigrants in upstate New York.

Photo credit: The Sun

French defense minister Bernard Kouchner said yesterday that “We should accept the result of the forthcoming elections whatever it is,” adding, “If nationalist-minded Taliban come to power through the ballot-box and respect the constitution, that is the Afghans’ business.”

To be sure, he added an important caveat: “What we reject is support for international jihad.”  Still, as I ask in my New Atlanticist essay “Afghanistan: Time to Give Up?,” “If the Taliban’s return to power is an acceptable outcome, what the hell have our forces been fighting and dying for these past seven years?”

Even the American general in charge of ISAF, David McKiernan, acknowledges that we’re “not winning” over there right now.  But are we really prepared to simply give up and go home?

In my New Atlanticist piece “Who Are the ‘Moderate’ Taliban?,” I round up the reactions to President Obama’s weekend promise to “reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban” and note that they’re almost uniformly negative.

On the surface, “moderate Taliban” sounds as nonsensical are “nonviolent terrorist” or “tolerant Nazi.”

Still, as Steve Hynd recently pointed out, the term “Taliban” is tossed about so loosely these days as to be nearly bereft of meaning.  As AEI’s Frederick Kagan – hardly a peacenick — put it:

In general terms, any group that calls itself “Taliban” is identifying itself as against the government in Kabul, the U.S., and U.S. allies. Our job is to understand which groups are truly dangerous, which are irreconcilable with our goals for Afghanistan–and which can be fractured or persuaded to rejoin the Afghan polity. We can’t fight them all, and we can’t negotiate with them all. Dropping the term “Taliban” and referring to specific groups instead would be a good way to start understanding who is really causing problems.

One hopes — indeed, presumes — this is what Obama was getting at.  If so, he’s on the right track.

Rusty Shackleford is hot on the trail of an Afghani arrested in California  for lying about his lack of association with terrorists.

The indictment, unsealed this morning, alleges [34 year old Ahmadullah Sais] Niazi hid associations with “Specially Designated Global Terrorists,” groups including Al Qaeda, Hizb-i-Islami and the Taliban, when he completed nationalization papers five years ago. During one visit, the government alleges Niazi visited Dr. Amin al-Haq, the security coordinator for Osama bin Laden.

Worth keeping an eye on.

My New Atlanticist post “Beating Al Qaeda But Losing in Afghanistan?” rounds up several major reports coming out today, the gist of which are:

• Our military strikes against al Qaeda have been so successful that a “complete al Qaeda defeat” is on the horizon.
• We’re finally killing their leaders faster than they can replace them.
• Our human intelligence in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region is finally decent.
• Yet, our top brass say we need a major rethink of our strategy and should refocus on al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Now, these would seem to be in stark contrast.  They seem, however, to be in alignment with Obama’s new Afghanistan strategy, which calls for radically narrowing our objectives.

We’re left, it seems, with this:

It would be a supreme irony, indeed, if the war in Afghanistan — entered into by the Bush administration as the opening salvo in the Global War on Terror launched in response to the 9/11 attacks — were successful in destroying al Qaeda and yet perceived as a failure because hubris created unreachable objectives for the mission.

My New Atlanticist essay “Obama Orders Pakistan Drone Attacks” notes that,

While President Obama has sent some major signals in his first days in office that his foreign policy will differ from President Bush’s, he sent one yesterday demonstrating continuity on a very key issue: targeting al Qaeda and Taliban militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

This should surprise no one, however, since this is what he said he would do in the summer of 2007 and for which he was widely criticized at the time.

In the comments to my “Taliban Retaking Afghanistan” post, commenter King Politics asked, “Can anyone answer why we didn’t embark on a Marshall Plan-style rebuilding effort of Afghanistan in 2003-04?”  In today’s Independent, former Afghan finance minister Ashraf Ghani makes a similar call.

My New Atlanticist essay “A Marshall Plan for Afghanistan?” I argue that the circumstances are simply too different.  While strongly supporting investing in Afghanistan’s human capital and infrastructure, I contend that we need to seriously rein in our expectations.

In 1947, the United States wanted to get Western Europe back on its feet. The most modern, developed states in the history of the planet had been devastated by war and were in serious danger of falling into the Soviet orbit. Their infrastructure had been destroyed and in some cases they were cut off by the Iron Curtain from former food suppliers and major trading partners. The Marshall Plan, therefore, was simply a rebuilding effort.

Afghanistan has not been a modern state since the dawn of the very concept of modernity. Indeed, a large part of the problem is thinking of “Afghanistan” as a state at all; it’s a collection of city states and tribal lands which happen to share a border thanks to colonial mapmakers.

By all means, let’s continue to invest in Afghanistan’s people.  Ghani’s goal of a licit income of $4 a day is quite reasonable.  But the idea that Afghanistan is going to become a modern, developed state in the lifetime of anyone now living borders on absurd.

Comments welcome, especially at the link.

Photo by Flickr user mknobil under Creative Commons license.