As the Obama administration winds down its troop surge in Afghanistan, it’s adopted a new political strategy for ending the war. And that new strategy represents a tacit concession that the best the surge could accomplish was rescuing Afghanistan from the brink of total failure.
What was the surge for, anyway? In one sense, as explained by President Obama, it was merely designed to stop the Afghanistan war from deteriorating. But Obama’s generals promised that it would do more — that it would whup the Taliban into suing for peace. And in the broadest sense of all, it would contribute to the Obama team’s ultimate objective for the region: to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaida.
Judged in the narrowest sense, then, the surge worked. Afghanistan is no longer spiraling into greater violence. But it’s failed to accomplish anything beyond that.
The Obama administration, as the Washington Post reports, is pursuing a new strategy to end the war, called “Fight, Talk, Build,” in Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s phrase. In essence, it means the U.S. will no longer outsource negotiations with insurgents to the Afghan government, and it hinges on getting the Pakistanis to bring its insurgent proxies to the table.
The problem is that the Obama team and the U.S. military still don’t know how to connect “Fight” to “Talk.” Under this new strategy, the connection isn’t any battlefield setbacks for the Taliban that bring them in from the cold, as the war’s last two commanders predicted. It’s a diplomatic effort, distinct from the surge, to persuade the Pakistanis to make the insurgents talk peace.
And that points to perhaps the central irony of the Afghanistan surge. Al-Qaida itself has indeed been degraded. But not because of the surge, since al-Qaida largely isn’t in Afghanistan anymore. It’s because of the raging drone war next door and the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. And those efforts may have pissed the Pakistanis off so much that peace talks to end the Afghanistan war are in trouble.
Clinton and other top-level officials saw that Pakistani intransigence last month. They visited Islamabad to press the Pakistani leadership to rein in the buck-wild Haqqani Network and commit the insurgents to an Afghanistan peace process. But the Pakistanis blew Team Obama off. Not only do the Haqqanis — Pakistan’s hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan — party in major Pakistani cities, but the deputy commander of the war confessed last week that Pakistani troops help rocket U.S. forces along the border.
The insurgents don’t seem particularly interested in talking. They’ve instead pulled off audacious recent attacks in the heart of the Afghan capitol. Last year, the U.S. was fooled by an insurgent impostor, revealing that it doesn’t even know to whom it can talk.
To understand how things reached this point, it’s helpful to reach back to 2009, when Obama crafted his “Af-Pak” strategy. In March 2009, he announced that his national-security team would now treat both Afghanistan and Pakistan as components of a unitary strategy. The goal of that strategy was ultimately to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaida in Pakistan and Afghanistan,” Obama said.
There was an unresolved tension at the heart of that strategy. Al-Qaida was in Pakistan; but the war was in Afghanistan — and it was deteriorating. Obama’s new commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, said he needed tens of thousands more troops to turn the war’s fortunes around and bring it to a successful conclusion.
Obama said yes to everything. He gave McChrystal his troops while upping the drone war in Pakistan to degrade al-Qaida, the main goal of the whole enterprise. In announcing the surge in December 2009, Obama set the bar low for what it would achieve. It would merely “break the Taliban’s momentum,” he said at West Point.
Almost immediately, McChrystal raised those expectations. Peace talks, McChrystal said, were “the inevitable outcome” of the surge. “[I]t is my job to help set conditions where people in the right positions can have options on the way forward,” McChrystal told the Financial Times in January 2010.
McChrystal’s successor, David Petraeus, periodically boasted to reporters that negotiations were right around the corner. “There are very high-level Taliban leaders who have sought to reach out to the highest levels of the Afghan government and, indeed, have done that,” Petraeus said in September 2010. “This is how you end these kinds of insurgencies.”
Judged by Obama’s standards, and not his commanders’, the surge has done its job. The Pentagon’s last report on Afghanistan, released Friday, found violence is down for the first time in five years — although recent United Nations reports reach the opposite conclusion. Achieving that took a massive amount of effort, including 5800 air strikes in a single year and the destruction of entire emptied villages along the Argandab River. McChrystal, Petraeus and all their troops can take pride in these accomplishments.
But McChrystal and Petraeus’ broader predictions about an “inevitable” peace deal, however, haven’t panned out. And that’s it for the surge. Troops have already started coming home. By next September,all 33,000 surge forces will be out, leaving behind “only” 68,000 troops, who will cede primary combat duties — whatever that really means — to their Afghan counterparts in 2014. Whatever fight remains on the ground, including in Afghanistan’s volatile eastern provinces, it won’t match the combat power of the past two years, and will rely on air power to make up the difference.
So when Clinton says that “under the circumstances, we must [fight and talk] at the same time,” there will in fact be less fighting. Nothing necessarily stops either the U.S. or the Taliban from talking while they fight. But the surge drawdown gives the Taliban a reasonable expectation that they can wait the U.S. out, so it makes little sense for them to come to the bargaining table. Only the Taliban’s Pakistani sponsors can provide additional inducements for the Taliban to negotiate, and they’ve yet to apply any such pressure.
And that’s where it actually gets worse. The Pakistanis have seen fit to quietly cooperate with the drone war, which (along with some well-timed special operations raids) has exceeded expectations, battering al-Qaida to the point where Obama officials predict that al-Qaida is just a few commanders away from irrelevance. But it’s come at a price — a price the Afghanistan war pays. The shock of the unilateral Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden has made the Pakistanis vastly less likely to help the U.S. in Afghanistan. Pakistan won’t invade its tribal areas to crush insurgent safe havens, and it stiff-armed Clinton on bringing Afghanistan’s insurgents to the peace table.
One can almost hear Vice President Joe Biden grinding his teeth. During internal deliberations about the surge in 2009, Biden argued the real center of the Afghanistan war was in Pakistan, and so rather than send 33,000 troops to fight in southern Afghanistan, the U.S. should up the drone war (he won on that) and focus diplomatically on bringing Pakistan to the table.
Now the surge is ending, and the last strategy standing looks a lot like Biden’s. Only this time, what’s successful in Pakistan appears to be, at best, irrelevant to the surge in Afghanistan — and, at worst, detrimental to the U.S. effort to bring the Afghanistan war to a soft landing.
The realest talk of all: after a decade, there may not be a better strategy left for the Obama administration to pursue than “Fight, Talk, Build.” Tens of billions of aid dollars to both the Afghanistan and Pakistan governments for a decade haven’t purchased reliable allies in either country. The silver lining is that terrorism has indeed become a diminishing threat to U.S. security. But if the best the U.S. can do in Afghanistan is attempt negotiations with its enemies while preparing Afghan forces for its departure, that’s a tacit eulogy for a misguided surge.
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