The “Afghanistan” Problem is In Pakistan

Joe Klein’s article on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is informative, but doesn’t inspire a ton of confidence. It seems that military planners want the Obama administration to dispatch further additional troops to Afghanistan over and above the plus-up that’s already been announced. But nobody really knows what the mission of these troops would be. There’s a catchphrase in circulation about realistic goals, poached from Robert Gates’ congressional testimony, about how we can’t try to create a “Central Asian Valhalla.” But it’s hard to even parse what that metaphor is saying we shouldn’t be doing, much less to say what it implies for what we should be doing. And based on everything I’ve heard, nobody really knows. And nobody Klein’s talked to seems to contradict that.

Meanwhile, the is focus on Afghanistan because that’s a war with troops on the ground. But just about everyone seems to agree that the more serious problems are actually in Pakistan. Bruce Riedel is leading the interagency review on Afghanistan and Klein reports:

The Riedel review won’t be done until the end of March, but it has already achieved some clarity about U.S. goals and priorities: “Afghanistan pales in comparison to the problems in Pakistan,” said an official familiar with Riedel’s thinking. “Our primary goal has to be to shut down the al-Qaeda and Taliban safe havens on the Pakistan side of the border. If that can be accomplished, then the insurgency in Afghanistan becomes manageable.” [...] “Obviously, we’re not going to invade Pakistan,” said a senior member of the Riedel review. “We have to convince the Pakistanis to do the job. But we haven’t had much luck with that in the past.”

Riedel was saying much the same thing in January:

[Q]uite critically, the safe haven that the Taliban and al-Qaeda and other jihadists have built in Pakistan has to be closed down. That can only happen with the cooperation of the Pakistani government. And trying to get that cooperation out of the Pakistani government in my judgment will be the single hardest test that Ambassador Holbrooke faces and in fact may be the single hardest foreign policy challenge President Obama faces.

The question of force levels in Afghanistan, in other words, is something of a red herring according to the main architects of our policy. The crucial issues are in Pakistan, and they’re ultimately political in nature—related to the willingness and capability of the Pakistani government to take on Taliban groups in border areas and, importantly, related to public opinion in Pakistan regarding priorities. With respect to this, I would recommend my colleague Colin Cookman’s new report—hot off the presses today—on covert strikes in Pakistan. The tactical efficacy of these strikes seems to be high, but politically there are a bunch of problems. And as Cookman writes, there’s little reason to think that tactical military force is going to resolve this issue:

While these strikes may bear some meaningful short- and medium-term successes, as a long-term strategy their value is less clear. Research from the RAND Corporation into the case histories of 648 terrorist organizations that carried out attacks between 1968 and 2006 found that only 7 percent were successfully eliminated through direct military force. This is in contrast to 43 percent who dropped their violent activities after some form of political accommodation and 40 percent who were broken up successfully through some combination of local policing, infiltration, and prosecution.

To end on a somewhat more optimistic note, a colleague shared with me yesterday the observation that American attention to the world abroad tends to be weirdly fitful. We ignore a place for a long time, and then we get into a panic about it. But to people who actually watch a given country or region on a consistent basis, year-in and year-out, the problems are always more serious than people appreciate when we’re in “ignore” mode but by the same token the deterioration is never quite as serious as people think when they’re in “panic” mode. Which isn’t to minimize the extent of problems in Pakistan. But it’s more to say that Pakistan’s been a troubled place for a long time and Americans shouldn’t confuse a rapid increase in our level of interest in Pakistan’s troubles with a rapid escalation in the scale of the troubles.