Changing the War in Afghanistan

Spencer Ackerman’s excellent tour de horizon piece about the latest developments in the Afghanistan debate did give me a bit of concern that we may wind up sliding into a somewhat pat narrative in which “the left” finds itself “losing patience” with the war in Afghanistan. I think it’s important to emphasize that to a considerable extent it’s the Obama administration that’s actually changing here, shifting their strategy to something that people who’d long supported a continued military presence in Afghanistan aren’t prepared to support.

From Marc Lynch’s writeup of a meeting yesterday with Richard Holbrooke:

But I’m actually less worried about the absence of metrics than I am by the continuing lack of clarity about the strategic rationale and core objectives of the mission. Moderator John Podesta zeroed in ruthlessly on this in his first question: what happened between President Obama’s March 27 declaration of a limited set of objectives –”I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future” — and the expansive goals of “armed state building” which appear to now define the mission?

Holbrooke restated the importance of Pakistan, and the interconnections of al-Qaeda and the Taliban(s), but ultimately didn’t answer the question. Indeed, tension appeared to exist between different members of his team. Holbrooke and other team members talked about a vast range of necessary steps across the entire spectrum — the U.S. can’t succeed unless Afghan farmers succeed, the Afghan government must gain legitimacy, and so forth. But at another point, team member Barnett Rubin said, in line with the original Obama policy, that “we are committed to fight there until we are secure from terrorist attacks launched from there and until the region is safe from nuclear terrorism.”

Some kind of armed campaign to promote Afghan agriculture is a rather different beast than using military force to fight al-Qaeda. And similarly, there’s talk about sending 45,000 more troops to Afghanistan. That’s a lot of people. When you combine it with the 25,000 additional troops Obama has already sent, that means undertaking a very different scale of mission than existed one year ago. If people are having doubts about this course of action it’s because the administration seems to be looking to undertake something that’s both rather different from the Afghanistan War we’ve come to know, and also remarkably ill-defined.