Finding the Exit From Afghanistan
Posted by Michael Cohen
Over at World Politics Review I have a new piece arguing that in the wake of the command change in Afghanistan US strategy must switch from trying to "win" in Afghanistan (whatever that means) to finding an exit strategy:
In the two
weeks since Gen. David Petraeus was nominated to be the new commander for U.S.
and NATO operations in Afghanistan, continuity has been the dominant theme in
describing what his replacement of ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal represents.
After all, Petraeus literally wrote the book on U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN)
doctrine, which McChrystal tried to apply in Afghanistan over the past year. It
only seems natural to expect that Petraeus will maintain the same approach.
But continuity is the worst possible option for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan,
because it would mean maintaining a strategy that appears increasingly unlikely
to succeed. Instead, President Barack Obama should use the change in
command to modify his goal, from "winning" the war in Afghanistan to
laying the
political and military
groundwork for withdrawal.
Failure to clearly identify which of these two paths would define the U.S.
mission has been perhaps the Obama administration's greatest strategic failing
in Afghanistan.
In March 2009, Obama declared that his goal in Afghanistan was to defeat,
dismantle and disrupt al-Qaida, and pointedly noted that "dictating"
Afghanistan's future was not in the cards. But McChrystal's strategy, laid out
only months later, was predicated not only on protecting the Afghan people, but
also on providing "a secure environment allowing good government and
economic development to undercut the causes and advocates of insurgency."
Even after the administration's lengthy Afghanistan review last fall,
the gap between Obama's
stated goal and McChrystal's ambitious strategy remained
unresolved. The president's 18-month timeline to begin drawing down U.S.
troops and his order to McChrystal not to occupy territory that couldn't be
turned over to Afghan security forces by June 2011 suggested a more minimal
goal of stabilizing Afghanistan and speeding the path toward withdrawal. But
McChrystal's military forays into Taliban-controlled and Pashtun-dominated
southern and eastern Afghanistan and his emphasis on U.S.-led nation-building
spoke to a different aspiration.
Indeed, under McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO mission was to both out-fight and
out-govern the Taliban -- in short, to "win" in Afghanistan. But
victory has not been in the cards in Afghanistan for a very long time. With
polling indicating that Americans are souring on both the war and Obama's
stewardship of it, the focus must shift to protecting U.S. interests while
leaving Afghanistan as stable as possible after our withdrawal.
Read the whole thing here
The idea that we will change a culture that is centuries old into something that is largely alien to the Afghan people is delusional and has a 100% chance of failure.
If we do "win"(which really hasn't been defined) what, exactly will we have gained? Our continued presences in Afghanistan will only become more deadly and expensive.
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