New Afghan Policy

On Armistice Day, at a full-scale meeting of his national-security team, Obama was presented with four options all four options called for more American troops, from ten thousand at the lower end to forty thousand at the upper. Though some in the Administration favor a smaller military footprint instead of a larger one, that was not among the choices offered to the President. Afghan is called US fifth war but for this fifth war, there was no fifth option.

The President rejected all four. He has apparently decided against anything like a quick drawdown, but he wants a map that plots an eventual way out, not just an abundance of ways further in. As he told an interviewer, there can be no “indefinite stay,” no “permanent protectorate.” And he has questions he would like answered.

So do the rest of us. Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg? Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum US is already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary waysUS could deploy that sum which would advance US goals as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed?
Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?) Any counterinsurgency campaign, it is told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

The President has come under heavy criticism for taking the time to ponder the imponderables. “The urgent necessity,” a respected Washington columnist wrote the other day, “is to make a decision—whether or not it is right.” Really? Does the columnist suppose that a country unable to find the patience for weeks (even months) of thinking could summon the stamina for years (even decades) of killing and dying?

What Obama seems to have discovered is that this is no longer the war that began eight years ago. That war was an act of retribution and prevention. But now who are Unite States punishing? What is US preventing? The old narrative is broken. The fifth war is becoming a sixth.

There is no doubt US is all out to bring Afghan war into Pakistan and to make this country bleed and see it scum. Our eastern neighbour is also in love with this idea and is seen more than willing to work as US proxy in its implementation of the devil’s design- The are in wait and see that eventually when their prey is seen down on its knees.

But then that is the dream of the vultures circling above that their dreams are rarely fulfilled.