America’s Must-Win War, say John McCain and Joseph Lieberman
By John McCain and Joseph Lieberman
Thursday, March 19, 2009; Page A15
Later this month, the Obama administration will unveil a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. This comes as most important indicators in Afghanistan are pointing in the wrong direction. President Obama's decision last month to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops was an important step in the right direction, but a comprehensive overhaul of our war plan is needed, and quickly.
As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a "minimalist" approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a "graveyard of empires" and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more "realistic" goals there -- for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favour of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists.
The political allure of such a reductionist approach is obvious. But it is also dangerously and fundamentally wrong, and the president should unambiguously reject it. Let there be no doubt: The war in Afghanistan can be won. Success -- a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary -- can be achieved. Just as in Iraq, there is no shortcut to success, no clever "middle way" that allows us to achieve more by doing less. A minimalist approach in Afghanistan is a recipe not for winning smarter but for losing slowly at tremendous cost in American lives, treasure and security.
Yes, our vital national interest in Afghanistan is to prevent it from once again becoming a haven for terrorists to plan attacks against America and U.S. allies. But achieving this narrow counterterrorism objective requires us to carry out a far broader set of tasks, the foremost of which are protecting the population, nurturing legitimate and effective governance, and fostering development. In short, we need a comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency approach backed by greatly increased resources and an unambiguous U.S. political commitment to success in Afghanistan over the long haul.
A narrow, short-term focus on counterterrorism, by contrast, would repeat the mistakes made for years in Iraq before the troop surge, with the same catastrophic consequences. Before 2007 in Iraq, U.S. Special Forces had complete freedom of action to strike at terrorist leaders, backed by more than 120,000 conventional American forces and overwhelming air power. Although we succeeded in killing countless terrorists -- including the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the insurgency continued to grow in strength and violence. It was not until we changed course and applied a new approach -- a counterinsurgency strategy focused on providing basic security for the people and improving their lives -- that the cycle of violence was at last broken.
Those who argue for simply conducting targeted counterterrorist strikes in Afghanistan also fail to grasp that by far the best way to generate the intelligence necessary for such strikes is from Afghan civilians, who will risk their lives to help us only if they believe we are committed to staying and protecting them from the insurgents and helping to improve their lives.
Loose rhetoric about a minimal commitment in Afghanistan is counterproductive for another reason: It exacerbates suspicions, already widespread in South Asia that the United States will tire of this war and retreat. These doubts about our staying power deter ordinary Afghans from siding with our coalition against the insurgency. Also important is that these suspicions are a major reason some in Pakistan are reluctant to break decisively with insurgent groups, which, in a hedging strategy, they view as integral to positioning Pakistan for influence "the day after" the United States gives up and leaves Afghanistan. That is why it is so important for the president to reject the temptations of minimalism in Afghanistan and instead adopt a fully resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy, backed by an unambiguous American commitment to success over the long term. In doing so, he must invest the political capital to remind Americans why this fight is necessary for our national security, speak openly and frankly to our nation about the difficult path ahead, and -- most of all -- explain clearly to our fellow citizens why he is confident that we can prevail.
As a presidential candidate, Barack Obama called Afghanistan "the war we must win." He was absolutely right. Now it is time to win it -- and we and many other members of both political parties stand ready to give him our full support in this crucial fight.
John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, was the 2008 Republican nominee for president. Joe Lieberman, an Independent Democratic senator from Connecticut, was the Democratic nominee for vice president in 2000.
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Civilians to Join Afghan Buildup
'Surge' Is Part of Larger U.S. Strategy Studied by White House
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 19, 2009; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031802313.html
A civilian "surge" of hundreds of additional U.S. officials in Afghanistan would accompany the already approved increase in U.S. troop levels there under a new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy being completed at the White House, according to administration officials.
President Obama is expected to make final decisions next week on that strategy, proposed by his top national security advisers and based on recommendations from senior military, diplomatic and intelligence officials and intensive consultations with NATO and United Nations partners.
Officials said the proposed strategy includes a more narrowly focused concentration on security, governance and local development in Afghanistan, with continued emphasis on rule-of-law issues and combating the narcotics trade. U.S. and British troops in the southern part of the country will attempt to oust entrenched Taliban forces, with an influx of reinforcements enabling them to retain control -- and help protect enhanced civilian operations -- until greatly expanded and sufficiently trained Afghan army and police forces are able to take their place.
In Pakistan, a senior defense official said "the jury is still out" on proposals to increase covert operations and missile strikes against insurgent sanctuaries in that country's western tribal areas, and to expand them into the southern province of Baluchistan, where the Taliban leadership openly operates in the provincial capital of Quetta. With the Pakistani government teetering and anti-American sentiment rising, "we have to be realistic about how this could all play out," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"You may feel good about killing more bad guys, but the costs may just be too high," he said.
More likely in the short term, officials said, are expanded efforts to aid the Pakistani military with training, new equipment and advice to improve its counterinsurgency performance, along with a massive increase of development aid to try to stabilize the country and wean tribal leaders away from insurgent groups. One problem yet to be solved is how to supervise the distribution of aid and reconstruction funds in an environment considered unsafe for U.S. officials to work in most areas.
Some of the proposed new civilian force in Afghanistan -- diplomats, specialists from federal departments such as Agriculture and Justice, and hundreds of new "full-time, temporary" hires -- would work at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, officials said. Others would be assigned to U.S. provincial reconstruction teams, or PRTs, located primarily in eastern Afghanistan, and to other efforts to build Afghan civilian capacity around the country. Patterned on a program first established in Iraq, the PRTs assist and advise Afghans in economic and local governance development.
The United States currently operates 12 of the 26 PRTs in Afghanistan. But unlike the others, run by NATO partners under civilian control, the U.S. teams are led and dominated by the military: Only a few of the 1,055 U.S. staffers on the teams were civilians, according to a government audit in January. A congressional oversight investigation last year said that "finding qualified individuals with applicable skills and experience poses a significant challenge to staffing."
The additional 17,000 U.S. troops scheduled for deployment this year -- bringing the total to about 55,000 -- will increase the combat imbalance between the United States and NATO, and scheduled withdrawals of Canadian and Dutch troops over the next two years will make Afghanistan even more of a U.S.-dominated war.
Obama has pledged to improve the civil-military balance in U.S. operations, and to put more of a civilian face on development and governance efforts. Although the overall civilian deployment plan for Afghanistan awaits Obama's approval, the State Department has already solicited applications for 51 new positions it expects to fill by July. Up to 300 additional civilians are anticipated under the strategy proposals.
Many are expected to be hired under a provision established by the Bush administration for special employment in Iraq. Unlimited, year-long hires were permitted, with authority to renew them for up to four years. Bush extended the provision to Afghanistan under an executive order he signed Jan. 16.
In addition to increasing its own civilian component, the administration seeks better coordination among the many other governments and international and nongovernmental agencies operating in Afghanistan, often with different rules and objectives. The strategy proposals include a strengthening of the United Nations as a clearinghouse and overall coordinator of nonmilitary efforts, including the appointment of veteran U.S. diplomat Peter W. Galbraith as deputy to Norwegian Kai Eide, the head of the U.N. mission in Afghanistan.
"This is a big deal," said a senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity before the appointment is announced. "The Bush administration undermined and ignored the U.N., and we minimized our influence. But imagine, with all the money we pay and American troops on the line, not to have a senior person" at the top level of the U.N. effort. A U.N. official said Secretary General Ban Ki-moon will announce Galbraith's appointment in "a matter of days."
Galbraith served in senior U.S. and U.N. positions in the Balkans, East Timor and other conflict areas. Sharply critical of Bush administration policy in Iraq, he resigned from the U.S. government in 2003 and served as an adviser to Iraq's Kurdish regional government.
Francis J. Ricciardone, one of the State Department's most senior Foreign Service officers and a former ambassador to Egypt and the Philippines, is expected to be named "deputy ambassador" to boost the diplomatic heft of the U.S. Embassy in Kabul. Obama last week nominated Lt. Gen. Karl W. Eikenberry, the former U.S. military commander in Afghanistan, as ambassador to Kabul.
Another diplomatic veteran, Timothy M. Carney, has begun work as head of a U.S. team assisting in preparations for national elections in Afghanistan in August. Carney, a former ambassador to Sudan and Haiti, worked on the Iraq reconstruction effort in Baghdad in 2003 but eventually became a critic of that operation. He was named Iraq coordinator for economic transition in 2007 under a vastly reduced U.S. reconstruction effort.
Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations and staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report.
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Getting It Right in Afghanistan
By Thomas A. Schweich
Tuesday, March 17, 2009; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/16/AR2009031602384.html
Democrats and Republicans have spent the past two years sparring with each other on key aspects of the effort to rebuild Afghanistan. We have disagreed on such issues as whether to spray the poppy crop with chemicals and whether President Hamid Karzai and his friends are too corrupt. But as Afghanistan has deteriorated significantly during this time, we have also come to realize that we share some core beliefs. As the administration completes its strategic review of Afghanistan policy, I urge Democrats and Republicans, our allies abroad, and the Karzai government to come together on key points before it is too late:
-- More troops, but with the right mission. President Obama has ordered 17,000 additional troops sent to Afghanistan. While more troops are needed to train the Afghan national army (and more civilian trainers -- not troops -- are needed to train the civilian police forces), additional troops risk invigorating the insurgency by increasing the number of civilian casualties. Civilian casualties are the single greatest reason we are losing support among the Afghan people and their government. U.S. commanders need to make clear that our primary mission in Afghanistan is to provide security to the people -- and that mission trumps pursuing terrorists in cases where the latter effort interferes with the former. A secure people will help us root out terrorists.
-- Public diplomacy in Europe. Some U.S. allies have largely maintained their effort in Afghanistan as a way to cooperate with the United States despite opposing the war in Iraq. They defined whatever mission their publics would accept, and NATO accepted that incoherence as the price of cooperation. Obama needs to get Europeans to understand that the most immediate threat to peace is the globalized extremism developing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which has already reached into Europe. Greater dialogue will result in a more unified European commitment and possibly more troops.
-- Restructured development assistance. Karzai complained late last year that NATO's provincial reconstruction teams (PRTs) constitute a "parallel government." The PRTs are a lottery; how much aid a province gets depends on the budget of the country commanding the PRT -- which could be the United States or Lithuania. Meanwhile, donors complain that they cannot go through the government in Kabul because its ministries are corrupt and slow-moving. Overall, the PRT structure distorts Afghan national priorities and conflicts with the government's structure. Working through community development councils to implement national programs under the general oversight of the Kabul government would allow the international community to fund what communities need rather than what allied nations can spare. This approach would affirm the political leadership of the central government while allowing communities to take ownership of reconstruction efforts and reduce costs.
-- Limited engagement with Iran. The Obama administration has taken the right step in saying it would engage with Tehran regarding Afghanistan -- but the engagement should be narrow in focus. When the United States branded Iran a part of "an axis of evil" while relying on Pakistan, which had basically created the Taliban, hard-liners gained the upper hand in Tehran. Iran, a nation of Shiite Muslims, derives no ideological or military benefit from supporting an extremist Sunni Muslim movement. Limited confidence-building efforts regarding Iran should begin with Afghanistan's drug trade, which funds the insurgency that is killing Americans. With over 50 percent of the Afghan opium trade transiting Iran, an estimated 3 million Iranians, mostly young people, are using heroin, morphine and opium. This common problem could be a starting point to a more productive relationship.
-- More effective engagement with Pakistan. Pakistanis believe that the United States propped up a military dictatorship to pursue its war against terrorism at the expense of their national interests. The democratically elected civilian government is trying to persuade its military and people that terrorist extremism and poverty are greater threats than India or the United States. We must financially support the new civilian government. Then we can work with it to finally end the Pakistani military and intelligence services' longtime partnership with armed militants and terrorists, and to integrate the tribal areas where these groups are based into the mainstream administration of the Pakistani state.
-- Agreement on common terms on peace negotiations with insurgents. Most of those fighting allied troops in Afghanistan pose no strategic threat to the United States. The Taliban regime, while vicious, brutal and repressive, did not plan and execute Sept. 11 -- al-Qaeda did. The Taliban continues to signal ambiguously the extent of its willingness to separate from al-Qaeda, compromise and seek a political role in Afghanistan. Until we see more credible signs of a willingness to make concessions, it is too early for real negotiations but not for exploratory talks to determine who would represent the various parties in real negotiations, and what sort of general terms Afghans and the international community could agree to. After that, how to deal with various Afghan factions is not a U.S. decision as long as those factions reliably disavow terrorism -- Afghanistan is a sovereign country.
-- Corruption. Massive corruption has eroded faith in the Afghan government and the international presence. The principal responsibility for corruption lies squarely with the Afghan government. The international presence can inadvertently feed corruption as military bases pay warlord militias to guard their perimeters and award contracts to warlords' relatives, some of whom are involved in drug trafficking and other crimes. The international community's use of contractors, some with no local knowledge or operational capacity, leads to opaque hierarchies of sub-contracting, in which some money is siphoned off in overhead by contractors and then funneled to locals who control security and construction companies. The United States and its allies must adopt a more refined assistance policy that attacks all causes of corruption.
These objectives depend on unity between the United States and its allies, and a recommitment by the Karzai government to integrity and decisiveness. Pulling this off will also require all of President Obama's diplomatic skills and patience.
Thomas A. Schweich, a visiting professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, was a special ambassador to Afghanistan during the Bush administration.
Source: www.washingtonpost.com
URL: https://newageislam.com/war-terror/america’s-win-war,-say-john/d/1261