" ... in the context of Afghan history, the Taliban bringing security was decisively important, since what had immediately preceded their iron rule was a nightmarish civil war during which you could be robbed or killed at will by gangs of roving ethnic and tribal militias.
It is has been a staple of Western political theory since the mid-17th century, when Hobbes wrote "Leviathan," that if the state does not provide security to its people, life will be "nasty, brutish and short." Hobbes wrote "Leviathan" in the shadow of the English Civil War, deriving from that bloody conflict the idea that the most important political good the state can deliver is security.
The United States relearned this lesson in Iraq with some success starting in 2007. But the U.S. seems to have developed instant amnesia about this issue in Afghanistan, where around 40 percent of the country was controlled by the Taliban or was at high risk for attacks by insurgents, according to a private assessment prepared by the Afghan military in April, which was obtained by CNN.
A glaring symbol of the collapse of security in the country is the 300-mile Kabul-to-Kandahar highway, economically and politically the most important road in the country, which is now too dangerous to drive on.
Who will then provide security? The Afghan army is relatively small and generally ineffective. The police are worse. The plans to ramp up the size and efficacy of those forces are, of course, a key part of the American exit strategy from the country. But that training mission is going to take years. Nor are NATO allies going to add significantly more troops. Indeed, a number of NATO countries are already heading to the exits.
That means that it now falls to the United States to do the heavy lifting in Afghanistan, and if Obama is serious about securing the country and rolling back the Taliban, he really doesn't have much choice but to put significant numbers of more troops on the ground. That way, he can start winning the war: win back the American public, roll back the Taliban -- who have melded ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda -- and provide real security to the Afghan people.
Such a ramp-up will have an additional benefit. In the larger war on al Qaeda and its allies, the center of gravity is the Pakistani public, military and government because it is in Pakistan where al Qaeda and its Taliban allies are headquartered. And in one of the most important strategic shifts since 9/11, the Pakistani military and government are now getting serious about wiping out large elements of the Taliban and allied groups on their territory and, most importantly, are doing it with the support of their population.
No longer are Pakistani military operations against militants in Swat and Waziristan seen by Pakistanis as "America's war": they are now seen as being in the vital interests of the Pakistani state because the Pakistani Taliban and other jihadist groups have made major strategic errors since early 2009, including marching close to Islamabad, attacking Pakistan's equivalent of the Pentagon and killing hundreds of Pakistani soldiers and policemen.
This new development is vitally important. Over the years, U.S. military commanders have often talked about hammer and anvil operations in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan that would bring an American hammer down on the militants based along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, who would then in turn be caught on a Pakistani anvil.
In reality, the American hammer was never large and the Pakistani anvil was never strong.
But the ongoing Pakistani military incursion into Waziristan, which was preceded by months of "softening up" operations with air strikes and artillery as well as a ramped-up American drone program aimed at al Qaeda and Taliban leaders there, is today setting the conditions for a real anvil.
The hammer must now be applied.
Armed groups don't sue for peace when they believe they might have the upper hand, and right now, the Taliban feel that they are winning the war -- or at least not losing it, which for most insurgencies amounts to the same thing. If there is to be some kind of political reconciliation with elements of the Taliban, that will only come once they truly believe they have no prospect of military success.
At the same time, key roads, cities and towns in Afghanistan must also be secured. Without providing that security, as Hobbes wrote three and half centuries ago, governments of any kind will fail at their most basic task."
A dichotomy in the president's recent arguments occurred to me. The President of the United States has noted repeatedly that he is "carefully deliberating" (a redundant statement) over the deploying of 60,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Now it is my contention (I have a crystal ball of my own) that the PoTUS is simply brainstorming on how to sell his refusal to the American public. Either way he is insisting that because this affects thousands of US troops and millions of Afghans that he must slow down ... pause ... deliberate ... make sure they've got this right. Yet health care, which will affect 300,000,000 Americans, not to mention 1/6th of our economy, oh we've got to get that done RIGHT NOW! "Folks need to just get out the way", he says. We don't even have time to post it online for 72 hours before the vote (a broken campaign promise) because it's gotta get done NOW!
It's absurd. We have an ideological man-child in the oval office ... and it's showing.
No comments:
Post a Comment