Dems Talk Afghanistan, Sans An Action Plan

Weekly Standard: Congress Should Stop Playing Political Football, Send Aid To This Key Front

(Weekly Standard)  This column was written by Frederick W. Kagan.

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One theme that emerged clearly at the Senate hearings with General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker was the need to abandon Iraq in order to deal with the real center of the war on terror in South Asia. A series of questioners put on the airs of grand strategic sophisticates to remind Petraeus that whereas his brief includes only Iraq, theirs covers the entire world -- and from their viewpoint, the fight that matters is not the one that Petraeus and Crocker and their subordinates are winning in Iraq, but the one in the "Afghan-Pakistan border region," as it was so often called. Petraeus and Crocker pointed out repeatedly and accurately that al Qaeda's leaders themselves continually refer to Iraq as the central front in their war against us, but to no avail. The real fight, they were told each time, is in the Afghan-Pakistan border region against the real al Qaeda that the Intelligence Community says has only grown stronger. And, the general and the ambassador were lectured, keeping too many troops in Iraq was preventing the United States from prevailing in this more important fight. Let's consider this thesis in a little more detail.

To begin with, numerous senators spoke of the Afghan-Pakistan border area as though there were no border -- forces poured into Afghanistan would somehow directly affect what was going on in Pakistan or, alternatively, the real al Qaeda was on the Afghan side where U.S. troops could get at them. Speaking ethnographically, of course, there is no border -- the Durand Line that separates Afghanistan from Pakistan cuts the Pashtun nation just about in half, and the porous border has seen decades of happy smuggling. But the border is very real both to our forces and to their enemies. Our troops know that they cannot cross into Pakistan, and the enemy knows it too. That's why the bases of the "real" al Qaeda are not in Afghanistan -- American troops in Afghanistan report very few al Qaeda fighters and those they do come across are mostly operating out of Pakistani bases. The al Qaeda bases that harbor Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and the other al Qaeda leaders plotting the attacks against which the Intelligence Community warns are in Pakistan -- principally Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Chitral in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP).

Pouring troops into Afghanistan does not address those problems. Even advocating an invasion of those areas (with or without Islamabad's consent) makes little sense -- al Qaeda works also with Kashmiri separatists, who have their own terror training bases outside of these areas, and we can be certain that the Pakistani government that supports the Kashmiri fighters will not be enthusiastic about American forces taking them out. And, even if they were, by this point we're pretty much occupying half of Pakistan. We could line a lot of soldiers up along the (20,000-foot) mountains along the border, but how does sealing the terrorists into their own base camps in Pakistan help? The problem isn't that they go into Afghanistan, but that we have no good plan for getting them out of Pakistan. That is a problem worthy of many senatorial hearings, and it would be nice if any of the advocates of losing in Iraq to fight the real enemy in South Asia had a solution to propose. It should be a sine qua non, in fact, for anyone who proposes accepting defeat in Iraq first to offer a concrete plan for doing something against the supposedly realer al Qaeda enemy in Pakistan.

Afghanistan is extremely important in its own right, of course, and if we fail in Afghanistan, then we will indeed offer al Qaeda another potential base from which to operate. Considering how well established it already is in Pakistan and how little Afghanistan -- one of the most desperately poor countries on earth -- has to offer the terrorists, it's a bit hard to see why they would relocate, but we should certainly deny them the opportunity. There are many other reasons to succeed in Afghanistan as well, moreover, including the possibility of developing a stable, democratic ally in the heart of a key region that is a producer rather than a consumer of security.

But now we must consider another set of questions: How urgently do we need to send more troops to Afghanistan, and is there really nothing else we can do? At the end of 2006, Iraq was so close to complete catastrophe that nothing short of a military surge supporting a changed military strategy had any chance of success. We were within a hair's breadth of defeat. That is not the case in Afghanistan. The Taliban insurgency has grown in strength, particularly in the south, government control remains weak, security forces are small and inadequately trained and equipped, corruption is rampant, and so on. But the situation is not deteriorating that rapidly, and relatively small additions of force -- with improved approaches -- have made a significant difference in important areas. NATO certainly needs to send significant additional forces to Afghanistan, and the United States will probably have to contribute most of them. But the urgency is nothing like what it was in Iraq in December 2006, and is driven more by the need to secure Afghan elections in 2009 than by the danger that the country is about to collapse.

To the question, "Is there really nothing we can do unless we send more troops?" the answer is unequivocally that there is something we can do. Congress can do it, in fact, and very quickly. Pass the supplemental defense appropriation that would allow development money to flow reliably to our soldiers in Afghanistan as well as Iraq. The advantage of Afghanistan's poverty (for us) is that a little money goes a long way. American soldiers have increasingly been leveraging development funds to starve the insurgency of recruits in a way similar to what has worked in Iraq (but tailored appropriately to conditions in Afghanistan). They need more money. One of the problems the British face in the south of the country is that their government does not give their soldiers development money to spend. We should find ways to help them out. Congress could do all of this with one roll-call vote in each house, and the aid would start flowing to Afghanistan faster than any additional brigades could arrive. American soldiers in Iraq often say that dollars are their best bullets -- the same is true in Afghanistan. If the congressmen who evince so much concern about Afghanistan's well-being really had the success of our effort at heart, they would stop playing political football with the supplemental and send the aid they control to our soldiers in this key front right away. The fact that they have preferred to delay the supplemental in order to threaten to force the president to withdraw forces from Iraq -- a tactic that hinders the effort in the theater they say is the most important in order to force a change of strategy in a secondary (to them) theater -- speaks volumes.

[imnho]

I am still waiting for the necons to explian why they thought that Iraq oil would pay for this war. I want to know why they were so sure that would happen. They told us that we would be greeted as liberators. Why did that not happen.

They told us that the Iraq army would stand up and we would stad down. That Iraq army just got routed big time by channey''s dying insergency movement.

I think I would have better luck in beliving in the tooth fairy than the Weekly Standard. Perhaps they should rename themselves the Weekly Sillyness.

[hypnotoad30]

The thing is, this new NATO report shows we actually are winning in Afghanistan, it is not in danger of collapse and the Taliban is being defeated there.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/the_afghanistan_success_story_1.html

www.bothinonetrench.com

[bigsk8fan]

WEEKLY STANDARD PUSHED SUCH A WAR!
Posted by bluestardad

yes, all the neocon republicans pushed an unnecessary war using no substantiated facts.

[roger_inkart]

Yes, Bush and company has been flailing in Iraq for over 5 years - throwing the lives of US servicemen down the toilet along with countless billions. Yet somehow it''s the dems fault that there is little progress in Afghanistan? You idiots demanded this endless war. You''ve been cheerleading it from before the begining. Now that the stress fractures are starting to show you''re looking for a scapegoat. Sad, but hardly surprising.

The wretched vermin at the NRO are shameless little rightwing media w.***** - and nothing more.

[bluestardad]

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS ARTICLE?

IF WE HAD NOT BEEN PLANNING TO GO TO IRAQ AND SPEND ALL THIS MONEY WE COULD HAVE CAUGHT THAT BUSH FAMILY FRIEND BIN LADEN!

BUT THE ISRAELI NEOCONS WANTED A WAR WITH IRAQ!

WEEKLY STANDARD PUSHED SUCH A WAR!

AMERICANS NEED TO START WAR CRIMES!

STAND UP OR SHUT UP!

[shingles1]

Why does Fred "leave no all you can eat buffet behind!" Kagan still have a job?

Regarding Al Qaeda in Iraq vs Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Spencer Ackerman writes:

Joe Biden "asked Ryan Crocker, who used to be ambassador to Pakistan, whether it would be better for U.S. interests to go after Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or Al Qaeda in Iraq.

Crocker, in an impossible political position -- give the correct answer and humiliate the Bush administration; give the administration''s answer and look like a fool -- dodged as much as he could. Then Biden forced him down. Crocker: "I would therefore pick Al Qaeda on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.""


So, Ambassador Crocker admits that Al Qaeda in Afghanistan/Pakistan is the bigger threat/problem. Then "why the f*ck are we d*cking around in Iraq."

[nearl4511]

Sans action plan? Yeah?

Same position Bush was in on 9-11-2001. Sans action plan for Afghanistan; plenty-o-plans for Iraq.

That''s why the CIA had to lead/direct the Afghan assault instead of the Dept of Defense.

Dem''s foreign policy plans should start with tar and feathering of WS editor bill Kristol (just ''cause that plan is already drawn up).

What a STUUUUUUPID article!

[irliberal]

The headline might as well have read "Pope picks nose" or "SinginRick finds image of Jesus in morning pancake".

WHERE IS BIN LADEN? That has really been the only relevant question that needs asking since the invasion of Afghanistan.

Seven years of war. Civil rights breached by our commander in chief. Internationally recognized torture sanctioned by the White House. Two invaded and currently occupied countries. Hundreds of thousands dead, including 4000 American soldiers. Billions of our tax dollars spent, and yes, are still being spent to this very moment.

Iraq, which had NOTHING to do with 9/11, is now an occupied country which will implode when we get out of it, whether that happens one, two, ten or five hundred years from now. A society that CHOOSES to be ruled by religion cannot become a democracy; it can only be a theocracy with voting cards.

Bin Laden still lives. The mastermind of 9/11 still walks free.

The one, simple word for this is: failure. No amount of deception, indignation or wailing by republicons can change these facts.

Failure of Bush. Failure of Cheney. Failure of the republicans.

Time for a change.

[glock4me]

DEMS TALK AFGHANISTAN, SANS AN ACTION PLAN

To the liberals reading this... "sans" means without... as in come November the dems will participate in the general election sans victory.

[Razzl]

Look who''s talking about "putting on the air of being a grand strategic sophisticate"? It''s incredible how much nothing you neocon apologists say just to prove you know the name of every province here and there, but know nothing that matters. The number of real, actual Al Quaeda operatives, that is, people trained and supported by Bin Laden''s network is what--maybe 5 people? For you to keep on calling the native unrest in Iraq some kind of Al Quaeda-directed operation is so obviously untrue that even us humble citizens on the street can see you''re just propagandizing in support of Bush. As propagandists you should be able to see that you''ve permanently lost your propaganda war to change the public mind on the pointlessness of Iraq. You should consider yourselves lucky that the public and the Democrats are focused enough to see where the real danger lies, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and are still willing to fund operations there.

I suppose this would be a good place to mention that we''re nearing an anniversary of sorts; within the next month or two we will have passed the point where the Bush White House could mount an illegal attack on Iran in order to expand its grand neocon war. From June forward Bush will be an entirely lame duck and Weekly Standard will be staring down the long night of ridicule and irrelevance you so richly deserve...

[tejasdemo]

Key front my b utt !

Congress should STOP WASTING MONEY LIKE THIS. Take a fifth of it and drop it off at a homeless shelter and then make all the residents UN ambassadors around the world.

Guaranteed it would do more good then the complete works of the morons who write for this toilet paper outfit.