A Blinkered Foreign Policy

By Cernig

Former Black Watch infantry officer and British Foreign Service officer Rory Stewart has long been an opponent of colonialist nation building ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today in an op-ed for the NY Times he sets out the truth as he sees it.

Terrorism is not the key strategic threat facing the United States. America, Britain and our allies have not created a positive stable environment in the Middle East. We have no clear strategy for dealing with China. The financial crisis is a more immediate threat to United States power and to other states; environmental catastrophe is more dangerous for the world. And even from the perspective of terrorism, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are more lethal.

President-elect Obama’s emphasis on Afghanistan and his desire to send more troops and money there is misguided. Overestimating its importance distracts us from higher priorities, creates an unhealthy dynamic with the government of Afghanistan and endangers the one thing it needs — the stability that might come from a patient, limited, long-term relationship with the international community.

He's certainly correct about terrorism, no matter how much the bed wetters of the extreme Right fear otherwise - the greatest national security failure of the Bush administration's bedwetters has been to largely ignore those far more serious threats. And he's probably correct about the counter-productive nature of the West's involvement in Afghanistan. He points out that Afghanistan was at its most stable when there were only 20,000 foreign troops there, but that as the West became obsessed with changing every aspect of Afghanistan into a model Muslim mirror of the West, the Pashtun South in particular became alienated and new recruits joined the indigenous Taliban as the populace increasingly saw a larger troop presence as an army of occupation rather than liberation.

He also notes that increased foreign intervention has made for a self-perpetuating rent-seeking culture:

Further, the more we give, the less influence we have over the Afghan government, which believes we need it more than it needs us. What incentive do Afghan leaders have to reform if their country is allowed to produce 92 percent of the world’s heroin and still receive $20 billion of international aid? Are they wrong to think that if they became more stable and law-abiding and wiped out the Taliban we would give them less support? That this is a protection racket where the amount of money one receives is directly proportional to one’s ability to threaten trouble?

This is certainly the experience of the more stable provinces in central Afghanistan, where leaders talk about the need to set off bombs to receive the assistance given to their wealthier but more dangerous neighbors. A more detached strategic perspective and less aid would give us more leverage.

It seems curious to me that among the most avid proponents of a long-term presence in Afghanistan and Obama's "Surge" are those Democratic foreign policy experts who argued, correctly, that an open-ended presence in Iraq did nothing to encourage Iraqis to solve their own problems - and that a definite timetable for withdrawal would be the best spur towards reconcilliation the West could provide.

But Stewart's most telling point is that a multi-decade heavy-handed presence in Afghanistan would, at best, give that nation the same "stability" enjoyed by Pakistan or the northern provinces of India. That is, not much at all and only at a vast expense of blood and treasure. As another expert with actual hands-on experience in the region at grassroots level, Nir Rosen, recently wrote:

Simply put, it is too late for Bush's "quiet surge" — or even for Barack Obama's plan for a more robust reinforcement — to work in Afghanistan. More soldiers on the ground will only lead to more contact with the enemy, and more air support for troops will only lead to more civilian casualties that will alienate even more Afghans. Sooner or later, the American government will be forced to the negotiating table, just as the Soviets were before them. "The rise of the Taliban insurgency is not likely to be reversed," says Abdulkader Sinno, a Middle East scholar and the author of Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. "It will only get stronger. Many local leaders who are sitting on the fence right now — or are even nominally allied with the government — are likely to shift their support to the Taliban in the coming years. What's more, the direct U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan is now likely to spill over into Pakistan. It may be tempting to attack the safe havens of the Taliban and Al Qaeda across the border, but that will only produce a worst-case scenario for the United States. Attacks by the U.S. would attract the support of hundreds of millions of Muslims in South Asia. It would also break up Pakistan, leading to a civil war, the collapse of its military and the possible unleashing of its nuclear arsenal."

In the same speech in which he promised a surge, Bush vowed that he would never allow the Taliban to return to power in Afghanistan. But they have already returned, and only negotiation with them can bring any hope of stability.

Talking our way to an exit from the doomed adventure in Afghanistan really is the only way out of that grim trap. Unfortunately, domestic political necessity has led Western leaders - including Obama - to become blinkered, unable to see the wood for the trees.

Comments

[Kat]

With apologies to Winston Churchill...

The United States invariably does the right thing -- after having exhausted it's national wealth for the benefit of the arms makers.