Afghanistan/Pakistan - Where's The Detail?

By Cernig

Kevin Drum notes counter-terror expert John Nagl talking to TNR's Michael Crowley about what's needed in Afghanistan:

Winning in Afghanistan, he realized, would take more than "a little tweak," as he put it to me from back in Washington a few weeks later, when he was still shaking off the gritty "Kabul crud" that afflicts traveler's lungs. It would take time, money, and blood. "It's a doubling of the U.S. commitment," Nagl said. "It's a doubling of the Afghan army, maybe a tripling. It's going to require a tax increase and a bigger army."

Nagl's talking about a force, from all sources including the Afghan security forces and NATO allies, of around 300,000 - about four times what's available right now - if the accepted wisdom of COIN manpower is to be applied. The Afghan's can contribute much of the raw manpower but the U.S. and it's allies will have to find the training, the elite point forces and the money. There's no indication there's the political or public will to do that, or even that it would work in the long run without even more money and training for reconstruction, anti-corruption efforts as well as compensation for bombing even more wedding parties in the process. And none of that will work if the tangled knot that is Pakistan's involvement cannot be untied.

Kevin writes:

This has now become conventional wisdom: the real problem is Pakistan. So far, however, in the same way that plans for rescuing General Motors rely mostly on handwaving about "restructuring," plans for solving the Pakistan problem rely mostly on handwaving about "getting tough." Unfortunately, hardnosed details on how this is actually going to work are pretty thin on the ground. If Obama wants public support for an escalation of the war in Afghanistan, his national security team better start providing those details pretty quickly.

I continue to believe that the reason there's so few details from anyone on how to resolve the Gordian Knot in Afghanistan and Pakistan is that no-one has a blessed clue how to go about it.

Comments

[anderson]

Cernig,

Doubling the US contingent? All that is going to do is require doubling the supply line, which means doubling the supply line protection money the Taliban is exacting from US coffers.

Doubling force will result in doubling (or more) the resistance. Meanwhile, profiteers on both sides suck up US taxpayer money and US troops and Afghan civilians continue to die, ad infinitum.

If western world keeps buying the bullshit, this conflict has the potential to be endless. We are on the threshold of infinite war.