Obama's Afghanistan Plan Revealed (Update)

By Steve Hynd

The new strategy in Afghanistan, which doesn't seem at first blush to be all that different from the old strategy in Afghanistan, is President Obama's biggest foreign policy initiative to date by far. As such, It's going to take time to assimilate all the nuances and produce meaningful analysis. Still, there are plenty of "first thoughts" out there that are worth a read.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there's a general consensus among American commentators that supports Obama's plan. I say unsurprising because there was already a general consensus that Afghanistan was an occupation that the U.S. needed to keep doing among right, centrists and interventionist left. If anything, the pro-occupation right are the most uncritically approving of Obama's plan. It's amazing how few of them note that it's a further repudiation of the hard right's "for us or against us" war on everything. To them, it's all black and white hats. Robert Kagan calls it a "gutsy decision" and Max Boot, the neocon who has been most obviously cozying up to the neo-liberal CNAS/COINdinista set in a series of joint op-eds recently, loves it.

Obama says that the primary goal is to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future," a goal Spencer Ackerman describes as "about the furthest thing from an endpoint as could be" even while being generally approving of Obama's taking a counter-insurgency approach to that goal. Al Qaeda is a many headed non-centric hydra of a network which has been successful in regenerating itself in Pakistan despite many setbacks. It's unclear that it is possible to "disrupt, dismantle and defeat" it in any timeframe short of decades. It's especially unclear that disrupting, dismantling and defeating either Afghan or Pakistani Taliban networks will get you closer to that lofty goal. Worse, with spin-off "self-starter" affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and other nations - as well as such "safe havens" as British suburbia - even if it could be done, it won't end the possibilities of another 9/11. But in any case, the Obama Strategy explicitly commits the U.S. to being at war in Pakistan too .

Even so, to accomplish that goal, Obama says, some other things have to happen - all of which are big ifs. Michael Tomasky at The Guardian writes:

If number one: If the administration can persuade Pakistan to spent less of its military energy confronting India and more dealing with the semi-autonomous western provinces, where the Taliban are hanging out, then some progress can be made against the latter.

If number two: If a schism can be forced within the Taliban armies, then we have a chance of vanquishing them. The belief -- although, by the administration's admission, we don't yet really have the intelligence to back this up -- is that a number of Taliban fighters are just in it for the money, not the ideology. If we bribe them more effectively than the Taliban, they'll lay down their arms.

If number three: If corruption can be controlled within the Afghan regime, and in the Pakistani military and infamous intelligence service, then we may have a shot at making the situation stable.

If number four: If the administration can "regionalise" the conflict and bring in players like Russia and (especially) Iran, then there's reason to hope that a regional solution can take firmer hold.

There are even more if's, but you get the idea. But here's a final if: If not this plan, then what?

Ackerman notes the wooliness quotient in the plan too, and that wooliness leads both Matt Yglesias and (more explicitly) Kevin Drum to worry about there being no exit ramps if any of those crucial ifs in Obama's plan don't work out. Obama's speech talks about "benchmarks" for performance by both Afghanistan and Pakistan's governments but doesn't spell out exactly what those consist of. On that subject, Kevin has some more on the "if not this plan, then what" dynamic as it relates to domestic politics.

I was a big proponent of setting benchmarks and milestones in Iraq, so I can hardly complain about this without grossly contradicting my past instincts.  But I guess you can just call me Walt Whitman this morning, because at a gut level something about this whole plan makes my blood run cold.  It's so McNamara-ish I can practically see him making the announcement in my mind's eye.

On a less purely emotional level, the key thing here is how Obama plans to make these benchmarks credible.  The problem with benchmarks in a war like this has always been the unlikelihood that an American president will withdraw troops without at least pretending to have achieved victory.  I mean, how do you do it?  Withdrawing support piecemeal because specific benchmarks in specific regions haven't been met makes no sense tactically, but stepping up to the press room podium one day and announcing, "We're losing, so we're pulling out" is political suicide, and everyone knows it.

There's a note there that's definitely true - that yet again domestic politics are being inflicted on foreign parts. But there's a measure of domestic framing to consider. When the left was advocating benchmarks for continued occupation, it was always with the view that one day a president might step up to the podium and say "obviously, the Iraqis/AfghansPakistanis want these things to happen far less than we do. We must not be more invested in that nation's success than they are so it is time to leave them to sort affairs to their own preferences." That's not nearly as suicidal, domestically, and would be followed by a strategic plan favoring containment, counter-terroris and more effective homeland security measures.

It remains true that developing a viable containment policy hasn't been given even a tenth of the energy that continued occupation has. Under the Bush administration, neocon influence and thinking meant it was never even on the table. Under the Obama administration, the COIN afficiandos who staff the DoD and the most influential think-tanks feeding Obama's foreign policy thinking keep saying "it wouldn't work" without ever advancing concrete reasons why not. Yet with the costs of Obama's Afghanistan strategy meaning that he's already said his budget's planned spending on the occupation was a drastic underestimate - and the U.S. looking at 15 years and over $1.3 trillion in commitment to a COIN occupation against what is increasingly a nationalist insurgency (and thus increasingly harder to defeat) - a containment answer to "if not this plan, then what?" is far overdue.

Update: James Joyner has a summary of a conference call between invited bloggers and Denis McDonough, deputy assistant to the president in charge of strategic communications for the National Security Council, and Caitlin Hayden, director of communications at NSC. None of the responses to blogger questions make me any happier about Obama re-labelling many Bush era goals as "new" and opting for a COIN "long war" in Afghanistan.