Kilcullen: "Afghanistan doesn't worry me. Pakistan does."

By Steve Hynd

The Sydney Morning Herald has an interview today with Australian COIN-guru Dr. David Kilcullen, formerly part of Petraeus' "dream team" and now a consultant to the Obama White House. It makes for very interesting reading.

Although the piece is headlined "Warning that Pakistan is in danger of collapse within months" Kilcullen isn't directly quoted saying that. But he is directly quoted as saying Pakistan is the real and true central front in the War on Terror (tm).

"We have to face the fact that if Pakistan collapses it will dwarf anything we have seen so far in whatever we're calling the war on terror now," said David Kilcullen, a former Australian Army officer who was a specialist adviser for the Bush administration and is now a consultant to the Obama White House.

"You just can't say that you're not going to worry about al-Qaeda taking control of Pakistan and its nukes," he said.

...Cautioning against an excessive focus by Western governments on Afghanistan at the expense of Pakistan, Dr Kilcullen said that "the Kabul tail was wagging the dog". Comparing the challenges in the two, he said Afghanistan was a campaign to defend a reconstruction program. "It's not really about al-Qaeda. Afghanistan doesn't worry me. Pakistan does."

..."We can muddle through in Afghanistan. It is problematic and difficult but we know what to do. What we don't know is if we have the time or if we can afford the cost of what needs to be done."

There seems to me to be a bit of hyperventilating going on there, though, as there is when Kilcullen says "You can't have al-Qaeda in control of Pakistan's missiles". If AQ isn't the problem why should we be worried about AQ defeating the seventh largest military in the world, let alone somehow de-nuking it? Kilcullen himself notes the Pakistan military is no pushover and is letting the militants control exactly what it has decided to allow them to control:

Laying out the scale of the challenges facing the US in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dr Kilcullen put the two countries invaded by US-led forces after the September 11 attacks on the US on a par - each had a population of more than 30 million.

"But Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control," he told the Herald .

Added to that, the Pakistani security establishment ignored direction from the elected Government in Islamabad as waves of extremist violence spread across the whole country - not only in the tribal wilds of the Afghan border region.

...Dr Kilcullen said a fault line had developed in the West's grasp of circumstances on each side of the Durand Line, the disputed border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"In Afghanistan, it's easy to understand, difficult to execute. But in Pakistan, it is very difficult to understand and it's extremely difficult for us to generate any leverage, because Pakistan does not want our help.

"In a sense there is no Pakistan - no single set of opinion. Pakistan has a military and intelligence establishment that refuses to follow the directions of its civilian leadership. They have a tradition of using regional extremist groups as unconventional counterweights against India's regional influence."

Pakistan's military has conceded to the Islamists the territory it has historically had no use for itself, that's all. It could throw them out of power in those areas by main force whenever it wanted to and then fight a COIN campaign with what survives. It simply chooses not to do so.

But all this strikes directly at the heart of the argument for an escalation of the US occupation in Afghanistan in the first place. If an army larger than the entire US military can't stop the extremists on the central front, what's a piddling amount of troops in the country next door supposed to do? If it simply refuses to stop the extremists, again what's to be done by waving a big stick next door? Kilcullen is obviously not advocating a general invasion of Pakistan, and for obvious reasons.

Yet if counter-terrorism (rather than counter-insurgency), diplomacy and containment are the order of the day for the central front, why are the US and its allies continuing to piss away blood and treasure on an occupation of a secondary front? Surely the same tactics, if they'll work on the main battlefield, should be the tactics of choice on secondary ones (as they're belatedly becoming in Iraq). Is the reason for continued occupation in Afghanistan simply fear of the political fallout from withdrawal without a pretext to claim "success" (again, like Iraq)? It begins to look very like it.

Comments

[empty]

Thanks for keeping on top of this Steve. What I truly don't get is how the f@$k someone who says things like "You can't have al-Qaeda in control of Pakistan's missiles" became the toast of the intelligentsia and adviser to a White House supposedly made up of the best and the brightest. Or is it that he knows better but figures us rubes can't handle the truth and is feeding us the crap he feels we are used to. I suspect it is the latter because no one who has spent any time studying the issue can be this dumb. Which brings up the question of why outside of (admittedly invaluable) sites like this no one confronts him.

[Steve Hynd]

Hi Empty,

As always, I bow to your knowledge of Pakistan's ins and outs so if you think I've got it right I'm very pleased.

I suspect "the latter" too, because all the other COINdinistas spout the same line of illogic and some of them I know are very bright. I suspect they do so because they've invested so heavily in the "COIN is better than Bush's mismanagement" meme for so long, and to their own benefirs, that they realise how it might look if they now said "but COIN won't work either now, time to leave and try CT/containment." It's the simple truth, but they're all too involved in the politics of careers to say so.

Regards, Steve

[News Reference]

Republican FOX owner Murdoch owns the Sydney Morning Herald.

Anything Murdoch owns he uses as propaganda.

Juan Cole takes a look at the article and says that "I don't know David Kilcullen. But the things he is alleged to have told Paul McGeogh of the Sydney Morning Herald about Pakistan are just bizarre."

Juan Cole is significantly more credible than any of Murdoch's mouthpieces.

Cole's observations are worth noting as a counterpoint to Murdoch's Sydney Morning Herald writer.

[Steve Hynd]

No, Murdoch doesn't own the SMH. Read your cite more carefully. It's referring to pillars mistakenly installed at the SMH offices that appear to bear Murdoch's image.

Fairfax Media still owns the SMH. Fairfax, in turn, was once owned by convicted Republican con-man Conrad Black.

However, I agree with Dr. Cole wholeheartedly. It's almost as if his post was written after mine was mentioned on a listserv we both belong to. Oh, wait...

Regards, Steve

[News Reference]

"No, Murdoch doesn't own the SMH."

Apologies, the double irony was that I was citing a Murdoch publication as a source [news.com.au /dailytelegraph] to complain about a Murdoch publication.

That's what I get for trusting a Murdoch headline: suckered.

[JustPlainDave]

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