Count me among the people who are worried about the second-order effects of surging a lot more troops into Afghanistan. It has every chance of placing an incredible amount of pressure on the new Pakistani government, potentially ratcheting up pressure on whomever replaces Musharraf as the head of state to an impossible degree. Indeed, it will change the status quo, and that is a great thing.
For too many years, the U.S. has taken a “devil you know” approach to Pakistan, assuming a wishy-washy Musharraf was preferable to an unknown government taking an unknown stance on the war. The devil we know has been bad for us. Forcing the issue is one of the best things policy makers can do. Pakistan must choose sides.
Despite all the talk of Musharraf’s alliance with the U.S., and how helpful he has been in the War on Terror, it is important to remember he is, almost by definition, antithetical to American interests. This is a man who canceled elections again and again, who banned secular parties from participating in at least one round of elections (entrenching the position and influence of the MMA, a coalition made up of extremist political parties), who took the opportunity of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination to crack down on the lawyers agitating for their branch of the government to stop being imprisons, who arrested a few al-Qaeda leaders but let the entire leadership of the Taliban and Kashmiri extremists operate freely.
In that sense, the civilian government is a bonanza. Ignore the people saying they don’t care about the militants in their midst. It is just an ignorant thing to say: the current ruling coalition is in power precisely because a secular party—the Awami National Party, a Pashtun-nationalist party opposed to Islamism—was allowed to participate in the elections earlier this year. It isn’t that the civilian government is indifferent or apathetic to the extremism in its midst, it is that too many years of aggressive military domination of domestic politics, quite often in the form of deliberately supporting various extremist groups (a holdover of Zia ul-Haq’s “Islamization” of Pakistani society, the consequences of which factor heavily into a book I’m reviewing soon), have produced a situation with no clear solution.
While Ambassador Ginsburg blithely writes them off as not caring and unable to do much because the war in Afghanistan is unpopular there, he seems to forget that this is entirely the U.S.’s own doing: it was American demands that Musharraf make immediate changes to Pakistan’s Islamist policies with little explanation, along with their dogged support of him as he canceled even the vestiges of democracy, that made America deeply unpopular.
Now, the U.S. is left with a daunting task: trying to win over a country it has, by its own definition, used like a condom. It will not be easy going forward; in fact, it will be incredibly difficult for a long while, as the worsening situation in Afghanistan indicates. But working with a freely-elected government is vastly preferable to working with a dictator, even if they’re not as easy to coerce into doing our dirty work for us. Building a solution with a democratic government is how a permanent solution to the regional conflict will be built. We’ve been remiss to forget that.
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I’ve been kvetching about what a poor idea increasing troop levels in Afghanistan is for a long while now. I wish they’d explain what the strategic objectives of our presence in Afghanistan are and how increasing troop levels will help achieve those. I doubt that the objectives can be achieved by that means. Not to mention the cost.
The issue of troops is a complex one. Adding too many without a sound strategy for using them is obviously a bad idea. And adding too many risks toeing the line the Soviets crossed, which is by serving to unite the different factions against them, including ones who were friendly to them.
At the same time, most of the problems related to Afghanistan stem from the military’s inability to hold territory—and that’s a manpower problem. In contrast to all the hyperbole about geography, it really comes down to bodies—in Helmand province, for example, the Marines can do an admirable job of clearing out an area of insurgents. But they can’t hold on to it, since there’s aren’t too many of them, and they have to rely on ANA and ANP officers to do that. And they still run away when it gets too dangerous.
So while simply dumping more bodies on the country carries big risks over what they would do, it’s hard to escape the basic problem that there simply are not enough troops there now to do the job they need to, which is creating pockets of stability.
The Pentagon folk have estimated that 400,000 troops would be required to use the strategy you’ve outlined. I can’t help but imagine that number would trigger the same reaction the Soviets provoked.
I wouldn’t be opposed to limiting the areas we’re trying to secure to just a few small enclaves. I wouldn’t even be opposed to increasing our deployment in Afghanistan to achieve that objective if necessary.
That wouldn’t secure the country, however.
Musharraf was good for keeping the MSR open. If his successor falls down on that job, other arrangements will have to made.
Maybe the newly-independent Islamic Republic of Baluchistan will be so grateful for our assistance they will grant us a SPOD at Gwadar and let the Indians build a railroad to Goreshk.
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