Strategic Incoherence Watch

From the Times:

Lieutenant-General Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador, last week warned Karzai against declaring victory prematurely. But Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region, has ruled out a rerun…

It appears some of Holbrooke’s staff were initially involved in leaking the reports of election fraud, seeing it as a chance to clip Karzai’s wings. They believed that an unconvincing victory would give the West leverage to persuade the president not to dismiss reformist ministers and replace them with warlords with whom he had made electoral deals.

However, as the political tensions threaten to spiral out of control, Washington is now trying to play down the problem.

“It is an achievement elections went ahead at all,” said one US official last week.

Asked what legitimacy a future Karzai government would have, the official said: “We’re not there to support the Afghan government. We’re there to disrupt, dismantle and demolish Al-Qaeda.”

Words fail. So Holbrooke decided to meddle in the election before all the facts were in, and now is ruling out a redo as if it’s his pet government to run. Then a U.S. official says we don’t care on jot about the Afghan government, only killing al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, U.S. officials are also saying al Qaeda is finished (Lawrence Wright, naturally, disagrees), President Obama is saying we need to “renew” our fight against al Qaeda (I thought they were almost finished?), and al Qaeda supposedly is building a huge new base in Pakistan.

And on the “supporting the government” front, let’s not forget Carl Levin’s speech calling for more Security Force Assistance… which is supporting the Afghan government. In fact, if that anonymous official was speaking anything close to the truth on this, then every single person in the military and Thinktankistan should drop this counterinsurgency nonsense immediately: our own government isn’t playing.

Argh. I hope that guy just got quoted out of context.

This post was written by...

Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.

Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.