posted March 17, 2009 5:43 pm
The signals coming from the Obama administration as a "strategic review" of Afghan policy is nearing completion this week are, to say the least, confusing. While much new thinking on the Afghan War has been promised, early leaks about the review's proposals for the next "three to five years" largely seem to promise more of the same: a heightened CIA-run drone war in the Pakistani borderlands, more U.S. military and economic aid for Pakistan (and more strong-arming of the Pakistanis to support U.S. policy in the region), more training of and an expansion of the Afghan army, and of course more U.S. forces -- the president has already ordered17,000 extra troops into the war.
The new policy elements, evidently involving modest invitations to (and threats toward) Iran, a belief that up to 70% of Taliban fighters might be won over via the right combination of money and "reconciliation," and a "scaling back" of hopes for Afghan democracy, hardly seem to add up to a brilliant thought exercise in the face of a disaster of a war now into its eighth year. In the meantime, of course, Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis continue to die.
Ironically, the real X-factor in how the Afghan War will be pursued in the years to come probably lies nowhere near Afghanistan. Just how severely, and for how long and in what complex ways, the global economic collapse will affect the United States and Washington's revenues may be the true determinative factor in whether the Obama administration slowly makes its way further into, or out of, the war. Will this president, with so many giant programs and problems on his plate, really be capable of fighting an Afghan war at more intense levels and in more expensive ways for long? Certainly, the Europeans and the Canadians, who think they've seen which way the wind is blowing, doubt it. According to an unidentified "senior French official" speaking to Agence France Press, "We are lowering our ambitions... The Americans are now looking for a way out; they no longer regard Afghanistan as strategic. It'll take two to five years, but we're in a logic of disengagement."
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