What is President Barack Obama’s biggest foreign policy headache? Is it China’s emergence as a global rival? Is it the tricky relationship with a sullen Russia? Is it holding back a belligerent Israel from attacking Iran? Or is it America’s failure to pressure Israel to make peace with the Palestinians and the damage this must inevitably cause to U.S. relations with the whole Arab world, and especially with the young revolutionaries of the “Arab Spring”?
There is little doubt that these highly important questions preoccupy a great many people in Washington. But they are overshadowed by an even more difficult and more urgent problem: what to do about Afghanistan.
America’s Afghan war has now lasted ten years, with no end in sight and no credible exit strategy. NATO has deployed 140,000 men in Afghanistan, of which 100,000 are American. Combat operations are planned to continue until the end of 2014, if not beyond — in other words, for another three to four years of agony. So far, some 1,500 American service men and men have been killed in action in Afghanistan and another 11,500 wounded.
These casualties are painful enough, but the really spectacular figures are in dollars rather than in lives. The war has so far cost the United States $420bn (about half the cost of the catastrophic Iraq war.) The bill in Afghanistan for this fiscal year alone is estimated at $113bn, with another $107bn earmarked for 2012. These are colossal sums. If spent on job creation they could have transformed the Arab world or Africa. They could have resolved the Palestine refugee problem, brought drinking water to millions, eradicated diseases, and much else besides. They could have done great things in repairing America’s own dilapidated infrastructure. But they have been squandered on an unwinnable war. In the words of Senator John Kerry, expenditure on this scale is simply “unsustainable,” especially at a time of America’s soaring federal deficits.
Not the least of the many absurdities of the Afghan war is the $28bn the United States has spent beefing up the Afghan army, which now numbers close to 350,000 men. The Pentagon has asked for another $12.8bn for 2012. But who will pay for this inflated army when the U.S. withdraws? No Afghan government could conceivably afford such a luxury. Will the U.S. be condemned to foot the bill for the foreseeable future?
The situation in Afghanistan cannot be separated from the almost equally dire situation across the border in Pakistan: hence the American appellation of ‘Afpak’ to describe the joint theatre of operations. These two fragile states, one of them a nuclear power, are home to some 200 million people, many of them poor, angry and extremely hostile to America because of the death and destruction which war has brought to their lives. The danger of large-scale social and political chaos is ever-present.
Most observers of the Afghan scene agree that there is no military solution to the conflict, only a political one. But how, when and by whom can this solution be brought about? The Obama administration does not seem to have put its mind to answering these questions with sufficient urgency. The argument in Washington tends to be about force levels in Afghanistan, rather than about peace.
Vice-President Joe Biden is known to favour a reasonably rapid drawdown of U.S. forces. He was none too keen on a ‘surge’ in U.S. forces in the first place, although Obama went ahead and agreed to send an extra 30,000 men. Another leading adviser who expressed doubts to Obama about the wisdom of maintaining high force levels in Afghanistan was General James Cartwright of the Marine Corps. Obama liked and respected him and intended to nominate him to replace Admiral Mike Mullen as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
But Cartwright has been passed over. His mistake was to take his advice straight to the President without informing Admiral Mullen and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, both enthusiastic backers of the troops’ surge. The job of chairman of the Joint Chiefs — in effect chief military adviser of the President — is going to General Martin Dempsey, at present head of the U.S. army. Cartwright has paid the price and is retiring.
General David Petraeus, overall commander in Afghanistan, was the leading advocate of the ‘surge’. He was evidently hoping to replicate in Afghanistan the success he had with a ‘surge’ in Iraq. But Petraeus is due to leave Afghanistan in September when he takes over as director of the CIA.
These different views illustrate the current disputes in Washington and among its allies. NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a powerful voice in the current debate, opposes a reduction in America’s force levels. “To reduce the force would be a mistake,” he told Britain’s Financial Times in an interview published on 31 May. “We don’t want to leave a security vacuum in the country after we have gone.” His argument was that “maintaining high military pressure [on the Taliban] facilitates the reconciliation process.” In the view of many experts, this is a highly doubtful conclusion. Rasmussen’s motives are suspect. His main concern would seem to be to maintain NATO’s prestige. He may think that anything like a scuttle out of Afghanistan would damage the Alliance’s image.
Whereas Rasmussen favours continued counter-insurgency operations requiring large numbers of men, other experts recommend that the United States should switch its focus to counter-terrorist operations, which require only small hard-hitting teams, such as the one which killed Bin Laden.
Others still argue that it is utter folly for America to hunt down and kill the Afghan Taliban since they are the very people with whom a political settlement will eventually have to be negotiated. On this view, an atmosphere suitable for peace talks should be created by reducing missile attacks by unmanned drones, as well as air strikes and night raids on residential areas, all of which inevitably kill civilians. A NATO air strike on 28 May killed 14 Afghan civilians, including 11 children, aged 2 to 7. A furious President Hamid Karzai issued a ‘last’ warning to NATO to cease such attacks. NATO made an apology. But the damage was done.
In an article in the International Herald Tribune on 24 March, Lakhdar Brahimi, a former UN special representative for Afghanistan, and Thomas Pickering, a former U.S. under secretary of state, recommended that a “neutral international facilitator” be appointed to explore with all potential parties the possibility of a negotiated end to the conflict. The facilitator, they wrote, could be a person, a group, an international organisation, a neutral state, or a group of states.
A settlement, they added, would require making room for Taliban representatives in central and provincial governments as well as guaranteeing that foreign forces would be withdrawn. Financial aid would be necessary — no doubt only a fraction of what the war is costing — as well as some way for the international community to keep the peace and enforce any agreement reached.
This is the voice of wisdom. So far, however, Obama seems to give more weight to the war-mongers among his advisers than the peace-makers. He has failed to make peace between the Arabs and Israel. Is he to fail in Afghanistan also?
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
Copyright © 2011 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 06 June 2011
Word Count: 1,203
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