Afghanistan: love it and leave it

National Security Network Executive Director Heather Hurlburt and General Paul Eaton in Politico today offer a very sensible eight points of broad agreement among recent reports on Afghanistan. As I was about to have a look through them to determine where they agreed and disagreed, I find this timely and useful.

Meanwhile, the New York Times is busy leading the effort to make news of supposed differences between the intelligence community and the military on how successful the Afghanistan “surge” is. This is silly, as the author of the article acknowledges in the fine print:  the cut-off date for the intel assessment is earlier than for the military assessment, and in any event intel analysts are paid to anticipate problems while military people are paid to solve them.

Eaton and Hurlburt (caveat emptor:  she is married to my first cousin once removed) are playing the better game, even if they fail to deal with my favorite question:  is Karzai worth it?  Their eight points add up to this:  however successful the military “surge,” we need to negotiate a way out (with all deliberate speed, as the Supreme Court would say) with support from the neighbors, having done what we can to improve local governance, revive the economy and train the Afghan security forces, thus leaving behind a regime that will not harbor transnational terrorists.

They talk about “political progress,” but it is unclear what they mean by it.  Maybe this is code for President Karzai cleaning up his, and his government’s act, or maybe it is progress in the reconciliation department, which is the label generally given to efforts to bring the Taliban in from the cold.  Or maybe it also covers efforts to get Pakistan to take stronger action against the Taliban.  Hurlburt and Eaton accept the judgment of several of the reports that failure to make progress should lead to quicker withdrawal and conversion to a counter-terrorist (i.e. kill the terrorists from afar) rather than a counter-insurgency (i.e. protect and serve the population up close) effort.

At this point, I don’t see any chance that the Administration will change its timeline, which will begin turnover of security responsibilities to the Afghans next July and aim to complete the process by the end of 2014.  The NATO decision boxed us in to that schedule, which is what the Administration presumably wanted.  It seems to have had the great virtue of removing Afghanistan from the domestic political debate, which is no place for rational discourse and decisionmaking these days.

What we could use now–tomorrow’s publication of the Administration “review” would be a good moment to start–is an honest assessment of where we stand on the main factors to which Hurlburt and Eaton point:  negotiations with the Taliban, cooperation by Afghanistan’s neighbors, strengthening of local governance and the economy, buildup of the Afghan security forces.  A bit on why Karzai merits $120 billion per year and the lives of American soldiers and civilians would be useful too.