Day: June 19, 2011

Afghanistan decision time, again

Douglas Ollivant at foreignpolicy.com is asking the right questions:

What are our national interests in Afghanistan? Which of those are vital?

How much are we willing to pay for them (money, blood, institutional focus)?

What other costs does our policy in Afghanistan incur (e.g., reduced leverage in Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan due to reliance on supply lines through their territory)?

What are the opportunity costs? How might our goals be accomplished in other ways?

Is our policy sustainable to some sort of completion?

And what — if anything — do we owe to the people of Afghanistan who have sided with the NATO effort?

None of these questions is about numbers of troops or about the timeline for withdrawal, which is what the press focuses most attention on.  But the troop decision depends on the answers to these prior questions:  what do you want them to do, how much will it cost (important to include the opportunity costs, as Ollivant does), and how long will it take?

The New York Times offers at least some insight into possible answers to the first question.  If, as President Obama has said many times, our primary objective in Afghanistan is to rid it of al Qaeda, then the mission we need to continue is a counter-terrorism one (find them and kill them) that likely requires relatively few troops.  Vice President Biden and a goodly number of members of Congress will line up on that side.

The problem is “gone today, back tomorrow.”  If we leave Afghanistan a weak state unable to control its territory, there is every reason to think that al Qaeda will come back.  That’s why there has long been a state-building, counter-insurgency component to the mission, though the President has never made it clear what end-state he is seeking to achieve when it comes to governance in Afghanistan.  That’s not surprising considering the challenges, currently epitomized by failure of the country’s largest bank. But we could just as easily make reference to the country’s thriving drug trade and endemic corruption.  If we stay, and if building the Afghan state is part of the mission, we are going to need to get more precise about what we are trying to accomplish.

Why should we care how Afghanistan is governed?  The one-word answer is “Pakistan.”  If al Qaeda or other extremists re-establish themselves in Afghanistan, there is every reason to expect them to attack Pakistan, an already fragile state with a large and growing nuclear arsenal.  As Trudy Rubin explains in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this is a major reason for continuing the counter-insurgency and statebuilding effort in Afghanistan and presumably explains why outgoing Secretary of Defense Gates seems confident that the President will resist domestic political pressure to reduce troops rapidly.

None of this makes staying in Afghanistan look attractive.  As the American ambassador has made clear, President Karzai’s harsh criticism of the American and NATO efforts in his country is taking a toll, as are the mounting costs of the war.  I find it hard to fault people who would prefer to get out quickly (my wife has been on that side of the argument for a couple of years now), even if my brain tells me having to return to Afghanistan would be worse than staying.

The one thing I would ask is this:  if we are going to stay to stabilize Afghanistan and build its state to the point that it can fight al Qaeda and other militants on its own, we need to be honest about how long it is going to take and how much it is going to cost.  The projected date for turning over security in the whole country to the Afghans, 2014, is looking far too soon, even if Washington remains willing to pay Kabul’s security bills.  I’ve seen something of “stabilization” in Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, and I’ve studied it elsewhere.  My guess is that we’ll be there at least 10 more years in significant numbers if we want to get a half-decent job done.  That’s another trillion dollars, more or less.  Even among friends, that’s a lot of money, and a lot of other opportunities foregone.

 

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The lemonade gambit

Regular readers of www.peacefare.net will know that I don’t usually refer to Tom Friedman, who often strikes me as more facile and glib than profound.  But his What To Do With Lemons in yesterday’s New York Times seems to me right on:  there is going to have to be a UN General Assembly resolution on Palestine this fall, so why not make it one that says something useful and gets the peace process restarted?

His proposed resolution would read:

This body reaffirms that the area of historic Palestine should be divided into two homes for two peoples — a Palestinian Arab state and a Jewish state. The dividing line should be based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed border adjustments and security arrangements for both sides. This body recognizes the Palestinian state as a member of the General Assembly and urges both sides to enter into negotiations to resolve all the other outstanding issues.

Friedman suggests this be passed not in the General Assembly, where resolutions are like pre-season football games (sometimes well played but they don’t count in the standings), but instead in the Security Council.

What are the tradeoffs here? The Palestinians get General Assembly membership (Friedman’s wording on this point needs some work though) and reference to the 1967 borders as the basis for any adjustments as well as reference to security arrangements. Security is generally regarded as an “Israel” issue, but there are many ways in which it applies also to Palestine. Israel gets recognition as a Jewish state, something Friedman notes was mentioned explicitly in the original 1947 UN partition resolution.

I’d have some concern that the specific wording Friedman suggests could be abused by Jewish extremists, some of whom would like Arabs to leave Israel and go to the newly independent Palestine, but that could be fixed. New population displacement would be an unwelcome development.

More important: Friedman’s suggestion does nothing to guide resolution of two other critical questions: return of refugees and Jerusalem. I imagine he would say these issues should be resolved in the subsequent negotiations. But the temptation of the parties to want any new resolution to tilt in their favor will make it difficult to leave these issues out.

The important thing here is not the specific wording: it is the idea of getting a resolution, whether through the General Assembly or the Security Council, that makes a positive contribution. That would be far better than a one-sided resolution that isolates Israel and the United States in the General Assembly, or is vetoed by the United States in the Security Council.

Something similar was achieved last fall, when a Serbian demand for General Assembly resolution on Kosovo was turned into a generally acceptable appeal for Belgrade/Pristina talks on practical issues that are reportedly now close to reaching some modest conclusions. The Middle East diplomatic challenge is orders of magnitude greater, but the Friedman gambit–to turn lemons into lemonade–might still work.

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