It’s the mission, smarty

Foreign policy eyes and ears will be on the President’s Afghanistan speech tonight.  But I fear the President will focus where the press points:  on the size of the troop drawdown.  Important though it may be, that is not the fundamental issue.  The key thing is defining the mission end-state, as I and others have already pointed out.

Why is this so important?  Because it is the mission that determines the number of troops (and civilians).  If you only want to kill Al Qaeda, you don’t need many civilians and the troops you need are not regular infantry but rather special forces.  If you want to stabilize Afghanistan and build up the state there so that it can continue to keep Al Qaeda out, that is an entirely different mission requiring lots of civilians and substantial numbers of regular army and marines to “clear, hold and build.” And many years.

The  President has been consistently ambiguous on the counter-insurgency mission.  His emphasis is always on counter-terrorism (killing Al Qaeda), with the occasional coda mentioning stability but without clarity about the end-state.  This is not a small issue.  It is the heart of the matter, as it determines how much personpower, years, blood and treasure we will have to invest.  And that in turn determines the “opportunity costs,” that is what we’ll have to give up in order to achieve our goals in Afghanistan.

President Obama is no dummy.  He understands perfectly well that the mission defines the requirements.  If I had to bet, he would keep the focus tonight mainly on counter-terrorism, mentioning counter-insurgency in the context of ensuring regional stability.  After all, the main problem with leaving Afghanistan before it can defend itself is that militants will begin to use it to attack Pakistan, a big and important country with a substantial nuclear arsenal.

He’ll say yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, but our job is not done.  We need to ensure that Al Qaeda cannot return to Afghanistan and that the region is stable, so that never again will extremists harbored there attack the United States. Enabling Afghanistan to defend itself is in the U.S. interest, he’ll argue.

My colleagues in the Twittersphere will snigger and say that it is our very presence in Afghanistan that attracts  extremists and enables their recruiting.  That is not an argument that can win in a world still governed by Bacevich’s Washington Rules.