Looking for justifications for self-destruction in Afghanistan and Pakistan

David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert and an admirer of the brutal and controversial Phoenix Program the CIA ran in Vietnam, argues that NATO needs to wage a counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan that will take at least ten more years and maybe fifteen. (Crunch Time in Afghanistan-Pakistan Small Wars Journal 02/09/2009) And that's on top of the 7-plus years we've been fighting in Afghanistan already.

Kilcullen doesn't explicitly say he's talking about 10-15 additional years. But I don't see how any other reading of his piece is reasonable.

He gives the inevitable snappy slogan to the approach he advocates: Prevent, Protect, Build, Hand-Off.

Each represents an "essential strategic task”, he says. I'll quote them here in bullet-point form:

• We need to prevent the re-emergence of an Al Qaeda sanctuary that could lead to another 9/11.

• We need to protect Afghanistan from a range of security threats including the Taliban insurgency, terrorism, narcotics, misrule and corruption.

• We need to build sustainable and accountable state institutions (at the central, provincial and local level) and a resilient civil society.

• Then we can begin a phased hand-off to Afghan institutions that can survive without permanent international assistance.

He then gives a desultory description of a less expansive option, then ridicules it as (my summary) something only wimps and losers would want to try. You don't want to be a wimp or a loser, now do you?

If we wanted to set up, say, a British-style colony in Afghanistan, then a 15- or 20-year war might be the way to go. Then, there would be the constant low-level terrorism and the periodic uprising for the following decades, or the following century, or however long it took us to decide what a fool's errand the whole thing had been.

Kilcullen somehow figures that we will be able to get the Pakistani government to escalate counterinsurgency in its territories bordering Afghanistan without much direct American combat involvement. And he doesn't discuss in that article any of the problems that would come with Americans and Europeans carrying on a 20 Years' War in Afghanistan. The idea that NATO involvement in such a protracted war could itself become a strategic problem doesn't seem to faze him.

More importantly, he assumes that the remains of Al Qa'ida are such a major threat that they cannot be countered without the huge and very risky commitment to 10-15 more years of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan would be. As was too often the case in the Cold War, threat inflation remains a chronic problem for US foreign policy.

Reuters is reporting Obama orders Afghan-Pakistan policy review 02/10/2009 and Gates expects Obama Afghan troop decision in days by David Morgan 02/10/2009.

Morgan reports:

The Obama administration is looking at plans to eventually nearly double the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to about 60,000. There are currently 37,000 U.S. forces in the country as part of a western military presence of about 70,000 troops.

The enthusiasm of our NATO allies for such a proposed escalation and expansion of the war is doubtful: Obama Means Blood, Sweat and Tears for Germany by Claus Christian Malzahn Der Spiegel Online 02/09/2009.

Meanwhile, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says he wants to open peace negotiations with some of the Pushtun rebel groups ("Taliban").

Fortunately, our quality news media are on the job, keeping us well informed about the situation. [cough, choke, cough] On the PBS Newshour for 02/09/09, Jim Lehrer interviewed two subject matter experts on Afghanistan: an Afghanistan hawk from the hawkish Rand Corporation and an Afghanistan hawk from the hawkish Heritage Foundation. The had a well-balanced discussion in which they mostly agreed with each other on the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan and expand it to Pakistan. (The opening news portion of the segment isn't too bad.)

Tags: afghanistan war, pakistan