WHERE is the Afghanistan policy headed? Will President Obama soon be tempted to say that with Osama bin Laden dead, on the positive side, but with the US-Afghan and US-Pakistani relationships still troubled and the insurgency still resilient, on the negative it’s time to declare victory, cut our losses and get the forces home fast?
In recent days, for the first time, I heard a clear answer from a senior administration civilian official. He stated in a White House briefing that the current US troop drawdown from 100,000 to 68,000 troops by September will be the extent of the cuts for a while.
They will be completed, according to a plan still being finalised by Isaf commander Gen John Allen, and the situation then assessed further, before any additional reductions are planned. Allen repeated the same thing in his recent congressional testimony. US and other Nato troops will still complete their main mission by 2014, but there will be no rush for exits in the meantime.
As Martin Indyk, Ken Lieberthal, and I explain in our new book, Bending History: Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy, that approach should come as no surprise for this president. In office, Obama has become a reluctant realist. On Afghanistan specifically, no metamorphosis was needed. From the beginning of his presidential campaign, Barack Obama had made it clear that he viewed the Afghanistan conflict as the correct war to pursue after 9/11. He pledged to swing focus from Iraq to Afghanistan and often spoke of adding at least two brigades of US combat forces to the latter mission, as the Taliban regained strength during the second term of the Bush presidency.
Many onlookers suspected that this was partly politics at the time. But this theory has been debunked by Obama’s actual performance as president. Far more than deploying two more brigades to Afghanistan, on top of the four or so already there when he became president, he added eight. The US had 30,000 troops in Afghanistan when Obama was inaugurated; it had 100,000 there by late 2010. Not only did Obama quickly turn to an Afghanistan policy review upon taking office, increasing that 30,000 figure to about 68,000 as a result, but agreed to a second major review in the fall of 2009 — and then doubled down his bets with another troop increase a second time.
Much of the purpose of the new troops Obama sent has been to establish substantial Nato troop concentrations in the key centres of the Afghan population, specifically the Pakhtun plurality in the south and east. Large numbers of added forces were sent to Helmand and Kandahar, the latter the spiritual home and base of the Taliban, the former a major source of additional support as well as wealth from the opium trade.
These areas are now much improved, as reflected in a few key facts and figures. Violence is down by one third to one half in the south. In Helmand, 50 per cent more children are now in school than in 2009, nearly half the population considers the roads secure in contrast to a third who felt that way a year before, and government officials now travel locally by road rather than Nato helicopter. The campaign plan calls for extending similar efforts to the country’s east this year and next, while completing the creation of a 350,000-strong Afghan army and police force.
There have been mistakes along the way, to be sure. The US administration has not maintained a consistent or constructive approach in dealing with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Several administration officials either excoriated the Afghan leader in public or wound up in heated exchanges with him in private that negatively affected the broader relationship.
Obama has also sometimes failed to project resolve despite his strong decision-making on the war. In announcing his decision to increase troops a second time at West Point on Dec 1, 2009, Obama also pledged to begin removing US forces from Afghanistan by July 2011.
By itself, a plan to make any additional foreign military buildup in Afghanistan temporary should not have raised too many eyebrows; after all, President Bush did much the same thing with the surge in Iraq. But Obama seemed to be promising a fairly rapid end to the war overall — and that seemed to be the message he wanted the US Congress and the American people to hear.
He took a similar approach last June, in announcing a faster initial troop drawdown than Gen Petraeus had favoured. This somewhat mixed effort, even if useful for handling domestic criticism of the war at home, has probably contributed unhelpfully to hedging behaviour among many Afghans and Pakistanis.
Where does this leave us? A convincing victory seems unlikely. But still attainable is an acceptable outcome, if Obama stayspatient. The future of Afghanistan may resemble what has been witnessed in parts of Pakistan, or Colombia, with an ongoing insurgency and certain areas largely beyond the control of the government for extended periods. But at least it will no longer be in Taliban hands or in an anarchic Somalia-like state; the areas where Al Qaeda could seek to take sanctuary would be more limited, and more vulnerable to government or Nato strikes.
That would not be a risk-free result but it would be preferable to outright defeat, and would still on balance probably keep America safe — and still square with Obama’s generally practical, if no longer quite so inspirational, approach to US national security policy.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Washington D.C.