This Seems Like a Big Problem

There's a story in The New York Times about some people inside the military who want to export the alleged success of the Anbar Awakening to Pakistan. Shawn Brimley and Ilan Goldenberg raise some good skeptical notes, but there's this whopper of a fly in the ointment lurking deep, deep, deep in to the story:

The training of the Frontier Corps remains a concern for some. NATO and American soldiers in Afghanistan have often blamed the Frontier Corps for aiding and abetting Taliban insurgents mounting cross-border attacks. “It’s going to take years to turn them into a professional force,” said one Western military official. “Is it worth it now?”

It's too bad that the quotation here really has nothing to do with the issue at hand, which is that the people we're proposing to fund are fighting alongside the Taliban. That's not "unprofessional" it's just not in America's strategic interests. The last thing we need is a better funded, trained, and equipped more professionalized pro-Taliban military force in Pakistan. I wish the article had looked at this a bit deeper.

Comments

So, you get a "gold star" for pointing out the problems with a potential solution. You can get an "elephant stamp" on your homework if you can devise and explain a workable solution. Or is devising possible solutions not in the job description of a pundit? You have the kibitzing part down to an art form. If only the world were that simple.

Posted by danceswithgoats | November 19, 2007 3:46 PM

Well, you can hardly blame them for overlooking this, Matt. I mean, it's unprecedented that we ever funded groups in Afghanistan or Pakistan that worked against our interests. It's not as if, for example, the US government had ever funded those fighting with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, or anything ...

Posted by David in NY | November 19, 2007 3:50 PM

That's not "unprofessional" it's just not in America's strategic interests.

I'm not sure that's true. If they were ordered not to help the Taliban - and one would hope the Pakistani military higher command has ordered that - then it is unprofessional in that they are not following orders.

Also, presuambly, part of the reason we would be paying them is to pay them not to help the enemy. Bribing the other side not to fight is a perfectly reasonably tactic.

Posted by Al | November 19, 2007 4:08 PM

I got really sick reading this article. When all you have is a hammer ...

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | November 19, 2007 4:15 PM

Here's an even better idea. We need to arm and train a military force that's zealous and dedicated, that knows the Taliban's territory extremely well and all the Taliban hiding-places, and that can easily gain control of that territory.

I know! Let's arm and train the *Taliban* and give them all sorts of fancy weapons like our current-generation Stinger missiles...

Best yet, we have a (currently inactive) former CIA asset who supposedly has great connections with those people and could help work out the details. Now all we have to do is figure out how to get in touch with that Osama Bin Laden fellow...

Posted by RKU | November 19, 2007 4:29 PM

This is a symptom of a broader problem with Afghanistan, rooted in ignorance, political correctness, and misguided egalitarianism. We were right to depose the Taliban after 9/11, but that, plus leaving a residual capability to smack down any resurgence, should have been the limit of our ambitions in Afghanistan. Liberals often scoff at the goal of a democratic Iraq, but Iraqis are like the Swiss compared to the various groups we collectively call Afghans. They are truly backward.

Then there's that whole bit about the extent to which Talibanism is interwoven with the Pashtun ethnic group, and how -- thanks to the colonial Brits, always thinking ahead -- the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan bisects the Pashtun lands.

This calls for a re-thinking of how to deal with Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan; neither area can be dealt with independently of the other. First, though, the political situation in Pakistan needs to be stabilized, and then whoever is running Pakistan in a few months needs to be involved in this re-thinking. Maybe the new Pakistani government can make peace with the Baluchis and enlist their help against the Pashtun Taliban sympathizers?

Posted by Fred | November 19, 2007 4:36 PM

Well, the folks who are 'on our side' in the Anbar Awakening were on the side of Al Qaeda a couple of years ago. It's not inconceivable that tribal leaders in Pakistan might switch sides as well. I don't know enough to say whether this is the right strategy for Pakistan right now. However it seems silly to dismiss it out of hand, especially given that all the other options have potential downsides as well.

Posted by RC | November 19, 2007 4:36 PM

People seem to be forgetting that the Sunnis in Anbar were the ones who started fighting Al Qaeda in Iraq because Al Qaeda in Iraq kept killing Sunnis indiscriminately. We (America) didn't recruit anybody, we simply took advantage of an opportunity opened up by AQIs excesses.

To the best of my knowledge, Al Qaeda (the real one) in Pakistan doesn't go around killing Pakistanis indiscriminately, and rather disapproved of their namesakes in Iraq for doing that. The situations in Iraq and Pakistan are not remotely parallel.

Posted by wvng | November 19, 2007 5:43 PM

Actually, Osama bin Laden has been pretty honorable about keeping his side of the bargain. He can infer things. Surely he inferred, when the U.S. all but sent him an engraved invitation in December 2001 to flee to Pakistan, that he had a role to play in the Global War on Terror. The role was scarecrow. To be both "marginal", as Bush put it in 2002, and the cause of code Orange security alerts when needed, as in 2004, OBL had to negotiate a sometimes complex course. But he did an outstanding job. No further attacks on U.S. soil - tacitly, both bin Laden and Bush understood that that would be a no no. But attacks in Spain, Turkey, Morocco, the UK - that was all right. So you give a mediocre general a perverse incentive to keep chasing OBL without catching him, you quickly underfund an occupation in Afghanistan and withdraw soldiers from it, you invade Iraq, and you connect every slimey deal you make with hedge funders, every abridgment of liberty, every rule that would allow you to eavesdrop on Democrats or anti-war activists or whoever, and things go swimmingly. What will upset the equilibrium is Musharref going down. The only realistic option for the U.S., then, is to sit down and negotiate a deal with OBL and the Taleban - maybe put in writing the tacit deal that has been going on for six pleasant years anyway.
As a sweetener, I'd suggest aid to Al Qaeda. I figure the schizoid right will go for it if it is framed the right way.

Posted by roger | November 19, 2007 5:48 PM

I'm not sure what to make about headlines in the NYT touting the alliance between the United States of America and tribal forces. Is it 2007 or 1707?

We started this century allied with Europe and most of the free world and in 8 short years our best friends in the globe are tribes...factions we pay to be our friends.

Posted by joejoejoe | November 19, 2007 6:50 PM

"We started this century allied with Europe and most of the free world and in 8 short years our best friends in the globe are tribes...factions we pay to be our friends."

You're forgetting: Afghanistan's the "good" war, so our European pals are there too.

Posted by Fred | November 19, 2007 7:13 PM

We started this century allied with Europe and most of the free world and in 8 short years our best friends in the globe are tribes.

Maybe we can start calling them "nations", like we do with Indian tribes.

Then we can introduce our foolproof plan for eliminating the poppy trade: casinos!

Posted by brooksfoe | November 19, 2007 8:53 PM

We were right to depose the Taliban after 9/11, but that, plus leaving a residual capability to smack down any resurgence, should have been the limit of our ambitions in Afghanistan.

That, Fred, is how we got into this mess in the first place: deposing the Afghan government and leaving nothing in its wake. Being the instigators and fomenters of chaos in the Muslim world is a good way to get yourself 9/11'd.

And the obstacles to having a stable government do not particularly correlate with being "backward". The deal-killer in Iraq isn't that the country is "backward", it's that it has oil and a tradition of centralized power, and none of the players are willing to give up on those prizes. That's what will keep them killing each other. In Afghanistan, there's a longstanding tradition of decentralized rule and no particular source of wealth; there's no reason why a deal for autonomous ethnic regions can't be brokered. Along the lines of, say, the Swiss.

Posted by brooksfoe | November 19, 2007 9:09 PM

Fred dumps this whopper: "plus leaving a residual capability to smack down any resurgence"

Uh, what do you call the troops there now?

Are they succeeding in "smacking down any resurgence"?

Christ, what an idiot...

The Taliban should should never have been attacked. They were irrelevant to anything and everything, especially to getting Osama bin Laden. Had Bush worked to negotiate with them - or even bribe them - to hand over Osama under threat of attack, they probably would have done it rather than be attacked by the US. Instead, he demanded they hand him over and attacked them when they asked for evidence he was involved - which Bush couldn't produce. Today, the Taliban in Pakistan acknowledge that bin Laden was connected to 9/11, but they don't care any more.

The notion of improving conditions in the FATA would be brilliant IF it were done by the Pakistanis themselves over the last 20 years. Trying to do it with the US paying for it and training government troops is simply not going to work now. It's too late. Pakistan is doomed to fall into the hands of Islamists sooner or later, probably within five years as I've said before.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | November 19, 2007 10:34 PM

"That, Fred, is how we got into this mess in the first place: deposing the Afghan government and leaving nothing in its wake."

Whaaa? The Loya Jirga, the UN-monitored elections? the billions of dollars worth of reconstruction? The Nato assistance force? We've wasted plenty of energy trying to carry the 'white man's burden' in the fourth world land of Afghanistan. Wasted energy.

Posted by Fred | November 20, 2007 1:24 AM

Can you find a billion dollars in Afghanistan?

I can't. I don't even know if that's a good measure of if the money went there or not, but you can look around and there is...a road going from Kabul to Khandahar! That's a couple million I suppose. There is a school in Khandhar that educates exactly one horse from one of Karzai's warlords. A bunch of incredibly bad engineering (done completely by U.S. firms), buckled bridges, structures that crumpled under snow, etc.. I have no idea if we cheaped out or the American contractors we hired pocketed all the money and built skeleton affairs they knew were going to fall over. A bunch of poppy fields we are going to erradicate and send what's left of Afghan society on a murderous rampage that doesn't care much about anything else than getting the guy who did in their crop.

Such a joke.

Posted by Ed Marshall | November 20, 2007 1:55 AM

The question is, why are we fighting in Afghanistan (and Pakistan, actually)? And who is the ennemy?
When the UN endorsed the creation of Pakistan, a single country voted against it, Afghanistan. The problem was (and still is) the Mortimer Durand line that marked the frontier. Historicaly, the "pashtoonistan" is a social and cultural reality, on both side of the frontier. In Pakistan, the North West Frontier Province is the translation on the ground.
Pakistan, land of the three "A" (Allah, America and Army) has another "A" for Afghanistan. To protect its back in front of India, to link its ports to Central Asia ressources, to control the pashtoons.
Today's war in Afghanistan is mostly fought in the pashtoonistan, against what seems to be mostly afghans and pakistanis and a few foreigners from central asia, mostly, and middle east.
In such a context, what is the goal of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan?
The afghan government won't be credible in front of its own people as long as it exists only by the guns of foreign countries. Permanent foreign forces bases on afghan soil won't be accepted either.

A solution could come from the fast realisation of the pipeline project! But in order to avoid new conflicts, two lines should be created, coming, from instance, from Turkmenistan, one going to Pakistan through Afghanistan, the other crossing Iran.
Afghanistan had always be a crossroad, where civilizations connect. If the deal is fair for all, it could bring a need for stability for all countries involved.

Those same interests and actors that fueled the war in the region since 15 years as a force of peace...!

Posted by bert | November 20, 2007 3:45 PM