The Wrongologist

What’s
Wrong Today:

President Obama made a surprise trip to
Kabul on Tuesday to sign a Strategic
Partnership Agreement (SPA) between the United States and Afghanistan
in a midnight ceremony meant to signify the beginning of the end of a war that
has lasted for more than a decade. Here he is in a helicopter with Ryan Crocker
on the way to meet Hamid Karzai:

The timing of the
trip, administration officials said, was dictated by the desire of both
presidents to sign the agreement before a NATO summit meeting in Chicago later
this month. But it also came just four days before two big campaign rallies that
serve as the symbolic kickoff of Mr. Obama’s re-election bid.

 

“The reason the Afghans have a new tomorrow
is because of you,” Mr. Obama said to several hundred troops assembled in a
cavernous hangar, against a backdrop of American flags and several armored vehicles.

 

The SPA is an executive order, not a treaty, since the President did
not take it to Congress. On the Afghan side, it also has the look and feel of an
executive order since it was not approved by the Afghanistan parliament.
Although the White House assures us that it has the force of law, it clearly
falls short of being a binding treaty.

So What’s Wrong?

1.  
How is it possible
that we can keep troops in Afghanistan for another 12 years without the agreement
of the American people?

Today,
there are about 88,000 US troops in Afghanistan. That will come down to 69,000
by September, and then most of those will leave by the end of 2013. The
document pledges that the US will have
no permanent bases in Afghanistan, but the issue won’t even come up
again for discussion for about a decade. Will Congress authorize this idea? Will
there be any discussion of this decision in the Congress?

2.  
Where will we find
the funding for Afghanistan’s domestic military to the tune of $4 Billion/year?

Well, we
know that Afghanistan cannot afford the enormous army being created for it, so
it will go on being supported by ‘strategic rent’ from outside powers or it
will collapse.

    3.  
How will this be
successful considering that our current strategy in Afghanistan is wobbly at best.
As a reminder, it consists of:

          a. Continuing
the counter-insurgency strategy, (COIN) which means we root out the Taliban while winning the hearts
and minds of the Afghans.

There is little reason to believe that COIN
is succeeding. See the Wrongologist’s prior posts, here,
here,
and
here.

The Afghanis’ hearts and minds have been
un-won by the toxic combo of night raids, peeing on corpses, burning Qur’ans,
etc., etc.

  b.
Training a capable new Afghanistan
National Army (ANA).

The ANA, now 187,000 strong, has an 86%
illiteracy rate. It is disproportionately Tajik (Dari Persian-speaking Sunnis are
not respected by the majority Pashtun) and has little or no buy-in from
Qandahar and Helmand provinces (Taliban strongholds).

Only one ANA military unit is assessed as
able to fight independently, (out of nearly 100). It is over-equipped, under-trained
and lacking in initiative and esprit de corps. That this army could defeat the
Taliban when the US and NATO depart is not at all a sure thing.

 c. Using
drone strikes to hit al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders in Pakistan.

We know
that the drone strikes have created a strong backlash in Pakistan. When the US
air force inadvertently hit 24 Pakistani troops in December, the Pakistani
parliament stopped NATO supply trucks from using the Pakistan route from
Karachi to the Khyber pass, marooning
thousands of tons of military equipment intended for the Afghanistan
National Army.

The
Pakistani Parliament is recommending against letting the US ship military goods
through Pakistan, and against allowing further drone strikes.

d.
Finding a way to replace Hamid Karzai
with someone else in 2012 who will be less corrupt but still compliant.

As Andrew
Cordesman said on May 1 in a Center
for Strategic and International Studies article:

“Every day seems to
widen the gap between the goals the United States is seeking to achieve in
Afghanistan and its ability to achieve them. Even apparent progress, like the
Strategic Framework Agreement between the United States and Afghanistan, seems
more a warning on the inability to define specific goals, milestones, and
resources—coupled with growing restraints on U.S. military action—than an
accomplishment.”

Cordesman
goes on to talk about the Taliban’s strategy:

“They [Taliban]
don’t need to initiate attacks on ISAF and U.S. forces; they only need to wait
and let them shrink. They can recover their “momentum” at the political level
by minimizing direct clashes with U.S. and ISAF forces, building up their
capabilities in their sanctuaries in Pakistan, and focusing on increasing their
influence in Afghanistan through intimidation and terrorism, attacks on Afghan
officers and officials….As in Vietnam, the insurgents can lose every major
tactical engagement and still win control in some Pashtun areas once U.S. and
ISAF forces are gone”.

The Wrongologist recommends Cordesman’s article; it is certainly worth a close read. He believes that our
present strategy will almost certainly fail to secure the south and the east of
Afghanistan.
He suggests we need to concentrate U.S., ISAF, and Afghan government resources
on the areas already largely under Afghan government control. He argues that instead of “clear, build,
and hold,” strategy, we need to “retain, secure, and support” the areas we
currently control.

Afghanistan is the war we should have won, but we
blew it ten years ago, and there are no do-over’s. While the President is drawing
the war down, he is not getting us out. It is not clear what the Pentagon’s
strategy is. What plan will we follow to secure a positive outcome?

Asking the nation to spend 12 more years fighting a
rear guard action needs to be explained in terms that the American people can
understand and accept.

That was not
a mission accomplished by the President’s speech to the nation on
Tuesday night.