Obama's Great Afghanistan Gamble

Everyone knows 17,000 more troops can't win the war in Afghanistan. So what's the exit strategy?

IF YOU CAN'T IMAGINE how President Obama intends to win the war in
Afghanistan, you're not alone. The challenge is daunting: Along with a
handful of war-plagued African states-Somalia, Burundi, the Democratic
Republic of Congo-Afghanistan is one of the world's poorest countries.
It's been racked by 30 years of war. Millions have fled into Pakistan
and Iran; tens of thousands more have been killed since the US-backed
jihad in the 1980s. "The reason we don't have moderate leaders in
Afghanistan today is because we let the nuts kill them all," Cheryl
Benard, Rand Corporation specialist and wife of former US Ambassador to
Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, told me in 2004, during an interview for
a book on political Islam. Obama's advisers say that their plan is to surge,
then negotiate-that is, beef up the US presence, stabilize the war, and
then seek a deal backed by regional diplomacy. But that raises a host
of questions, starting with: If negotiations are the answer, who's at
the table?

President Hamid Karzai:
His government is, well, mostly nonexistent. "Forty percent of the
country is either partly or entirely off-limits to the government and
to international aid groups," says Mark Schneider of the International Crisis Group.
Karzai has been derided as merely the "mayor of Kabul," but it's worse
than that: "He doesn't have much influence with parliament, so you
can't even say that he controls the capital," says Marvin Weinbaum, a
former State Department intelligence official who advised Obama's
campaign. Terrorists strike fortified targets in Kabul, from the Indian
Embassy to the Ministry of Justice, with impunity.

Karzai
is struggling to regain control. By skillfully appointing governors and
mayors, he's built a cadre of officials loyal to the regime. Still, in
the provinces, the government's writ is weak. Law enforcement and the
courts are virtually absent, leaving the field to criminals and drug traffickers.
Corruption poisons everything: Afghanistan is ranked 176 out of 180
countries surveyed by the corruption watchdog group Transparency
International; it produces more than nine-tenths of the world's illicit
opium; and criminal gangs reach from the most remote districts into
Karzai's own family-one of his brothers has been accused of involvement
in the heroin trade.

The security forces: The pre-surge force of 13,100
US and 56,420 NATO troops (including 24,900 Americans) has been unable
to secure Kabul and its environs, not to mention huge swaths of the
south. Some NATO forces do little fighting, and some, like Canada's,
are leaving. Afghan public opinion is turning against the coalition,
partly because of rising civilian casualties caused by air strikes.
Meanwhile the 80,000-strong Afghan National Army can't operate on its
own, while the Afghan National Police, also numbering around 80,000,
are dysfunctional, corrupt, and infiltrated by Taliban fighters; many are merely militiamen for local warlords.

The Taliban: In the 1990s, they rode to power by
mobilizing armies of orphans and refugees brainwashed in Pakistani
madrassas; toppled in 2001, they've come roaring back in rural areas
where Karzai's feckless governors and crooked cops are viewed with
disdain. They use threats, blandishments, and their cultlike ideology
to expand their power base, village by village and clan by clan. Yet
their hold is not as firm as it might seem. Polls indicate that 9 out
of 10 Afghans disapprove of the Taliban. And, notes Seth Jones, an
Afghanistan expert at Rand, "Most of the tribal, subtribe, and clan
leaders don't particularly care for the central government, and they
don't particularly care for the Taliban. They are willing to switch
sides." The hardcore Taliban, he estimates, may be as small as just
2,000 to 3,000 fighters. They do, however, have allies-other militant
factions, criminal gangs, and, of course, their own brethren beyond
Afghanistan's borders. In Pakistan, the Taliban shura
(council) is run by Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed true believer
who headed Afghanistan until 2001. Farther north, Mullah Omar's allies
include the Haqqanis, heirs to one of the more violent jihadist
factions from the US-sponsored war in the 1980s, and Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar, perhaps that war's most bloodthirsty combatant, both of whom
regularly dispatch fighters into contested areas surrounding Kabul.
(See Your Tax Dollars at War.)

The new players: With US advice and funding, Karzai
is trying to counter the Taliban through a pair of new initiatives. The
Afghan Social Outreach Program is quietly building anti-Taliban local
councils. A parallel program, the Afghan Public Protection Force, has a
pilot project under way in Wardak province to build quasi-official
militias not unlike the US-sponsored Sunni Awakening that mobilized
Iraqi tribes against Al Qaeda. J Alexander Thier of the US Institute of Peace is
hopeful. But, he says, "It scares the bejesus out of people because
this would result in the arming of Pashtun militias. It's extremely
risky."

Which gets us back to the question: What's the endgame of the
surge-and-negotiate strategy? Already there is plenty of negotiating
behind the scenes. Karzai has an ongoing dialogue with the Taliban,
with former Taliban allies in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan mediating, and
there are reports of talks involving Hekmatyar, too. But Obama's
advisers are split on whether those top-down negotiations will work:
Some suspect that there can be no deal as long as the Taliban think
they're winning.

An alternative approach gaining favor inside the beltway is
bottom-up negotiations to mirror the Taliban's village-by-village
strategy. "This is a country that historically has had very little
central government," General David McKiernan, the US commander, said
last November. "But it's a government with a history of local autonomy
and local tribal authority systems." Jones, of Rand, says the key is
winning the loyalty of rural Afghans. If it's done right-if America
maintains a light footprint, if tribal leaders see improvements in
security (as well as cold, hard cash), and if Afghanistan's meddling
neighbors can be persuaded to help stabilize the country-then the
loyalties of the Pashtun tribes may turn. If that happens, Jones says
hopefully, "They can tip pretty quickly." Of course, if the surge
causes more civilian deaths and further inflames anger at the United
States, they could just as easily tip the other way. Therein lies the
great risk of Obama's gamble.

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