Robert Dreyfuss: Obama's Great Afghanistan Gamble

[laststeamtrain]

Obama's Great Afghanistan Gamble

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

By Robert Dreyfuss

May 19, 2009 "Mother Jones" -- 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?

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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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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article22662.htm

[ShortnFiery]

1. Hello!?! You don't win OCCUPATIONS. The natives are going nowhere - we've already lost.

We just haven't moved our troops out of their nation(s) yet. :(

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. It's hard to imagine what Obama thinks he can do to fix that mess.