National Intelligence Estimate Reaffirms Pakistan’s Role in Defeating Taliban

The latest National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) for Afghanistan and Pakistan report what most analysts of the region and the wars there already know: the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan won’t work unless the Pakistani government and military rounds up its Taliban allies and breaks the back of the various groups that constitute the Taliban in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.


The New York Times was leaked the documents and, yesterday, Elisabeth Bumiller wrote an intriguing piece announcing the findings of the reports:


“The reports, one on Afghanistan and one on Pakistan, say that although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.”


She further wrote that the NIE offers the “the consensus view of the United States’ 16 intelligence agencies, as opposed to the military, and were provided last week to some members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.” She reported that military officers are far more open to an optimistic outcome, given the military’s somewhat successful push into Kandahar, the local hotbed of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. The differing views on the likely short to medium outcome in the Af/Pak region might pertain to a widely held view within the intelligence services that there exists a strategic stalemate between the partisan and near boiling civil war there, unless Pakistan makes a move against its own strategic prerogatives. Those strategic prerogatives require that the Pakistan government and military aid and abet the Taliban in order to maintain, so-called, strategic depth in Afghanistan as a countermove to the perceived Indian intervention into Afghanistan’s domestic politics—and by extension, intervention in the very heart of Pakistan. The military fighting in the field might well require that the world be such that victory in Afghanistan and Pakistan is possible and indeed, likely. Otherwise, soldiers might think, why fight?


President Obama will release his December, mid-policy review tomorrow (Thursday December 16th). Along with the spate of news that fares badly for his efforts in the Af/Pak region, the recent death of his Special Envoy, Richard Holbrooke has surely dealt him a blow. Further, that his 30,000-troop spring time surge only worked into the field this past September can’t help the politics of the policy much. Whatever the merits of the surge, there’s simply not been sufficient for the surge to ramp up and show results, so say both intelligence analysts and military officers. And results matter: President Obama’s re-election hinges on a feasible exit strategy that politicos might credibly defend as victory in Afghanistan.


For all this and more, the political scene has been awash with the speculation that President Obama will segue to a narrower counter-terrorism policy directed against the insurgents in the tribal regions on the shared border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the meat of which Vice President Biden has long supported. This policy would demand fewer boots on the ground and would be consistent with both the 2011 draw down and the commitment to stay in Afghanistan and Pakistan until at least 2014.


The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) simply confirms a political fact that most analysts concerned with Afghanistan and Pakistan have known for at least a year. The War in Afghanistan is lost to the U.S and NATO, in every credible form, under every credible definition that applies to “loss”, unless Pakistan digs in and thrashes out the Taliban.


The trouble is that Pakistan will likely not turn out the Taliban. Leaders of the government and the military in Pakistan think they need those groups of militants to secure Afghanistan for their own interests after the U.S and its NATO allies leave. Indeed the recent Wikileaks diplomatic cables show that India is worried about the Taliban return to power.


A series of cables have surfaced that bear on conversations between Indian Defense Minister A.K. Antony and then-U.S. National Security Advisor James Jones.


One cable reads: “The Indian military is concerned by the situation in Afghanistan, Antony admitted, and stressed that the international community’s operations there must succeed because the India cannot imagine for a moment a Taliban takeover of its “’extended neighbor”. Pakistan’s government is worried that its Indian counterpart intends to push into Afghanistan to create a bulwark against Pakistan’s moves to spur on an ongoing insurrection in Kashmir and to engage in acts of terrorism or Indian soil, in the name of that distant insurrection.
Pakistan’s government may be right to worry. The leaked cables show that among India’s top concerns is that NATO and the U.S. supply and resupply their troops in Afghanistan through Pakistani land-routes. Indian officials worry that given the transport route, Taliban forces, known to bribe and buy off border guards, stand to siphon off a great deal of explosive material for their home made improvised explosive devices (I.E.D’s). Thus, India is worried that NATO and the U.S military indirectly funds the insurgency that they are fighting. Since the funding and supply chains seem near endless, so then is the insurgency in Afghanistan and Pakistan.


Suppose then that it were possible to pay off the Pakistani military to do the U.S. and NATO’s bidding and maintain strict and incorruptible border controls. Suppose the Pakistani military were offered unlimited caches of weapons and fighter jets and so on, along with financial aid to increase pay rates in the armed forces, for instance. Even then, it is unlikely that the U.S and its NATO allies would be able to buy out the Pakistani military and intelligence officials. (This is perhaps the greatest obstacle to curbing corruption in Pakistan’s government and military institutions.)


For, the Pakistani military’s ambivalence with the U.S and its NATO allies has little to do with money. The military is already awash with foreign aid funds, from major NATO donors. The problem lies in the perceived idea that the NATO is trying to steal away from Pakistan’s its source of credible deterrent from a possible Indian military invasion. Again, the Wikileaks cables show that the U.S and NATO have long been interested in removing a store of highly enriched uranium from Pakistan for fear of it falling into the hands of Taliban insurgents, and worse, Al Qaeda, based in Pakistan.


The strategic game afoot in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the one that the Obama Administration’s Af/Pak policy is meant to draw toward U.S interests, is intractably complicated. And, perhaps, irreparably geared against those U.S interests because, at the end, Pakistan is afraid that it will lose everything that it values-- its arms, its nuclear weapons, its very identity-- to India’s intervention. In this, it may not matter that the fear is nearly as unfounded as the belief that Pakistani government and military leaders will be able to control the Taliban that they have long bred and reared.

Faheem Haider is the Senior Blogger on Asia for the Foreign Policy Association.

WikiLeaks Disclosure Sets off Defensive Posture in the International Politics of Pakistan.

The recent news on Pakistan’s international relations that came out of the latest WikiLeaks document cache has been remarkably easy to bear.  Nothing untoward has happened.  All the players have played their parts. International politics between the U.S and Pakistan continues in recognizably similar ways as it did yesterday, and the day before.  Of course, strategic politics has nakedly come to the fore and understandably so; the real news however is non-news--that though everyone has grumbled, moaned, they have all walked away into their own corners of politics and chicanery to hold onto their share of power in Pakistan.

Indeed, each partisan to Pakistan’s politics is doing its best to preserve necessary ties while claiming priority for its own prerogative.  The media is leading the charge here, and both the central government in Islamabad and its U.S allies are on the defensive. The right is blaming President Asif Ali Zardari, pointing to Saudi King Abdullah’s criticism of the political situation in Pakistan—a rather veiled threat? -- that “when the head is rotten, it affects the whole body.”  The left and the center in Pakistani politics, the majority of Pakistanis therefore, are talking about sovereignty as they have always done. Already, judging by a series of opinion polls conducted by organizations like Pew Research and the New American Foundation over the summer, Pakistanis distrust the U.S intervention in Pakistan and blame the U.S squarely for the intensifying drone attacks in the tribal regions.  The new revelations that the U.S. had been intent on removing enriched uranium from a nuclear site and therefore, had been intervening in Pakistan’s favorite national capability, its nuclear arsenal, can only inflame that distrust and disdain.

So far, the Zardari administration in Islamabad has been loath to deal with the rightists in Pakistani politics.  Thus the right-leaning English language newspaper, The News front page piece chiding President Zardari drew an unsurprisingly mild response from the executive office: Zardari claimed that King Abdullah is like his older brother.  ”Call me names”, he seemed to say, “and I will turn the other cheek.”  He might well have added that he is doing this to maintain his precarious grip on power.

Consider that Zardari needs to brush aside this offensive rebuke. Hardliner Saudi Wahhabis help fund the Taliban in Pakistan, as much as they do in Afghanistan. Perhaps to contain the domestic criticism laid against him, King Abdullah spoke to appease the homebred Wahhabis; perhaps not. There is no doubt, however, that Zardari bowed before King Abdullah in order to staunch as much of the runaway support of the right as he can.  In order to not fall in the way of his democratically elected predecessor, and current opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif he needs to kowtow to the right.  Perhaps more importantly he needs to court the military to his side, though he has long bristled at that fact.

President Zardari and his ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) have been deferring to the military after a terrible summer of misrule and missed opportunities.  After the devastating summer floods that ruined farms and fertile fields in large swathes of the countryside, the people of Pakistan sanctioned the Pakistani military as the only functioning authority in the country.  (Note how many are clamoring for the seemingly misremembered clarity and purpose of General Musharraf’s rule!)  Since then Zardari and his Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani have been looking for a way to undercut the military for their political benefit.

Indeed, the recent news might have provided that opportunity.  Upon the disclosure that the U.S. had been trying to get rid of a cache of enriched uranium in Pakistan for fear that it would wind up at the disposal of militants, even the left leaning English daily Dawn that often defends the Zardari administration, raised the specter of Pakistan’s contested sovereignty. It’s front-page headline: “Pakistan’s nuclear capability a source of strength: PM”. At the same stroke as defending Pakistani national pride, Prime Minister Gilani tied together the fate of Pakistan with the fate of the ruling party.  Notice though that even though he spoke to the pride of place of the nuclear arsenal, and therefore of Pakistani national security, he failed to mention that the Pakistani military might have anything at all to do with securing Pakistan’s nuclear capability.

In response to Gilani’s bold move, the U.S. government, through the person of the newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, has argued for the continued cooperation of sorts that it enjoys with Pakistan, without backtracking from its criticism of the Zardari government and without disavowing the moves it reportedly made against Pakistan’s nuclear, military complex.

These moves and counter-moves raise the haunted ghost of previous U.S. interventions in Pakistan.  Those interventions have not gone well for the Pakistani people. How might the U.S. now defend itself against the claim that it is charging head-long into occupying Pakistan, when it has been shown to have interfered into Pakistan’s favorite public capability: its nuclear arsenal?  Little surprise then that Ambassador Cameron Munter moved to calm those in the military and in the political right and published an op-ed piece this morning in the right-leaning newspaper The News, announcing in part that:

Pakistan is an important strategic partner of the United States. Of course, even a solid relationship will have its ups and downs. We have seen that in the past few days, when documents purportedly downloaded from US Defense Department computers became the subject of reports in the media.

Moreover he claimed, the U.S foreign policy team:

…will continue to work to strengthen our partnership with Pakistan and make progress on the issues that are important for our two countries. We can’t afford anything less. I am in close contact with Pakistan’s leadership to make sure we continue to focus on the issues and tasks at hand. President Obama, Secretary Clinton, and I remain committed to being trusted partners as we seek to build a better, more prosperous world for everyone.

It is too early to tell if the U.S government’s overtures to the Pakistani people, over the summer and now, going forward, will smooth out years of implacably opposed opinion on unhelpful interventions in Pakistan’s politics.  Most Pakistanis think that American promises aren’t worth much. Promises of a longer stay coupled with more productive moves to ensure the safety of Pakistanis in the tribal regions, plans to spur on economic growth, raise education standards, fall to daily drone strikes.  But maybe there is yet a third way.

Faheem Haider is the Senior Blogger on Asia for the Foreign Policy Association.

Governments, Aid Organizations Look to Humanitarian Needs of 14 million Pakistani Flood Victims

The humanitarian needs of the victims of the floods are urgent and immediately obvious. Clean drinking water, food, shelter, clothing, and medicine to help maintain the dignity and capabilities of the tens of millions of people affected by the raging floods in the Khyber-Pahktankhwa Province. Unfortunately dense fog and a running forecast of heavier rain has stymied the efforts of numerous governments to provide much needed rescue and relief aid to the victims of this terrible deluge.  Indeed, the inability of public and private actors has a larger political and social consequence: militant organizations are reaching out the desperate people of the Northwest, thereby undercutting international efforts to build long-standing alliances with the more moderate people of the region.

The U.N. updated its estimate of the number affected by this disaster to upwards of 13 million. More than 1 million people have been displaced, while 1,500 or more individuals are dead.   Livestock have been destroyed, farmland submerged in polluted water and detritus.  However, even though fewer than 2000 people are known to have died, the number of people who require public and private assistance is much higher than the combined number of individuals who needed help after the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Some estimates suggest 30,000 to 60,000 people remain stranded in far-flung villages.  It is a tall order to get to all these people in record time.  It remains to be seen whether the logistical obstacles that serve to explain the government’s slow response can also serve as excuses to the government’s failure to protects its citizens at its time of most dire need.

Consider that though many tens of thousands have been rescued and many hundreds of thousands meals have been delivered, the need on the ground has far outstripped the resources available to counter the crying demand.  Recent reports suggest that humanitarian groups and charities already on the ground are seen as more effective than government efforts to push into washed-away villages.   The U.S. commitment of $40 million in aid and financial assistance has not registered in barren stomachs; the raging waters have pushed back any attempts to reach victims further down river (all of Pakistan stands to be a river). Indeed, the Pakistani government’s military rescue and relief efforts seems to have stalled for the same reason.  Taking advantage of this opportunity, Islamist groups already present in the region have reached out to the victims of the floods and have bitingly declared that they were on the ground days before the Pakistani military reached the Northwest.

A recent Associated Press report helps lay out the problem from Pakistan’s perspective:

“Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said Monday that the floods were a bigger crisis than the 2005 Kashmir earthquake that killed nearly 80,000 people and the army’s operation against the Taliban in the Swat Valley last spring that drove more than 2 million people from their homes.”

Reuters has reported that Islamic charities with ties to banned terrorist groups have rushed in to fill the gap left behind by the Pakistani government’s slow response.  By reaching out to the victims of the flood, Islamists seem to want to wash away the memory of their harsh crackdown on moderate Muslims in the region. The military’s tardiness thus plays against the government’s assessment of its duties to protect its people against the threat of Islamist co-optation.

Consider that groups like Jamaat-ud-Dawa, run by the leader of founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group held responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks have fed and clothed thousands of people long before the government were able to reach the victims of the flood.  These groups are surely placing bets that if their relief efforts pay off, they will gain a ready supply of recruits, who armed with their spiteful disdain for Islamabad, will fight what they perceive to be an ineffective central government and its international allies.

The people affected by the flood have some reason to hold such targeted views. To some extent the government’s explanation cannot excuse its broadly ineffective response to what is surely one of the most urgent public policy crises in Pakistan’s recent history.  That ineffective response undercuts any attempt that the U.S. and British governments might make to broaden their international security strategies to contain the growing threat of the migration of militant Islam throughout Pakistan.

Hence to cut off the militants’ reach and to bolster the claims of the international humanitarian project, it is very important that politically non-aligned groups help reach the frontiers of the flooding as soon as possible. There are aid groups on the ground that can help. The International Rescue Committee is a leading humanitarian organization that has mobilized its settled infrastructure to help all those left behind by the flood.  In country for over 30 years, IRC is singularly able to provide well-arranged, coordinated help in the areas most badly affected by the flood.  It has pledged to help provide clean water, shelter and essential supplies to the refugees of the flood.  

In the meantime millions of people have been evacuated in the South to make way for the devastation to come, without paying mounting costs in human lives. The price of food is sky rocketing and the mass migration of millions of hungry and desperate people into centrally located, shoddily constructed shelters is the perfect recipe for a public health disaster.  The worst is yet to come.  One hopes that the government will be better able to respond to that worsening crisis.

Faheem Haider is the Senior Blogger on Asia for the Foreign Policy Association.  This article originally appeared at pakistan.foreignpolicyblogs.com. 

The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Changing Nature of Warfare in the Middle East

The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Changing Nature of Warfare in the Middle East

By Dina Rezk

As a range of new and fantastic allied weapons systems descended upon Iraq’s desert terrain in 1991 with unprecedented precision, speed and technological prowess, militarists all over the Western world hailed the advent of a ‘revolution in military affairs’ (RMA). The combination of technology and information dominance would ensure that modern war would be quick and easy, with minimal casualties on both sides. As the end of the Cold War brought the Middle East and Third World to the centre stage of international conflict, the Western world was consoled by a futuristic vision of efficient and sanitised battles; computer-game style warfare.

Almost two decades on, following high-tech military escapades in Afghanistan, Somalia, Kosovo and Iraq, which have been neither clean nor efficient, this so called ‘revolution’ in military affairs raised a plethora of questions regarding the nature of change, its implications on the battlefield and its effects on international relations and strategic warfare more generally, particularly in the Middle East where the locus of Western power has been consistently and vehemently challenged.

Have we been fighting faster and cleaner battles in distant lands with the help of superior technology and information? In a military sense, there have certainly been unprecedented advances. The first Gulf War in 1991 saw the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and thermal night vision devices to allow coalition forces to exploit the desert terrain with twenty-four hour a day freedom of manoeuvre in all weather conditions. ‘Operation Desert Storm’ consisted of 43 days of strategic air attacks with precision bombing to gain air superiority and disrupt Iraqi command and control. It was the first time in the history of the British army that they knew where they were during a desert battle.

During the 18-hour firefight on 3-4 October 1993 in Mogadishu, Somalia provided another good case study of the use of real-time imagery under actual battle conditions. Equipped with the latest in portable tactical earpieces and handheld GPS systems, the American army’s Delta Force and Rangers fought under the observation of Orion spy-planes and Recce helicopters relaying live, infra-red video images back to command headquarters. Responding to Somalian retaliation in a heavily populated region of Mogadishu, commanders used their unprecedented situational awareness to direct a convoy to a crash site.

And yet we have several examples which show the limits of the RMA’s military achievements. Afghanistan aptly demonstrates the extent to which the Taliban and al-Qaeda were able to outsmart, avoid and adapt to US precision firepower. Similarly in 1999, Serbian Air Defence Operators did little more than turn their radars off to deny NATO aircraft the signals they needed to locate and destroy them. There has also been the problem of friendly fire, not surprisingly more of an occupational hazard now that commanders have their fingers on the trigger at such a great distance from the battlefield.

At a strategic level in the most recent invasion of Iraq (‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’) the 1st Marine Division raised the critical distinction between an awareness of an enemy’s capability, where high tech intelligence devices certainly can and do play a role, and the more complex need to divine the intentions of enemy commanders. The latter requires a distinctly old-fashioned, human dimension which has been somewhat eluded by the new, shiny glamour of the RMA. In the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom, this proved a critical failing since more often than not plans were based on or keyed into specific enemy responses. This is all the more important when the cultural framework within which your enemy is operating is fundamentally different to your own: superimposing Western values to counterparts in the Middle East has consistently led to critical predictive failures in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Understanding the way your enemy thinks and how they are likely to react reveals itself as a problematic shortcoming of the RMA thus far and shows that certainly at a strategic level, it has some progress yet to make.

Taking the strategic point a step further, the numerous wars of the past two decades seem to demonstrate that the long-term vision and strategy that was once demanded to justify war has been subdued by the reassurance that victory will be certain and casualties few. Whilst precision firepower and high-tech intelligence certainly makes the job of military invasion easier, it has come as an unpleasant realisation to the West that in order to lay claim to political victory, the victor must confront the defeated face to face. It is this victory that the US has yet to achieve most notably in Iraq and Afghanistan. That an invading and conquering army must now to be succeeded by an occupation force of an equal or larger size is perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this new ‘Western’ way of war.

The more worrying question of course, is what happens when the RMA catches up with the Middle East. Some argue that the military successes of the RMA derive from the fact that the West has only flexed its military muscles in less developed parts of the world where its strength and superiority is clearly marked. What will a war look like when both sides have stealth technology and precision cruise missiles? In the meantime, (true to the history of warfare and the many that came before them) guerrillas, insurgents and terrorists have been able to identify the weaknesses of the high-tech Western world and capitalise on them. So far they have been unnervingly successful, as 9/11 poignantly illustrated. It is not insignificant that the development and growth of international terrorism has correlated with the eruption and exercise of the RMA in the Middle East and Third World. The past two decades have shown that despite the hopes of military propagandists, Western military strength and superiority is neither secure, nor does it guarantee political power. In the same way, political power in the modern world no longer depends on military strength. It is this redefined relationship between politics and warfare that the international community must now contend with.

Dina Rezk is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge.

Next Week: Afghanistan: What is the current relationship between al Qaeda and the Taliban?

Shifting Sands is the blog of the Middle East International Affairs Programme at LSE IDEAS, analysing current events in the Middle East and contributing to the ongoing deliberations over policy prescriptions.

Amber Holewinski, Editor

Obama and Afghanistan: Lessons from the Last War.

If President-elect Obama makes good on his campaign promise to withdraw troops from Iraq, it would be a serious mistake to ship them to Afghanistan. The situation there requires a more comprehensive approach that emphasizes politics and diplomacy. Mr. Obama could do worse than to draw some lessons from the Soviet effort to find a political solution in the late 1980s.

In its own entanglement, Moscow was supporting a quasi-communist government and fighting a counterinsurgency financed and supplied by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and a number of others, primarily through Pakistan. Soviet diplomats, military officers, and security officials worked tirelessly to find an international agreement as well as to win over mujahadeen leaders and convince them to join a coalition government.

The Soviets faced formidable challenges: the party they were supporting was internally divided, the opposition was well supplied for a variety of sources, and the U.S. drove a hard bargain by refusing to stop sending weapons until the Kabul government stepped down. While Moscow wanted to end the war that was a drain on resources, men, and morale, it had to so without leaving a vacuum or a hostile government on its southern border.

When the USSR invaded Afghanistan it did not expect to create a communist state there. Rather, the goal was to create a stable and friendly government in Kabul. The thousands of party advisors sent to assist in spreading government authority, however, often ignored local traditions; by 1986 Moscow realized they were doing more harm than good. Moscow ultimately concluded that even the generous amount of technical and political assistance it was providing would not end the civil war there if major opposition leaders could not be brought into the government.

The U.S. invaded Afghanistan to strike at the heart of Al-Qaeda; once there, it engaged in a massive democratization program. The results of its efforts have been mixed, but it is clear that the country is becoming less stable, and the distinctly anti-democratic Taliban are gaining the upper hand. Given the circumstances, it is time to recognize that the U.S. should devote its energies primarily to creating a potentially undemocratic but nevertheless stable Afghanistan, something Mr. Obama is reportedly considering.

Even this more limited goal will prove difficult to achieve. However, the Soviet experience suggests the following steps will be necessary. First, finding a strong leader who can unite enough of Afghanistan’s various forces to keep the country from spinning out of control. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in part to remove the erratic and bloody-minded Hafizullah Amin, then spent six years trying to prop up the ineffectual Babrak Karmal before overseeing his replacement with Mohammed Najibullah. For all his faults (and he had many) the new leader proved strong enough to hold his own party together while using his clan links to open dialogue with some opposition leaders.

Second, it will mean taking an active role in bringing former enemies into the fold. Moscow got into this game a little too late, and its efforts were hampered by internal divisions about which mujahadeen leaders would be acceptable partners for the the Kabul government. In this sense the U.S. is somewhat better positioned – it already has similar experience in Iraq, where General David Petraeus was able to reach out to Sunni leaders in the Anbar province.

Third, it will mean forging a regional consensus on Afghanistan which includes Iran, Pakistan, Russia and the Central Asian States. In general the U.S. has been able to cooperate with each of these countries to a greater or lesser degree from the start of the NATO operation there in 2001. However, the Bush administration’s failure to constructively engage Iran and Russia, as well as its miscalculations in Pakistan, have created a murky picture in the region. (Needless to say, improving relations with Iran is doubly important if Obama is serious about withdrawing from Iraq.)

The Harvard realist Stephen Walt argues that going through with a planned expansion of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan may not be the best idea because of the relative costs involved. I would add that it is unlikely the U.S. or its NATO allies will commit the numbers necessary to pacify all the regions where the Taliban is active. If NATO were to take a more active role on the Pakistani side of the Pushtun tribal belt, which serves as a refuge for Taliban fighters, it would likely do more harm than good. It is useful to remember that Moscow also experimented with increasing troop numbers even as it was looking for a way out of the conflict in 1985, but ultimately Soviet leaders saw that the “surge” was only deepening their involvement, not leading to a resolution. It is safe to say that Afghanistan will only become stable once enough Taliban are co-opted to make a central government viable and the Afghan military (and tribal militias) are able to fight the remainder with U.S. supplies.

Soviet leaders were aiming for a similar scenario as they sought a way to withdraw their troops between 1986 and 1991. Almost all of the former participants (both people on the ground and at the center of decision-making in Moscow) I have spoken with believe they came close to succeeding. When the Geneva Accords were signed in April 1988, it was far from clear whether the Soviet backed government in Kabul would last more than a few months after the withdrawal. Yet after February 1989 the Afghan army, which rarely took a leading role in battles while Soviet troops were there, proved able to face down mujahadeen offensives on its own. Not only did the Kabul government hold most of the territory previously held primarily by Soviet forces, but the regime actually outlasted the USSR by four months!

Many Soviet officers realized early in the war that the task of creating a stable Afghanistan could never be fulfilled through military means. Eventually their superiors in Moscow came to believe the same thing and began pursuing both international diplomacy and internal reconciliation. When I spoke to Nikolai Kozyrev, the chief Soviet negotiator at the Geneva Accords and a specialist on the region, he highlighted this as the main lesson to draw from the Soviet experience. “Diplomacy allowed us to withdraw our troops,” he said, and pointed out that talks with the Taliban were absolutely necessary. In the end, the reconciliation would be up to by the Afghans themselves.

Further Reading:
For the current situation in Afghanistan and how it developed, I highly recommend the work of Dr. Antonio Giustozzi at the Crisis States Research Centre, including this paper. The veteran journalist Ahmed Rashid recently released a useful book on the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan, pessimistically entitled Descent into Chaos. A number of useful reports are available from the International Crisis Group. Finally, there was an interesting discussion on Iraq and Afghanistan this weekend in the New York Times.

A Long Goodbye

What Gorbachev’s effort to get out of Afghanistan can tell us about how a President Obama might face the challenge of withdrawing from Iraq.

Barack Obama’s progressive supporters have been upset by his recent statements on Iraq. Yet his recent “move to the center” on the war should not be particularly surprising. After all, no matter how opposed he may have been to the war in 2003, in 2008 he would be taking over as commander in chief of the world’s most powerful nation and military with commitments all over the world. His advisors have pointed out, no doubt, that how he handles the situation will determine how he is seen by his detractors at home and how the US is seen abroad for years to come.

A useful historical parallel is the Soviet experience in trying to get out of Afghanistan. Mikhail Gorbachev, a reform minded leader who came to power in March 1985, faced a similar dilemma to the one Obama will face if elected. He was opposed to the war but was afraid of the consequences a withdrawal of Soviet troops might have on Moscow’s relationships with its numerous allies and clients. On the day he became General Secretary he jotted down a note saying that the Soviet Union needed to find a way out of Afghanistan, but do it in stages.

A US withdrawal from Iraq would most likely lead to an increase in violence, at least in the short term. It could mean increased influence for Iran. It could mean that US allies in the region and beyond, no matter their views on the war, begin to doubt Washington’s commitment and look elsewhere for support. All of the above could become ammunition for conservatives at home, much like the collapse of South Vietnam became a rallying point for conservatives in the late 1970s.

All of this could happen even if the US stays in Iraq for 10 years. The long term consequences for the US, as well as the region, might be more severe. But politics is a short term business. President Obama would have to think about the 2012 election, when the consequences of a withdrawal could be used against him.

That is why I was not surprised to hear that Obama was “modifying” his stance on troop withdrawal. After an uproar from his progressive supporters, he explained himself at a speech in Georgia on July 8: “We have to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in…You’ve got to be sure our troops are safe, you have to be sure the country doesn’t collapse.”

Gorbachev made similar statements on numerous occasions between 1985 and 1989, when the withdrawal, in closed, official meetings. Here he is at Politburo meeting in February 1987:

We could leave [Afghanistan] quickly…and blame everything on the previous leadership, which planned everything. But we can’t do that. They’re worried in India, they’re worried in Africa. They think that this will be a blow to the authority of the Soviet Union in the national-liberation movement. Imperialism, they say, if it wins in Afghanistan, will go on the offensive.

Indeed, Moscow’s numerous allies were worried about the implications of a withdrawal and the collapse of a fellow communist state and made their concerns known to Soviet officials. Gorbachev felt Moscow could not take these concerns lightly.

Gorbachev spent several years trying to find ways to make possible a Soviet withdrawal that did not bring about the collapse of the communist regime in Kabul and the attendant blow to Soviet prestige. This included economic aid as well as a policy of national reconciliation to bring opposition elements into the Kabul government. Most of these, however, resembled efforts undertaken between 1980 and 1985. Only when it had become clear that these efforts were failing that Moscow really started to move towards a withdrawal, which finally began in May 1988. In the meantime, the Soviet 40^th army continued to lose over 1000 dead per year and many more wounded.

Contrary to the expectations of US intelligence officials and many in Moscow, the Kabul regime survived without Soviet troops as long as Moscow kept sending economic aid and materiel. Soviet prestige did not collapse as a result of the withdrawal – on the contrary, it allowed Moscow to improve relations not only with the United States but also with China and some nations in the Middle East.

Which brings us back to Obama. A delay in the withdrawal may be justified, but only if he has a serious plan of what will happen during that period. His desire to talk to Iran is a good start- that country is a regional power and will no doubt carry weight in Iraq long after foreign troops are gone. Yet if he has a concrete plan to make sure the Iraqi army is more reliable than it is now or that the government is more stable he has not shown it.

My fear is that President Obama may, like Gorbachev, spend precious time reinventing the wheel or waiting for already failing programs to work. The delay may placate some of his conservative critics, but it will also be costly in terms of live lost and treasure spent. And it may erode his political capital as well, making his task of improving Washington’s relationship with the rest of the world much more difficult.

Of course, the United States is not the Soviet Union, Obama is not Gorbachev, Iraq is not Afghansitan. Yet the concerns that leaders of powerful empires face in trying to extricate their armies from such wars are similar. Obama’s supporters who would like to see him bring the troops home will most likely be disappointed, just as those who hoped Gorbachev would bring the troops home right after coming to power were to see the war drag on for almost four more years.