More on Afghanistan, the unwinnable war

China Hand has posted yet another great round-up of what’s been happening in Afghanistan and Pakistan recently.
He notes that just about everybody except the US’s leading politicians and Pakistani prez Asif Ali Zardari has now become convinced that the US-led military campaign against the Taleban– and, I would add, other anti-Karzai forces– in Afghanistan is unwinnable. (Zardari may or may not think it’s unwinnable. But for now, he is so deeply reliant on the financial aid he’s getting from the Pentagon that he carries on acting as though it can be won.)
China goes through a long list of people who now say publicly that the Taleban have to be negotiated with and cannot be destroyed or defeated on the battlefield. These include:

* Afghan prez Hamid Karzai,
* Taleban head Mullah Omar,
* The Saudis (who recently hosted a reconciliation meeting between reps of the above two parties),
* The British military commander in Helmand,
* The editors of Britain’s Financial Times,
* Britain’s outgoing ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Cowles,
* The Danish Foreign Minister,
* The UN Sec-Gen’s rep in Kabul, Kai Eide…

… So the only major relevant parties who still act as though a military “victory” is possible against the Taleban are… the two US presidential candidates, nearly all other members of the US political elite– and Prez Zardari of Pakistan.
What’s more, as this report from the Council on Foreign Relations’ ‘Pakistan Policy Working Group’ makes clear, a US military “success” in Afghanistan also requires that Washington use muscular means to force Pakistan to support the effort.

Which is really problematic. First of all, because most Pakistanis (like most Afghans) are deeply opposed to the US military’s forays around their country, all guns blazing. Secondly, because in Pakistan (as in Afghanistan), the US claims that what it’s doing is “supporting” an indigenous, democratically elected government. There is a circle there that can’t be squared.
(As, I might note, I pointed out back in January 2007, in my whole critique of the way US ‘Counter-insurgency’ doctrine is always couched as being conducted in legitimate support of a legitimately constituted “Host Nation” government… But then, what happens if it turns out that most citizens of said “Host Nation” don’t actually want you there? My rule of thumb: The only authorities that can legitimately lead counter-insurgency campaigns are the legitimate state authorities of the nation affected.)
So, back to Pakistan and Zardari. China Hand writes (in his always wonderful prose),

Zardari is—unfortunately, there is no nice way to say this—a sleazy, scheming creep unsure of his power and standing and therefore terminally addicted to non-stop political manipulation in order to weaken Pakistan’s democracy and divide and diminish the forces that might combine to remove him.
He is also America’s chosen client in Pakistan.
Zardari eagerly inherited [his late wife Benazir] Bhutto’s deal with the United States, by which she would become Pakistan’s civilian leader and take the burden of supporting anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda operations off the unpopular Musharraf’s shoulders and in return obtain America’s active financial and military backing.
And, for the time being, America is playing along with Zardari as Bhutto’s heir.
But for how long?
That brings us the second problem.
Pakistan is on the verge of political and economic free-fall. Zardari is unpopular, he’s lost the support of the second-most powerful political grouping in Pakistan, the PML-N, suicide bombers have moved out of the border areas and are ripping the heartland to pieces, and the economy is in tatters.
Bangladesh used to set the standard for South Asian dysfunction and a common insult in Pakistan used to be “not worth a takka”, the takka being the Bengalis’ hangdog currency.
Now the Karachi stock market has crashed, the currency has lost one third of its value, Pakistan is mentioned in the same breath as Iceland as a potential bankrupt state, the US is now of all times holding back on aid and demanding transparency and accountability, and All Things Pakistan tells us the Pakistani rupee has dropped below the one takka, just as our proud eagle-dollar now lies supine beneath the webbed talons of the much-mocked Canadian loon.
Viewed through one lens, of course, Zardari’s dilemma is not a bug—it’s a feature. An impoverished, unpopular ruler who needs a billion dollars a month to keep his country going makes for an abjectly eager client disproportionately reliant on US support.
But memories of Musharraf’s fall are still fresh enough in the United States to make US policymakers leery of Zardari—who doesn’t even measure up to Musharraf levels of intellect and fortitude—as the vessel for American hopes in Pakistan.
…Inside Pakistan, unfairly or not, a majority of Pakistanis believe all the troubles they are experiencing are blowback from NATO’s aggressive, excessively militarized campaign to subjugate the Taliban’s Pashtun tribal homelands on both the Afghan and Pakistani side of the border in order to secure the Karzai regime.
Apparently that outlook has been reinforced, not undermined, by the series of devastating suicide blasts that have shaken Pakistan’s heartland.
… To put it bluntly, there are very few if any people in Pakistan’s military, government, press, or general population who are willing to die for Hamid Karzai.
Within Pakistan, public opinion is firmly behind Nawaz Sharif, the canny politician at the head of the PML-N.
Sharif has staked his political fortunes on serving as the voice of Pakistan civil society, calling for decoupling from US security goals in Afghanistan and negotiation with the Pakistani Taliban.
His patron is Saudi Arabia, which injected him back into Pakistani politics last November (Sharif had been deposed by Musharraf and sent into exile) with the idea that he would offer an alternative to the GWOT Muslim-on-Muslim bloodbath promoted by the United States.
And, according to his favored English-language outlet, Pakistan’s The News, Sharif showed up at the Taliban-Karzai talks in Saudi Arabia.

China Hand notes this important fact about about Nawaz Sharif:

Nawaz Sharif—despite being the most popular politician in Pakistan, the former prime minister who presided over Pakistan’s emergence as a nuclear power, the man who controls Pakistan’s most important province of Punjab, the man who leads the democratic party, the PML-N, which is poised to rout Zaradari’s PPP if fresh parliamentary elections are held soon, and is the trusted interlocutor of the Saudis, who could make a real difference in Afghanistan–is the invisible man in US reporting on Pakistan.
I think that’s because Sharif represents an anti-US consensus that is so democratic, broad-based, and politically and strategically viable that reporting on him would provide an embarrassing contrast to the Zardari train wreck that we pretend will somehow save our adventure in Afghanistan, pacify the Pashtuns, and bring civil peace in Pakistan.

He continues:

So let’s review the problems with taking the military fight to the Taliban in Afghanistan and western Pakistan:
First, the consensus outside the United States is that our military policy is a failure.
Second, the consensus inside the democratic but terminally ineffectual Afghan government is that our military policy is a failure.
Third, the only significant political force in South Asia that supports our policy is an unpopular and incapable client, Asif Zardari.
Fourth, our policy is wildly unpopular inside Pakistan and Zardari faces a powerful political challenge from a viable democratic alternative: the experienced, popular, and savvy Nawaz Sharif, whose patron is Saudi Arabia and not the United States, and whose policies favor negotiation and accommodation over military support for US and NATO operations.
The logical inference one can draw from these circumstances is that democracy, regardless of its popularity inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, has not delivered the right leaders or the necessary resolve, and is not a friend to US policy.
And, even under the best of circumstances, the exigencies of a [US] war policy in Afghanistan and western Pakistan demand clients who are responsive, effective, and in control of their military and intelligence apparatus…

He concludes the post with this “hypothetical timeline”:

Four months for a new US administration to take power.
Three months for the foreign policy planners and war wonks to convince the president that NATO fortunes in Afghanistan and Pakistan need something other than two or three brigades (Obama) or adept insider nut-twisting (McCain) to succeed–a change in governments is needed.
Three months to pull the strings, remit the money, neutralize targets, and yank the most yankable chains of the western press. Frederick Kagan, call your office. Hamid Karzai, Asif Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif—watch your backs.
Then two months for the endgame, the announcements from the presidential palaces, and expressions of US government support, more in sorrow than in anger, with hope that this marks a turning point in the struggle.
Britain’s acerbic ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, is apparently thinking along the same lines, according to the leaked French cable reported in the IHT:
Within 5 to 10 years, the only “realistic” way to unite [Afghanistan] is for it to be “governed by an acceptable dictator,” the cable said, adding that “we should think of preparing our public opinion” about such an outcome.

It should take the United States about a year to kill two democracies. That’s my guess.

China Hand has done us all a great service here. Chapeau! I see only one weakness in his argument: He seems to believe that the desire for a robust, butt-thumbing military victory in Afghanistan that’s being voiced by all sides in the current US election campaign will still be a central feature of the governing policy of the new administration.
For my part, I see a good chance that that won’t be the case. I believe that both candidates may be quite sincere in what they’re saying right now, in the heat of the election. But next January, once they get into office and have had a much more extensive chance to have their people actually study the situation and start to formulate policy directives?
Also, the whole ‘GWOT’ thing has already slid off the front burner considerably over the past three weeks, what with the global financial-system meltdown and all. The financial crisis will still be front and center next January.
How will “looking and acting muscular” in Afghanistan actually help the next President to resolve the financial crisis? I truly don’t think it will. It is quite likely that by then, either man as president– but more so, Obama– would see the maintaining of a massive military force in the field in such distant, hostile terrain, as contributing hugely and in a continuing way both to our budget deficits and to poisoning Washington’s relations with other parties around the world– including, but not limited to, the Saudis– whose support Washington will continue to need if it’s to have any hope of restoring financial order without the whole west plunging into a deep and lengthy Depression…
So I guess I don’t see US policy post-January as necessarily following in a straight line from what we’re hearing from both major candidates today. Let’s certainly hope it doesn’t, anyway.