Re-Thinking Afghanistan

I would be all for military engagement here, if the government we were
protecting had the support of its own people.  But this war here makes
no sense.  Our troops are fighting and dying trying to prop up a
government that is corrupt, undemocratic and heavily involved in narco-
trafficking.  Hamid Karzai cheated in the last election.  And so, for
us to be fighting so valiantly to keep in power someone there who
cheated...well, that just does not make any sense any more.

Let's just send to President Karzai, send to the country of
Afghanistan, all the economic assistance they need.  But military
assistance?  It just doesn't seem to make sense any more.

Abel Malcolm
________________


The New York Times

October 28, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist
Don’t Build Up
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

It is crunch time on Afghanistan, so here’s my vote: We need to be
thinking about how to reduce our footprint and our goals there in a
responsible way, not dig in deeper. We simply do not have the Afghan
partners, the NATO allies, the domestic support, the financial
resources or the national interests to justify an enlarged and
prolonged nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

I base this conclusion on three principles. First, when I think back
on all the moments of progress in that part of the world — all the
times when a key player in the Middle East actually did something that
put a smile on my face — all of them have one thing in common: America
had nothing to do with it.

America helped build out what they started, but the breakthrough
didn’t start with us. We can fan the flames, but the parties
themselves have to light the fires of moderation. And whenever we try
to do it for them, whenever we want it more than they do, we fail and
they languish.

The Camp David peace treaty was not initiated by Jimmy Carter. Rather,
the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat, went to Jerusalem in 1977 after
Israel’s Moshe Dayan held secret talks in Morocco with Sadat aide
Hassan Tuhami. Both countries decided that they wanted a separate
peace — outside of the Geneva comprehensive framework pushed by Mr.
Carter.

The Oslo peace accords started in Oslo — in secret 1992-93 talks
between the P.L.O. representative, Ahmed Qurei, and the Israeli
professor Yair Hirschfeld. Israelis and Palestinians alone hammered
out a broad deal and unveiled it to the Americans in the summer of
1993, much to Washington’s surprise.

The U.S. surge in Iraq was militarily successful because it was
preceded by an Iraqi uprising sparked by a Sunni tribal leader, Sheik
Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, who, using his own forces, set out to evict
the pro-Al Qaeda thugs who had taken over Sunni towns and were
imposing a fundamentalist lifestyle. The U.S. surge gave that movement
vital assistance to grow. But the spark was lit by the Iraqis.

The Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, the Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and
Lebanon, the Green Revolution in Iran and the Pakistani decision to
finally fight their own Taliban in Waziristan — because those Taliban
were threatening the Pakistani middle class — were all examples of
moderate, silent majorities acting on their own.

The message: “People do not change when we tell them they should,”
said the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert Michael
Mandelbaum. “They change when they tell themselves they must.”

And when the moderate silent majorities take ownership of their own
futures, we win. When they won’t, when we want them to compromise more
than they do, we lose. The locals sense they have us over a barrel, so
they exploit our naïve goodwill and presence to loot their countries
and to defeat their internal foes.

That’s how I see Afghanistan today. I see no moderate spark. I see our
secretary of state pleading with President Hamid Karzai to re-do an
election that he blatantly stole. I also see us begging Israelis to
stop building more crazy settlements or Palestinians to come to
negotiations. It is time to stop subsidizing their nonsense. Let them
all start paying retail for their extremism, not wholesale. Then
you’ll see movement.

What if we shrink our presence in Afghanistan? Won’t Al Qaeda return,
the Taliban be energized and Pakistan collapse? Maybe. Maybe not. This
gets to my second principle: In the Middle East, all politics —
everything that matters — happens the morning after the morning after.
Be patient. Yes, the morning after we shrink down in Afghanistan, the
Taliban will celebrate, Pakistan will quake and bin Laden will issue
an exultant video.

And the morning after the morning after, the Taliban factions will
start fighting each other, the Pakistani Army will have to destroy
their Taliban, or be destroyed by them, Afghanistan’s warlords will
carve up the country, and, if bin Laden comes out of his cave, he’ll
get zapped by a drone.

My last guiding principle: We are the world. A strong, healthy and
self-confident America is what holds the world together and on a
decent path. A weak America would be a disaster for us and the world.
China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long,
slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.

The U.S. military has given its assessment. It said that stabilizing
Afghanistan and removing it as a threat requires rebuilding that whole
country. Unfortunately, that is a 20-year project at best, and we
can’t afford it. So our political leadership needs to insist on a
strategy that will get the most security for less money and less
presence. We simply don’t have the surplus we had when we started the
war on terrorism after 9/11 — and we desperately need nation-building
at home. We have to be smarter. Let’s finish Iraq, because a decent
outcome there really could positively impact the whole Arab-Muslim
world, and limit our exposure elsewhere. Iraq matters.

Yes, shrinking down in Afghanistan will create new threats, but
expanding there will, too. I’d rather deal with the new threats with a
stronger America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/opinion/29kristof.html?em &
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/opinion/28friedman.html?em
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