Survival: Global Politics and Strategy, vol. 51, no. 5, October–November 2009, pp. 47–67
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US President Barack Obama’s current policy, in line with the prevailing Washington consensus, favours escalation in Afghanistan. The idea is that as the United States’ military presence in Iraq is drawn down, the use of force can be refocused on Afghanistan to forge a more viable state. The principal instruments of this policy are more American troops with better force protection (a customised version of the counter-insurgency ‘surge’ employed with ostensible success in Iraq) and firmer bilateral diplomacy with Pakistan. The administration’s policy appears to be overdetermined. The premise of the policy is that the United States must ‘own’ Afghanistan in order to defend its strategic interests. But that premise begs the question of whether US strategic interests actually require the United States to assume the grand and onerous responsibility of rebuilding the Afghan state. They do not.
American interests
The United States has two strategic imperatives in the region. One is to contain and ultimately debilitate al-Qaeda, which with the support of a resurgent Taliban on both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border has reconstituted its operational base and safe havens in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The other is to limit radicalisation in Pakistan, staving off the country’s political disintegration and ensuring that a reasonably friendly Pakistani government remains in control and that the country’s nuclear arsenal stays out of jihadist hands.
It was clear even before the 11 September attacks that among Islamist groups, al-Qaeda posed the most dangerous strategic threat to the United States. Thus, after 11 September, the American priority was to unseat a regime – the Taliban – that was providing sanctuary and operational support to al-Qaeda, in order to prevent further attacks. Afghanistan was therefore the prime target. US officials knew that Pakistan had discreetly supported the Taliban for reasons largely unrelated to al-Qaeda’s anti-Western and anti-American designs, and Washington’s objective vis-à-vis Pakistan, subsidiary to that of eliminating Afghanistan as al-Qaeda’s sanctuary and the Taliban as its patron, was to enlist Pakistan in ensuring the incapacity of al-Qaeda once coalition forces had succeeded in dislodging it. For a variety of familiar and well-documented reasons – American military commanders’ tactical misjudgements at Tora Bora, the intensity of Pashtuns’ cross-border kinship, Pakistan’s regional strategic interest in maintaining a degree of instability in Afghanistan, and Islamist influences in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate – this effort to harness Pakistan as a robust counter-terrorism partner has not succeeded. Thus, eight years after the 11 September attacks, the core al-Qaeda infrastructure has re-materialised in Pakistan.
Al-Qaeda remains the biggest threat to the United States in Central and South Asia, and counter-terrorism is thus still Washington’s most pressing task. There is little dispute on this point. The question is whether counter-insurgency and state-building in Afghanistan are the best means of executing it. The mere fact that the core threat to US interests now resides in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan casts considerable doubt on the proposition. Unlike the Taliban, the secular Pakistani government is not a viable target for the US military. Its relationship...
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Steven Simon is Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Jonathan Stevenson is a Professor of Strategic Studies at the US Naval War College. Both authors are Contributing Editors to Survival.
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