The Deadline
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
Obama is a smart guy. But smart guys are sometimes too smart and, in their over-smartness, take unwise decisions.
Afghanistan was the mess left behind by the preceding Bush Administration, which Obama inherited when he took over the White House in January 2009. Obama and his policy experts then went about conducting a three-month-long painstaking review of the Afghan war strategy, the results of which he formally announced on December 1, 2009, in a speech at the US Army’s foremost training academy, West Point. In it, Obama announced his decision to enhance US troop presence in Afghanistan by 30,000 but, more crucially, he gave a deadline to begin transferring US troops out of Afghanistan, starting in July of 2011. On June 22, 2011, he stated that he would begin drawing down troops in July, and troops would continue to come home “at a steady pace” until the end of 2014, when transition of the war’s conduct to Afghan security forces would be complete.
It is this self-imposed departure deadline that has operated to virtually shackle US leverage in the region, sending confusing and mixed signals. The announcement itself was self-defeating in concept. It limits US combat commitment while urging others to make an unlimited commitment. It is tantamount to a husband asking his spouse to maintain a lifelong commitment of fidelity long after the temporary marriage of convenience has expired.
The unintended consequence of the US deadline is that it emboldens its foes, eviscerates the resolve of its allies from other nations, and demoralizes its Afghan supporters. Apart from that, it leaves Pakistan with much-diminished incentive to latch on to fickle and erratic US policy agendas.
The over-plotted US policy on Afghanistan just won’t work. Interconnected with the deadline have been three other flaws also of its own making: encouraging India into Afghanistan, foisting Karzai and Zardari, and expecting the Afghan security forces to do the heavy lifting.
Encouraging India to raise its profile in Afghanistan, as the US is doing, is hardly a recipe to gain Pakistan’s trust, and foisting Karzai and Zardari as ramparts against radicalism only invited more radicalism.
Then there is this myth of the US military transitioning combat capacity to the Afghan security forces. The Afghan security forces can best be described as a rabble – ill-disciplined, grossly uneducated, mired in thievery, desertion-prone, and drug-addled. They are neither respected nor accepted. It is like preparing police to avert a military takeover.
Despite freedom of expression being enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and the lip service paid to diversity of opinion, the thinking culture of Washington is permeated with conformity. Without the challenging scrutiny that non-conformity brings, strategic errors are neither identified nor corrected.
Already, US-initiated unnecessary conflicts in the post-9/11 era have had a massive consequence on the American economy, costing it well over 2 trillion dollars. It would have been far cheaper and far less bloody to tackle occupation situations in Palestine and Kashmir. Afghanistan and Iraq were both wrong wars. The wiser war – which has yet to be fought – has to be fought in the power corridors of Washington.
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