As mentioned in the previous post, Steve Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations recently returned from helping shape Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s 60-day review
As mentioned in the previous post, Steve Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations recently returned from helping shape Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s 60-day review of Afghanistan war strategy. He shared his thoughts on a conference call with reporters this afternoon, and they weren’t encouraging.
Biddle published a piece in the American Interest recently that attracted a great deal of attention for conceding that the case for staying and fighting in Iraq is only marginally stronger than the case for leaving. On the call, he said he returned from Afghanistan still holding that equivocal perspective, but now “the situation is worse at the margins” than he previously thought. But the interests that justify the war, for Biddle, are not primarily about keeping Afghanistan from returning to a “state-scale haven” for international terrorism, they’re about keeping Pakistan stable. “If Afghanistan got no worse than it is today, our minimum national security interests are met,” he said. “The problem is if we were to leave today, I think the trajectory there would be substantially negative, and Afghanistan would get a lot worse.”
What’s to be done? Biddle said he was only going to speak for himself, but he said that overwhelmingly, the U.S. had to exercise “leverage” to “affect cost-benefit calculus of key officials” in the Afghan government, arguing that lack of political will to govern fairly and effectively was as much if not more of a problem than lack of capacity. For the security picture, Biddle argued that in the immediate term, McChrystal should pick a small number of “critical provinces” — Khost, Helmand and Kandahar — and throw “a lot more people, Afghan and U.S.” there. They would have between 12 and 24 months to secure the population there — not necessarily win, he said, but improve security. If they can’t, then he said he’d say it’s time to withdraw.
All this sounded like, well, Vietnam, to the call’s moderator, Gideon Rose. A war we have to fight not for direct U.S. national security interests but to stop neighboring countries from collapsing? “We’re only talking about one domino,” Biddle said, but he didn’t explain how securing Khost, Kandahar and Helmand would forestall the collapse of Pakistan next door. “But it’s an indirect rather than a direct goal,” Rose rejoindered. “In other words, you don’t care about Afghanistan as much as you care about Pakistan.”
“That is true,” Biddle said, contending that a withdrawal from Afghanistan that risked the fall of Pakistan would be viewed as a greater foreign-policy blunder than Iraq. “But isn’t that how we got… deeper into Vietnam?” Rose asked. “Because no one was willing to bite the bullet?” Biddle conceded the accuracy of a scary parallel.
“„I think that’s a very important analogy to keep in mind. I thought the analogy between Iraq and Vietnam was misguided and unhelpful. I think the analogy between *Afghanistan *and Vietnam is potentially a good deal closer. The underlying nature of this conflict is much closer to Vietnam than Iraq ever was. That doesn’t necessarily mean the same outcome is foreordained. And I think a central implication of all this for anyone who decides that this close call on the merits should not be resolved in favor of withdrawal is if you’re going to stay, you need to make darn sure that we get a better outcome than we did in Vietnam. That we fix some of the mistakes we made then and we do it right this way.
Biddle considered the prospect of a purely counterterrorism strategy, but not for long. “This whole goal of al-Qaeda using Afghanistan to strike the United States is not inconsequential, but is the lesser challenge,” Biddle said about an alternative, counterterrorism-focused strategy. “Whatever you think drones can do to keep Osama bin Laden’s head down, and to keep he and Zawahiri ducking, and perhaps suppress his [strikes against] the United States as a result, those techniques are a very weak device for keeping the Karzai government in office in place and preventing its replacement by a Pashtun Taliban alternative that would be a threat to Pakistan.”
But it was not clear from Biddle’s remarks why an American public that supports an Afghanistan war as a defensive and retaliatory effort against al-Qaeda for 9/11 would support a war to keep the Karzai government in power and to forestall a potential threat to Pakistan.
$1.3 trillion in federal spending unaccounted for, report finds
Despite calls for independent bodies to keep government accountable, the Sunlight Foundation’s most recent Clearspending report has found the federal
$1.89 billion given to states to fight HIV
The federal government Monday announced more than $1.89 billion in funding to states to fight the HIV epidemic with access to care and with more cash for the failing AIDS Drug Assistance Program. According to an HHS press release , $813 million of that money will go directly to the ADAP programming. An additional $8,386,340 will be issued as a supplement to 36 states and territories currently facing a litany of unmet needs and access issues.
1 Brigade and 1 Battalion
ISTANBUL – It’s 10 p.m. in the lowest level of the Istanbul airport. In 20 minutes I’ll be allowed to board my plane to Kabul, bringing me to the
1. Brian Schweitzer
As governor of Montana, Schweitzer doesn’t represent one of the most highly populated, high-profile electoral states in the country. But this
#1 in Conspiracy Theories
Andrew Young’s tell-all biography of John Edwards, hitting shelves next week, is surging in one Amazon.com category in particular. #1 in Conspiracy
$1 Million for Toomey
Pat Toomey, the former Club for Growth president and leading Republican candidate in Pennsylvania’s 2010 Senate race, has announced a $1 million haul in the
$1 Trillion for Fannie and Freddie?
That is the worst-case scenario, according to Egan-Jones Ratings Co., quoted in a Bloomberg article making the rounds. The agency says that if home prices
$1.3 Million for Brown
The GOP’s candidate in the Massachusetts special election raised more than one million dollars -- double the goal -- in a 24-hour moneybomb on the Ron Paul
Ten Loopholes That Can’t Make It Into FinReg
Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, wrote a blog post that lists the loopholes lobbyists most want inserted into Sen. Chris Dodd’s (D-Conn.)
Bachmann uncomfortable over earmarks ban
Republicans appear to have boxed themselves into a corner with their portrayal of earmarks as wasteful spending, as many of them have backed a moratorium on
Troubled mine holds hope for U.S. rare earth industry
China currently controls 97 percent of the world’s rare earth production. The Mountain Pass Mine could change that -- if it can overcome serious environmental concerns.