OBAMA'S UNWINNABLE WAR STRATEGY

Despite the plan to send more troops to Afghanistan, the Saudis are still engaged in secret talks with the Taliban to see if a negotiated settlement can be reached. Overall, however, White House strategy for what is an unwinnable war still remains unclear.
The White House seems to believe that if the Taliban can be softened up with a troops surge they will be more likely to accept a NATO brokered agreement. That thesis presumes the Taliban is the kind of enemy that capitulates easily but history has shown otherwise. The reality is that a surge of 30,000 troops means little in a country the size of Afghanistan. It will not radically change the dynamics of the war in favor of NATO.
One thing has become clearer with time and it is that the war in Afghanistan is no longer a war against Al Qaeda. That rationale wore thin when it was clear that Al Qaeda was based in Pakistan and the insurgents fighting NATO in Afghanistan were mostly Taliban from the country’s majority ruling tribe, the Pashtuns – the same Pashtuns who fought the Soviets to a standstill. The Taliban are not all Pashtuns but NATO has been fighting mostly in parts of the country traditionally run by Pashtuns, namely the east and south. Therefore, NATO has found itself up against a traditional Pashtun nationalism that promotes the principle that invaders should be driven out no matter what their reasons for being on Pashtun territory.
While the Obama administration has been unwilling to publicly admit that there can be no victory against the indigenous Pashtuns, it has to be aware that since 2002 the prevailing view among experts and senior British military figures has been that a prolonged war in Afghanistan has to be avoided at all costs because it is unwinnable. In 2002, there were angry voices in Washington when the British High Commissioner in Pakistan told journalists at a reception in Islamabad that Washington and London had agreed to seek a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. There were immediate denials by senior U.S. and British diplomats but the cat was out of the bag.
The High Commissioner stated that negotiations with the Taliban were the only means to end the war and that people should realize there were “good and bad” Taliban and talks with the “good” Taliban were crucial to a way forward. He also pointed out that the Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the top British commander in Afghanistan, shared his views. Throughout the Afghan conflict it has always been the British who have dared to announce publicly that it is a war with no victory. Brig. Carleton-Smith stressed that, while it was militarily possible to manage the Taliban insurgency, troop increases would never deliver a “decisive military victory.” He went so far as to point out that having the Taliban across the table discussing a political settlement was exactly what was needed to end insurgencies of the type NATO faced in Afghanistan. He stressed that people should not feel uncomfortable about the concept of a negotiated settlement. In making that statement he reinforced a long standing tenet of British colonial history, especially in the 20th century that negotiated settlements with insurgents were necessary to end wars in which victory was impossible and defeat inevitable. In 2002, Brig. Carleton-Smith realized that the Taliban and NATO could fight each other to a standstill and no side would win. That is exactly what has happened since 2002, except that this year U.S. generals warned Barack Obama the war was tipping in favor of the Taliban. Some sources have suggested Obama was told that if he wanted to push for a negotiated settlement leading to withdrawal, he would have to temporarily restore the balance of power on the battlefield so he could negotiate from strength, or even parity but time was not on his side.
If that is true, Obama will need to move quickly to begin serious negotiations and divest his administration and Congress of talk of victory and winning. That may not be possible with a Congress that has taken the country into two wars within a decade. Congress has constantly ignored dissenting voices about the potential for failure in Afghanistan. Some of those voices included senior British diplomats like Sherard Cooper Coles, once an ambassador to Washington. In 2009, in a cable to the French ambassador to Kabul, Cooper Coles noted that the Afghan government was not respected by the people and corruption was rife with security deteriorating.
There have been credible reports that the Saudis, who have been acting as intermediaries in talks with elements of the Taliban, have been asked to step up their efforts in 2010. The Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai has recommended talking to the Taliban but he runs a government riddled with corruption. There are well founded suspicions that some of his inner circle would be happy with a prolonged war in which they could continue to reap large profits from U.S. subsidies and be free to run an international drugs trade with protection from NATO.
As for the Taliban, they could see the surge as a challenge, knowing that in the long term public support for NATO’s Afghan war will erode, leading to a prolonged, unpopular war, and eventually a hasty withdrawal of the type the Soviets were forced to make. At the beginning of December 2009, the White House refused to respond to news reports that the Taliban had offered the Obama administration “legal guarantees” that it would not allow Afghanistan territory to be used as a base for attacks on other countries. In return, the Taliban wanted a timetable for the withdrawal of all foreign troops. The Taliban made the offer in a statement emailed to news organizations and, while no official comment was forthcoming in Washington, the Obama White House appeared to reveal its Afghan strategy in the form of two answers to a question asked by several media outlets. The question was what the response would be if the Taliban by its use of the phrase “legal guarantees meant it would sever ties with Al Qaeda. Defense Sec. Robert Gates said the Taliban would be unlikely to negotiate on U.S. terms until their momentum had been stopped. Sec. of State, Hilary Clinton, also dismissed the idea the Taliban would deliver up Al Qaeda at this stage. The statements of the two White House insiders implied an Obama strategy because on the premise that squeezing the Taliban militarily through his proposed surge would force them to agree to negotiate on U.S. terms. If that is the hand he is playing it will be doomed to fail because it suggests the U.S. position is my road or the high road. In response to such a narrow agenda, the Taliban may offer an alternative – a long, costly, unwinnable war. Time is not on Obama’s side and if he believes a troop surge will change the dynamics of the war in any significant fashion he is misguided. Brig. Carleton Smith was right that sitting down with the Taliban across a table is the only way to negotiate an end to the conflict and withdrawal of NATO. Tie is not on Obama’s side.