Seems like my skepticism was justified.

This is a little scary. According to General McChrystal, the post-capture plan for Marjah, the Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan, is government in a box. The Guardian editorial page has looked inside the box and is unimpressed:

So what is in the box? Once the fighting has ended, Isaf has dedicated “district development teams” to move into Marjah. A US team is working alongside a group of Afghan civil servants which the Karzai government is allegedly meant to deploy. To encourage them to serve in what must be a highly risky secondment, their average monthly salary is being quintupled to about $300. Once all this is done, the plan is for the US Agency for International Development to help farmers plant crops by opening up the canal network, a project started by the US half a century ago, but which it has yet to complete. As if that were not enough, Hanif Atmar, the Afghan interior minister, urged elders from Marjah’s main tribes to give him their sons so that he can recruit 1,000 local police officers, whose job will be to keep the Taliban out.

I can see why the editors at The Guardian are skeptical. I am as well. So is Joshua Foust – a real Afghanistan expert – at Registan.net:

Which brings us back to the discussion about civilian casualties above. Considering how ISAF was embarrassingly unable to figure out why or how it was going to handle the civilians in Marjeh, right up to their inability to postbelievable or consistent population estimates, I’m left with the same thought I had two weeks ago, when ISAF signaled they were really serious about Marjeh this time: what’s the end game? Simply throwing an expatriate Helmandi who lived in Germany for 15 years into the mix – which is the current plan – doesn’t actually address the serious shortcomings the military-led governance issues have had.

Meanwhile, the civilians continue to bear the brunt of this offensive: the Coalition is destroying the barely functioning Taliban “shadow” government in the area, and so far their plan for a viable replacement haven’t moved beyond the vaguest of platitudes. Please, I am begging the readers here: if you know of some plan to leave something functioning in ISAF’s wake, something Afghan-led with a realistic chance of lasting once the 10,000 (or whatever) troops have to leave this tiny area, please let me know about it. Because right now it looks like they’re fighting with no end game in mind. And that’s pretty scary.

I guess there’s always luck…

The very awesome AfPak Channel needs an intern to help run the  Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative at New America.

More information is available here.

The next – and likely final – phase of the war in Afghanistan seems to be taking shape. The Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid optimistically calls it “fight and talk,” while India’s Brahma Chellaney pessimistically sees it as “surge, bribe, and run.” Both seem accurate, depending on your point of view.

The US media is reporting extensively on the upcoming US assault on Taliban in Helmand. The Asian press, by contrast, is focusing much more attention on Karzai’s outreach efforts to the Taliban, and the widening rift between Karzai and the Obama administration. Putting these pieces together allows us to make some predictions on the US’s exit strategy in Afghanistan: everyone gets something and no one gets everything.

• The US gets to claim that the surge has weakened the “bad” Taliban.
• The Karzai government gets to claim that it ended the war by negotiating with the “good” Taliban.
• The Taliban gets to say that it stood up to the US for 8 years and prevailed.

While this is clearly simplistic, I think this is how the narrative is likely to evolve. There are good and bad points to this “plan.”

Ending the war is clearly good. The US is never going to commit to the level of troops and resources required to defeat the Taliban. According to counter-insurgency experts, the US and its allies would need at least 500,000 troops to eliminate the Taliban, and I have seen no evidence that the US or anyone else is prepared for this level of commitment.

The bad – or should I say sad – point is that the exit strategy looks like theater: the US beats up the “bad” Taliban while the Afghan government negotiates with the “good” Taliban.” The whole effort seems like a largely a face-saving exercise for all parties. If the US government considered the Taliban an existential threat to US national security, it would not be considering an exit strategy that requires separating “good” from “bad” Taliban.

The war in Afghanistan has cost close to $750 billion and almost 40% of that expenditure was in the last year alone. It is sad that the end result of all of this is likely to be a negotiated settlement with the Taliban that the Obama administration might have been able to reach before spending all this money.

I recently came across a monumentally stupid program the US Agency for International Development (USAID) is implementing in Afghanistan, the Regional Afghan Municipalities Program for Urban Populations (RAMP UP). It’s a $600 million, three-year program for about 50 local governments in Afghanistan. I would call it the Fiscal Reform and Urban Development project or the FRAUD project.

Read the rest of this entry…

The Department of Defense is going to release its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) this week, setting out the strategic priorities of the Department of Defense. Abu Muqawama has posted an advance copy of it. Below are the priorities for dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

…prevailing against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and its border regions requires a comprehensive approach employing all elements of national power. Focusing resources where the population is most threatened, our military and civilian efforts align with the following primary objectives:

Reversing Taliban momentum through sustained military action by the United States, our allies, and Afghanistan’s security forces;

Denying the Taliban access to and control of key population and production centers and lines of communications;

Disrupting the Taliban outside secured areas and preventing Al Qaeda from regaining sanctuary in Afghanistan;

Degrading the Taliban to levels manageable by Afghanistan’s National Security Forces (ANSF)…

This policy seems at odds with the current situation. Here’s what the New York Times reports today:

Read the rest of this entry…

This week, there was a big conference on Afghanistan in London. President Karzai made clear that he intends to reach out to the Taliban. The US and other governments involved in Afghanistan seem to agree (to varying extents) that a political solution with the Taliban is the only viable way to end the insurgency.

How’s that policy working out? It would appear not too well. The Washington Post reports that Taliban leaders deny meeting with Kai Eide, the outgoing head of the UN mission in Afghanistan, even though Eide reported he met with them. Ron Moreau’s recent article in Newsweek makes the Taliban’s claim credible:

The London conference was a futile exercise. Once again Washington and its allies are looking for solutions that don’t exist: a new Karzai, bribing the Taliban, negotiating with the Taliban. No Taliban leader of any stature seems to have entered into negotiations thus far. U.N. special envoy Kai Eide reportedly met in Dubai on Jan. 6 with Afghans who claimed to represent the Taliban and said they could pass messages to the Quetta Shura, but it’s unlikely that their mission was actually sanctioned by anyone in the senior leadership.

I think it’s important to ask what’s plan B? Suppose the Taliban view Karzai’s willingness to negotiate as a sign of weakness? Perhaps the Taliban think they can win, so have no incentive to negotiate. The US government has already said that there is no military solution, only a political one. The assumption here seems to be that the Taliban want to talk. I hope someone has verified this because we seem to be heading in a very dangerous direction in Afghanistan. What if the Taliban don’t want to negotiate, but want to keep fighting? What then? Do we keep fighting a war we say we cannot win? Does anybody know if the Taliban wants to negotiate?

At this point many of you may be saying “Barak, there is no such thing as the Taliban, it’s highly decentralized.” Good point. But I wasn’t the one who brought up the idea of negotiating with them. I don’t want to be overly critical, but if the Taliban does not exist as a centralized, hierarchical organization, this makes negotiations even more difficult. If it’s a decentralzied organization, Karzai will need to strike deals with lots and lots of “Taliban” who may be little more than local strongmen. Moreover, do we keep fighting those who do not want to negotiate? This would seem to require some nimble policy choices and public relations management: the US isn’t fighting the Taliban, just the bad Taliban. That will probably go over as well as New Coke.