Steve Coll notes three conundra for the U.S. in AfPak

There have been few more eloquent advocates of McChrystal's proposed surge in Afghanistan than Steve Coll. Coll has hardly been gung-ho; he has authority because he has considered in depth the experience of the Soviets, the Vietnam analogy, the weaknesses of the Afghan government, the likely  impact of various courses of action on Pakistan -- and because he has recognized (and evinced) the need for humility from advocates of all positions.

So it's all the more sobering that immediately before and after Obama's unveiling of his strategy, Coll has acknowledged or highlighted several keys ways in which U.S. policy is walking a tightrope at best, undercutting itself at worst.   Coll's thinking on three conundra is below. The first two are published in an online chat at Foreign Policy (12/1); the last is from Coll's blog today (12/2).

1)  Combat vs. protection 

Tired Soldier: Won't increasing numbers of U.S. troops lead to more contact (combat) and further alienate the civilian population? In my experience in Afghanistan, more contact has always meant more fire support gets used, which means more civilians get killed, which turns the local tribal elders against us and multiplies our enemies. General McChrystal hasn't been able to break that cycle yet. Any sense that the new strategy avoids this trap?
Steve Coll: It's a good question. The McChrystal report suggests that he expects more contact and more violence initially, but then hopes to "hold" and "build" in a more passive manner in the major population centers, once they are cleared of Taliban cells and networks. The level of violence in the big cities even now is not very intense, but that may change as international forces try to make themselves more felt in places like Kandahar. Apparently the new strategy will also recommit to rural Helmand province, a poppy-growing region. I'm not sure whether the Taliban will see it as in their interest to go all out there, given that they have other targets that will be less heavily defended, but in the short run, I would expect violence in Helmand to rise for the reasons you suggest. Already, however, the international community has some tribal and other allies in Helmand to work with on their side of the conflict.

Steve Coll vs. Rory Stewart on the AfPak endgame

In almost perfect counterpoise on Obama's excrutiating decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan and Pakistan are two supremely well-informed former sojourners in that country, Rory Stewart and Steve Coll. Stewart sees futlity in what he casts as neoimperialist attempts to shape an alien culture; Coll outlines with great authority the dangers of letting the Taliban thrive, and advocates working to foster an Afghan government that negotiates and governs its way to a measure of legitimacy and adequate authority. They are not quite opposites, since Stewart would not cede the country to the Taliban and Coll is cautious and noncommittal about the degree of military engagement. But they're on different sides of the midpoint.

Considering the linked or not-so-linked goals of neutralizing al Qaeda and stabilizing Afghanistan, both emphasize the swallow-the-spider-to-catch-the-fly nature of pursuing the latter goal as a means to the former. But Stewart ravels out the chain of goals to mock it, while Coll demonstrates pretty powerfully that the concantenations are real. Here's Stewart's irony:

Policymakers perceive Afghanistan through the categories of counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, state-building and economic development. These categories are so closely linked that you can put them in almost any sequence or combination. You need to defeat the Taliban to build a state and you need to build a state to defeat the Taliban. There cannot be security without development, or development without security. If you have the Taliban you have terrorists, if you don’t have development you have terrorists, and as Obama informed the New Yorker, ‘If you have ungoverned spaces, they become havens for terrorists.’

Coll breaks this circularity by widening the chessboard. The key to Pakistani stability, he emphasizes, is peace with India:

American policy over the next five or 10 years must proceed from the understanding that the ultimate exit strategy for international forces from South Asia is Pakistan's economic success and political normalization, manifested in an Army that shares power with civilian leaders in a reasonably stable constitutional bargain, and in the increasing integration of Pakistan's economy with regional economies, including India's. Such an evolution will likely consolidate the emerging view within Pakistan's elites that the country requires a new and less self-defeating national security doctrine. As in the Philippines, Colombia, and Indonesia, the pursuit of a more balanced, less coup-ridden, more modern political-military order in Pakistan need not be complete or confused with perfection for it to gradually pinch the space in which al Qaeda, the Taliban, and related groups now operate. Moreover, in South Asia, outsiders need not construct or impose this modernizing pathway as a neo-imperial project. The hope for durable change lies first of all in the potential for normalizing relations between Pakistan and India, a negotiation between elites in those two countries that is already well under way, without Western mediation, and is much more advanced than is typically appreciated. Its success is hardly assured, but because of the transformational effect such normalization would create, the effects of American policies in the region on its prospects should be carefully assessed.
Against this backdrop, a Taliban insurgency that increasingly destabilizes both Afghanistan and the border region with Pakistan would make such regional normalization very difficult, if not impossible, in the foreseeable future. Among other things, it would reinforce the sense of siege and encirclement that has shaped the Pakistan Army's self-defeating policies of support for Islamist militias that provide, along with a nuclear deterrent, asymmetrical balance against a (perceived) hegemonic India.

More directly to the point of how the U.S. should proceed in Afghanistan, Coll one by one recouples the delinkages of those who suggest the U.S. can 'contain' al Qaeda without working hard to foster a coherent state in Afghanistan. First, most arrestingly, he debunks the notion that chaos or Taliban rule in large swaths of Afghanistan and Pakistan don't matter much, because al Qaeda could find a haven in any of a number of failed or extremist states:

It is simply not true that all potential al Qaeda sanctuaries are of the same importance, now or potentially. Bin Laden and his No. 2, Ayman Al-Zawahiri, have a 30-year, unique history of trust and collaboration with the Pashtun Islamist networks located in North Waziristan, Bajaur, and the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. It is not surprising, given this distinctive history, that al Qaeda's presumed protectors -- perhaps the Haqqani network, which provided the territory in which al Qaeda constructed its first training camps in the summer of 1988 -- have never betrayed their Arab guests.
These networks have fought alongside al Qaeda since the mid-1980s and have raised vast sums of money in Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states through their connections. They possess infrastructure -- religious institutions, trucking firms, criminal networks, preaching networks, housing networks -- from Kandahar and Khost Province, and from Quetta to Karachi's exurban Pashtun neighborhoods, that is either impervious to penetration by the Pakistani state or has coopted those in the Pakistani security services who might prove disruptive. It is mistaken to assume that Bin Laden, Zawahiri, or other Arab leaders would enjoy similar sanctuary anywhere else. In Somalia they would almost certainly be betrayed for money; in Yemen, they would be much more susceptible to detection by the country's police network. The United States should welcome the migration of al Qaeda's leadership to such countries.

Coll also rebuts the notion that the Taliban might not shelter al Qaeda this time around:

It would also be mistaken to believe, as some in the Obama administration have apparently argued, that a future revolutionary Taliban government in Kabul, having seized power by force, might decide on its own or could be persuaded to forswear connections with al Qaeda. Although the Taliban are an amalgamation of diverse groupings, some of which have little or no connection to al Qaeda, the historical record of collaboration between the Haqqani network and al Qaeda, to choose one example, is all but certain to continue and probably would deepen during any future era of Taliban rule in Afghanistan. The benefits of a Taliban state to al Qaeda are obvious: After the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States gathered evidence that al Qaeda used Afghan government institutions as cover for import of dual-use items useful for its military projects. Reporters with the McClatchy newspaper group's Washington bureau recently quoted a senior U.S. intelligence official on this subject: "It is our belief that the primary focus of the Taliban is regional, that is Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the same time, there is no reason to believe that the Taliban are abandoning their connections to al Qaeda ... The two groups ... maintain the kind of close relationship that -- if the Taliban were able to take effective control over parts of Afghanistan -- would probably give al Qaeda expanded room to operate." This assessment is consistent with recent history.

Coll has a nuanced view of history. He sees the parallels between U.S. attempts to pacify Afghanisan and the Soviet debacle there, but also the differences:

By comparison to the challenges facing the Soviet Union after it began to "Afghanize" its strategy around 1985 and prepare for the withdrawal of its troops, the situation facing the United States and its allies today is much more favorable. Afghan public opinion remains much more favorably disposed toward international forces and cooperation with international governments than it ever was toward the Soviet Union. The presence of international forces in Afghanistan today is recognized as legitimate and even righteous, whereas the Soviets never enjoyed such support and were unable to draw funds and credibility from international institutions. China today wants a stable Afghanistan; in the Soviet era, it armed the Islamic rebels. The Pakistani Army today is divided and uncertain in its relations with the Taliban, and beginning to turn against them; during the Soviet period, the Army was united in its effort to support Islamist rebels. And even if the number of active Taliban fighters today is on the high side of published estimates, those numbers pale in comparison to the number of Islamic guerrillas fighting the Soviet forces and their Afghan clients.
In other words, the project of an adequately stable Afghan state free from coercive Taliban rule for the indefinite future can be achieved, although there are no guarantees.

He also debunks the cliche that a cohesive state in Afghanistan is an impossible dream because it has never happened before:

Nor does the project of an adequately intact, if weak and decentralized, Afghan state, require the imposition of Western imagination. Between the late 18th century and World War I, Afghanistan was a troubled but coherent and often peaceful independent state. Although very poor, after the 1920s it enjoyed a long period of continuous peace with its neighbors, secured by a multi-ethnic Afghan National Army and unified by a national culture. That state and that culture were badly damaged, almost destroyed, by the wars ignited by the Soviet invasion of 1979 -- wars to which we in the United States contributed destructively. But this vision and memory of Afghan statehood and national identity has hardly disappeared. After 2001, Afghans returned to their country from refugee camps and far flung exile to reclaim their state -- not to invent a brand new Western-designed one, as our overpriced consultants sometimes advised, but to reclaim their own decentralized but nonetheless unified and even modernizing country.

The range of Coll's historical perpective - that the U.S. is not the Soviet Union (though prone to some of the same kinds of errors), that a coherent Afghan state is not a pipe dream, that the AfPak badlands are al Qaeda's native environment -- is really priceless. Equally nuanced is his sense of the possibilities and limitations of political pressure informed by goals that are political in the deepest sense: peace between Pakistan and India, inter-ethnic engagement and negotiation by the Afghan government.

None of this deep knowledge and balanced perspective means that Coll is necessarily right about the prospects of in some recognizable sense "winning" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But he's come closer than either Richard Holbrooke or Stanely McChrystal to articulating what success might look like -- and even how the U.S. and international community might help foster it.

Stewart's view is as complex, nuanced and informed as Coll's. He details the unlikeihood that the U.S. can defeat the Taliban outright; the equal unlikelihood that the Taliban could overrun the entire country; the impossiblity of "building" a central government whose writ extends in modern nation-state style across the entire country; and the paradox that a relatively strong state can be a more dangerous haven for the likes of al Qaeda than a weak one. He emphasizes what can't be done more than what can, and Coll does the opposite; but both see a mixed outcome and the possibility for limited cooperation/collaboration with the Afghan government, infused by humility.

But a fundamental difference remains. Coll defends assumptions and ultimately (if equivocally) embraces goals that Stewart sees as delusive:

The fundamental assumptions remain that an ungoverned or hostile Afghanistan is a threat to global security; that the West has the ability to address the threat and bring prosperity and security; that this is justified and a moral obligation; that economic development and order in Afghanistan will contribute to global stability; that these different objectives reinforce each other; and that there is no real alternative.

But why delusive? In the end, Stewart's critique devolves into literary criticism - an analysis of the syntax of two 19th century British statesmen with different world views. His preference for the language and world view of the skeptic is not an argument. He highlights many perhaps insurmountable difficulties of attaining the vision outlined above, but he stops short of really indicating how to attain a messy but viable alternative. Coll, in the end, engages facts on the ground more relentlessly.

UPDATE 11/1: In retrospect I don't think I did justice to Stewart's argument here, which is cleaner in his Senate testimony. His case for why Afghanistan is unlikely to achieve a reasonably unified national government any time soon is at least as detailed as Coll's to the contrary, as is his policy recommendation -- 20,000 troops, aid targeted to selected projects.

I do think that there's a logical flaw in one of Stewart's syllogisms: a) Afghanistan is 30 years behind Pakistan in state-building capacity; b) Pakistan is a worse danger to us than Afghanistan, precisely because it's a cohesive enough state to preclude full-scale US military engagement in its tribal havens for the Taliban and al Qaeda; c) we're actually better off with a weak Afghanistan than we'd be with a relatively strong one. That sequence ignores the fact that Pakistan is so dangerous in large part because of the long Afghan Civil War and Pakistan's engagement with (creation of) the Taliban. Stewart lampoons the chicken-egg nature of arguments for counterinsurgency-as-counterterrorism, the interchangeability of alleged cause and effect But his attempt to pull the cause and effect chain straight is no more convincing than that of the counterinsurgency theorists.

More to come on this.

The great wealth transfer

In March, Rob Atkinson pointed out that the housing bubble resulted not so much in wealth destruction so as in wealth transfer -- from homeowners to buyers, which also means from the older and wealthier to the younger and less wealthy. Perhaps the broader U.S. debt binge also accelerated wealth transfer from west to east, from the developed world to China, India and other emerging manufacturing centers.

Trade surplus countries were lending to U.S. consumers in order to sell their goods to them. Left unchecked, that's a road to ruin, akin to a nineteenth century London clothier selling on credit to the hopelessly indebted gentry and aristocracy who populate Victorian novels. But the trend was checked -- violently -- and early enough that few see any serious risk that the U.S. Treasury will not be able to meet its obligations.

The U.S. will be paying this debt off for a long time. Household, business and government deleveraging will slow growth. Looking backward, higher interest rates, checking voracious consumerism and reducing U.S. trade deficits, might have led to more gradual and sustainable growth in the trade surplus countries as well as in the U.S.

But still...the turbo-charge to growth in China and India and other emerging manufacturing centers may have been valuable. China at least is now in a position to develop its own consumer market. Painful and risk-laden as the rebalancing of world trade may be, the go-go years' boost to industry and expectations may still prove to have been a net positive for the high-growth, trade surplus emerging economies.

A lesson in humility from Robert Gates

A month ago, commenting on the G-20 meeting, the FT's Philip Stephens credited Obama with recognizing that "to understand the extent of US power – and it is still unrivalled – a president must also map its limits."

Defense Secretary Robert Gates elaborated that principle as the core strategy of U.S. foreign policy in a long interview with CNN last week.

He began with a primer on the power of apology and self-correction:

Q You've heard a lot of Republican criticism that he's going around the world apologizing about America. Do you accept that?

SEC. GATES: Well, I like to remind people that when President George W. Bush came into office, he talked about a more humble America. And, you know, you go back to Theodore Roosevelt and his line about speaking softly but carrying a big stick. I think that acknowledging that we have made mistakes is not only factually accurate - I think that it is unusual because so few other governments in the world are willing to admit that, although they make them all the time, and some of them make catastrophic mistakes.

And in speeches myself, I have said that at times we have acted too arrogantly. And I didn't feel that I was being apologetic for America. I just was saying because - I was just saying that that's the way we are in terms of being willing to recognize our own limitations, and when we make a mistake, to correct it, because I think the next line that I always use is, no other country in the world is so self-critical and is so willing to change course when we feel that we've strayed from our values or when we feel like we've been too arrogant.

So I think - I have not seen it as an apology tour at all, but rather a change of tone, a more humble America. But everybody knows we still have the big stick.

Gates proceeded to model this humility when discussion turned to Pakistan. He not only refused to patronize or denigrate Pakistani efforts against the Taliban but equated their failures with American failures in counter-terror and counterinsurgency over the past sixteen years:

Q But you do think that the [Pakistani] leadership gets it? Because I look at what's happened, Mr. Secretary. They have these Taliban forces, insurgency, 60 miles from the capital, 100 miles from the capital. And what they've done so far is move 6,000 troops from the eastern border to the western border out of an army of about a half-million.

This does not strike one as a full-throated response at every level that mobilizes the nation and its defense forces. Do you think that there is still a way to go for the Pakistani military in terms of focusing on this threat?

SEC. GATES: Well, I think what you have to do is look at it in some historical context. For 60 years Pakistan has regarded India as its existential threat, as the main enemy. And its forces are trained to deal with that threat. That's where it has the bulk of its army and the bulk of its military capability.

And historically, the far western part of Pakistan has generally been ungoverned. And the Pakistani governments going back decades would do deals with the tribes and the Pashtuns and would play the tribes against one another, and occasionally, when necessary, use the army to put down a serious challenge.

I think that - and partly it's because the Punjabis so outnumber the Pashtuns that they've always felt that if it really got serious, it was a problem they could take care of. I think the - that's why I think the movement of the Taliban so close to Islamabad was a real wake-up call for them.

Now, how long it takes them to build the capabilities, the additional military capabilities and the training that goes into counterinsurgency and so on and to develop the civilian programs that begins to push back in that part of the country, I think, is still a period ahead of us.

But I would just remind that, you know, the first al Qaeda attack on the United States was in 1993. We really didn't change much of anything we did until after we were hit on September 11th, 2001. So al Qaeda was at war with us for eight years, at least eight years, before we acknowledged that we were at war with them as well. And I think a little bit of the same denial has been going on in Pakistan. But I think that the recent developments have certainly got their attention.

Q Do you think they have the counterinsurgency capacity? Because at some level armies don't like to fight these kind of wars, as you well know. What armies like to do is have a big enemy so they can have a big budget and never have to fight a war. And that is, in effect, what has happened with Pakistan with India, which is they have this big enemy. It justifies a very large budget for the Pakistani military. But they don't actually have to fight, whereas this one, the insurgency, is one which they have to fight. They could lose. And so they worry, I think, that they even have the capacity. Do they have the capacity for real counterinsurgency?

SEC. GATES: Well, I think that they are at the beginning of the process of developing that capacity. But again, to provide some perspective, in 2003, when we went into Iraq, or even in 2001 and '02, when we went into Afghanistan, our Army didn't have that capacity either. We had forgotten everything we learned about counterinsurgency in Vietnam. And it took us several years to change our tactics and to get ourselves into a position where we could effectively fight a counterinsurgency.

So institutions are slow to change even in the face of a real threat. And I think that the Pakistanis are beginning to open up to others, to get additional help. I certainly hope that's the case. But I don't - it's not something where I would sort of blame the Pakistani army, because we went through the same process ourselves as we confronted a building insurgency in Iraq.

We had to learn all over again how to do this, and we had to acquire the equipment to do it effectively, completely outside the normal Pentagon bureaucracy, for the most part. So perhaps I have a little more understanding of the challenges that our Pakistani counterparts face than perhaps others.

Finally there was this discussion of the limits of our capabilities in Afghanistan -- and how to leverage the power that we do have:

Q You once said that the chief lesson you learned from 40 years in government was the limits of power. So apply that lesson to Afghanistan today. What do you think of - what are the limits to what America can do in Afghanistan?

SEC. GATES: Well, I have been quoted as accurately as saying I have real reservations about significant further commitments of American military - of the American military to Afghanistan, beyond what the president has already approved. The Soviets were in there with 110,000, 120,000 troops. They didn't care about civilian casualties. And they couldn't win. If there's ever an example that military power alone cannot be successful in Afghanistan, I think it was the Soviet experience. And I think there's a lot we can learn from that. And so I worry - it is
absolutely critical that the Afghans believe that this is their war. It is their war against people who are trying to overthrow their government that they democratically elected.

For all of its flaws and shortcomings, it is theirs. And they - we must be their partner and their ally. If we get to the point where the Afghan people see us as occupiers, then we will have lost. So the way we treat the Afghans, the importance of keeping the Afghans in the lead in many of these activities, the military as well as the civilian, I think is absolutely critical, so that they know - so that these villagers know that it's their people who are leading this fight. This isn't some foreign army coming in there, like all the previous foreign armies, to just occupy them.

Q But that means that a year from now, six months from now, you are unlikely to approve a request for additional troops in Afghanistan.

SEC. GATES: I would be a hard sell; there's no question about it. And I have not made a secret of that, either publicly or in government meetings. I think we will have - between the American military commitment and our coalition partners, the ISAF partners, we will have about 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. That's only about 10,000 shy of what the Russians had. And I think we need to think about that.

My view is it would be a far better investment to focus on building the strength of the Afghan army and the Afghan police, making sure that of the numbers of people we have there, there are adequate trainers so that we can accelerate the growth of those forces.

It's that combination of a certain level of international support for the Afghan military effort and the growing of the Afghan security forces themselves. It's that partnership that I think eventually will be successful in Afghanistan. As long as - if we try to do it all ourselves, I think it won't work.

If we try to do it all ourselves, I think it won't work. What was that, up top, about the U.S. learning from its mistakes?

Wherefore base? Bastardy base?

Andrew Sullivan, plumping as ever for Obama and McCain, submits to his own 'base instincts' while worrying about those of the electorate:

The chart above shows the remarkable polling similarities in John McCain's recent primary successes. After a slow decline, at some point late last year, voters sensed he really was their best bet on character, policies and viability. And so the battle now is really one between the worst base instincts of both parties and their most promising candidates for the general election. It's about the defensive figures of the past defending their turf and power against their own parties redefining themselves for the center. I'm hoping McCain and Obama manage to defeat these forces of entropy.

While he has totally bought in to the promise of Obama as a "uniter," Sir Sullivan, as many have noted, has some polarizing tendencies of his own (ya think?). I support Obama, but I recognize that there are plenty of good reasons to support Hillary. And while I admire McCain and have been disgusted by the campaign Romney has run, a large corner of my brain suspects that Romney would be a better president - I think he's ten times smarter than McCain, and intelligence counts for something if not everything.

Sullivan, like too many commentators, has succumbed to the assumption that if voters don't go his way they've gone to hell in handbasket. In the inscrutable mind-heart-gut calculus, many may conclude that Hillary's toughness and Romney's brains are qualities needed in a President. How can Sullivan, or anyone, be certain that McCain won't drive the U.S. off another pre-emptive cliff, or that Obama could handle a world-threatening crisis like, say, nuclear war between India and Pakistan? All of us should trust that the electorate is smarter than we are. Not infallible, but on the whole an effective decision-making engine.