" in addition to protecting the population centers, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will include developing the country and work to reduce the horrendous level of illiteracy rate that stands at 72 percent, in order to cultivate better educated Afghani leaders to run the country in the future " To avoid turning Afghanistan into another Vietnam- whish remains a possibility if the U.S. strategic thinking shifted to accommodate the variables in the theater of operations, thus president Obama is eager to avoid becoming another Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) in his second term. Also to avoid the possibility of ending up with a Karzai’s government that would look a lot like the South Vietnamese government which fell to the communist north in 1975 despite having twice the number of combat troops, and double the tanks and more than 1400 combat aircraft.
The U.S. strategy in Afghanistan can be understood as a four-pronged approach, or as 4 wars rolled into one.
1: The main purpose of the Afghani surge is to protect the major Afghani population centers which will be augmented by deployment of the 30, 000 troops of whom 15,000 will perform combat duties while the rest will be support and leadership troops. In terms of military strength, the 30, 000 U.S. soldiers will not be able to make a major or an immediate impact in Afghanistan, despite additional troops commitment from the NATO allies, which is due to the vastness of the country and the spread of the Taliban over hundreds of miles that the U.S. will end up relinquishing to them anyway. Another issue is the logistical hurdles that face troop deployment. Though Obama said that he wants the troops to be ready on the ground within six months, this however will present a logistical nightmare for the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) which is tasked to deploy those troops to Afghanistan while simultaneously retrograding or redeploying troops out of Iraq which were previously scheduled for redeployment by the end of 2010 as stipulated in the SOFA agreement between the U.S. and Iraq. This simultaneous deployment and redeployment out of and into two different theaters of two different wars has never been done in U.S. military history.
2: Special operations missions: This strategy applies lessons learned from the Iraq War. The appointment of General Stanly McChrystal to lead the war in Afghanistan is not a coincident. General McChrystal headed special operation units that conducted secret special operations missions in Iraq. Key to the new Afghanistan strategy is the secret assassinations and leadership decapitation strategy that worked in Iraq. Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward wrote in his 2007 book “the War within” that he obtained secret U.S. military documents that credited the success of the U.S. in Iraq to this “secret assassination war” , moreover, British newspaper the Daily Telegraph reported on this type of war that included secret CIA assassination squads and drones attacks as far back as 2003. The Telegraph reported then that U.S. Special Forces were trained by secret Israeli teams famous for its “Arabic-speaking assassination units. This type of war is well under way in both Pakistan and Afghanistan and is using a combination of drones’ attacks and CIA assassination squads on high value targets of the Taliban and Al Qaida leadership.
3: in addition to protecting the population centers, the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will include developing the country and work to reduce the horrendous level of illiteracy rate that stands at 72 percent, in order to cultivate better educated Afghani leaders to run the country in the future. This approach include building schools, provide clean water resources , building roads and clinics in the country side that will eventually, the U.S. planners hope, will win the Afghani people and woe them out of the Taliban’s influence
4: The U.S. Pakistan strategy: president Obama made it abundantly clear in his speech that Pakistan stands at the center of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. U.S.’s Pakistan strategy includes providing much needed upgrades in the Pakistani military arsenal and providing them with new and much more lethal weapon systems. In addition to that, the U.S. is assisting the Pakistani government in fighting its own Taliban which thus far has mixed results. In order to allay the fears of skeptical Pakistanis, president Obama dispatched Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a tour to Pakistan last month with a fat check book that included an immediate infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars in aid and another 7.5 billion dollars to follow which supposed to be used to improve the lives of Pakistani citizens. This approach, to engage the nuclear Pakistan on a deeper level, has never been tried by the U.S. before. Previous U.S. engagements with Pakistan were on the basis of need-only whereas the U.S. retains excellent and strategic relations with Pakistan’s arch enemy India. The Pakistanis; therefore, view the U.S. interests in helping their tattered economy and in rebuilding of their infrastructure with paralyzing suspicion. The U.S.; however, is trying to assure the Pakistani leaders and people that its excellent relations with India, the ever-present elephant in the room for Pakistan, will not come at their expense and that the U.S. engagement with Pakistan, this time around, will not be temporary but rather is long term. This long term U.S. commitment to Pakistan resulted from a U.S. strategic awakening that in order to win in Afghanistan, the U.S. has to also win in Pakistan.
*Written for Al Arabiya. Ali Younes is policy and defense analyst based in Washington DC. |
