... The centerpiece of the strategy — and a big part of the rationale for sending 30,000 additional troops — was to safeguard the Afghan people, provide them with a competent government and win their allegiance.
Last fall, when Obama struggled over a fresh, post-Bush strategy for Afghanistan, that's what he decided on. Keep the insurgents at bay, prop up the government, and get a lot more helpful to the people of Afghanistan, including the Taliban who live and work among them.
As the New York Times reports today, that somewhat idealistic plan hasn't been productive. So now what?
What has turned out to work well is an approach American officials have talked much less about: counterterrorism, military-speak for the targeted killings of insurgents from Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Faced with that reality, and the pressure of a self-imposed deadline to begin withdrawing troops by July 2011, the Obama administration is starting to count more heavily on the strategy of hunting down insurgents.
Obama is now moving towards an approach that should have been used all along here at home -- starting with our reaction to 9/11. Forget about the lavish and hamfisted military.
Use a well-targeted police action to remove the dangerous elements whether you're talking about Kandahar or Washington, DC. By the beginning of this year in Washington it was clear* that reaching out to Republican politicians -- our homegrown American Taliban -- was worse than useless. It wasn't getting the new president unequivocal victories. The opposition insurgency was gaining ground. Targeted political neutralizing, which is what our Repub-liban are using on us, is what our elected leadership should be using on them.
Imagine this: a disheartened and worried opposition.
American intelligence reporting has recently revealed growing examples of Taliban fighters who are fearful of moving into higher-level command positions because of these lethal operations, according to a senior American military officer who follows Afghanistan closely.
Judging that they have gained some leverage over the Taliban, American officials are now debating when to try to bring them to the negotiating table to end the fighting. Rattling the Taliban, officials said, may open the door to reconciling with them more quickly, even if the officials caution that the outreach is still deeply uncertain.
Fine. The options have much greater potential than the current kill-one-Taliban-and-fifty-civilians approach. Work on negotiation after you've gained leverage, after you've targeted them and scared them. Not before. And that's whether you're talking about the Pashtun Taliban over there or the Republican Taliban over here.
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As Frank Rich reminds us, the Pentagon Papers weren't the shocker that ended the Vietnam War and the WikiLeaks revelations won't be the tipping point for the Afghan war either. Both are more like anti-climaxes.
Most Americans knew or guessed the crux of the Pentagon Papers, too. A full year earlier the Senate had repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution; no one needed a “top secret” smoking gun by 1971 to know that L.B.J. had lied about the Tonkin incident. The papers didn’t change administration war policy because we were already pulling out of Vietnam, however truculently and lethally (the Christmas 1972 bombing campaign, most notoriously). In 1971, the American troop level was some 213,000, down from a peak of 537,000 in 1968. By 1973 we were essentially done.
Unlike Nixon, Obama is still adding troops to his unpopular war. But history is not on his side either in Afghanistan or at home. The latest Gallup poll found that 58 percent of the country favors his announced timeline, with its promise to start withdrawing troops in mid-2011. It’s hard to imagine what could change that equation now.Certainly not Pakistan. As the president conducts his scheduled reappraisal of his war policy this December, a re-examination of 1971 might lead him to question his own certitude of what he is fond of calling “the long view.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its 1971 Pentagon Papers coup. But another of the Pulitzers that year went to the columnist Jack Anderson, who also earned Nixon’s ire by mining other leaks to expose the White House’s tilt to Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani War. The one thing no one imagined back then was that four decades later it would be South Asia, not Southeast Asia, that would still be beckoning America into a quagmire.
*Edited to removed repetitious nonsense!
