Afghanistan: How Much is Enough?

Authors: Steven Simon; Jonathan Stevenson

DOI: 10.1080/00396330903309857

Publication Frequency: 6 issues per year

Published in: Survival, Volume 51, Issue 5 October 2009 , pages 47 - 67

Abstract

US President Barack Obama's current policy, in line with the prevailing Washington consensus, favours escalation in Afghanistan. The idea is that as the United States' military presence in Iraq is drawn down, the use of force can be refocused on Afghanistan to forge a more viable state. The principal instruments of this policy are more American troops with better force protection (a customised version of the counter-insurgency 'surge' employed with ostensible success in Iraq) and firmer bilateral diplomacy with Pakistan. The administration's policy appears to be overdetermined.1 The premise of the policy is that the United States must 'own' Afghanistan in order to defend its strategic interests. But that premise begs the question of whether US strategic interests actually require the United States to assume the grand and onerous responsibility of rebuilding the Afghan state. They do not.

American interests

The United States has two strategic imperatives in the region. One is to contain and ultimately debilitate al-Qaeda, which with the support of a resurgent Taliban on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has reconstituted its operational base and safe havens in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The other is to limit radicalisation in Pakistan, staving off the country's political disintegration and ensuring that a reasonably friendly Pakistani government remains in control and that the country's nuclear arsenal stays out of jihadist hands.2

It was clear even before the 11 September attacks that among Islamist groups, al-Qaeda posed the most dangerous strategic threat to the United States. Thus, after 11 September, the American priority was to unseat a regime - the Taliban - that was providing sanctuary and operational support to al-Qaeda, in order to prevent further attacks. Afghanistan was therefore the prime target. US officials knew that Pakistan had discreetly supported the Taliban for reasons largely unrelated to al-Qaeda's anti-Western and anti-American designs, and Washington's objective vis--vis Pakistan, subsidiary to that of eliminating Afghanistan as al-Qaeda's sanctuary and the Taliban as its patron, was to enlist Pakistan in ensuring the incapacity of al-Qaeda once coalition forces had succeeded in dislodging it. For a variety of familiar and well-documented reasons - American military commanders' tactical misjudgements at Tora Bora, the intensity of Pashtuns' crossborder kinship, Pakistan's regional strategic interest in maintaining a degree of instability in Afghanistan, and Islamist influences in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate - this effort to harness Pakistan as a robust counter-terrorism partner has not succeeded. Thus, eight years after the 11 September attacks, the core al-Qaeda infrastructure has re-materialised in Pakistan.

Al-Qaeda remains the biggest threat to the United States in Central and South Asia, and counter-terrorism is thus still Washington's most pressing task. There is little dispute on this point. The question is whether counter-insurgency and state-building in Afghanistan are the best means of executing it. The mere fact that the core threat to US interests now resides in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan casts considerable doubt on the proposition. Unlike the Taliban, the secular Pakistani government is not a viable target for the US military. Its relationship to al-Qaeda is far more subtle and complicated than was the Taliban's. Whereas the Taliban embraced al-Qaeda as an economic benefactor in the absence of international legitimacy, and thus amounted to a full strategic ally of an enemy, Islamabad perceives al-Qaeda as a kind of virus: it is ultimately inimical to the Pakistani leadership, but the wrong kind of coercion could cause it to mutate into something more dangerous - to wit, a catalysing movement that fuels Islamic radicalisation in Pakistan and imperils the secular regime. This is one reason that Pakistan's counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency cooperation has been so erratic. Another reason is that helping to keep the Taliban a viable political player in Afghanistan serves Pakistan's regional strategic interests in providing Pakistan with strategic depth vis--vis India and in denying India a fully stable and cooperative regime there.

President Obama has cast Afghanistan as a neglected war of necessity in contrast to the putative war of choice with Iraq. Yet for the United States, any analytic distinction between a war of choice and one of necessity at this point is arguably untenable: if necessity is a function of an existential threat - that is, one that imperils the American state - the United States faces none from any quarter, so no war it undertakes is truly necessary in that sense. The Soviet Union, with abundant nuclear weapons and a vast, wellequipped military, was an existential threat. Al-Qaeda, though extremely dangerous and disruptive, is not.3 War, of course, may be on balance a desirable or advisable way of advancing American interests. In the case of Afghanistan, the implicit assumption of US policymakers is that pacifying the country through coercive and expansive counter-insurgency operations and a concerted effort to bring order to its politics will make it easier, or at least will not make it harder, to contain regional militancy and ensure stability in Pakistan. The United States plans to bring the American troop presence in Afghanistan to 78,000 by mid 2010, which would represent an increase of nearly a third over the mid 2009 number. Fiscal-year 2010 funding for Operation Enduring Freedom will increase by almost 40%, including a $7.5 billion bump for the Afghan security forces and an additional $700 million for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund, a flexible spending programme that allows for swifter and more tailored training and equipment for Pakistani counter-insurgency forces. Indeed, in August 2009 US commanders began pressing for more troops to be deployed at a faster pace.4

Whatever US officials might concede privately, the White House, State Department and Pentagon have thus far not acknowledged publicly the possibility that greater American intrusiveness in Afghanistan might mean less Pakistani cooperation. That, however, appears to be the case. To be sure, Pakistan has pragmatically responded to US pressure to thwart the Taliban in its tribal areas. But it is more significant in the broader strategic context that Pakistan has objected to expanded US military operations in Afghanistan on two grounds. Firstly, they would cause a cross-border spillover of militants into Pakistan and increase the counter-insurgency burden on the Pakistani military. Secondly, they would foment political instability in Pakistan by intensifying popular perceptions of American military occupation of the region and the Pakistani government's complicity with the Americans in suppressing a group that was not even considered an enemy of Pakistan. Indeed, in a July 2009 briefing, Pakistani officials made it clear that, however concerned the United States was about the Taliban, they still regard India as their top strategic priority and the Taliban militants as little more than a containable nuisance and, in the long term, potential allies.5

In this light, the realistic American objective should not be to ensure Afghanistan's political integrity by neutralising the Taliban and containing Pakistani radicalism, which is probably unachievable. Rather, its aim should be merely to ensure that al-Qaeda is denied both Afghanistan and Pakistan as operating bases for transnational attacks on the United States and its allies and partners.

Pitfalls of the current policy

The Obama administration's instincts favouring robust counter-insurgency and state-building in Afghanistan reflect the 1990s-era US and European predilection for peacekeeping, reconstruction and stabilisation, and the multilateral use of force for humanitarian intervention, deployed to positive effect in the Balkans and withheld tragically in Rwanda. To the extent that this mindset was premised on an expansion of the rule of law to hitherto poorly and unjustly governed areas, such as Somalia and Bosnia, it reflects the broader conception of counter-terrorism adopted after 11 September. Insofar as it favours collective action by major powers with the unambiguous endorsement of the UN Security Council, it is also consistent with the Obama administration's rejection of Bush-era unilateralism. And an aggressive internationalist approach to spreading democracy and the rule of law, notwithstanding the shortsightedness and inefficacy of the Bush doctrine, is admirable and in some instances appropriate.6 In this case, however, it is more likely to hurt than help. While a larger US military footprint might help stabilise Afghanistan in the short term, the effects of collateral damage and the aura of US domination it would generate would also intensify anti-Americanism in Pakistan. This outcome, in turn, would frustrate both core American objectives by rendering it politically far more difficult for the Pakistani government to cooperate with Washington (and easier for the quasi-independent Inter-Services Intelligence to collude with the Taliban and al-Qaeda), thus making it harder for the United States to defeat al-Qaeda. It would also increase radicalisation in Pakistan, imperil the regime and raise proliferation risks, increasing rather than decreasing pressure on India to act in the breach of American ineffectuality.

Counter-insurgency in Afghanistan also would probably fail. Counterinsurgency generally works only when the domestic government resisting the insurgents enjoys the respect and support of most of the domestic population. Rising perceptions of Hamid Karzai's government as ineffectual and corrupt, and especially suspicions that it rigged the 20 August national election, indicate that it does not have that kind of credibility among Afghans. On the operational level, provisional and qualified counter-insurgency success in Iraq is not a persuasive precedent for a comparable result in Afghanistan. One indirect indication is the difficulty the Obama administration is having in figuring out how to measure such success.7 While Iraq's prime insurgency challenges were essentially compartmentalised in the confined space and among the relatively small populations of Anbar, Diyala and Ninewah provinces and in Baghdad, Afghanistan's hazards permeate its Texassized national territory. Thus, applying the surge formula to Afghanistan, however it is adjusted, is likely to empower warlords, increase factionalism and ultimately make Afghanistan harder to sustain as a functioning unitary state. This would make Afghanistan more susceptible to being used as a strategic pawn by a number of regional actors, including Iran as well as India and Pakistan.

Comprehensively successful counter-insurgency in Afghanistan, however, is not necessarily required to fulfil the US counter-terrorism mission. It remains unclear whether a US-led counter-insurgency effort would aim to induce the Taliban factions to reject al-Qaeda, or some other constellation of tribes to join forces against the Taliban. But none of the factions share the kind of overarching nationalist self-interest that unified Iraqi Sunnis across tribal lines. They are more like Somali clans, and no visible daylight has emerged between the 'good' Taliban and 'bad' militants. Those advocating an extended counter-insurgency campaign note that 'the Taliban is not a unified or monolithic movement', that many Taliban militants 'fight for reasons having nothing to do with Islamic zealotry', and that each Taliban grouping has 'specific needs' and 'particular characteristics'.8 By the same token, however, these home truths indicate such a high degree of motivational fragmentation within the Taliban that no single faction is likely to gain complete dominance. Thus, power is likely to remain devolved, and Afghan factions, like Somali ones, will tend to worry about, and focus on, immediate rivals rather than external adversaries.9 To the extent that there is unity among Afghan factions, as with Somalis, it will be against foreigners.10

As for Pakistan, its unabashed central strategic concern is India, as it has been since the nation's inception in 1947. It seems likely that the upsurge of Pashtun nationalism and Taliban influence that threatens its stability has as much to do with the growing weight of the US presence in the country as anything else. Although it is worth trying to convince Pakistan's leadership that the Taliban rather than India is the most salient threat to them, even those calling most urgently for energetic US-Pakistani counter-terrorism teamwork concede that success on this score is not guaranteed.11 Pakistan has lost wars and territory to an India that is now armed with nuclear weapons and has tried to outflank Islamabad by insinuating Indian influence into Afghanistan. The Pakistani army would rather not be caught in the middle. The Pakistani general staff is unlikely to be persuaded that the best way to protect Pakistan's strategic stake is to abandon the allies that they have cultivated for decades to keep its western flank secure. In any case, it is the establishment of 'mini-Afghanistans' within Pakistan that is the problem, rather than the Afghan Taliban, which is fundamentally uninterested in waging expeditionary campaigns against the West.

Policy adjustments

Given the tenuous relationship between instability in Afghanistan and the graver threat posed by instability in Pakistan, the typically long duration of insurgencies and infrequency of indecisive outcomes, and the daunting list of prerequisites to US counter-insurgency success in Afghanistan, Washington should quietly develop a fallback strategy. Such a strategy should play to demonstrated US strengths. From the standpoint of the US domestic constituency to which American policymakers are ultimately answerable, the core concerns are still al-Qaeda and allied militants and the threats they pose to Americans.

Accordingly, Washington might continue its current policy of eliminating al-Qaeda's leadership through targeted killing. Although it is a controversial policy, the Obama administration's position in the freighted domestic policy debate on the nature of counter-terrorism is entirely consistent with it. Despite its declared post-11 September national security policy, which acknowledged roles for both law enforcement and military force in combating terrorism, in practice the Bush administration gave short shrift to law enforcement and strongly favoured military measures. Obama, both during the presidential campaign and after assuming office, decried what he and others viewed as the excessive militarisation of counter-terrorism in practice, and endorsed a more fluid, open-minded and pragmatic approach. While he would prefer to fight transnational terrorists with law-enforcement tools, he understood that that could not always be done effectively. In particular, he realised that the United States could not, practically speaking, dispatch FBI special agents to Pakistan's anarchical tribal areas and other ungoverned spaces in an unmarked Ford Crown Victoria to arrest al-Qaeda suspects and bring them back to federal district court in Washington for trial, so measures like targeted killing from drones were needed. Thus, Obama continued and in fact ramped up the targetedkilling policy when he became president.

The new president confirmed his instrumental view of counter-terrorism in an impassioned but grounded May 2009 speech, in which he stated for the record that the counter-terrorism tool chosen should fit the particular circumstances. Though he nodded clearly to the preferred status of the lawenforcement approach in focusing on closing the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and ending the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, he also argued more generally for 'strategically applying our power' as well as our principles, and doing so 'pragmatically'. The president further noted that 'absolutists' on the 'national security' and the 'law enforcement' side of the counter-terrorism debate were both wrong, and endorsed a middle course of 'common sense'.12 One key implication of the speech was that re-orientating American counter-terrorism policy away from the use of military force would render Islamist militancy more containable by demonstrating US restraint and emphasising American respect for the rule of law. The other, though, was that military force remained indispensable in certain circumstances.

It does appear that targeted killing, while only an operational tool and not a strategic solution in itself, can help manage a terrorist threat.13 Open-source information indicates that the recent US campaign in Pakistan, in particular, has been effective. Over the past 18 months or so, the United States has used two related types of unmanned aerial vehicles, the Predator and the faster, higheraltitude Reaper, which is capable of carrying two Hellfire anti-tank missiles and precision-guided bombs, to attack individuals and safe houses, eliminating about a dozen key al-Qaeda operatives and dozens more other militants. There were 36 such attacks in 2008 and about 20 in the first eight months of 2009. As of the end of August 2009, they had eliminated Abu Jihad al-Masri, al-Qaeda's intelligence chief; Khalid Habib, head of its Pakistan operations and fourth in the chain of command overall; Abu Khabab al-Masri, the group's ranking explosives expert; and Abu Laith al-Libi, al-Qaeda's commander in Afghanistan. One of the missiles killed Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in August.14

The success of the air-strikes has resulted from improved technical and human intelligence on al-Qaeda operations in the border area. The logic of the strategy is to make it increasingly difficult for al-Qaeda to repopulate its command structure, and US officials believe the programme has produced the broadest and deepest impact on al-Qaeda senior leadership in several years. Continued success could yield the practical neutralisation of al-Qaeda in Pakistan. Bureaucratically, the Obama administration has already set the table for adopting this strategy: for FY 2010, it has requested $79.7m for Hellfire missiles and $489.4m for 24 Reapers, nearly doubling the 2009 number.

The most conspicuous problem with the targeted-killing programme is that, in addition to killing key al-Qaeda operatives, it had claimed the lives of over 150 innocent civilians through August 2009. Targeted killing became a major point of controversy well before the United States undertook this programme, mainly as a result of a November 2002 US operation in Yemen, when a Predator drone fired a Hellfire missile into a car travelling on a remote road and carrying Abu Ali al-Harithi, a senior al-Qaeda leader, killing al-Harithi along with five others, and when the Israeli targeted-killing campaign intensified in response to the second intifada that began in 2001.

Lawyers by consensus regard transnational terrorism as a transgression falling uneasily between the cracks of traditional criminal law and the customary law of armed conflict, and targeted killing as a punitive remedy falling just as discomfitingly between the cracks of those two legal regimes as well as international humanitarian law. For basically pragmatic and prudential reasons, they are generally willing to accept that targeted killing is not tantamount to government-sanctioned political assassination, which has run counter to US policy since 1976. (In that year President Gerald Ford issued Executive Order 11905 barring assassination, after revelations of CIA attempts to assassinate several heads of state, notably Cuban leader Fidel Castro.15) They also concede the reality that full due process cannot always be afforded terrorists owing to the immediate threat some pose, and the operational impracticality of subjecting purportedly actionable intelligence to quasi-judicial review in very tight time frames.16 But a level of indiscriminateness that claims civilian casualties at an order of magnitude higher than legitimate ones is not only dubious in ethical and humanitarian terms, but may also be politically counter-productive. On this issue, the laws of armed conflict broadly apply, and they require that the use of military force be necessary, as a matter of self-defence, to eliminate a genuine threat and that it be reasonably proportionate to that threat.

Even in more conventional scenarios, two countervailing questions have also arisen. Firstly, is a combatant legally consigned to paralysis, or unduly high-risk ground operations, when an adversary, like the Taliban or al-Qaeda, chooses to use 'human shields'? Secondly, is some degree of indiscriminateness permissible in the name of strategic necessity? There are strong arguments for a negative answer to the first question and an affirmative answer to the second. Article 28 of the Fourth Geneva Convention provides that the presence of non-combatants cannot be used to immunise legitimate military targets from attack. While an attacker must try to avoid civilian casualties, some level of collateral damage may be warranted - as it was, for example, in NATO's air campaign against Serbia in the 1999 Kosovo War. Likewise, as Hizbullah fired missiles from populated areas in Lebanon against Israeli civilians in 2006, Israel had the right to take action against the ongoing threat, even if its operations would inevitably cause some level of civilian casualties. (Whether Israel's 2006 Lebanon war, in duration, intensity and the magnitude of civilian deaths, was proportionate and strategically sound is another question.) And it is difficult to contend, even in retrospect, that the United States and the United Kingdom could have feasibly avoided the 20,000 French civilians inadvertently killed in the air operations that prepared the ground for the Normandy invasion in 1944.

In light of these kinds of cases, the received view among ethicists is that the acceptability of the ratio of combatant to non-combatant casualties is a function of how critical the legitimate military target is and whether there are plausible and more discriminate alternative ways to remove the threat posed by that target.17 On this view, there may well be al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan whose killing might justify civilian casualties. Such questions remain controversial. But in the current situation of irregular warfare between state and non-state actors, for which there is less historical precedent, they are even harder to resolve. That does not mean, of course, that the gloves are off and anything goes. But it does suggest that the legal constraints that ought to apply to states battling those who resort to 'hiding in plain sight' are more nuanced than outright prohibitions, and that the loss of civilian lives in targeted drone strikes - though undeniably regrettable and tragic - does not perforce make the operations illegal or immoral.

The legality of targeted killing remains hotly contested between the national governments with the standoff targeting capabilities and humanitarian lawyers who view it as an evasion of at least three legal regimes and a practice which, if endorsed by law, raises the incentive to use force rather than resort to law to a dangerous and uncivilised degree.18 This debate will take time to resolve. But it seems safe to say now that, based on considerations of criminal law, international humanitarian law and the law of armed conflict, and from a moral as well as a legal standpoint, the only arguably acceptable substitute for due process in the context of targeted killing is a combination of accurate intelligence, assiduous target selection that prioritises minimising civilian casualties, and technically precise targeting. Review processes have been established for both assessing the accuracy of purportedly actionable intelligence and determining the feasibility of targeting a given terrorist with a minimal probability of harming innocent civilians.19 But the details of the procedures used and the level of scrutiny applied remain essentially secret, and certainly closely held by the US military and the CIA.20 Moreover, these procedures are reportedly routinely disregarded in the field, where mid-level operational commanders or CIA officers sometimes order drone strikes without higher approval.21 Finally, fears about the integrity of targeted-killing operations have arisen from disclosures that disreputable private military contractors have been hired to deploy missiles on Predators.22

The Obama administration has already made it clear that, as a matter of policy, arrest, detention and due process - in a word, law enforcement - are the preferred instruments for dealing with terrorists, while noting that the circumstances of the counter-terrorism campaign in Pakistan make their use in a way that effectively prevents and deters terrorism impracticable. Those circumstances include the inflammatory effect a major US-led military incursion would have on Pakistani public opinion, inspiring jihadism and imperilling the Pakistani government; the prohibitive risk and low probability of success of dispatching special-operations ground forces to attempt to hunt down and snatch terrorists in the physically forbidding and substantially ungoverned tribal areas of Pakistan; and the ambivalence of Pakistani security forces in rendering assistance.

To further ease the burden of defending its targeted-killing policy, the Obama administration might publicly amplify the operational necessity of the policy in three additional ways. Firstly, the Obama team could illuminate in public statements the nature and level of the threat posed by the terrorists targeted for drone strikes by providing details about their activities and capabilities. Secondly, the administration could make public the basic contours of the targeting-review process and thus open it to debate among policymakers, intelligence and military officials, humanitarian and international lawyers, and other interested parties. Thirdly, it could ensure that the process is followed more faithfully than it appears to have been and promulgate, in general terms, the steps it is taking to do so.23 In sum, having made plain its disposition towards judicious pragmatism with respect to counter-terrorism in general, the Obama team should now package and put forward its targeted-killing policy in particular more explicitly and systematically.

An appropriate statement would reflect the administration's understanding of the legally tenuous nature of targeted killing, its comprehension of both the moral gravity and the prudential necessity of undertaking it, and its acknowledgement and acceptance of the need for as much transparency as possible with respect to such a controversial policy. This statement would not, of course, intrinsically yield better intelligence, greater accuracy or fewer civilian casualties. Furthermore, the responsible services might well chafe against public-diplomacy priorities that tended to dictate greater rigour in the targeting-review process and greater transparency about particular review processes, namely, those that resulted in heavy civilian casualties. But a terrorist-detention policy shrouded in legal obfuscation and operational secrecy proved both a political and a strategic liability for the Bush administration. The lesson, which most soldiers and operators as well as civilian officials now surely understand, is that more, not less, transparency is necessary to sustain legally controversial policies in a democratic system which places a premium on political accountability.

Accordingly, some balance between procedural transparency and substantive secrecy ought to be achievable, and the administration should try to strike it. Greater accountability would tend to engender a more rigorous targeting-review policy and could, perforce, lead to fewer civilian casualties. American analyst Daniel Byman, looking at the Israeli experience, has outlined sensible procedures for assessing the operational validity of targeting particular individuals.24 There is no obvious reason that a review process similar to the one he has described, involving sequential consideration up the military and civilian chain of command, then a legal review by a Justice Department official, and finally a judgment by a special court modelled on the statutorily created Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, could not be systematically imposed across a wider range of target-selection criteria, including the likelihood of collateral damage.

A comprehensive policy would also have to account for political blowback. Thus far, the Obama administration has decided that the benefit of picking off al-Qaeda's leaders has outweighed the cost of inflaming Pakistani public opinion and prompting a major retaliatory attack on US targets. This assessment could well change if the Taliban gains territory in Pakistan, though discreet American pressure and the United States' new willingness to share technical intelligence with Islamabad seems to be producing a more vigorous Pakistani response. Furthermore, the cost-benefit analysis becomes more vexing when targeting al-Qaeda leaders in areas of Pakistan outside the ungoverned tribal areas, of which Pakistanis in general are less protective, is considered. For example, a drone strike in the city of Quetta in Baluchistan, the seat of Taliban power and suspected hiding place of al-Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, would likely prompt a higher level of public outrage than tribal-area operations as well as prot estations (disingenuous or not) from Islamabad that the United States had violated Pakistani sovereignty. It would also carry a higher risk of civilian casualties.25 Yet the very success of the targeted-killing programme in Waziristan led survivors to move into Baluchistan and would seem to necessitate an expansion in that direction.

Despite these uncertainties, there is at least some insurance built into the fallback strategy in that it would be conducted in a relatively favourable homeland-security environment. It is now vastly more difficult for attackers to enter the United States than it was in 2001. Customs and immigration services are more alert. A consolidated, if still flawed, watch list now exists. Both intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are better at sharing information and highly attuned to the threat from Central and South Asia, while aviation security is in a different league than it was eight years ago.26

The United States, of course, is far from invulnerable, and al-Qaeda has a well-appreciated protean quality that has enabled it to reconstitute itself in the past after suffering harsh blows. But the fact remains that the combination of decimating al-Qaeda's operational leadership in Pakistan and substantially strengthened defences at home will reduce the likelihood of a devastating jihadist attack along the lines of 11 September without the state-building effort in Afghanistan that the administration seems to have embarked upon. To the extent that the Pakistani government would be relieved of some of the burden of helping the United States dismantle a Pakistani strategic asset - the Afghan Taliban - that government might actually face less domestic radicalisation.

To be sure, the re-Talibanisation of Afghanistan would be undesirable in a number of ways. It would, for example, render Afghanistan more cooptable by al-Qaeda. It would also consign some Afghans, particularly women, to oppression and human-rights violations at the hands of the Taliban. But US failure to execute an ambitious counter-insurgency and state-building policy runs a prohibitive risk of playing into al-Qaeda's hands. Among the most cherished aspects of al-Qaeda's strategy is the 'management of savagery', which constitutes the title of an important jihadist manual - subtitled 'the most important stage through which the umma will pass' - propagated under the pseudonym 'Abu Bakr al-Naji' via the Internet beginning in 2004. In essence, the strategy calls for a war of attrition in which Muslims bleed and gradually enervate the United States and its allies by repeatedly drawing them into military conflict.27 Such designs raise the question of whether the United States, having intervened full-bloodedly in Afghanistan, will likewise occupy and attempt to reshape every underdeveloped country in which jihadists establish a presence. This sort of project would surely be impracticable. Yet given al-Qaeda's transnational cast and noted adaptability, jihadists under its influence will almost inevitably rise to political prominence elsewhere. In this light, it is unclear where US-led intervention might end, and how Washington could carry the burden of the Afghanistan precedent.

Finally, within the operational environment of Afghanistan and Pakistan themselves, the alternative to a minimalist approach is likely to be not the controlled and purposeful escalation envisaged by the current policy but rather a pernicious spiral with an indeterminate outcome. If the United States continues to respond to the threat of al-Qaeda by deepening intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban will rejoin with heightened terrorist and insurgent operations that bring further instability. Indeed, that appears to be happening. In August 2009, as US ground commanders requested more troops, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on CNN described the situation in Afghanistan as 'serious and deteriorating' and the Taliban as having 'gotten better, more sophisticated, in their tactics'.28

The United States' next logical move would be to intensify pressure, raising civilian casualties, increasing political pressure on the Kabul and Islamabad regimes, and ultimately weakening them, which would only help al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In fact, some evidence of this dynamic has already materialised, as the Pakistani government has faced difficulties in dealing with hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis displaced by the military campaign, undertaken at Washington's behest, in the Swat Valley. Certainly worries about Islamabad's ability to handle the Taliban on its own are justi fied. Some Taliban members are no doubt keen on regime change in favour of jihadists, as noted by Bruce Riedel, who headed up the Obama administration's 60-day policy review.29 But Pakistan's military capabilities should not be given short shrift. The Pakistani army, however preoccupied by India, is seasoned and capable, and able to respond decisively to the Taliban should its activities reach a critical level of destabilisation. Inter-Services Intelligence, devious though it may be, would be loath to allow the transfer of nuclear weapons to the Taliban.

Moving forward

Al-Qaeda's attrition strategy has a political as well as an operational dynamic: if the United States and its allies are continually goaded into drawing Muslim blood, more Muslims will be antagonised and therefore become ripe for recruitment. American strategist Jeffrey Record, a professor at the US Air War College, has argued that barbarism in waging war makes it difficult, if not impossible, for a democracy like the United States to keep its democratic credentials intact, and thus is hardwired to fail. Citing the French experience in Algeria and both the French and the American campaigns in Vietnam, Record notes that 'the stronger side's vulnerability to defeat in protracted conflicts against irregular foes is arguably heightened if it is a democracy'. This is because citizens of democracies tend to find military escalation - encompassing higher casualties, rising brutality and the near-inevitable erosion of democratic practices - increasingly intolerable and often reach their limit before victory can be secured.30

It follows that the most difficult challenge to sustaining a maximalist US policy, leaving aside substantive questions of strategy, is that of keeping the American people on board. The US government can sustain a deployment of some 75,000 troops, the funding it requires, and the public's tolerance for steady casualties for only a finite - and dwindling - period. If the US deployment in Iraq were reduced by two-thirds over the next year, the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan would still be about 125,000. To support that number, US military practices would require a force twice as large to be perpetually either preparing to deploy or recovering from deployment. That would mean one half of US ground forces would be indefinitely committed to Iraq and Afghanistan, while Afghanistan becomes the largest recipient of US foreign aid.

An effort on that scale would garner majority US domestic support only if the public sees likely victory and Congress, the White House and the Beltway punditry line up decisively behind the policy. The emerging trends are pointing in the contrary direction. As monthly and annual US casualties in Afghanistan reached historical peaks in August 2009, and the Afghan national election loomed, a poll conducted by ABC News and the Washington Post indicated that most Americans did not support an extended US military commitment in Afghanistan.31 Congressional Democrats are balking at anticipated requests for more troops.32 And even conservative columnists, like the influential George F. Will, have turned against a maximalist Afghanistan policy.33 Overall, increasingly strong perceptions of the Karzai government as inept and corrupt are making prospects that the United States could enlist it as an effective counter-insurgency partner and lend it the legitimacy required to rebuild the country seem more and more baseless.

The upshot is that only if the United States establishes a well-calibrated limited policy now will it have the political flexibility to sustain it over the longer-term and thereby to effectively contain the jihadist threat in Central Asia. If, on the other hand, the Obama administration promises more than it can deliver in Afghanistan, a reprise of Vietnam may occur: once failure becomes clear, domestic support will evaporate, the administration will be compelled to withdraw precipitously, and the United States will lose considerable traction in the region.

These factors suggest that the United States should limit its Afghanistan/Pakistan policy to counter-terrorism and disown country-wide counterinsurgency and state-building in Afghanistan. At the same time, Washington must remain highly sensitive to the dynamic whereby decreased military activity in Afghanistan combined with robust operations in Pakistan could induce al-Qaeda to return to Afghanistan and render it a main threat once again. In that light, any abrupt wholesale American military withdrawal from Afghanistan would be too risky. Instead, the United States should seek to facilitate a glide-path to a substantial drawdown - and with it fewer casualties and lower expenditures in Afghanistan - over the next few years.

Doing so would involve continuing to suppress al-Qaeda in Pakistan with selective and discriminate drone strikes and denying al-Qaeda access to Afghanistan. The former would require bases within Afghan territory from which to deploy airpower and special-operations forces against terrorists and terrorist infrastructure, as well as the troops and equipment to secure these bases. The latter would call for reinforced border security and force protection within Afghanistan, which in themselves would entail a surprisingly large number of soldiers. For these purposes, the United States would continue to bring extensive human intelligence and surveillance capabilities to bear on Afghanistan to detect and assess potential threats to American interests. To mitigate and eliminate such threats, the generous deployment of US special-operations forces to Afghanistan - which currently comprises some 50% of all US special-operations personnel - would have to be maintained over the medium term. Meanwhile, US train-and-equip programmes for Afghan security forces should be intensified in contemplation of a gradual and controlled hand-off of the domestic counter-terrorism mission to them when they are ready, as well as to prepare them for counterinsurgency operations, should the Afghan government wish to use them for that purpose.

The United States should also provide strong political and economic support for the Afghan government, which is likely to remain under Karzai once the votes of the 20 August election are counted and certified. Kabul, however, should be left to take the lead in managing its relationship with the Taliban (as well as anti-narcotics policy). With US encouragement, the Karzai government should make it clear to Pashtuns in the southern and eastern parts of the country that if they support insurgents or terrorists aiming to destabilise the Afghan or Pakistani governments, they will suffer financially and militarily. Again, some US forces would be needed to give such arrangements teeth, but not at the levels required for an all-out counter-insurgency. American insurance against a militant Islamist coup or an uncontrollable level of destabilisation also should be left in place. This could entail a standby stabilisation force with tactical air capabilities based in or near Kabul, along with a robust quick-reaction force.

That policy would reflect the reality that a deeply committed counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan is potentially counterproductive, probably unwinnable and in any event unnecessary. The United States can protect its interests and fulfil its international security obligations with a far more circumscribed counter-terrorism effort focused on Pakistan. Under such an approach, US policy would recognise Afghanistan as the residual problem that it has, in fact, become.

Notes

See, for example, Peter Baker and Dexter Filkins, 'Groundwork is Laid for New Troops in Afghanistan', New York Times, 1 September 2009.

See, for example, Bruce Riedel, 'Armageddon in Islamabad', National Interest, no. 102, July-August 2009, pp. 9-18.

See Robert Kagan, 'The President and the “Necessary War” Myth', Washington Post, 23 August 2009; Stephen M. Walt, 'The 'Safe Haven' Myth', Foreign Policy, 18 August 2009; http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/18/the_safe_haven_myth.

Helene Cooper, 'US Military Says Its Force in Afghanistan is Insufficient', New York Times, 24 August 2009.

See Eric Schmitt and Jane Perlez, 'Pakistan Objects to U.S. Plan for Afghan War', New York Times, 21 July 2009.

See, for example, Lincoln A. Mitchell, 'Beyond Bombs and Ballots: Dispelling Myths About Democracy Assistance', National Interest, no. 88, March-April 2007, pp. 32-6.

David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker, 'White House is Struggling to Measure Success in Afghanistan', New York Times, 7 August 2009.

Fotini Christia and Michael Semple, 'Flipping the Taliban', Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 4, July-August 2009, pp. 40-41.

See Steven Simon, 'Can the Right War Be Won?', Foreign Affairs, vol. 88, no. 4, July-August 2009, pp. 136-7.

See, for example, David Kilcullen, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Riedel, 'Armageddon in Islamabad', p. 18.

'Remarks by the President on National Security', 21 May 2009, The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-On-National-Security-5-21-09/.

See, for example, Daniel Byman, 'Do Targeted Killings Work?', Foreign Affairs, vol. 85, no. 2, March-April 2006, pp. 95-111; Steven R. David, 'Israel's Policy of Targeted Killing', Ethics and International Affairs, vol. 17, no. 1, April 2003, pp. 111-26.

Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, 'C.I.A. Missile Strike May Have Killed Pakistan's Taliban Leader, Officials Say', New York Times, 7 August 2009, p. A7; Salman Masood, 'Taliban in Pakistan Confirm That Their Leader Is Dead', New York Times, 25 August 2009.

The prohibition has been skirted in a number of instances by means of military 'leadership strikes' targeting political leaders, such as the US bombing of Libya in 1986, which clearly targeted Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi, and the opening salvos of the Iraq War in 2003, which were unabashedly intended to kill Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

See, for example, Kenneth Anderson, 'Targeted Killing in U.S. Counterterrorism Law and Strategy', A Working Paper on Counterterrorism and American Statutory Law, a Joint Project of the Brookings Institution, the Georgetown University Law Center, and the Hoover Institution, 11 May 2009, pp. 9-12; http://cryptome.org/kill-lawyers.pdf.

See, for example, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2004).

Anderson, 'Targeted Killing in U.S. Counterterrorism Law and Strategy', pp. 5-8.

See, for example, Eben Kaplan, 'Backgrounder: Targeted Killings', Council on Foreign Relations, 2 March 2006, http://www.cfr.org/publication/9627/.

See Hina Shamsi, 'No Longer A Debate About Targeted Killings', CBS News, 21 July 2009, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/07/21/opinion/main5176876.shtml.

See David Montero, 'Use of Drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan: Deadly, but Legal?', Christian Science Monitor, 12 August 2009, http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0812/p99s01-duts.html; Rajiv Chandrasekaran, 'Sole Informant Guided Decision on Afghan Strike', Washington Post, 6 September 2009m p. A1.

See James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, 'C.I.A. Said to Use Outsiders to Put Bombs on Drones', New York Times, 20 August 2009.

Matthew J. Machon, 'Targeted Killling as an Element of U.S. Foreign Policy in the War on Terror', School of Advanced Military Studies, US Army Command and Staff General College, Fort Leavenworth, KS, 25 May 2006, p. 62, http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/machon.pdf.

See Byman, 'Do Targeted Killings Work?', pp. 108-11.

See David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt, 'U.S. Weighs Taliban Strike Into Pakistan', New York Times, 18 March 2009.

See generally US Department of Homeland Security, 'Progress in Implementing 9/11 Report Recommendations', 22 July 2009; http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/dhs_5_year_progress_for_9_11_commission_report.pdf.

See Abu Bakr Naji, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass, trans. William McCants, John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, Harvard University, May 2006.

Cooper, 'US Military Says Its Force in Afghanistan is Insufficient'.

See Riedel, 'Armageddon in Islamabad'.

Jeffrey Record, 'Why the Strong Lose', Parameters, vol. 35, no. 4, Winter 2005-06, pp. 20-21. Record cites Gil Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also Omer Bartov, Hitler's Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and the War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Jeffrey Record, 'The Use and Abuse of History: Munich, Vietnam, and Iraq', Survival, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 163-80.

Jennifer Agiesta and Jon Cohen, 'Public Opinion in U.S. Turns Against Afghan War', Washington Post, 20 August 2009.

Helene Cooper, 'G.O.P. May Be Vital to Obama in Afghan War', New York Times, 3 September 2009.

George F. Will, 'Time to Get Out of Afghanistan', Washington Post, 1 September 2009.