The Guardian reports that Britain now regards Pakistan and Afghanistan as “one theater”. While this makes strategic sense it also carries with it a hidden danger: Pakistan can only be included in the theater of its own volition, otherwise operations in Pakistan will constitute an attack across an international border. The political cooperation of Islamabad is now explicitly critical to the success of the entire campaign. Once Pakistan suspends its cooperation, the bottom falls out of the strategy. There is one further difficulty: this has implicitly now become a battle for Pakistan. The Jihadi elements will now concentrate on pressuring Islamabad into withdrawing support for the campaign against it. Destabilization efforts against the Pakistani government must now be expected. While the new strategy is necessary it carries the risk of escalation: the ante has been upped in a very public sort of way. Presumably the UK is reflecting the thinking of the Obama administration. But if BHO wants to escalate the campaign he must be absolutely determined to see things through to victory.
Britain has offered its full backing for a renewed military offensive inside Pakistan, as UK ministers confirmed the country was now “part of a single campaign” alongside Afghanistan.
Defence secretary John Hutton said the UK supported targeting Pakistan-based Taliban and al-Qaida positions and urged Europe to begin offering assistance to eradicate insurgents in the tribal regions bordering Afghanistan.
Confirming that Britain was being drawn into a widening regional conflict, Hutton said the time had come to target Taliban and al-Qaida havens inside Pakistan. In his most explicit statement of intent against Afghanistan’s troubled neighbour, Hutton said that the military objectives in the region must now have “an equal focus on both countries”.
AFP offered more details of the Obama strategy.
Marvin Weinbaum, who was a State Department analyst on Afghanistan and Pakistan until 2003, said Obama was both doing more and setting a more attainable goal. “I think we were wrong initially to think that we could create a strong central government,” said Weinbaum, adding that there was never a history of Kabul exerting control over all of Afghanistan.
“The Bush administration used that kind of rhetoric, that it’s going to create a model democracy and meanwhile tried to do it on the cheap,” said Weinbaum, now a scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute. …
Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region, said that the US exit strategy was “pretty basic — we can leave once the Afghans can deal with their own security problems.”
But he warned that the “most daunting” aspect of the strategy was to tackle insurgents holed up in Pakistan, whose government switched overnight from Taliban backers to cornerstone US ally after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Holbrooke gave a blunt warning to Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, elements of which are widely believed to have tipped off militants about impending US military action.
Kamran Bokhari, a senior analyst at the Stratfor global intelligence company, said the Obama team had not yet shown how they would change Pakistani behavior.
It may not be impertinent to point out that Pakistan was never entirely ruled from Islamabad either. Pakistan can to some extent be regarded as an synthetic country which has been in the process of falling apart since it was created. The danger of course, is that Obama will wind up doing the very same thing Weinbaum accused the Bush administration of doing — trying to change a country and doing it on the cheap. But in one sense the odious comparison fails. Afghanistan was the secondary front in the Bush War on Terror strategy and for that reason it was always going to be “on the cheap” relative to Iraq. But now the situation is reversed, no thanks in part to the earlier victory won in Iraq. Afghanistan is going to be Obama’s central theater. In other words, Afghanistan will be to Obama what Iraq was to GWB.
Like Iraq, Pakistan too can be won. But it will take a long time and great determination to do it. And in the end, the outcome may be nothing like any “exit strategy” that Obama may contrive. Like all other great enterprises, the aspiration to victory — if aspiration there is — comes at the price of accepting the risk of defeat. As the war widens into Pakistan there will be many a dangerous crisis. Obama will need to have the US public behind him. Ironically, he may get more support from his political foes than his “base” if the going gets rough.
Interestingly, while Iraq was always called “Bush’s War”, operations in Iraq were fully covered by Congressional authority. While covert actions have been going in in Pakistan for a long time, an explicit extension of the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan, while logical, is potentially without explicit Congressional approval. If Pakistan is going to be part of the war the fact is that it risks being an undeclared war. That may escape the notice of the MSM for as long as it continues its adulation of Obama, but if his support should erode, it may suddenly come to their attention.
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18 Comments
1. ADE:Oh dear,
So the problem is conceptual. There is no border for which “otherwise operations in Pakistan will constitute an attack across an international border”; nor is it the case that “as UK ministers confirmed the country was now “part of a single campaign” alongside Afghanistan”.
Borders and countries are Western-speak.
When a problem is mis-conceived, always expect reality to surprise you.
ADE
Mar 28, 2009 - 10:40 pm 2. weSwinger:Has the O-boy! admin lost their base? Stay tuned. . .
Mar 28, 2009 - 10:41 pm 3. Belmont Club » Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan « MY WP:[...] Continued here: Belmont Club » Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan [...]
Mar 28, 2009 - 10:50 pm 4. Chiral:Borders serve as excuses, real or not. What matters is whose feelings get hurt by crossing them.
Mar 28, 2009 - 11:09 pm 5. Walt:During the campaign, candidate Obama said he would invade Pakistan if necessary. Everyone thought he misspoke. It looks like he meant it.
So now the Afghan war’s become
Mar 28, 2009 - 11:59 pm 6. Doug:A source of major angst for some
Who worship at the feet of O the one
The Left for whom a war is fraught
With many horrors they had thought
Were safely buried now that they had won
But Barry O had other plans
He’ll strike the tribesmen and the clans
And cross the border with an old heigh-ho
The Pakis they will not complain
As Barry sets the whole campaign
In motion with a gesture don’t you know
The gesture you’ll be pleased to hear
Will cause the Lefty base no fear
For Barry knows that flat beer has no fizz
It’s not a war for goodness sake
He knows a war the Left won’t take
An overseas contingency is what it is
The siege of Kabul, 1842
The Disasters In Affghanistan. – Times Archive
Thousands of the enemy thronged the whole area of the cantonments, rending the air with their exulting cries and committing every kind of atrocity
The Affairs Of India. – Times Archive
Report after report has arrived that the siege of Cabul continues to be pressed with unabated vigour
India, Affghanistan, And China. – Times Archive
Mar 29, 2009 - 6:17 am 7. Michelle Renee:Lady Sale, who occasionally botanized, was always guarded by two Affghans
Chiral: Borders serve as excuses, real or not. What matters is whose feelings get hurt by crossing them.
Unless the border in question is the US border, then it doesn’t matter if American citizens get their feelings hurt to see a flood of incoming illegals, those are potential Donk voters so shut the funk up.
Mar 29, 2009 - 6:33 am 8. Quig:@ #6 Michelle Renee Tut! |Tut! Such language, young lady! Really! Most unbecoming!
Mar 29, 2009 - 7:34 am 9. steveaz:Nations and borders aren’t the antiquated Western constructs that confound our campaign against the Taliban. The real stumbling block, I think, is our reflexive assumption that central, Federal capitols rule anything at all.
The resultant misdirection and lack of awareness of peripheral, subsidiary players hobbles us every time. Everything that afflicts a size-able human demographic, from epidemics to natural catastrophes to relative poverty is mis-described, mis-treated and usually exacerbated by this dumb tendency.
(We all remember the attempts by media and politicians to shove recent natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the terrible S.E. Asian tsunami (”America is Stingy”) into this confining box.)
Worse, and, this drives my enthusiasm for sites like Wretchards, this “tick” of looking for a single-point locus is not inevitable in humans. It is being modeled daily in media and other commons’ to the detriment of more atomized, diverse analytical methods.
In essence, we’re being taught to think this silly way. The result is an never-ending barrage of dichotomous, false choices. Whether it is intentional or not, diverse, pluralistic thought is stunted, and we are edged ever towards petty social conflict as the traditional Anglo defusing behaviors like cheerful tolerance, self-deprecating humor and regional fraternity lose their effectiveness.
Victor Davis Hanson had written about the general “coursening” of America’s political discourse here at PJM. I think that he’s describing the social symptoms of decades of intellectual dumbing. And, it could be that, outside of our borders (”over there”), terrorist attacks, piracy-on-the-seas, wars and urban insurgencies are the taxes we pay for becoming dumb.
Mar 29, 2009 - 7:46 am 10. Lifeofthemind:LBJ’s stock goes up.
Mar 29, 2009 - 8:57 am 11. Mike Sylwester:Pirates and aboriginal threats were always out there. The difference is that now we hobble ourselves by giving them the legal protections that were reserved for conduct, even for conflict, between civilized nations in a more civilized time.
Pakistan can to some extent be regarded as an synthetic country which has been in the process of falling apart since it was created.
The same could be said about India, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, and other countries in that region.
Pakistan is not falling apart. Rather, some regions are demanding more cultural autonomy or control over their natural resources.
Also, the Congressional declaration that authorized the USA to invade Afghanistan suffices to authorize also the USA to attack targets inside Pakistan. No members of Congress have criticized such attacks. Since Obama became President, the USA has continued to carry out such attacks as before.
Mar 29, 2009 - 9:03 am 12. Charles:I think the gathering talk on Pakistan is aimed at Quetta where AQ & Taliban leaders live in peace and security.
I think they will be targeted. If they are listening they will think the same thing too.
Mar 29, 2009 - 9:10 am 13. erc rodson:Imagine what the settlement the American West would have been like if the American Indian tribes of the day had AK 47’s and cell phones. Imagine if they had shared a three or four common languages instead of hundreds and a single highly structured religion instead of a diffuse set of religious practices.
Now, remember, how long it took to pacify the tribes and settle them on reservations. It is unlikely that a Western model government in Afghanistan or Pakistan is likely to control all the ground in either country any time soon. Some kind of a federation of the tribes, as reflected in the periodic national councils, is certainly possible, and is probably more likely in Afghanistan than in Pakistan. Pakistan suffers from the imposition of the British model of government, which works well in a modern homogenous society but has not worked well in most Third World countries.
We see the familiar story in much of both countries that, “you own the ground you stand on” and maybe as far as you can see. The rest of the territory is debatable space.
Candidate Obama talked about invading Pakistan at will, a la the Cambodian incursions. (We were in Cambodia and Laos during the Viet Nam war unofficially long before we went in openly with armor and air.) He, or his advisors, had at least correctly identified Pakistan as a major part of the problem. How President Obama will actually accomplish this remains an open subject. Note that the use of air strikes into Pakistan, begun under Bush, continues under Obama, without much fanfare.
We are fortunate, so far, that Russia, China and Iran have not taken more active roles in stirring the pot. It is also interesting that no one seems to be taking the realpolitik path of setting up a strongman in Afghanistan or Pakistan and leaving them to rule with a heavy hand. (I agree, but the way: strong men haven’t worked out very well for us, although a number survive in the former Soviet Asian countries.)
Interesting times. I an concerned that the American government will insist on the perfect and reject the “good enough”.
Mar 29, 2009 - 9:21 am 14. Belmont Club » More Afghanistan:[...] noted in an earlier post, the strategy of widening the war against Taliban targets in Pakistan by relying on Islamabad means [...]
Mar 29, 2009 - 9:21 am 15. Doug:Ugh! Indian Delivers Soviet Fire and Speaks with Digital Tongue.
Mar 29, 2009 - 2:52 pm 16. Belmont Club » Help, the police:[...] earlier post noted that one of the necessary consequences of using the Pakistanis to press down hard against the [...]
Mar 30, 2009 - 12:02 am 17. Belmont Club » Max Boot on Afghanistan:[...] an earlier post, I wrote that it made sense to treat both Pakistan and Afghanistan as one theater, but that this [...]
Mar 30, 2009 - 1:39 am 18. Doug:Gallegher is talking to Daniel Hannan!
Mar 30, 2009 - 8:52 amSorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.