You can’t make this kind of stuff up. More from Woodward:
Safe havens would no longer be tolerated, Obama had decided. “We need to make clear to people that the cancer is in Pakistan,” he declared during an Oval Office meeting on Nov. 25, 2009, near the end of the strategy review. The reason to create a secure, self-governing Afghanistan, he said, was “so the cancer doesn’t spread there.”
But we’re spending 10x on Afghanistan what we’re spending on Pakistan. The cancer argument is a post-hoc rationalization because if you actually believe it, you could never justify such a large preventive commitment to Afghanistan. It is treating a patient with colon cancer by focusing most of your attention on making sure the cancer does not spread to the appendix. If Pakistan “dies” of cancer, Afghanistan will be wholly irrelevant. If Pakistan is “cured” somehow, then efforts to contain the threat in Afghanistan will become exponentially easier.
Everytime Pakistan comes up, it makes clear how poorly conceived is our Afghan policy. Sometimes we need to stabilize Afghanistan to prevent it from destabilizing Pakistan. Sometimes, the problem is in Pakistan and we need to keep it from spreading to Afghanistan. But the links between stability in the two countries is just assumed rather than actually examined. The empirical data strikes me as unambiguous. Despite the fact that the border is porous, Pakistan was under less threat from radical Islamist in the 1990s when the Taliban ruled most of Afghanistan than it is now when various extremists groups are loosely affiliated in a series of overlapping (and sometimes competing) insurgencies.
I’ve suggested one reason why in the past:
This is not surprising actually. Insurgencies are at their most dangerous — in terms of threat of contagion — when they are fighting for power. The number of insurgencies that actually manage to sponsor insurgencies elsewhere after taking power is surprising low.
I’ve also raised another related issue before as well:
In reality, the Taliban — if it did seize power, which is no sure thing — would likely find itself starved for resources to maintain itself in power. Indeed, it is probably as likely that efforts to retain control would drain resources currently devoted to the campaign in Pakistan. This may be one reason, by the way, why Pakistan was under less threat from Islamist radicals from 1996 to 2001 when the Taliban controlled Afghanistan then in the years since.
Yet another issue comes from Pakistani paranoia vis-a-vis Indian machinations in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s ambivalent attitude toward radical Islamist groups is a function of the primarily anti-Indian orientation of the Pakistani security aparatus. You can disarm that in one of two ways — either you can solve the India-Pakistan dispute or you can provide the Pakistanis with “strategic depth.” I’ve long argued that solving the Indian-Pakistan dispute would do more for American interests than progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front:
In contrast to our imprecise interest in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as a way to improve our image, we have more concrete interests vis-a-vis Pakistan. We want to encourage Pakistan to retool its military to combat Islamist insurgents and ensure the security of its nuclear weapons in the case further gain by the Taliban. The only way to achieve these goals is by easing tensions with India.
Reduced tensions with India would strengthen civilian control in Pakistan. It would allow the Pakistani military to refocus on the domestic insurgency. It would reduce incentives to support radical groups like Laskar-e-Taiba. Furthermore, the only way to move forward on the issue of nuclear safeguards would be in conjunction with the adoption of like measures in India.
But the reality is that like the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, this one is also likely close to intractable. Both sides’ established patterns of behavior are grounded now more in spite than in strategic calculus. India and Pakistan remain at each other’s throats as a matter of habit and precedent as much as anything else, and as a result the conflict is durable beyond its rational foundations. But if you can’t reduce tensions between the two, then you have to accept the consequence, which is that Pakistan will never wholeheartedly crack down on the Islamist insurgents that they see as their best tool for keeping pressure on India and influence in Afghanistan.
Back to Woodward:
“How can you fight a war and have safe havens across the border?” Panetta asked in frustration. “It’s a crazy kind of war.”
Well, of course. But is even crazier is seeing a fatal flaw to the core of your strategy and yet continuing to try to implement the strategy. Our inability to think clearly about the Pakistan issue is probably the single most significant reason for the incoherence of our approach in Afghanistan.
If the main worry is the future stability of Pakistan, then in a weird way the best way to safeguard that would be to tolerate an Islamist and anti-Indian government in Afghanistan. If the main worry is Afghanistan, then we need to think about some sort of containment approach because Pakistan will never be as cooperative as we’d like. That’s just the reality of the situation, and wishing it were otherwise is not going to make it so. Our current approach to Pakistan is the ultimate triumph of hope over reason.
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