Cut and Run in Afghanistan?

Cernig, writing at the terrorist-enabling left-wing blog, Newshoggers, seeks to deligitimize the continuing U.S. and multinational presence in Afghanistan:

The US military is building a new barracks for an expected 20,000 additional troops in Afghanistan. Various luminaries are calling for new strategies there, ones that recognise the military reality that force alone cannot "win" in Afghanistan and the geopolitical reality that no efforts at all can "win" if Pakistan is opposed to them. Turkey is mediating between Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to acheive reconcilliation between the two sometime-rivals and the incoming Obama administration plans a new aid and training program to attempt to reverse the inexorable decline of what used to be an Afghan success story.

But all may be missing an important point - the war in Afghanistan should be over, and the mandate for a US and allied presence there has lost its rationale. Doug Saunders, writing in Canada's Globe and Mail on Friday, noted that the Western presence in Afghanistan is authorised under Chapter VII of the UN Charter ....

Our soldiers are authorized to oust the Taliban, but only insofar as those “Taliban” are the ones who are going to allow al-Qaeda to operate again.

And, as several analysts have pointed out, the presence of Western forces in Afghanistan, along with the karzai government's rampant corruption and inefficiency, are what now drives Taliban militancy in Afghanistan. Western forces have become more a part of the problem than a solution ....

We've already seen too many times the negative consequences of "mission creep", not least of which is the undermining of international law and of UN mandates themselves, if they can be stretched like taffy to cover eventualities they were never intended to. If there's a new mission, it needs a new authorisation and a clearly defined set of objectives. If there isn't, then it's time to bring everyone home.

This essay is among a number of related artices found on the antiwar left that have sought to portray a military response to Mumbai, which would require a large-scale deployment along the Afghan-Pakistan border to root out terror sanctuaries there, as a "Bush- Cheney" plot of extremist right-wing propaganda to prop up the American military-war complex, for an endless campaign of neo-imperialist aggression on the periphery and the shredding of the Constitution at home.

All this talk at Newshoggers on Afghanistan about "new strategies" and that "force alone" will not work is hogwash.

On Mumbai, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has urged the government of Pakistan to act decisively in responding to the massacre:

She said: “There is urgency in getting to the bottom of it; there is urgency in bringing the perpetrators to justice; and there is urgency for using the information to disrupt and prevent further attacks.”

Sources privy to the meetings said Pakistan had expressed its readiness to work jointly with India in investigating the incident, but had wanted such a cooperation to be comprehensive and also addressed its own concerns.

However, Rice was reportedly not ready to listen to Pakistan’’s grievances about India’’s interference in Balochistan, the role of Indian consulates along the Afghan border in promoting instability in Pakistan and other such issues. Instead, she told Pakistani leaders that she would like to discuss only the issue at hand.

The "issue at hand" is the out-of-control militants who have a free-hand in the tribal areas, and until Islamabad moves to dismantle the terror cells, other regional efforts of Afghan security and Indo-Pakistion diplomacy and trade cooperation will take a backseat.

The role of Afghanistan is integral to all of this. A collapse of the Afghan regime will restore the regional balance of power to where it was prior to September, 2001. The U.S. is right to seek a build-up of basing capabilities, which will facilitate the shift toward revamped COIN operations for the Afghan state. This will not be, of course, an exclusive military operation. As was true under the Petraeus surge in Iraq, a multipronged approach of miltary tactics combined with inter-factional outreach and cooperation, will provide the basis for a victory over the extremists.

The threat in South Asia is not al Qaeda - the key actors of interest for antiwar opponents - but the follow-on terrorists operating on the same ideology of Islamist extremism, and to deny this threat by arguing that the "war is over" is ignorant and irresponsible. It is a policy of cut-and-run, the very same strategy of defeat that the antiwar left pushed to abandon Iraq to the forces of world darkness over the last few years.