Questions for FPI, Ctd.

Adding to Greg's excellent points from earlier regarding the Foreign Policy Initiative's recently published fact sheet on Afghanistan, I too noticed a couple of curiously absent items from their analysis: cost and scope.

On the first point, FPI make no mention of the financial costs entailed in the Afghan mission--estimated somewhere between $750,000 and $1 million per person based off the proposed surge total of 40K--or how an indefinite presence in Afghanistan will affect American spending options both at home and abroad.

This leads directly into mission scope. Absent any kind of endgame or "Mission Accomplished" benchmarks, this fact sheet merely outlines the indefinite occupation of one particular country. If the greater War on Terrorism can be fought and won on this front alone, then what does that say about known al-Qaeda havens such as Yemen and Somalia? Max Boot, who's cited in the brief, writes in the pages of Commentary Magazine that "pure" counterterrorism:

is the strategy that Israel has used against Hamas and Hezbollah. The result is that Hamas controls Gaza, and Hezbollah controls southern Lebanon. It is the strategy that the U.S. has employed in Somalia since our forces pulled out in 1994. The result is that the country is utterly chaotic and lawless, and an Islamic fundamentalist group called the Shabab, which has close links to al-Qaeda, is gaining strength. Most pertinently, it is also the strategy the U.S. has used for years in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

So if our strategy to defeat al-Qaeda is insufficient in Somalia, why aren't we planning indefinite counterinsurgency in that country as well? In the brief, FPI argues that the All Volunteer U.S. military is stronger than it has been in years, and any complaints about it being overburdened are "no truer now" than they were when voiced in reference to Iraq. Does this argument apply only to a War on Terrorism based in Afghanistan, or does it give the United States the flexibility to fight al-Qaeda as needed on other continents?

If, as FPI claims, 60,000 troops slated for redeployment from Iraq next summer will help plug in the holes of a revamped Afghan presence, where then would the troops come from to properly fight al-Qaeda elsewhere? If Fred Kagan--cited multiple times throughout this fact sheet-- is correct, and a "small-footprint counterterrorism strategy" can't work in Afghanistan, why is it acceptable in other terrorist hotbeds?

To believe this fact sheet is to believe that the so-called Global War on Terrorism isn't all that global after all--it in fact leapfrogs from mission to mission, conveniently enough, alongside American forces. Wherever we go, there's your war. Whereas Iraq was once the "central front" in the War on Terrorism, now--in accordance with an Iraq withdrawal I suspect most of the analysts listed in this brief likely opposed--it is imperative that we shift those resources toward Afghanistan. The so-called central front appears to be one step ahead of us.

For FPI's facts to add up, Afghanistan must now remain the one and only central front, and al-Qaeda must remain America's only serious enemy. Both notions strike me as terribly shortsighted.