Afghanistan, Pakistan
'The U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan sent a top-secret cable to Washington last month warning that the persistence of enemy havens in Pakistan was placing the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan in jeopardy, U.S. officials said.The cable, written by Ryan C. Crocker, amounted to an admission that years of U.S. efforts to curtail insurgent activity in Pakistan by the lethal Haqqani network, a key Taliban ally, were failing. Because of the intended secrecy of that message, Crocker sent it through CIA channels rather than the usual State Department ones. - Washington Post
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It's understandable why Washington wants Pakistan to end its support for the Haqqani network, but it's impossible to understand why we've based our Afghan strategy around the idea that this support is actually going to disappear and Afghanistan will be "stabilized" according to our prerogatives. It's been obvious for years now that Pakistan is looking out for its own interests in Afghanistan irrespective of American threats or inducements. Yet 10 years later, here is America's ambassador saying that all of our efforts will go to pot unless Pakistan does something it has repeatedly made clear it would not do.
Bernard Finel is equally exasperated:
'See, our approach to both those countries has been posited on the believe that they are somehow acting contrary to their own interests and that if we just educate them theyâ??ll come around. What do I mean?Well, we escalated in Afghanistan on the assumption that it would be in Pakistanâ??s interest to suppress radical groups across the border. Why? Because they are â??obviouslyâ? a threat to Pakistan. But look, the Pakistanis are not stupid. They get that there is a double-edged sword dynamic here, but they have made a conscious choice to use radical groups as a proxy both to maintain influence in Afghanistan and as a hedge against India. They have a redline, apparently, about the expansion of those groups into Pakistan proper â?? at least into the provinces beyond the FATA â?? but otherwise, they have zero interest in supporting the eradication of groups like the Haqqani network. But instead of understanding this definition of their interests, we continue to act as if they are operating under some sort of false consciousness that we can alter simply by, you know, explaining their own interests to them.
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Myra MacDonald makes another critique:
'Meanwhile, the U.S. strategy is, and has always been, internally inconsistent. At one level it wants to retain military bases in Afghanistan after 2014, which could be used for drone strikes and other military operations against Pakistan where many of the Islamist militants are based. Yet it needs Pakistani endorsement for a deal with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, whose support is required to bring the rest of the movement on board and who is, despite Pakistani official denials, believed to be living in an Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) safe house, most likely in Karachi.In short, however inconsistent the strategy, it has depended on bluff. And that bluff is weakening.
I am increasingly reminded of the words of one western official speaking last year on Afghanistan: â?ÂWe stay we lose, we leave we lose.â?Â
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I think it's this zero-sum thinking that has gotten us into trouble in the first place. America can't "lose" in Afghanistan. We've killed bin Laden and shredded most of the senior leadership that perpetrated 9/11. Why is this not enough?