Posts Tagged ‘pakistan’
Carrots and Unmanned Killer Drones
Sunday, March 8th, 2009
Obama is starting to show his shrewdness in international politics. On March 7, he talked to an assemblage of reporters on Air Force One:
Obama Ponders Outreach to Elements of Taliban
By HELENE COOPER and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG Published: March 7, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/08/us/politics/08obama.html
The idea here is simple. Recognizing that the Taliban is far from united, why not try to increase our chances of victory in Afghanistan by negotiating with with moderate Taliban leaders to reduce the number of groups we have to fight in open warfare.
Pretty shrewd.
Critics will no doubt say that such a policy is naive at best, that there are no “moderate Taliban leaders” and that negotiations will only display weakness and a lack of will to fight that will only encourage the Taliban.
Given the nature of the Taliban there may be some validity to this argument. However, today the Obama administration hinted at the the stick that will go along with the carrot:
US to Step up Attacks on Pakistan as it Forces Taliban to Talk
The United States is planning to escalate aerial bombing raids on Pakistan’s tribal areas in tandem with efforts to force moderate elements of the Taliban to the negotiating table, the Telegraph has learned.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/495
8601/US-to-step-up-attacks-on-Pakistan-as-it-forces-Taliban-to-talk.html
Thus we have the carrot:
In an article in Foreign Affairs magazine last December, (Afghan policy expert Barnett) Rubin proposed a ‘grand bargain’ in which NATO would end military action if the Taliban agreed “to prohibit the use of Afghan (or Pakistani) territory for international terrorism”. Such an agreement would “constitute a strategic defeat for al-Qaeda,” he wrote.
And the stick:
Officials in contact with the State Department said on Sunday that a new offensive would see a dramatic increase in Predator drone attacks on Taliban targets in defiance of Pakistani objections to cross-border attacks.
Apparently the message will be, if you stop blowing things up, negotiate in good faith, and pledge not to harbor Al Quaeda we will treat you fairly. If you continue to fight support terrorists we will view you as our enemy and we’ll continue to target your leadership with unmanned drones that can kill them from ten thousand feet while they’re sitting on the crapper.
What makes Obama think this strategy will work? Because his military advisors are convinced the same strategy was successful in Iraq.
Mr. Obama pointed to the success in peeling Iraqi insurgents away from more hard-core elements of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a strategy that many
credit as much as the increase of American forces with turning the war around in the last two years. “There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region,” he said, while cautioning that solutions in
Afghanistan will be complicated.Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban “should be explored,” an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, and he signaled that reconciliation could emerge as an important initiative, mirroring the strategy used by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq.
In Obama’s words:
“If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic
fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said.
But lest anyone think Obama thinks Afghanistan is Iraq…
At the same time, he (Obama) acknowledged that outreach may not yield the same success. “The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex,” he said. “You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of challenge.”
Will it work? Who knows. Maybe. The plan is much subtler than “Shock and Awe” and will require deft co-ordination between the military and the state department – something that hasn’t happened much in recent years. However, despite the fact Obama is listening to many of the same military advisors that George W. Bush listened to in Iraq, and despite the fact that his diplomatic brain trust of Richard Holbrook and Barnett Rubin probably have no more of a clue what motivates Taliban leaders than any other westerner, I am heartened by one thing Obama said:
Asked if the United States was winning in Afghanistan, a war he effectively adopted as his own last month by ordering an additional 17,000 troops sent there,
Mr. Obama replied flatly, “No.”
We may not have a president with all the answers. But at least he’s honest.
