The Complications of an Afghan Withdrawal

So what else can be said about our involvement with Afghanistan, and our erstwhile friends next door, the Pakistanis?

Well, as it turns out, quite a lot. And astonishingly, all of this is pouring out in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s speech to the nation June 22 spelling out some of the details of his Afghanistan withdrawal plans.

It turns out in this One World community of ours, it’s pretty difficult to fight against terrorists (Al Qaeda, the Taliban) plaguing Afghanistan, and to protect poor and innocent civilians, and to prevent Al Qaeda from re-establishing itself in Afghanistan, when our most important “friend” in the region, Pakistan, has a plurality of its military leaders who think we are the enemy, not the terrorists or even their traditional enemy, India.

This message comes from one of the most plugged in international affairs journalists and TV commentators around, Fareed Zakaria, host of CNN’s flagship foreign affairs show GPS, editor at large for Time Magazine, and columnist for the Washington Post.

Writing on the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post, Zakaria delivers his fastball on the Pakistan military with this wind-up:

“This week’s news that a Pakistani brigadier general has been arrested for his ties to a radical Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, is only the latest in series of events that have rocked that nation. In the past year, two senior Pakistani officials have been gunned down, one by his own security guard. Last month, well-armed militants attacked a key naval base in Karachi, an operation that required inside assistance. Also last month, a brave Pakistani journalist, Syed Saleem Shahzad, who detailed the growing extremist presence within the Pakistani military, was tortured and killed, almost certainly by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (which denied the allegation). And then there is the case of Osama bin Laden, who was for years comfortably ensconced in an army town.”

And here comes the pitch:

“Last month, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, Husain Haqqani, was invited to speak at the country’s National Defense University. Addressing a large gathering of officers, Haqqani asked the audience, ‘What is the principal national security threat to Pakistan?” He offered three categories: ‘from within [Pakistan],’ ‘India,’ and, ‘the United States.’ A plurality voted for the third option.”

Unsettling, to say the least. And remember, we have been pouring money (more than $20 Billion at last count) into Pakistan to prop up their economy and to equip their military AND to buy their support for Afghanistan military operations. After all, Afghanistan is landlocked, and a good part of the supplies for our troops must go through Pakistan to Afghanistan, IF they don’t get waylaid in the process.

And now, while digesting the Zakaria column, what should pop up on my computer screen (and yours?) but a major New York Times story by David Sanger, illustrated by the burnt out remains of an oil tanker headed for U.S. troops which was attacked and destroyed in Pakistan, with this startling second paragraph news as a follow-on to President Obama’s speech:

“Though the president could not say so directly, one of the constraints on America’s retreat from a hard and bloody decade is the recognition that, more than ever, the United States will be relying on Afghanistan’s help to deal with the threats emerging from Pakistan.

The administration argues that the killing of Osama bin Laden last month at his compound deep inside Pakistan, combined with scores of other counterterrorism strikes, have given it greater leeway to reduce its troop numbers in Afghanistan. Yet Pakistan’s angry reaction to that raid also makes it more urgent than ever that the United States maintain sites outside the country to launch drone and commando raids against the militant networks that remain in Pakistan, and to make sure that Pakistan’s fast-growing nuclear arsenal never falls into the wrong hands.”

And he adds: “…the administration’s primary focus now was a much larger, and more dangerous, presence of insurgents remaining in Pakistan.

The essence of Mr. Obama’s decision is to accelerate what’s working — no matter how loudly the Pakistanis protest about drone strikes and violations of their sovereignty.”

So let’s be clear about this. As the debate over the wisdom of President Obama’s withdrawal decision continues, senior unnamed administration officials, leaking to the New York Times, are saying we’ll be reducing troops in Afghanistan on the one hand while waging a more concerted war in Pakistan on the other. And that we need Afghanistan as a staging area, so don’t expect the “withdrawal” to continue until there are no Americans left in Afghanistan. As long as we can’t trust Pakistan, and as long as the Pakistani military supports terrorists hostile to us and to Afghanistan, we’ll be there waging war, one way or the other.

And Secretary of State Clinton made it clear at a Senate hearing June 22 that we’re not going to abandon the Afghan women and children whose future we have fought so hard to assure.

Again to quote a New York Times story: “At the Senate hearing, Mrs. Clinton cited a large increase in school enrollment — from 900,000 boys under the Taliban to more than 7 million students today, 40 percent of them girls — and a 22 percent decrease in infant mortality.

‘Despite the many challenges that remain, life is better for most Afghans,’ she said. ‘And the Karzai government has many failings, to be sure, but more people in every research analysis we are privy to say they see progress in their streets, their schools, their fields.”

So, readers, are we or are we not retreating from Afghanistan? Is our challenge in Pakistan, a nuclear armed state, now more brutal than ever? And what kinds of conflicts do you see around the horizon in that region?

While you’re figuring out the answers to that, let me dwell for a moment on the memorable question from Rodney King, “Can we all get along?”

The answer, in this One World of ours, is, sadly, NO.