Finding the Exit From Afghanistan Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at World Politics Review I have a new piece arguing that in the wake of the command change in Afghanistan US strategy must switch from trying to "win" in Afghanistan (whatever that means) to finding an exit strategy:

In the two weeks since Gen. David Petraeus was nominated to be the new commander for U.S. and NATO operations in Afghanistan, continuity has been the dominant theme in describing what his replacement of ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal represents. After all, Petraeus literally wrote the book on U.S. counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine, which McChrystal tried to apply in Afghanistan over the past year. It only seems natural to expect that Petraeus will maintain the same approach.

But continuity is the worst possible option for U.S. efforts in Afghanistan, because it would mean maintaining a strategy that appears increasingly unlikely to succeed.  Instead, President Barack Obama should use the change in command to modify his goal, from "winning" the war in Afghanistan to laying the  political and military groundwork for withdrawal.

Failure to clearly identify which of these two paths would define the U.S. mission has been perhaps the Obama administration's greatest strategic failing in Afghanistan.  

In March 2009, Obama declared that his goal in Afghanistan was to defeat, dismantle and disrupt al-Qaida, and pointedly noted that "dictating" Afghanistan's future was not in the cards. But McChrystal's strategy, laid out only months later, was predicated not only on protecting the Afghan people, but also on providing "a secure environment allowing good government and economic development to undercut the causes and advocates of insurgency."  

Even after the administration's lengthy Afghanistan review last fall, the gap between Obama's stated goal and McChrystal's ambitious strategy remained unresolved.  The president's 18-month timeline to begin drawing down U.S. troops and his order to McChrystal not to occupy territory that couldn't be turned over to Afghan security forces by June 2011 suggested a more minimal goal of stabilizing Afghanistan and speeding the path toward withdrawal. But McChrystal's military forays into Taliban-controlled and Pashtun-dominated southern and eastern Afghanistan and his emphasis on U.S.-led nation-building spoke to a different aspiration. 

Indeed, under McChrystal, the U.S. and NATO mission was to both out-fight and out-govern the Taliban -- in short, to "win" in Afghanistan. But victory has not been in the cards in Afghanistan for a very long time. With polling indicating that Americans are souring on both the war and Obama's stewardship of it, the focus must shift to protecting U.S. interests while leaving Afghanistan as stable as possible after our withdrawal.  

Read the whole thing here

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The idea that we will change a culture that is centuries old into something that is largely alien to the Afghan people is delusional and has a 100% chance of failure.
If we do "win"(which really hasn't been defined) what, exactly will we have gained? Our continued presences in Afghanistan will only become more deadly and expensive.

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