Obama’s All Action, No Strategy in Afghanistan

Spencer Platt / Getty Images An international conference, thousands of fresh US troops, even possible talks with the Taliban—Obama’s in a diplomatic frenzy. But what’s his Afghan policy?

President Obama has ordered 17,000 troops to Afghanistan and an international conference, but there’s no strategy yet in place as his National Security Council review prepares to report to him this month for his moment of decision.

The Obama administration announced last week it will lead a conference on Afghanistan and has even invited Iran, its western neighbor, to the table. Obama has also opened the door to reaching out to the Taliban. But the diplomacy is running ahead of the policy, which so far is unknown.

An acceptable outcome would be a regional political accord in which moderate Taliban and their tribal allies disavowed Al Qaeda, as the Sunni chiefs did in Iraq.

The president’s determination to shift US military resources to Afghanistan from Iraq has stirred up a sustained chorus of second thoughts, especially from his left. Voices of caution and dissent have recalled the Soviet army’s flight in 1989, the US quagmire in Vietnam, and even the British military fiasco in Afghanistan a century ago.

Nobody involved in Obama’s policymaking, including top US military commanders, believes there can be a purely military solution. Yet Obama’s recent order sending 17,000 fresh US troops to Afghanistan and his decision last week to withdraw 100,000 troops from Iraq by September 2010 signal his seriousness about ending the Iraq war and turning his focus to Afghanistan.

Obama’s national security team, led by CIA analyst Bruce Riedel, who reports to National Security Adviser James Jones, is currently engaged in a strategic review of several existing official assessments, including a full regional work-up commissioned last October by CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus.

The administration’s policy will be unveiled before the NATO summit in early April. The president will reportedly travel to a Muslim capital—he announced plans Saturday to travel to Turkey in the next month—to give a major address intended to mark a sharp break between his war and the Bush war on terror. Then, presumably, the international conference on Afghanistan will be held.

A shift de-emphasizing military force in favor of high-level regional diplomacy is the centerpiece of the emerging Obama policy. The mission will focus on containing and isolating Al Qaeda and Taliban militants by denying them bases in their frontier sanctuaries inside Pakistan. Ahmed Rashid, the distinguished Pakistani author and member of Petraeus’ strategy review, and Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert at New York University who has briefed Vice President Joe Biden, envision a contact group authorized by the UN Security Council that will provide a forum to defuse Pakistani-Indian conflicts over their competing interests in Afghanistan, seek a solution to the Kashmir conflict, and provide guarantees to Pakistan against hostile encroachments of its borders by India.

The president’s team has already debriefed Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, and army chief Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, among others. The review group will work closely with State Department special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who recently returned from the region. An Obama policy in southwest Asia is beginning to take shape, though critical details have yet to come into focus, according to military and political advisers involved in the assessment process.