Obama's wrong road to Afghanistan

Daniel Larison

During the first week of the new Obama administration, Secretary of State Clinton named two high-profile special envoys, former Democratic Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell and former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, to lead U.S. diplomatic efforts in Israel-Palestine and Afghanistan and Pakistan respectively. While the first appointment drew more media scrutiny and caused more controversy owing to Mitchell’s reputation for “even-handedness,” the Holbrooke appointment is by far the more important and potentially more dangerous selection, given the greater strategic importance of Pakistan for U.S. interests and regional stability. Taken together with a new round of U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistan, which President Obama will likely continue, the appointment of Holbrooke suggests that the new administration’s Pakistan policy will, like its predecessor’s, be driven by “war on terror” logic.

If the last administration had nothing more than a “Musharraf policy” in Pakistan, this one seems to have nothing more than a Taliban policy. Everything in Holbrooke’s record and his statements suggest that he sees these countries through the narrow prism of the Afghan war, giving Pakistan’s internal problems no attention in his pre-election Foreign Affairs essay. Indeed, he goes so far as to define the two states as a “single theater of war,” which at once gives license to interfere in Pakistani affairs as part of the war while neglecting the consequences of intervention. Missile strikes inside Pakistan have already generated enormous ill feeling among the Pakistani public, and continued treatment of their country as part of our war zone will increase the backlash against the U.S.

Pursuing such a narrow approach to Pakistan paradoxically increases the chances of broader regional instability by making Pakistani cooperation in the war the linchpin of U.S. policy in South Asia. Holbrooke endorses the goal of “regional agreements” to secure Afghanistan, which summons the specter of a “grand bargain” that will attempt a comprehensive settlement among Afghanistan’s neighbors to satisfy Islamabad and thus reduce the chance that Pakistan would try to destabilize the Afghan government. Despite the reported success of the Indian government in lobbying against its inclusion in Holbrooke’s special envoy brief, a comprehensive settlement will likely have to involve India, one of Afghanistan’s major patrons, and in the process strain and jeopardize the U.S.’s sole bilateral relationship that has genuinely improved over the past eight years.

During the presidential campaign and in the days following his victory, Obama repeatedly floated the possibility of American mediation of the Kashmir dispute. Obama’s suggestions generated enormous opposition from Indian political and media circles, who restated their traditional view that Kashmir was a purely bilateral matter with Pakistan. The “grand bargain” theory, particularly as laid out by Ahmad Rashid, currently an advisor to Gen. David Petraeus, regarding Afghanistan and Pakistan, assumes that the Pakistani military would be more willing to fight the Taliban in the west if its eastern border were secured and the Kashmir dispute were resolved. This underestimates the military’s ideological attachment to Kashmir and their maximalist objectives aimed at acquiring the entire territory, and it links conflicts that have little relation to one another. Perversely, heightened tensions along the Indo-Pakistani border following the attacks on Mumbai have encouraged this sort of thinking in U.S. foreign policy circles.

Holbrooke is precisely the wrong diplomat to manage the situation. He has a reputation for diplomatic success mostly because of his role in negotiating the Dayton accords that concluded the Bosnian War. But Dayton was made possible thanks to dramatic advances on the ground by U.S.-trained Croatian forces and a limited NATO air campaign. Given such leverage, Holbrooke was able to hammer out a tenuous peace while being anything but a neutral arbiter. In his new role tending to Afghanistan and Pakistan, he must find a diplomatic and political solution for two states (and, realistically, three, including India) where no such advantages exist. Moreover, he will not have the luxury of opposing the interests of one side as openly as he did in 1995. Holbrooke’s aim in Afghanistan and Pakistan will be very different: to prolong and intensify Pakistani support for the war against the Taliban precisely because the U.S. and NATO cannot provide a military solution on their own.

In light of last November’s Mumbai terrorist attacks, worsening economic conditions in Pakistan, the weakness of the civilian government and persistent rebellion in Baluchistan, U.S. relations with Pakistan cannot be governed solely according to how Islamabad does or does not aid military operations against the Taliban. There are too many pressing problems inside Pakistan to focus inordinately on the country’s northwestern tribal areas at the expense of the rest of the country and neighboring India. The first moves of the new administration seem to show little awareness of this, which means that President Obama may end up plunging ahead with an ill-conceived strategy that is, as Holbrooke himself might say, at once too limited and too broad.