What If We Fail in Afghanistan?
As always Steve Coll is worth reading and in this article lays out four situations:
Quote:
What would be the consequences of a second Islamic Emirate? My scenarios here are intended analytically, as a first-draft straw-man forecast: The Nineties Afghan Civil War on Steroids; Momentum for a Taliban Revolution in Pakistan; Increased Islamist Violence Against India, Increasing the Likelihood of Indo-Pakistani War and Increased Al Qaeda Ambitions Against Britain and the United States.
From:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blog...tml#entry-more
I have scanned previous threads, but cannot readily find one that has looked at futurology.
How does offshore balancing work?
How would the US get there from here? Do Afghans who got taken in by talk of "this time we will stay" be given green cards and brought to live in Wisconsin with the Hmong? What will be US policy when the taliban start stringing up the stragglers from lamp poles? Will the US somehow prevent Pakistan (and India) from restarting their proxy war in Afghanistan? Will the US continue to bomb "afpak" after having pulled out? from which bases? on what grounds?
What was the point of the whole exercise?
Will there be any price to pay in terms of credibility and does it even matter?
Just asking. There may well be excellent answers to all of those questions and those may not be the right questions either.
Read Jim Gant's 45 page article ....
which tells how to establish a secure tribal base point.
In 1962 in Vietnam's Central Highlands, approximately a half-dozen SF ODAs (with some military and civilian air assets) managed to secure over 200 villages (a region of several hundred square miles - lots of space for small airfields) and were running 30K+ of CIDG militia. Was done then; and could be done today.
As to Bagram and the rest of the old Northern Alliance region, the Pashtun-based Taliban would have problems in repeating their 1996-2001 sweeps. To overcome the indigenous forces (and the "Northern Alliance" part of the ANA, its largest ethnic component), the Taliban would have to concentrate forces and then would be exposed to conventional firepower.
I don't see the military problems you see.
The political problem is that drawing back into the old Northern Alliance region and establishing "tribal engagement strong points" per Jim Gant in the border regions, would result in a renewed Astan civil war. That is Steve Coll's concern in the article cited by David, along with some other scenarios which seem speculative to me.
1 Attachment(s)
US-Afghan joint strategic partnership declarations
Inked in 2005 and renewed in 2008, I'm attaching a .pdf file of the 2005 US-Afghan joint strategic partnership declaration. Besides this, a number of other agreements exist (status of forces, Bagram lease, etc.) which I haven't tracked down to urls.
Thought all might want to read this part of the "D" in DIME. The flavor is that of US support for a strong, centralized Astan government - which I think is nuts in light of Astan's history and politics.