Spencer Ackerman recently spent two weeks playing with TF Currahee in Khost and Paktya provinces. Their big fear? Not the dreaded Spring Offensive—that’s passed out of fashion since people noticed a few years ago that militant activities actually didn’t slow down much during the winter. No, now everyone is worried about a Winter Offensive, which is, near as I can tell… exactly what every other recent winter has been, with a moderate but not major decrease in militant activity as the passes get snowed over. (I’m curious if all these seasonal variations in fighting wouldn’t be characterized in such breathless terms if units stayed in-country longer than 12 months.) So, what is the big plan to deal with it?
Complementing the military countermeasures would be what Schloesser called a “development surge” — essentially a jobs program for military-aged men to offer them alternatives to violence, like “clearing ice and snow from roads; doing construction training workshops; road maintenance; distribution of essentials to villages that are basically isolated, such as clothes and food for them, and things like that.”
Whether Schloesser has the resources necessary remains to be seen. The principal reconstruction effort in Khost Province is the construction of a highway spanning the distance from Khost to Gardez. Contracting on the project ended in April and the effort was expected to last 20 months — far outlasting the coming winter. Neighboring provinces have even paltrier public-works opportunities.
Great. Short term busy work, with no view toward a sustainable economy, sustainable security, or stable relations with the government. No push for education so a generation won’t grow up illiterate and violent. What a fail-safe way to undermine the insurgency. But there is a bigger picture to consider.
The Bush Administration is, right now, completely clueless about how to proceed with Afghanistan—in part because of troop levels, in part because of myopic policies like “development surges,” and in part because Bush just let Afghanistan run on auto-pilot for a few years while he started another war in Iraq. But at the moment there are four—count ‘em, four—separate reviews of the war there, in the White House, at NATO, in CENTCOM, and at the DOD. At this point, you can almost guarantee an accurate guess about which review will say what in what way.
But the issues in Afghanistan are beyond the petty political maneuvering of President Bush trying not to leave a legacy of failure in his wake. The continuing cross-border attacks into Pakistan may or may not actually be happening, depending on who you ask. After the embarrassing news that a pair of U.S. helicopters may have been forced back into Afghanistan by Pakistani fire, a DOD spokesman has finally come out and said it didn’t happen.
In the midst of all this shifting and adjusting and reviewing and sabre-rattling, however, is Afghan Defense Minister Rahim Wardak’s assertion that we’re this close from a joint Afghan/Pakistani/American anti-terror force. I’m certain the prospect of Pakistani troops operating inside Afghanistan will be welcomed rapturously, as will Afghan forces operating in Pakistan.
Or maybe this will be structured like the Queens Own Corps of Guides, or the old Khassadars, or the Khyber Rifles.
It just doesn’t make any sense. If there really are that many reviews going on, it would be daft to start a politically messy, logistically complicated joint terror force along the Durand Line. There has to be something else to this story, but we don’t really know what that is, yet.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1801 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor. Follow him on twitter: @joshuafoust
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According to the Washington Post the Afghans proposed that multinational force. That might explain why it came up during the reviews. Anyway, I don’t expect that to happen any time soon.
A nice read along with that is this report on PAK military support for ACM forces within AFG.
No one ever said it was easy