Published August 14th, 2009 by Future Atlas
An Alternative Strategy for Afghanistan
Analyst Andrew Bacevich questioned the US strategy in Afghanistan on NPR’s “Morning Edition” today.
We don’t need to fix Afghanistan and the world, he said; we simply need to defend the US. The American interest in Afghanistan is limited to insuring “that Afghanistan does not become a sanctuary for a large number of jihadists plotting attacks against the United States.”
Our current strategy and level of commitment does not reflect that limited interest, he said. The current approach fails “to think seriously about where our interests lie and to think seriously about how much power we have available and where it can most effectively be used.”
As an alternative, “explore the possibility of providing incentives to the warlords to get them to rule their little patch of Afghanistan in ways that keeps the Taliban and especially keeps al-Qaida out. In other words, we would pay them in order to accomplish that for us.”
Present strategy leads to “perpetual occupation,” according to Bacevich.
This alternative strategy could present several issues:
- The warlords are often corrupt and brutal — sometimes as brutal as the Taliban — and backing them could be difficult for Americans to stomach.
- The brutality and oppression of the warlords brought the Taliban to power in the 1990s, and could enable them to triumph again.
- If American aims are limited to blocking hostile jihadists, we might do as well negotiating with the Taliban directly, as some say is inevitable.
(Image courtesy NASA)