George Packer on the Fallow Ground in the War in Afghanistan

George Packer’s latest piece in the New Yorker is a must read for anyone interested in Afghanistan and the war, there, boiling over.

Packer is sifting through President Obama’s Afghanistan war strategy.  He’s interested in parsing through the infighting, the dramatic change in leadership personnel, the wild hedging on Obama’s fruitless partnership with the heroically incompetent Karzai Administration–to find some sign on the ground that points to a politically negotiated reawakening among the Pashtun tribes. So far, Packer reports, the signs are all lies.

Please spend some time thinking over the article.  In the meantime, I’ll quote the piece at length; the take away is all there, in the two paragraphs you’ll find below.

“No one, however, has been able to come up with an alternative to the current strategy that doesn’t carry great risks. If there were a low-cost way to contain the interconnected groups of extremists in the Hindu Kush—with drones and Special Forces, as Vice-President Biden, among others, has urged—the President would have pursued it. If a return to power of the Taliban, which may well be the outcome of a U.S. withdrawal, did not pose a threat to international security, Obama would have already abandoned Karzai to his fate. But anyone who believes that a re-Talibanized Afghanistan would be a low priority should read the kidnapping narratives of two American journalists, Jere Van Dyk and David Rohde, who were held by the Taliban, along with the autobiography of the former Taliban official known as Mullah Zaeef. Together, these accounts show that the years since 2001 have radicalized the insurgents and imbued them with Al Qaeda’s global agenda. Tactically and ideologically, it’s more and more difficult to distinguish local insurgents from foreign jihadists.”

“American policy is drifting toward a review, scheduled for December, and Obama is trapped—not by his generals but by the war. It takes great political courage to face such a situation honestly, but if in a year’s time the war looks much the way it does now, or worse, Obama will have to force the public to deal with the likely reality: Americans leaving, however slowly; Afghanistan slipping into ethnic civil war, with many more Afghan deaths; Pakistan backing the Pashtun side; Al Qaeda seizing the chance to expand its safe haven. These consequences would require a dramatically different U.S. strategy, and a wise Administration would unify itself around the need to think one through before next summer.”