Thoughts on Gen. Petraeus As a Game Changing Commander in Afghanistan?

It seems that the day’s reportage always fails to deliver good news.  Lives lost and opportunities squandered, squarely pegged in the middle of each New York Times piece, is the mounting price we pay. NATO troops and Afghan sons and daughters, fathers and mothers dead and dying.

Today’s bomb attack has added four more casualties to the list of the dead.  The grisly accounting stands at 8 lives lost, soldiers, and members of the NATO force meant to oversee the U.S roll back of Al Qaeda–and Taliban–in the region. Yesterday, an Afghan soldier killed three British soldiers in Helmand Province.  The local Taliban claimed that the soldier responsible for the murders had joined the insurgency.

News like this can only set back our resolve to see this fight through and make sure that after NATO troops leave–in whatever manner such a thing makes sense–they leave behind a country that will not relapse into a hot civil war, wrapped in some genocidal haze.  This, even though each NATO casualty often accompanies news of civilian deaths; as well, a sizable increase in the numbers of the dead within the Afghan armed forces.  These are not the signs that stand behind comity and cooperation.

We must place our wary trust on a partner who is himself run through with doubt and differing motives. The Afghan leadership needs to work with ISAF forces and aid workers.Still they’re placing side bets with their enemy for a separate peace when NATO soldiers finally leave.  The patiently strategic  game is dead in the water.  It needs to be resuscitated in some meaningful way.

So it’s an X-factor– not unexpected, but yet unconsidered in its implications–that just such a resuscitative move may be coming along.  The New York Times confirmed what Senator Carl Levin had only passingly mentioned: General Petraeus is pushing put the Haqqani network on the terrorist list.  This is a very assertive move and is the clearest sign yet that General Petraeus intends to be a game changer.

Listing the Haqqani network would force American citizens to cease exchanging and trading with the Haqqani network and its affiliates.  Its power of the move would come in sideways: the U.S. government is empowered by law to put pressure on governments harboring listed terrorist groups.

In political economy jargon General Petraeus will have raised the costs of transactions of Pakistan working with the Haqqani network, while in the same move, it will make it more difficult for Karzai to reach a separate, unstable peace with Pakistan. This moves pushes back the Haqqani network from its base of power in the tribal regions where it is known to host and harbor foreign insurgents, who tend to be better skilled in war craft than the local, part-time Afghan insurgents.

This implies that before things get better, they’ll get much worse.  But at least when the smoke clears, we’ll have won some clarity in the field.  The question is: is clarity a worthwhile prize if the price that must be paid for it is that we set the field on fire?