America's Afghan Mission: The Wrong Front Line?
After the death of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. is now faced with a difficult question. My latest column for CNN.com asks: Is the commitment of 100,000 troops in Afghanistan hurting our ability to fight terrorism in Pakistan?
The killing of Osama bin Laden raises many haunting questions. Here's the most important:
Has our mission in Afghanistan become obsolete?
To think through that question, start with a prior question: Why did we remain in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban?
The usual answer to that question is: To prevent Afghanistan from re-emerging as a terrorist safe haven.
There have always been a lot of problems with that answer. (For example: Does it really take 100,000 U.S. troops, plus allies, to prevent a country from becoming a terrorist safe haven? We're doing a pretty good job in Yemen with a radically smaller presence.)
But this week, we have exposed to sight two huge problems with the usual answer.
1. The world's most important terrorist safe haven is visibly not Afghanistan, but instead next-door Pakistan.
2. Because the U.S. presence in Afghanistan requires cooperation from Pakistan, the Afghanistan mission perversely inhibits the United States from taking more decisive action against Pakistan's harboring of terrorism.
Here's a very concrete example. Through the 2008 presidential campaign, candidates John McCain and Barack Obama tussled over the issue of direct anti-terrorist action inside Pakistan. On February 20, 2008, McCain called Obama "naive" for suggesting that he might act inside Pakistan without Pakistani permission.
In retrospect, McCain's answer looks wrong. But think about why McCain said what he did. He knew that acting in a way that offended Pakistan would complicate the mission in Afghanistan. The United States looks to Pakistan to police the Pashtun country on the other side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Guerrilla wars become much harder to win if the guerrillas are allowed sanctuary across an international border. So if the mission in Afghanistan is the supreme priority, then acting in ways that offend Pakistan must be avoided.
But this thinking leads to an upside-down result: In order to prevent Afghanistan from ever again harboring a potential future bin Laden, we have to indulge Pakistan as it harbors the actual bin Laden! ...
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