Afghanistan wave 4
Counterterrorism causes decentralization – solves
Download 0.66 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Solvency – counterterrorism solves Afghan collapse
- AT: CT approach causes Taliban takeover
Counterterrorism causes decentralization – solvesCutting the mission by half and focusing on decentralization solves Sanger, 7/21/10 (David, New York Times, “Afghan Deadline is Cutting Two ways,” http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/world/asia/22assess.html?_r=3&hp) “After nearly nine years of war,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior official in Mr. Bush’s State Department, wrote over the weekend inNewsweek, “continued or increased U.S. involvement in Afghanistan isn’t likely to yield lasting improvements that would be commensurate in any way with the investment of American blood and treasure. It is time to scale down our ambitions there and both reduce and redirect what we do.” Mr. Haass is not recommending full withdrawal. Instead, he said in an interview, “I’m talking about reducing combat troops and operations and costs and casualties by more than half,” leaving mostly Special Forces, air power and trainers for Afghan troops in the region. In Kabul on Tuesday, President Karzai talked about having Afghan soldiers and the police taking responsibility for security by 2014. “Why should we be confident of that,” Mr. Haass asked, “given the history of Afghanistan?” Solvency – counterterrorism solves Afghan collapseMinimizing the US commitment but retaining some permanent presence is vital to preventing Afghanistan collapse Joffe, 10 - a senior fellow at the Institute for International Studies, and an Abramowitz Fellow at the Hoover Institution (Josef, The New Republic, “Stay Forever,” 8/12, lexis) They know that democracies fight wars of choice only if victory is swift, bloodless, and reasonably priced. They don’t like operations that are indecisive, and this one has lasted even longer than the war in Vietnam. The asymmetry has become crueler over time. Thirty-five years after the fall of Saigon, postmodern Western society is horrified even by blood we shed on the other side. This our enemies have learned as well, hence the tactics of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban, which lure our forces into killing (either real or make-believe) civilians. Nothing has soured Germans more on the war in Afghanistan than the scores of Afghans killed near Kunduz in a German-ordered bombing run by U.S. aircraft late last year. How many were civilians? We’ll never know. Democracies will fight as fiercely as totalitarians when their own lands are at stake. But they won’t fight to the end in a difficult war of choice, as Afghanistan surely is. Yet the willingness to stay as long as it takes is the alpha and omega of any counterinsurgency strategy. If we go in, we have to be willing to stay sine die. We must not think like a traditional army that knocks out the enemy and then goes home. We have to think like a police force. The police stay on the beat forever. Only then can they tell the good guys from the bad guys. Only then can they gain vital intelligence from the locals. Only because they reliably serve and protect can they conquer “hearts and minds.” But why would we stay where interests (remote) and costs (high) are so unbalanced? There are lots of good reasons. Our interests may be abstract, but they are not unreal. The greater Middle East, from the Levant to Kashmir, will be in the twenty-first century what Europe was in the twentieth: the arena where endless vicious conflict--strategic as well as ideological, within as well as between states--will come home to haunt us if it remains unchecked. Indeed, the Taliban pale against a failing, deeply anti-Western nuclear state like Pakistan or a revolutionary regime like Iran’s that believes it is on a mission from God. Here, then, is our conundrum: We must never set an exit date, as we did not in Kosovo. But, for the last decade, Western forces have stayed in Kosovo only because nobody dies, neither “them” nor us. American troops are still in Germany because there are no IEDs on the autobahns. The only way, therefore, for us to stay in Afghanistan is to go with our advantages and dodge our weaknesses as democracies, which recoil sooner or later from the sight of blood--theirs and ours. Our advantages are technology and training: skilled soldiers, “eyes in the sky,” information processing, and standoff weapons ranging from drones to aircraft carriers and long-range bombers. Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest is (erroneously) credited with the counsel to “git thar fustest with the mostest” as a guarantee of military success. Today, the key is to “git thar fustest with the bestest”--be swift and precise. Keep enemies off balance, exploit surprise, rely on air- and space-borne intelligence, disrupt their command and logistics networks (yes, even irregulars have supply lines), immobilize them, keep them from massing, avoid “collateral damage.” Deny them sanctuaries and stay away from the population, which also means: Forget nation-building. There is no nation in Afghanistan. No, you can’t “win” that way--in the sense of enshrining a preferred political order or routing the enemy for good. But you can constrain and deter your foes by maximizing their costs and minimizing yours. Best of all, a combination of watchful presence and nimble offensive can be sustained indefinitely. And indefinite the twenty-first century’s “Great Game” will be. The tactical payoff is the enemy’s growing conviction that we won’t go home. The strategic benefit is that he might eventually reconsider and start talking in earnest. That’s the best we can do, and it is better than throwing in the towel in round six. AT: CT approach causes Taliban takeoverThe Taliban won’t be able to take over Afghanistan if the US ends COIN and a CT approach will prevent al Qaeda from having a sanctuary Sageman, 9 - adjunct Associate Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs and former case officer for the CIA (Marc, “Confronting al-Qaeda: Understanding the Threat in Afghanistan,” Perspectives on Terrorism, vol. 3 n.4, http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php?option=com_rokzine&view=article&id=92&Itemid=54) a. The possibility of Afghan insurgents winning is not a sure thing. Twenty years ago, it took a far better armed and far more popular insurgency more than three years to take power after the complete withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan. Unlike 1996, when the Taliban captured Kabul, the label Taliban now includes a collection of local insurgencies with some attempts at coordination on a larger scale. The Taliban is deeply divided and there is no evidence that it is in the process of consolidating its forces for a push on Kabul. Local Taliban forces can prevent foreign forces from protecting the local population, through their time honored tactics of ambushes and raids. General McChrystal is right: the situation in the countryside is grim. But this local resistance does not translate into deeply divided Taliban forces being able to coalesce in the near future into an offensive force capable of marching on to Kabul. Command and control frictions and divergent goals hamper their planning and coordination of operations. They lack popular support and have not demonstrated ability to project beyond their immediate locality. b. Taliban return to power will not mean an automatic new sanctuary for al-Qaeda. First, there is no reason for al-Qaeda to return to Afghanistan. It seems safer in Pakistan at the moment. Indeed, al-Qaeda has so far not returned to Taliban controlled areas in Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda’s relationship with Taliban factions has never been very smooth, despite the past public display of Usama bin Laden’s pledge of bayat to Mullah Omar. Al-Qaeda leaders seem intimately involved in the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, less so with Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura, and even less with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s forces. Indeed, the presence of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan divided Taliban leaders before their downfall. Likewise, loyalty for Taliban leader Mullah Omar also divided al-Qaeda leadership. This complex relationship between al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban factions opens up an opportunity for the U.S. Government to mobilize its deep understanding of local history, culture and politics to prevent the return of a significant al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan through exploitation of internal rivalries and judicious use of political and economic incentives [8]. c. Even if a triumphant Taliban invites al-Qaeda to return to Afghanistan, its presence there will look very similar to its presence in the FATA. Times have changed. The presence of large sanctuaries in Afghanistan was predicated on Western not so benign neglect of the al-Qaeda funded camps there. This era is gone because Western powers will no longer tolerate them. There are many ways to prevent the return of al-Qaeda to Afghanistan besides a national counter-insurgency strategy. Vigilance through electronic monitoring, spatial surveillance, networks of informants in contested territory, exploitation of internal Afghan rivalries, combined with the nearby stationing of a small force dedicated to physically eradicate any visible al-Qaeda presence in Afghanistan will prevent the return of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The proper military mission in Afghanistan and elsewhere is sanctuary denial. Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 0.66 Mb. Share with your friends:
|