Economic development counterplan solvency

Economic development counterplan solvency

“Instead of spending money on the military, they should spend money on aid--for civilians, for jobs,” Ustad Atta Mohammad Noor, the influential governor of Balkh, told me. More than one million people live in Balkh; 90 percent are completely impoverished farmers, with no access to clean water, health care, or education. Jobs and infrastructure, the governor said, would translate into popular support for the counterinsurgency effort and for the Karzai government, which most Afghans I met in the north deride. “It’s not only the job of the Afghan government,” he argued. “It is also the job of the international community, especially of the United States.”

The provincial head of the Afghan Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation said his office has received no budget at all this year to help the returning refugees. The refugees “call us liars,” he said. “They say, ‘You have betrayed us.’ ... For all we know, they have joined the Taliban.”

Withdraw to Northern Afghanistan CP (works with partition CP solvency / plan mechanism)

Withdrawal to the north solves your aff--- entirely

Downing, 10 –political/military analyst (7/29/10, Brian, Asia Times, “Plan B for Afghanistan,” http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LG29Df02.html)


The US would have strategic options and benefits that it does not have as long as it fights the war as it currently does. Perhaps most importantly, it would allow the US to reduce its bloody, expensive, and counter-productive presence in Central Asia. 
The US could hold out the carrot of economic aid to Taliban-controlled regions. There already is a great deal of US infrastructure there in the form of hydroelectric dams, irrigation systems and road networks. This could lead to moderation within the Taliban, a complete break with al-Qaeda (to include turning over its leadership), and perhaps someday even to reconciliation and reintegration of the two parts of the country, perhaps after an agreement hammered out by a loya jirga (grand council). 
Alternately, the US could pursue a stick policy. The US could support insurgencies in the south based on numerous Pashtun tribes which have longstanding hostility toward the Taliban. Further, Taliban behavior could be moderated by the threat of small-scale airstrikes from drones and fighter aircraft. 
In an even less accommodating form, the US could prevent the Taliban from ever occupying an administrative center and becoming a government. The Taliban would have to remain a ghost-like guerrilla movement, unable to govern, spouting slogans that no longer resonate in the hearts and minds of Pashtuns. 
It is particularly relevant to political considerations in the West that any of these policies could be pursued with a greatly reduced US/NATO troop presence. 
The US would realize other benefits from withdrawing to the north. Domestic support for the effort would firm as Americans saw themselves no longer backing an inept and corrupt government and as working with a credible coalition of northern leaders, perhaps led by Abdullah Abdullah, who finished second to Karzai in last year's fraud-ridden elections. 
Americans would see more political and economic development - signs of progress frustratingly absent today. Leaving the core insurgent areas and retrenching in other areas would greatly reduce US casualties and Afghan civilian casualties. Indeed, the US could greatly cut its troop levels, perhaps even reducing them by half in two years. 
Regional cooperation in North Afghanistan would have long-term positive influences on the geopolitics and economic development of the area and large parts of Central Asia as well. There would be a closer working relationship with Russia, which for all its wily moves along its expansive periphery has been helpful with US/NATO logistics into Afghanistan as it shares an opposition to Islamist terrorism. 
Other cooperative arrangements will present themselves. Iran has built up western Afghanistan as a glacis against the Taliban, which slaughtered its officials and cruelly oppressed its Shi'ite co-religionists, the Hazaras. India, too, shares a concern with terrorism in the region and has embarked on significant aid programs in the north. 
The US could rethink its uneasy and dubious partnership with Pakistan. Its assistance was critical in supplying the mujahideen bands during the Soviet war. It led to a Soviet exit but also to a hypertrophied military intelligence service that has become the hub of terrorist and insurgent groups in Afghanistan and India. Over the years, US policy has sought to detach Pakistan from such groups - to no avail. Pakistan is perhaps the strongest state sponsor of terrorism and yet enjoys generous aid packages and trade relations. 
Recognition of the two states' differing interests in Afghanistan would make US supply lines through Pakistan even less reliable than they are now. Presently, the Pakistani Taliban attack convoys on the roads between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass and the large Pashtun population in Karachi is poised to endanger logistical depots there. The reduction of US troop levels allowed by withdrawal from the south would make Pakistan less important logistically and also reduce its leverage in Washington. 
Russia has maneuvered about in Central Asia but has not sought to endanger Western supply lines into Afghanistan. It has used its influence along its periphery to facilitate supply lines from the Baltic to Kyrgyzstan and has recently authorized US polar flights to use Russian air space. Russia shares the US's concern with the Taliban and its support is more dependable than Pakistan's. 
A reduced presence in Afghanistan would enable the US to wage the "war on terror" in a less expensive, more adroit and perhaps more successful manner. The heavy US footprint from Iraq to Afghanistan has provided a rallying cause for jihadis throughout the Islamic world. The US could establish partnerships with local intelligence services and respond not with large operations but with rapid insertions and extractions of special forces or with the use of small-scale airstrikes. This would certainly be the case with any return of al-Qaeda bases to Pashtun parts of Afghanistan or even south of the frontier. 
Withdrawal from the Pashtun parts of Afghanistan would be seen by many as tantamount to defeat - "cutting and running" in American political discourse. Such claims would undoubtedly be made and would resonate strongly in the media and public, but they display little understanding of strategy or military history. 
In 1942, Colonel Dwight Eisenhower and General George Marshall determined that reinforcing the Philippines would be a misallocation of men and materiel and chose instead to fall back on Australia. Nine years later, their fellow five-star general Douglas MacArthur withdrew from positions near the Yalu River in Korea and consolidated to the south. None of these generals was thought unwise, craven or unpatriotic - and neither war ended in defeat. 
As noted, withdrawing from the south and east need not be a permanent state of affairs, diplomacy and unfolding events could bring the two parts of the country back together. But should the division stand, the line would better recognize the ethnic realities of the land far better than the one Mr Henry Durand drew between Pakistan and Afghanistan in 1893. 

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