Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
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- AT: Afghanistan Secession
- AT: Afghanistan Spills Over To Pakistan
AT: Afghanistan EconomyLong timeframe --- best case scenario for big growth is 10 years Seema Patel, consultant for the Post-Conflict Reconstruction Project at CSIS, leading an evaluation study of reconstruction efforts, “Breaking Point: Measuring Progress in Afghanistan” CSIS 2-23-2007 (http://www.csis.org/media/csis/pubs/070223_breakingpoint.pdf) Even with full international support and sound policies and programs, Afghanistan in 10 years will likely still be a poor and underdeveloped country. Sustained growth in the economy and trade will not provide enough jobs and steady income for Afghan families. The central government will struggle to retain legitimacy, to collect revenues for the sustenance of its military and bureaucracy, to eliminate corruption, to deliver social and judicial services, and to extend its presence to the whole country. Pockets of territory will remain or fall under the influence of local strongmen, and Afghans will rely on local and tribal institutions to fill the vacuums left by the state. Historical social divisions between tribes, ethnicities, and regions will persist, and populations will remain isolated from one another and from the center. Neighbors will meddle in Afghanistan’s domestic economy and politics. Substantial economic growth impossible --- Afghanistan’s too weak Peter Bergen, Professor at Johns Hopkins, Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, , “Afghanistan Outlook” FNS, Congressional Testimony Before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 2-15-2007 But I think the overarching point is Afghanistan is a classic sort of glass half empty, half full problem, but the (train ride ?) is definitely going down. And I think we also have to say what a success in Afghanistan -- Afghanistan is never going to become Belgium. It's going to be a poor, weak, fragile state for the foreseeable future. But it's one where security can be improved and it's one where the economy can be slightly improved. And I am optimistic about those things, and we need some of the things that President Bush is talking about today. I think they'll play in quite well with that.
Internal instability, however, always is centripetal. Since the Pashtuns are not fighting to secede, they must capture Kabul if they hope to return to government for all Afghanistan. Otherwise they fail, remaining a chronic, but not terminal, security problem. At this point, they are unable to capture Kabul or to hold territory against NATO. The scale of violence has increased but control of the land has not changed much, based on open source reporting. AT: Afghanistan Spills Over To PakistanNo spillover from Afghanistan to Pakistan – Pakistan already maintains ties Tiedemann 9 (KATHERINE TIEDEMANN 09 policy analyst in the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative specializing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “Withdrawal without winning” http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/09/14/withdrawal_without_winning) A second argument, made most recently by Frederick Kagan inthe September 5-6 Wall Street Journal, is that, to quote from its headline, "A stable Pakistan needs a stable Afghanistan." But does it really? Are there reasonable prospects for a stable Afghanistan over the next decade no matter what we do? Isn't there a good argument that part of the problem in Pakistan stems from our continued presence in Afghanistan? We are told that bases in Pakistan are used to support the insurgents in Afghanistan, while simultaneously being told that it is the fighting in Afghanistan that is endangering Pakistan. Reciprocal causation is certainly possible, but this modern version of the turbulent frontier doctrine is not backed by solid logic. Pakistan's ISI and army clearly maintain ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan, and although they cannot exert anything like complete control, once the danger of a Taliban defeat by the U.S. passes they would have every incentive to reign in their clients. Furthermore, the stability of Pakistan does not depend on pacifying the tribal areas. While the recent efforts by Pakistan to regain control of some of its territory may owe something to our combating the Taliban, I wonder if the effect is a large one. In parallel, it can be argued that we gain general influence over Pakistan by fighting i n Afghanistan, but here not only the magnitude of the effect but its sign is open to question. Afghan instability won’t affect Pakistan—Pakistani affairs will be affected by internal forces Pillar, PhD, CIA retiree, 2009 [Paul, “Counterterrorism and Stability in Afghanistan,” 10-14, cpass.georgetown.edu/documents/AfghanHASCPillarOct09_1.doc] The possible connection of events in Afghanistan to Pakistan has, of course, become a major part of debate on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan. Although influencing developments in Pakistan is not why we intervened in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s importance requires that the connections, if any, be addressed. Two questions must be asked. One is how much effect anything happening in Afghanistan is likely to have on the politics and stability of Pakistan. There is a tendency to think of such questions in spatial terms, with visions of malevolent influences suffusing across international boundaries like a contagious disease. But the future of Pakistan will be influenced far more by forces within Pakistan itself. Those forces include the inclinations of the Pakistani population and the will and capabilities of the Pakistani military, which is by far the strongest—in several senses of the term—institution in Pakistan. Pakistan has more than five times the population of Afghanistan and an economy ten times as large. Pakistani policymakers and the Pakistani military have a keen interest in Afghanistan, partly because of concerns about Pashtun nationalism and mostly as a side theater in their rivalry with India. But events inside Afghanistan will not be decisive, or anything close to it, in shaping Pakistan’s future. The other question is exactly what sort of influence, for good or for ill, events in Afghanistan are likely to have on Pakistan even if that influence is marginal rather than decisive. Again, the spatial model of spreading instability tends to dominate thinking, but it is unclear exactly how the model would materialize in practice. Establishment of a hostile regime on one’s borders (and we should note that Islamabad’s relations with the current Afghan government of Hamid Karzai have been anything but cordial) may weaken one’s own internal stability if it offers substantial new resources to an internal opposition or provides a base of operations that the opposition previously lacked. But even establishment of an Afghan Taliban state or proto-state would not do these things to Pakistan. Even if the Afghan Taliban—who have been beneficiaries more than enemies of the Pakistani government—decided to turn their attention away from consolidating domestic power to try to stoke an Islamist fire in Pakistan, they would have few additional resources to offer. And the Pakistani Taliban already have bases of operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, which appear as part of Pakistan on maps but which Islamabad has never effectively controlled. In the meantime, an expanded U.S.-led counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is more likely to complicate than to alleviate the task of Pakistani security forces, insofar as it pushes additional militants across the Durand line. A larger U.S. military presence in the immediate region also would make it politically more difficult for the Pakistani government to cooperate openly on security matters with the United States, in the face of widespread negative sentiment inside Pakistan regarding that presence. 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