Below The Beltway

I’ve been skeptical for some time of President Obama’s insistence on increasing American military involvement in Afghanistan. As I noted when Obama announced his 17,000-troop Afghan surge, it’s unclear precisely how he thinks we can win a war that has been going on for 7 1/2 years already:

The question is what the strategy is going to be.

Are we there to hunt down bin Laden and finish off the Taliban, or are we there to prop up the Karzai government ? If it’s the first, it has a chance of succeeding, although it’s worth noting that the bulk of the center of Taliban and al Qaeda power now seems to be located in the northern provinces of Pakistan, a supposed ally. If it’s the second, then Obama would be trying to do something that neither the British Empire nor the Soviet Union was able to succeed at, impose his will in Afghanistan.

In today’s New York Times, we learned another element in this still-unfolding strategy:

WASHINGTON — President Obama declared in an interview that the United States was not winning the war in Afghanistan and opened the door to a reconciliation process in which the American military would reach out to moderate elements of the Taliban, much as it did with Sunni militias in Iraq.

Mr. Obama pointed to the success in peeling Iraqi insurgents away from more hard-core elements of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a strategy that many credit as much as the increase of American forces with turning the war around in the last two years. “There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and in the Pakistani region,” he said, while cautioning that solutions in Afghanistan will be complicated.

(…)

Mr. Obama said on the campaign trail last year that the possibility of breaking away some elements of the Taliban “should be explored,” an idea also considered by some military leaders. But now he has started a review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan intended to find a new strategy, and he signaled that reconciliation could emerge as an important initiative, mirroring the strategy used by Gen. David H. Petraeus in Iraq.

“If you talk to General Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said.

At the same time, he acknowledged that outreach may not yield the same success. “The situation in Afghanistan is, if anything, more complex,” he said. “You have a less governed region, a history of fierce independence among tribes. Those tribes are multiple and sometimes operate at cross purposes, and so figuring all that out is going to be much more of a challenge.”

No, the real challenge is defining what victory actually is and what our goals in Afghanistan should be. We went into the country initially to capture and destroy the elements of al Qaeda that had launched the September 11th attacks. By and large, that mission was accomplished long ago and the remaining elements of al Qaeda have been reduced to hiding in the northern provinces of Pakistan and smuggling audio tapes of someone who may or may not be Osama bin Laden to Al Jazeera on a semi-occasional basis.

Meanwhile, our troops are still in Afghanistan propping up the Karzai Government, which appears to be on the verge of a Constitutional crisis of it’s own making and the American troops on the ground are trying to complete a mission that doesn’ t seem to have a clear goal in mind.

If destroying al Qaeda is the goal, as the President has said, then why aren’t we fighting them where they actually are ?

If it’s not, then what are we still doing there ?