in an
un
stable region, and with its two most important neighbors in conflict with America, seems nearly impossible.
Against this backdrop President Obama decided to write his own narrative of the war’s end. He used the grand occasion of the NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago to say, come hell or high water, American troops will leave Afghanistan by 2014. They will do so because the (wobbly) Afghan security force of around 230,000 (down from the original 400,000 number) that we are training is taking over the security of the country (which will cost us about $4 billion a year), and also because a partnership treaty we have signed with Karzai will ensure stability and continuity in that country after we leave.
But if we leave Afghanistan to a shaky security force and an erratic president, how will we ensure that the state we built will not buckle before the Taliban break up and disintegrate? Afghanistan has none of what Iraq had when we left in December 2011. Iraq had close to a million men in its security forces. It also has oil revenue as well as the requisite education system and social infrastructure to build and maintain a force of that size—and even so Iraq is still teetering on the verge of chaos.
Can we be sure that Karzai will not toss aside the Afghan constitution to stay in power beyond 2014? Will resulting protests and civil conflict add to the still-raging insurgency to make real the Afghanistan of our worst nightmares? Most important, if we leave will we have any influence? Not likely.
We have not won this war on the battlefield nor have we ended it at the negotiating table. We are just washing our hands of it, hoping there will be a decent interval of calm—a reasonable distance between our departure and the catastrophe to follow so we will not be blamed for it. We may hope that the Afghan army we are building will hold out longer than the one the Soviet Union built, but even that may not come to pass. Very likely, the Taliban will win Afghanistan again, and this long and costly war will have been for naught. Our standing will suffer and our security will again be at risk.
And then there is Pakistan to consider.
President Asif Ali Zardari is an enigmatic figure. He inherited the leadership of Pakistan’s largest political party after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a vicious bomb attack blamed on Pakistan’s homegrown branch of the Taliban. Pakistanis don’t like Zardari much. They think he is a hustler, and the memory of his corruption in the 1990s when his wife was prime minister has forever been chiseled into the country’s collective memory. But he should not be dismissed so easily. He is a survivor and a shrewd operator. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler between 1999 and 2008, jailed Zardari on corruption charges and sent his wife into exile. The two made a comeback in 2007 after Musharraf’s rule started to unravel. The years in jail were a trial by fire that turned Zardari into a formidable politician, cunning and ambitious enough to climb his way up to the presidency.
One evening in June 2009, soon after I joined Holbrooke’s team, we called on Zardari at the presidential palace in Islamabad. Holbrooke had brought along journalists on the trip to show them firsthand how important Pakistan was to the Afghan war. Zardari was eager to play his part. As if he had read Holbrooke’s mind, he lost no time in subjecting the note-taking reporters to a long and meandering rigmarole liberally seasoned with an idea that could be paraphrased as “Pakistan deserves more of Uncle Sam’s cash—a
lot
more!”
“Pakistan is like AIG,” he said to drive his point home. “Too big to fail.” What he meant was that his country was “too strategic,” “too dangerous,” or, as Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann would later put it, “too nuclear,” to fail. “You gave AIG one hundredbillion dollars; you should give Pakistan the same,” said Zardari.
un
stable region, and with its two most important neighbors in conflict with America, seems nearly impossible.
Against this backdrop President Obama decided to write his own narrative of the war’s end. He used the grand occasion of the NATO summit in his hometown of Chicago to say, come hell or high water, American troops will leave Afghanistan by 2014. They will do so because the (wobbly) Afghan security force of around 230,000 (down from the original 400,000 number) that we are training is taking over the security of the country (which will cost us about $4 billion a year), and also because a partnership treaty we have signed with Karzai will ensure stability and continuity in that country after we leave.
But if we leave Afghanistan to a shaky security force and an erratic president, how will we ensure that the state we built will not buckle before the Taliban break up and disintegrate? Afghanistan has none of what Iraq had when we left in December 2011. Iraq had close to a million men in its security forces. It also has oil revenue as well as the requisite education system and social infrastructure to build and maintain a force of that size—and even so Iraq is still teetering on the verge of chaos.
Can we be sure that Karzai will not toss aside the Afghan constitution to stay in power beyond 2014? Will resulting protests and civil conflict add to the still-raging insurgency to make real the Afghanistan of our worst nightmares? Most important, if we leave will we have any influence? Not likely.
We have not won this war on the battlefield nor have we ended it at the negotiating table. We are just washing our hands of it, hoping there will be a decent interval of calm—a reasonable distance between our departure and the catastrophe to follow so we will not be blamed for it. We may hope that the Afghan army we are building will hold out longer than the one the Soviet Union built, but even that may not come to pass. Very likely, the Taliban will win Afghanistan again, and this long and costly war will have been for naught. Our standing will suffer and our security will again be at risk.
And then there is Pakistan to consider.
President Asif Ali Zardari is an enigmatic figure. He inherited the leadership of Pakistan’s largest political party after his wife, Benazir Bhutto, was killed in a vicious bomb attack blamed on Pakistan’s homegrown branch of the Taliban. Pakistanis don’t like Zardari much. They think he is a hustler, and the memory of his corruption in the 1990s when his wife was prime minister has forever been chiseled into the country’s collective memory. But he should not be dismissed so easily. He is a survivor and a shrewd operator. General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s military ruler between 1999 and 2008, jailed Zardari on corruption charges and sent his wife into exile. The two made a comeback in 2007 after Musharraf’s rule started to unravel. The years in jail were a trial by fire that turned Zardari into a formidable politician, cunning and ambitious enough to climb his way up to the presidency.
One evening in June 2009, soon after I joined Holbrooke’s team, we called on Zardari at the presidential palace in Islamabad. Holbrooke had brought along journalists on the trip to show them firsthand how important Pakistan was to the Afghan war. Zardari was eager to play his part. As if he had read Holbrooke’s mind, he lost no time in subjecting the note-taking reporters to a long and meandering rigmarole liberally seasoned with an idea that could be paraphrased as “Pakistan deserves more of Uncle Sam’s cash—a
lot
more!”
“Pakistan is like AIG,” he said to drive his point home. “Too big to fail.” What he meant was that his country was “too strategic,” “too dangerous,” or, as Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann would later put it, “too nuclear,” to fail. “You gave AIG one hundredbillion dollars; you should give Pakistan the same,” said Zardari.
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