WASHINGTON, Mar 28 (IPS) - The argument for deeper U.S. military commitment to the Afghan War invoked by President Barack Obama in his first major policy statement on Afghanistan and Pakistan Friday - that al Qaeda must be denied a safe haven in Afghanistan - has been not been subjected to public debate in Washington.
A few influential strategists here have been arguing, however, that this official rationale misstates the al Qaeda problem and ignores the serious risk that an escalating U.S. war poses to Pakistan.
Those strategists doubt that al Qaeda would seek to move into Afghanistan as long as they are ensconced in Pakistan and argue that escalating U.S. drone airstrikes or Special Operations raids on Taliban targets in Pakistan will actually strengthen radical jihadi groups in the country and weaken the Pakistani government?s ability to resist them.
The first military strategist to go on record with such a dissenting view on Afghanistan and Pakistan was Col. T. X. Hammes, a retired Marine officer and author of the 2004 book "The Sling and the Stone", which argued that the U.S. military faces a new type of warfare which it would continue to lose if it did not radically reorient its thinking. He became more widely known as one of the first military officers to call in September 2006 for Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld?s resignation over failures in Iraq.
Col. Hammes dissected the rationale for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan in an article last September on the website of the "Small Wars Journal", which specialises in counterinsurgency issues. He questioned the argument that Afghanistan had to be stabilised in order to deny al Qaeda a terrorist base there, because, "Unfortunately, al Qaeda has moved its forces and its bases into Pakistan."
Hammes suggested that the Afghan War might actually undermine the tenuous stability of a Pakistani regime, thus making the al Qaeda threat far more serious. He complained that "neither candidate has even commented on how our actions [in Afghanistan] may be feeding Pakistan?s instability."
Hammes, who has since joined the Institute for Defence Analysis, a Pentagon contractor, declined to comment on the Obama administration?s rationale for the Afghan War for this article.
Kenneth Pollack, the director of research at the Saban Centre for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institution, has also expressed doubt about the official argument for escalation in Afghanistan. Pollack?s 2002 book, "The Threatening Storm," was important in persuading opinion-makers in Washington to support the Bush administration?s use of U.S. military force against the Saddam Hussein regime, and he remains an enthusiastic supporter of the U.S. military presence in Iraq.
But at a Brookings forum Dec. 16, Pollack expressed serious doubts about the strategic rationale for committing the U.S. military to Afghanistan....
continue at Inter Press Service