U.S. Army Major General Peter Fuller was relieved of his command in Afghanistan earlier this month because, when asked about Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s recent hand-over-heart vow that “if there is war between Pakistan and America, we will stand by Pakistan,” he called Karzai “erratic” and asked, “Why don’t you just poke me in the eye with a needle! You’ve got to be kidding me.” But what was more surprising than MG Fuller’s reaction — which, if one considers the 1,800 Americans killed protecting Afghanistan, was restrained — was that of a “Western diplomat” who, wishing to remain anonymous due to the sensitivity of his statement, observed, “The phraseology could have been better.” In other words, weeks after Joint Chiefs Chairman (Ret.) Michael Mullen’s testimony specifically confirming Pakistani intelligence’s support of the Taliban’s September attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul, which killed 25 people, six months after the U.S. hunt-down of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani Army town of Abbottabad, and 10 years into a war against a Pakistan-fueled insurgency, criticizing the grammar of a pro-Pakistan statement remains one step too far outside the shade for the coalition of the willing.
The firing comes amid revelations about a “secret memo” delivered from Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari to Admiral Mullen last May. The memo called for U.S. support in convincing the ISI to axe its Taliban-training “Section S,” revealing the U.S.’s ongoing courtship of the ISI — a courtship the U.S. plans to continue, judging by Jeffrey Goldberg’s December profile in The Atlantic, “The Ally from Hell,” which ominously concludes with an insider’s assurance that General David H. Petraeus, in his new role as CIA director, will make progress with the ISI because he has “a good personal relationship with these guys.”
Whatever the U.S. position, it has not taken a “secret memo” for Afghans to conclude that Pakistanis are at the root of their problems. For most Afghans in Kabul, the target of a startling trend of shopping center attacks this year despite its vaunted “Ring of Steel” security perimeter, “Pakistani” is nearly synonymous with “terrorist.” Even in Pashtun-dominated Kandahar, most Afghans consider the violence — this year has brought the assassination of the provincial police chief, the provincial shurah chief, the Kandahar City mayor, and many district officials — to be a Pakistani export. Southerners rank Pakistani support as one of the top three reasons the Taliban fight, according to an Asia Foundation survey released this month. Shurah leaders in Kandahar and surrounding provinces privately say not only that they believe the ISI is supporting Taliban operations in the south, but that Pakistan will reach further as America exits.
President Karzai’s statement of Pakistani solidarity was, then, meant for Pakistani consumption, not domestic. This reflects an instinctive bow to Pakistani power at a time when the waning U.S. presence was unable to prevent the July assassination of Karzai’s close adviser Jan Mohammad Khan and the September assassination of his nationally respected Peace Council chief Burhanuddin Rabbani.
But the intended audience of the U.S.’s perennially tame statements on Karzai’s corruption and Pakistan’s subversion (Admiral Mullen’s statement came only after he retired) is less clear. The center of gravity in counterinsurgency, according to Gen Petraeus’s Army field manual, is not external actors but the domestic population. An Afghan population left guessing about U.S. feelings towards the puppet-masters in Pakistan or the corrupt administration in Kabul is more likely to be suspicious of the promises ISAF makes with conviction, particularly regarding the “transition” buzz: as a NATO spokesman assured Afghans this week, “NATO’s combat role will be progressively reduced, but Afghanistan will need support after 2014 and that support will continue.”
Unfortunately, the U.S.’s fixation on institution-building and politicking comes at the expense of Afghans’ trust. MG Fuller was fired for weakening ISAF’s “solid relationship” with the Afghan government, but it is unclear how Afghans, a record 56% of whom reported corruption to be a major problem in daily life in 2011, view anyone boasting affinity with such a dubious bunch. Meanwhile, those who emphasize fixing “AfPak” relations, to use the late Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s tired phrase, overlook the second- and third-order effects of gaining the grassroots trust of the population: Afghans confident in U.S. intentions and presented with an apolitical timetable for U.S. withdrawal would be far likelier to stop facilitating the Pakistan Taliban’s presence in Afghanistan. This, coupled with drastic cuts in the U.S. aid given to Pakistan (and, consequently, to the Taliban and radical madrassas via the ISI), would disrupt the flow of insurgents into Afghanistan, not to mention the spill-over of the fundamentalist Deobandi teachings that are tightening their grip on Afghanistan’s mosques.
Indeed, the diplomats and civilian advisers are as guilty as the military in favoring politics over COIN. Too often, the most cherished metric for evaluating the over $18.8 billion the U.S. has spent on foreign aid in Afghanistan is the “burn rate.” As the June 2011 “Evaluating U.S. Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan” Senate report put it, “Political pressures create perverse incentives to spend money even when the conditions are not right.” The result is a distorted Afghan economy (it is geopolitically taboo to even suggest deregulating Afghanistan’s poppy cash crop) and a looming depression, a preoccupation of many elders at this week’s Kabul “jirga.”
As for civilian advisers, consider the lax COIN metrics of Andrew Exum, an Afghanistan expert at the Center for a New American Strategy, “Washington’s go-to think tank on military affairs,” as The Washington Post has suggested. In July 2009 he said the “11th hour” was at hand, predicting that by August 2010 ISAF would have to be able to demonstrate progress in lowering civilian body counts and increasing security force competence. Yet the percentage of Afghans agreeing that the police force is unprofessional and poorly trained remained a constant 58% in 2010 (dropping to 56% in 2011), and civilian deaths in the first six months of each year have increased from 622 in 2009 to 1,167 in 2011. Undaunted, last December Mr. Exum predicted July 2011 would be a COIN “watershed,” when “the unmistakable outlines of progress or deepening evidence of problems will emerge.” Yet as 2012 approaches, any Afghanistan verdict remains murky.
There are some encouraging signs of breaking the political impasse. Last month Afghanistan signed a long-overdue strategic partnership agreement with India, the natural enemy of the Taliban and al Qaida in the region. This came in the wake of the U.S.’s summer decision to delay payments on hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid and reimbursements to Pakistan. As for the State Department, its Afghanistan budget has passed its peak, giving hope that “burn rate” obsessions and million-dollar salaries for civilian “technical advisers” will be a thing of the past. Yet with Kabul jirga attendees and an Afghan opposition figure in Washington warning this week of a post-2014 civil war, the U.S. still has a counterinsurgency effort to win. When world leaders convene in Bonn next month to make sense of where Afghanistan goes from here, “phraseology” ought to be the least of their concerns.
Patrick Knapp is a U.S. Army officer who recently returned from a year working in a civilian capacity as a field officer for an aid program in Kandahar City, Afghanistan.