Pondering Aghanistan

Last month I did a post on Afghanistan that put me squarely in the camp that was pushing for President Obama to quickly make a decision on whether he was going to follow the McChrystal strategy or not. After a month of reading various articles and opinions, and after the events of this week, I think I may have been hasty there. That delay for the last month may actually have provided the leverage needed to secure a key component of the McChrystal strategy: a central government that, while likely to be far more corrupt than we would like, is at least broadly perceived as legitimate and constitutional.

Would this good news have happened if Obama had already committed to more troops for Afghanistan?

President Barack Obama on Tuesday applauded Afghan President Hamid Karzai for accepting election fraud findings that invalidated nearly a third of the votes cast for him in August.

Obama said the breakthrough offers new hope that a credible Kabul government will emerge to partner with the U.S. and NATO in battling a resurgent Taliban insurgency and blocking al-Qaida's return.

I don't know for sure of course, but I have my doubts that Karzai would have accepted a runoff without the leverage of US support being withheld, or even withdrawn. My opinion of the counter-terrorism option for Afghanistan, where we stand off and use air strikes and special forces to keep al Qaeda from recreating bases there, is that it is ridiculous. But maybe it was never really intended to be implemented. It just had to be credible enough to make Karzai think that we were really considering it as an option. I'm not inclined to give Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt here, that he acted out a role in advocating the CT approach, but I can see how it could have been useful in pressuring Karzai.

I know my friends on the right are as anxious to see a decision made as I was, and maybe I'm giving Obama too much credit here. But intentional or not, I think that having that leverage over Karzai was important.