Behind the debate over the speed and scope of the Obama administration’s promised troop drawdown from Afghanistan is a complex calculation of how a reduced U.S. military presence would affect prospects for negotiations. President Obama is due to announce his decision on troop reductions on Wednesday. Hit the jump to read the rest of the story.
Behind the debate over the speed and scope of the Obama administration’s promised troop drawdown from Afghanistan is a complex calculation of how a reduced U.S. military presence would affect prospects for negotiations.
President Obama is due to announce his decision on troop reductions on Wednesday, ahead of his scheduled visit on Thursday to Fort Drum, N.Y., the home of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division which has made multiple deployments to Afghanistan.
“He’s finalizing his decision. He’s reviewing his options,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said Monday.
Announcing a big troop reduction — for example, 10,000 of the 100,000 Americans now serving in Afghanistan — might send a message to the Taliban to not bother with negotiations. Too small a withdrawal means President Obama could risk losing what remains of the American public’s support for a U.S. role in Afghanistan that might have to continue through years of negotiations.
After a decade of war, it’s become clear neither side can land a knockout blow on the battlefield, and that some form of negotiated settlement is needed to end the fighting with an outcome that preserves the most important American goals: a stable Afghanistan that can deny sanctuary to violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the most radical elements of the Taliban.
A negotiated settlement is also seen as critical in preventing the region from sliding back into the bloody civil war of the 1980s and 1990s that rocked the region and incubated the Taliban and al Qaeda.
A strong and continuing U.S. military presence — providing security while building Afghanistan’s army and police — would be essential muscle driving the Taliban to talks and keeping them there, diplomatic experts say. It’s the heavy weight that would enable American diplomats to tell baulking Taliban negotiators to go stuff it.
“You have to have an alternative to negotiations,” veteran diplomatic troubleshooter James Dobbins told The Huffington Post. “You need to be able to tell the Taliban that if we get an agreement there’s all kinds of benefits for them, but we don’t need an agreement.” Dobbins negotiated settlements to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo and set up Afghanistan’s postwar government in 2002.
The Taliban, said Dobbins, “need to know we can just walk away.”
As Obama makes his decision about the size and timing of a draw-down of American troops, “the insurgents certainly will be watching — gauging the durability of the American commitment” in Afghanistan, said Dobbins.
No negotiations are currently underway, But “very preliminary” contacts and discussions involving American and other diplomats and the Taliban have been held for several weeks, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said over the weekend. Although senior administration officials are wary of taking part in formal negotiations under an international facilitator such as a United Nations envoy, the concept of a negotiated settlement has wide backing. “We have all said all along that a political outcome is the way most of the wars end,” Gates explained Sunday on CNN.
Or, as retired Army Lt. Gen. David W. Barno put it, “We can’t rub them out and they [the Taliban] haven’t been able to take any cities.” Barno, a senior advisor at the Center for a New American Strategy, a centrist think tank, commanded U.S. and allied combat troops in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005. “Nobody on ‘our’ side is talking about victory now,” Barno observed, adding: “We had it eight years ago, and squandered it.”
Now, managing war-weary domestic public opinion while bringing the war to a satisfactory conclusion will require tricky presidential footwork, said Jeffrey Laurenti, a senior expert on negotiations at the Century Foundation in New York. “A precipitous draw-down this year would run the risk of being seen as a sign of intent to depart regardless of success at negotiations,” said Laurenti, author of a forthcoming book on Afghanistan. “At least through this year’s fighting season, you want to maintain as close to a complete military capability as possible.”
