Rethinking Afghanistan

While Iraq has dominated the majority of media and military attention since 2002, the public focus is beginning to shift.

The border between Afghanistan and western Pakistan, a region known as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that remains ungoverned by either Afghanistan or Pakistan, has been marred with violence and an increase in al-Qaeda and Taliban presence.

“In many of these settled areas relentless Taliban incursion have already lead to the complete collapse of tribal and civilian administration,” said foreign policy analyst Malou Innocent at the Cato Institute.

“According to senior U.S. intelligence officials al-Qaida, Taliban, and allied terrorist groups have 157 training camps in the tribal areas alone and more than 400 logistical support locations in the tribal areas and the northwest frontier provence.”

The situation in Afghanistan has been strained as well. Current troop levels have been insufficient for restoring security, due in part both by the amount deployed to Iraq and limitations put on NATO troops.

“We have a fair number of NATO forces, some 30,000, but many of them are stationed up North in the country where there is virtually no threat and virtually no fighting…a number of caveats, restrictions, on the use of their forces. Some can not be used at night, some can not be used in combat zones,” said vice president of defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute Ted Galen Carpenter.

The drug war has also threatened the chances for stability. While some funding from the international heroin reaches al-Qaida, warlords loyal to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai and a substantial portion of the general population profit as well. According to Carpenter, these are allies that the U.S. needs to keep.

Still, Carpenter said, even if these problems are addressed it is unlikely that the shape Afghanistan takes will be particularly pleasing to the U.S.

“We have to accept the realities of Afghanistan, of regional power-brokers and less than a western style democracy…the reality is that the Afghan system, such as it was, worked pretty well for a good many decades…”

Carpenter added, “We may even need to see if we can cut a deal with the Afghan Taliban, to divide that fraction from its al-Qaida allies. Much as General Petraeus, rather shrewdly, cut a deal with indigenous Iraqi sunni insurgents to separate them from al-Qaida in Iraq.”