Inside story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

[Ali_Syed]

Long but worth while read.

The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan - By Vali Nasr | Foreign Policy

It was close to midnight on Jan. 20, 2009, and I was about to go to sleep when my iPhone beeped. There was a new text message. It was from Richard Holbrooke. It said, “Are you up, can you talk?” When I called, he told me that Barack Obama had asked him to serve as envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan. He would work out of the State Department, and he wanted me to join his team. “No one knows this yet. Don’t tell anyone. Well, maybe your wife.” (The Washington Post reported his appointment the next day.)

I first met Holbrooke, the legendary diplomat best known for making peace in the Balkans and breaking plenty of china along the way, at a 2006 conference in Aspen, Colorado. We sat together at one of the dinners and talked about Iran and Pakistan. Holbrooke ignored the keynote speech, the entertainment that followed, and the food that flowed in between to bombard me with questions. We had many more conversations over the next three years, and after I joined him on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2007, we spoke frequently by phone.

Now, making his sales pitch, Holbrooke told me that government is the sum of its people. “If you want to change things, you have to get involved. If you want your voice to be heard, then get inside.” He knew I preferred to work on the Middle East and in particular Iran. But he had different ideas. “This [Afghanistan and Pakistan] matters more. This is what the president is focused on. This is where you want to be.”

He was persuasive, and I knew that we were at a fork in the road. Regardless of what promises candidate Obama made on his way to the White House, Afghanistan now held the future – his and America’s – in the balance. And it would be a huge challenge. When Obama took office, the war in Afghanistan was already in its eighth year. By then, the fighting had morphed into a full-blown insurgency, and the Taliban juggernaut looked unstoppable. They had adopted a flexible, decentralized military structure and even a national political organization, with shadow governors and district leaders for nearly every Afghan province. America was losing, and the enemy knew it. It was a disaster in the making.

But Holbrooke, who would have been secretary of state had Clinton won the presidency but had been vetoed by Obama to be her deputy when she accepted the State Department job instead, now insisted to me that he relished the chance to take on what he dubbed the “AfPak” portfolio. “Nothing is confirmed, but it is pretty much a done deal,” he told me. “If you get any other offers, let me know right away.” Then he laughed and said, “If you work for anyone else, I will break your knees. This is going to be fun. We are going to do some good. Now get some sleep.”

Two months later, I was at my desk at SRAP, as the office of the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan quickly became known. Those first few months were a period of creativity and hope. Holbrooke had carved out a little autonomous principality on the State Department’s first floor, filling it with young diplomats, civil servants, and outside experts like me, straight to the job from a tenured post at Tufts University. Scholars, journalists, foreign dignitaries, members of Congress, and administration officials walked in daily to get their fill of how AfPak strategy was shaping up. Even Hollywood got in on SRAP.

Angelina Jolie lent a hand to help refugees in Pakistan, and the usually low-key State Department cafeteria was abuzz when Holbrooke sat down for coffee with Natalie Portman to talk Afghanistan.

People started early and worked late into the night, and there was a constant flow of new ideas, like how to cut corruption and absenteeism among the Afghan police by using mobile banking and cell phones to pay salaries; how to use text messaging to raise money for refugees; or how to stop the Taliban from shutting down mobile-phone networks by putting cell towers on military bases. SRAP had more of the feel of an Internet start-up than a buttoned-up State Department office.

for the rest, please visit the link: The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan - By Vali Nasr | Foreign Policy

[Ali_Syed]

Re: Inside Story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

The crux of the article is how Holbrooke wanted the issue to be resolved diplomatically, but it was scuttled by the white house as they went out for CT plus which included troop surge in Afghanistan and Drone strikes in Pakistan.

The alternative, which Vice President Joe Biden favored, was a stepped-up counterterrorism effort, dubbed “CT-plus,” that would involve drone strikes and Special Forces raids, mostly directed at al Qaeda’s sanctuary in Pakistan’s wild border region near Afghanistan. But this looked risky – too much like “cut and run” – and there was no guarantee that CT-plus could work without COIN. Like Biden,** Holbrooke thought COIN was pointless, but he was not sold on CT-plus. He thought you could not have a regional strategy built on “secret war.” Drones are no substitute for a political settlement.**

**During the review, however, there was no discussion at all of diplomacy and a political settlement. Holbrooke wanted the president to consider this option, but the White House was not buying it. **The military wanted to stay in charge, and going against the military would make the president look weak.

So Obama chose the politically safe option that he did not like: He gave the military what it asked for. Months of White House hand-wringing ended up with the administration choosing the option that had been offered from day one: fully resourced COIN and 30,000 additional troops. But Obama added a deadline of July 2011for the larger troop commitment to work; after that the surge would be rolled back. In effect, the president said the new strategy was good for a year.

**Holbrooke argued for political reconciliation as the path out of Afghanistan. But the military thought talk of reconciliation undermined America’s commitment to fully resourced COIN. On his last trip to Afghanistan, in October 2010, Holbrooke pulled aside Petraeus, who by then had replaced McChrystal as commander in Afghanistan, and said, “David, I want to talk to you about reconciliation.” “That’s a 15-second conversation,” Petraeus replied. “No, not now.”
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The commanders’ standard response was that they needed two more fighting seasons to soften up the Taliban. They were hoping to change the president’s mind on his July deadline and after that convince him to accept a “slow and shallow” (long and gradual) departure schedule. Their line was that we should fight first and talk later. Holbrooke thought we could talk and fight. Reconciliation should be the ultimate goal, and fighting the means to facilitate it.

The Taliban were ready for talks as early as April 2009. At that time, Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin, shortly before he joined Holbrooke’s team as his senior Afghan-affairs advisor, traveled to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. In Kabul Rubin met with former Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who laid out in detail a strategy for talks: where to start, what to discuss, and the shape of the settlement that the United States and the Taliban could agree on.

[Ali_Syed]

Re: Inside Story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

The White House, however, did not want to try anything as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art lost on America’s top decision-makers. They had no experience with it and were daunted by the idea of it.

While running for president, Obama had promised a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy: America would move away from Bush’s militarized foreign policy and take engagement seriously. When it came down to brass tacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, Clinton was the lonely voice making the case for diplomacy.

But Clinton shared Holbrooke’s belief that the purpose of hard power is to facilitate diplomatic breakthroughs. During many meetings I attended with her, she would ask us to make the case for diplomacy and would then quiz us on our assumptions and plan of action. At the end of these drills she would ask us to put it all in writing for the benefit of the White House.

On one occasion in the summer of 2010, after the White House had systematically blocked every attempt to include reconciliation talks with the Taliban and serious regional diplomacy (which had to include Iran) on the agenda for national security meetings with the president, Clinton took a paper SRAP had prepared to Obama. She gave him the paper, explained what it laid out, and said, “Mr. President, I would like to get your approval on this.” Obama nodded his approval, but that was all. So his White House staff, caught off guard by Clinton, found ample room to kill the paper in Washington’s favorite way: condemning it to slow death in committee meetings.

Turf battles are a staple of every administration, but the Obama White House has been particularly ravenous. Add to this the campaign hangover: Those in Obama’s inner circle, veterans of his election campaign, were suspicious of Clinton. Even after Clinton proved she was a team player, they remained concerned about her popularity and feared that she could overshadow the president.

Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff until September 2011, told me Clinton “did a great job pushing her agenda, but it is incredible how little support she got from the White House. They want to control everything.” Victories for the State Department were few and hard fought.

The White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s videoconferences with Karzai, and he was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan. At times it looked as if White House officials were baiting Karzai to complain about Holbrooke so they could get him fired.

The White House worried that talking to the Taliban would give Holbrooke a greater role. For months, the White House plotted to either block reconciliation with the Taliban or find an alternative to Holbrooke for managing the talks. Lute, who ran AfPak at the White House, floated the idea of the distinguished U.N. diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi leading the talks. Clinton objected to outsourcing American diplomacy to the United Nations. Pakistan, too, was cool to the idea. The “stop Holbrooke” campaign was not only a distraction – it was influencing policy.

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[Ali_Syed]

Re: Inside Story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

Afghans and Pakistanis were not alone in being confused and occasionally amused by the White House’s maneuvers. People in Washington were also baffled.

PURSUING RECONCILIATION WAS difficult against the combined resistance of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the White House. It took a massive toll on Holbrooke. Still, Rubin, his Afghan-affairs advisor, provided the intellectual capital for him, arguing in ever greater detail that the Taliban would come to the table and that Karzai and many Afghans favored talking to them. Holbrooke and Rubin were sure a deal that would sever ties between the Taliban and al Qaeda and bring peace in Afghanistan was within reach.

The Obama administration’s approach to reconciliation, however, is not exactly what Holbrooke had in mind for a diplomatic end to the war. Holbrooke thought that the United States would enjoy its strongest leverage if it negotiated with the Taliban when the country had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan. He had not favored the Afghanistan surge, but once the troops were there, he thought the president should use the show of force to get to a diplomatic solution.

But that did not happen. The president failed to launch diplomacy and then announced the troop withdrawal in a **June 2011 speech, **in effect snatching away the leverage that would be needed if diplomacy were to have a chance of success. “If you are leaving, why would the Taliban make a deal with you? How would you make the deal stick? The Taliban will talk to you, but just to get you out faster.” That comment we heard from an Arab diplomat was repeated across the region.

Yet it was exactly after announcing the U.S. departure that the administration warmed up to the idea of reconciliation. Talks with the Taliban were not about arranging their surrender, but about hastening America’s departure.Concerns about human rights, women’s rights, and education were shelved. These were not seen as matters of vital U.S. interest, just noble causes that were too costly and difficult to support – and definitely not worth fighting an insurgency over.

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[Ali_Syed]

Re: Inside Story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

I remember Holbrooke shaking his head and saying. “Watch them [the CIA] ruin this relationship. And when it is ruined, they are going to say, ‘We told you: You can’t work with Pakistan!’ We never learn.”

Holbrooke knew that in these circumstances, anyone advocating diplomacy would have to fight to be heard inside the White House. He tried to reach out to Obama, but his efforts were to no avail. Obama remained above the fray. The president seemed to sense that no one would fault him for taking a tough-guy approach to Pakistan. If the approach failed (as indeed it did), the nefarious, double-dealing Pakistanis would get the blame (as indeed they did).

IN OCTOBER 2010, during a visit to the White House, General Kayani gave Obama a 13-page white paper he had written to explain his views on the outstanding strategic issues between Pakistan and the United States. Kayani 3.0, as the paper was dubbed (it was the third one Pakistanis had given the White House on the subject), could be summarized as: You are not going to win the war, and you are not going to transform Afghanistan. This place has devoured empires before you; it will defy you as well. Stop your g***ose plans, and let’s get practical, sit down, and discuss how you will leave and what is an end state we can both live with.

**Kayani expressed the same doubt time and again in meetings. We would try to convince him that we were committed to the region and had a solution for Afghanistan’s problems: America would first beat the Taliban and then build a security force to hold the place together after it left. He, like many others, thought the idea of an Afghan military was foolish and that the United States was better off negotiating an exit with the Taliban.

In one small meeting around a narrow table, Kayani listened carefully and took notes as we went through our list of issues. I cannot forget Kayani’s reaction when we enthusiastically explained our plan to build up Afghan forces to 400,000 by 2014. His answer was swift and unequivocal: Don’t do it. “You will fail,” he said. “Then you will leave and that half-trained army will break into militias that will be a problem for Pakistan.” We tried to stand our ground, but he would have none of it. He continued, “I don’t believe that the Congress is going to pay $9 billion a year for this 400,000-man force.” He was sure it would eventually collapse and the army’s broken pieces would resort to crime and terrorism to earn their keep.

Kayani’s counsel was that if you want to leave, just leave – we didn’t believe you were going to stay anyway – but don’t do any more damage on your way out. This seemed to be a ubiquitous sentiment across the region. No one bought our argument for sending more troops into Afghanistan, and no one was buying our arguments for leaving. It seemed everyone was getting used to a direction-less America.

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[Ali_Syed]

Re: Inside Story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

**It was to court public opinion that Obama first embraced the war in Afghanistan. And when public opinion changed, he was quick to declare victory and call the troops back home. His actions from start to finish were guided by politics, and they played well at home. Abroad, however, the stories the United States tells to justify its on-again, off-again approach do not ring true to friend or foe. **They know the truth: America is leaving Afghanistan to its own fate. America is leaving even as the demons of regional chaos that first beckoned it there are once again rising to threaten its security.

**America has not won this war on the battlefield, nor has the country ended it at the negotiating table. **America is just washing its hands of this war. We may hope that the Afghan army the United States is building will hold out longer than the one that the Soviet Union built, but even that may not come to pass. Very likely, the Taliban will win Afghanistan again, and this long, costly war will have been for naught.

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[Ali_Syed]

Re: Inside Story of how White House let diplomacy fail in Afghanistan

The Kayani doctrine - Dr Farrukh Saleem

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The Kayani Doctrine, built on four pillars, comprises: American troops would have to withdraw from Afghanistan; reconciliation among Afghan factions is not possible without the ISI; the Jalalabad-Torkham-Karachi route remains the most viable for withdrawing American forces and India cannot be allowed to encircle Pakistan.** In 2009, General McChrystal, commander Isaf and commander US forces in Afghanistan (USFOR-A), refusing to buy the Kayani Doctrine, requested a ‘troop surge’ numbering 30,000-40,000. In 2010, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, 502nd Infantry Regiment, 187th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team and the 101st Sustainment Brigade were deployed to Afghanistan.

In 2010, General Petraeus, commander Isaf and commander USFOR-A, refusing to buy the Kayani Doctrine, began implementing his “comprehensive counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy”. General Petraeus’ COIN had four pillars: “securing and serving the population, understanding local circumstances, separating irreconcilables from reconcilables and living among the people”.

By 2011, America’s cost of war in Afghanistan hovered around a colossal $500 billion and the US had incurred 1,814 fatalities. By 2011, Petraeus’ four pillars had begun to fall flat – one by one. America could no longer sustain the war in Afghanistan – neither politically nor financially. Finally, President Obama, in a prime time speech, bought into the Kayani Doctrine by announcing a troop drawdown schedule. On December 2, 2012, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held talks with COAS General Ashfaq Kayani. This may have actually been the first formal buy-in of the Kayani Doctrine.

**On December 17, the principal deputy assistant attorney general told a federal court in New York: “In the view of the United States, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is entitled to immunity because it is part of a foreign state within the meaning of the FSIA (Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act).” This may have actually been an implicit acceptance by the US of the ISI’s indispensability in the Afghan endgame (the doctrine’s second pillar).
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On December 29, Pakistan received $688 million under the Coalition Support Fund (CSF). According to the Ministry of Finance, “from May 2010 onwards Pakistan had asked for $2.5 billion under the CSF but only $1.9 billion have been reimbursed.”

On February 10, “two convoys each hauling 25 shipping containers entered Pakistan at the Chaman and Torkham borders” heading back to where they came from. To be certain, these convoys will be followed by a few thousand taking back around 750,000 major military items valued at close to $40 billion (the doctrine’s third pillar).

Indian defence analysts claim that the British have acted as the intermediaries in the latest US-Pakistan rapprochement and that Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are also involved in the game. Pakistan is once again becoming the centre piece in the Afghan endgame.

India’s Ambassador MK Bhadrakumar, who served in Islamabad, Kabul, Tashkent and Moscow, opines, “Washington is stonewalling India’s requests for the extradition of two key protagonists who are in the US jails – David Headley and Tahawwur Rana” and that “India’s worst fears with regard to the situation in Afghanistan are probably coming true.”

Apparently, India’s dream of encircling Pakistan is evaporating up in thin air (the doctrine’s last pillar). In all probability, Pakistan’s security challenges are going to become even more challenging after Nato pulls out of Afghanistan. With America gone, militants of all sorts and forms could team up in their attempt to subdue Pakistan. Apparently, the Pak Army does not have much of a doctrine for such a contingency.

The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad. Email: [email protected]. Twitter: @saleemfarrukh