The Af-Pak Dilemma

I was going to respond to David Adesnik’s post directly when Christian Brose went ahead and did part of it for me—sort of:

Now, don’t get me wrong: The two challenges are linked. You can’t solve either problem in isolation. The Durand line means nothing to our enemies. Etc, etc. I get it.

Chris is talking about how you can’t really do anything in Afghanistan without dealing with Pakistan. Yet I say “sort of” because he’s annoyed that the Obamans keep using the neologism “Af-Pak” to refer to this cluster of issues that need to be worked on in tandem. He says he’s annoyed for reasons of diplomatic etiquette, which is fair enough. Yet he seems annoyed perhaps a bit more than is warranted.

And sure enough, in the very next post, Brose is writing again about building Afghan democracy without much reference to Pakistan. This was the (perhaps obscurely stated) thrust of my previous post—not the dig about aligning goals to budgets. Now there’s nothing intrinsic to Afghans that makes them somehow unsuited to democracy, culturally or otherwise. Indeed, the poll Chris cites sure makes it sound like they’d like to try it out. (Or at least the subset of Afghans the pollsters managed to get to, did.) That’s great. Really.

But so what? How does getting a democratic Afghanistan advance our goals in nuclear-armed and increasingly unstable Pakistan (which, after all, is why we care at all in the first place)? I’d argue that it doesn’t, and that the expedient way to deal with the Af-Pak issue (sorry!) is to come to some kind of arrangement regarding ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service, to whom we largely owe the instability flowing out of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Now this is very complicated stuff, and it’s not at all clear what kind of arrangement this could be (and with whom it could be reached!). According to some reports, ISI has lost control over its former clients, including the Taliban. According to others, ISI has been severely compromised by radical Islamists in its ranks. Either way (or whatever the actual truth may be), the root of the region’s instability is not to be found in Afghanistan proper, so I don’t see the point of trying to triage a tribal society to democracy when our little sand castle can be kicked over at any time by some bully across the Hindu Kush.

A holistic approach, one that probably won’t feel much like “victory” when it’s done, but which will nevertheless bring some sort of order to the region, is our best hope for sleeping soundly at night. It has to be tried, vigorously. And I think that Richard Holbrooke is the right man to give it a go.

NOTE: Edited slightly from when I first posted it for clarity and slightly for content.