Advice on Afghanistan

The lead article in today’s New York Times is titled, “Obama Advsiers are Split on Size of Afghan Force.” It describes a debate within the Obama adminstration about how many troops are required and what the exact nature of the mission should be. Key participants include Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke.

According to the article, Vice President Biden thinks we need to pay more attention to Pakistan, both due to the instability of the nuclear-armed nation and the fact that it is now the main refuge of Al Qaeda. Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton are requesting a more robust force even though some think it will make the United States look like more of an occupier.

In my opinion, Joe Biden is right. The reason we got into Afghanistan in the first place was to fight Al Qaeda not the Taliban. The whole Afghan effort is suffering from “mission creep.” The current idea du jour is that we must protect Afghanistan civilians to succeed instead of just fighting militants. Though this strategy proved successful in Iraq, surely we don’t want to stay in Afghanistan for the time required to do this, including building schools and other nation-building exercises. On top of it all, Afghanistan has just had a national election which was far from a paragon of democracy.

So what should we do? I think we need to continue surgical strikes against Al Qaeda, but not from the air or CIA drones because too many civilians get killed in the process. We have some of the best special operations teams in the world, and it’s about time to use them.