Kerry Opens Vigorous Debate on Afghanistan

babylonsister

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Wed Sep-16-09 06:30 PM
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Kerry Opens Vigorous Debate on Afghanistan

Edited on Wed Sep-16-09 06:33 PM by babylonsister

http://washingtonindependent.com/59638/kerry-opens-vigorous-debate-on-afghanistan

Kerry Opens Vigorous Debate on Afghanistan
Contrasts With Politically Driven Iraq War Hearings
By Spencer Ackerman 9/16/09 7:14 PM

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) (WDCpix)

Most congressional hearings bring administration officials up for a grilling. Others present interest group-backed pseudo-experts to give canned analysis. Rarely do congressional hearings present eclectic analysts who address a given policy option from a first-principle perspective to an engaged group of lawmakers. Yet that’s exactly what happened Wednesday afternoon when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began what chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) described as a series of hearings about the war in Afghanistan.

Kerry assembled three experts to scrutinize the core issues at the heart of the war and the alternatives proposed to wage it: John Nagl, the president of the Center for a New American Security, a think tank that has provided significant personnel and intellectual heft to the Obama administration; Steve Biddle, an influential security expert with the Brookings Institution who advised Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s recent review of Afghanistan strategy; and Rory Stewart, head of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, who wrote a widely read travelogue of his journeys through Afghanistan. Intellectual cleavages over both strategy and basic views of the war were apparent on the panel, with Nagl and Biddle supporting a more robustly resourced war with broader aims than Stewart endorsed. But both Nagl and Biddle grappled with the harder implications of such positions, with Nagl emphasizing the primacy of competent Afghan, not U.S., security forces, and Biddle equivocating on the overall importance of Afghanistan to U.S. interests.

This week, President Obama is expected to approve McChrystal’s strategy review, and McChrystal is expected to finalize a palette of options for resourcing the war, including the prospect of U.S. troop increases. Amid rapidly eroding public support for the war, one of the larger concerns roiling lawmakers is whether the counterinsurgency strategy fulsomely embraced by the administration is sufficiently tied to the administration’s stated objectives of eradicating al-Qaeda safe havens in Pakistan and preventing al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan. Kerry asked if this week’s successful commando raid in Somalia against an important al-Qaeda-linked figure — launched from offshore bases and requiring no on-land troop presence — might be a model for an alternative strategy.

“Sir, it tells us you can conduct counterterrorism with a light footprint, not counterinsurgency,” Nagl replied. Kerry was unsatisfied with the answer: “That’s exactly my point,” he said. Nagl parried that the presence of neighboring Pakistan was the crucial difference, as the absence of U.S. forces would contribute to the destabilization of Afghanistan’s neighbor, while their presence inspired Pakistani resolve. “I am convinced that American counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in Afghanistan have contributed to the more effective Pakistani counterinsurgency campaign” of the spring, when Pakistani troops finally evicted Taliban insurgents from the Swat valley.

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It was difficult to read the impact the testimony had on the assembled senators. Most, including Kerry, posed skeptical questions to all panelists, indicating a more open debate than the congressional debate over the Iraq war, which often devolved into questioning designed to elicit politically-useful responses. Kerry, for instance, has described the struggle against al-Qaeda as a “global counterinsurgency,” yet he aimed most of his more pointed questions at Nagl, who mostly agrees with that analysis.

Kerry said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had agreed to testify before the panel next month, after President Obama made a decision on whether to send additional troops to Afghanistan. Another hearing, on how to avoid failure in Afghanistan, is scheduled for Thursday morning, when the panel will hear from ret. Gen. Bantz Craddock, the former NATO commander; development expert Clare Lockhart; novelist Khaled Hosseini; and Ryan Crocker, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq and Pakistan.