The Political Whore

By Mitch Perry
PoHo contributor
Mitch Perry is the anchor of the WMNF Evening News on 88.5 FM community radio

This past Saturday in Tampa, the man hailed as the savior of the Iraq war, Gen. David Petraeus, as part of being honored by Toastmasters International, was to have given a speech, However, Washington business took precedent, and speaking in the Central Command leader’s stead was Rear Admiral Mike Franken, U.S. Navy Deputy Director of Strategy Plans & Policy for Central Command.

Appearing at the Marriott Westshore Hotel, Franken said he was up for taking questions from the hundred conventioneers in attendance at the end of his slide filled presentation. Unfortunately, Toastmasters provided limited time for the military official to speak (the world champion of public speaking from 2005 was giving a seminar in the same room), and thus he was able only to respond to a couple of audience queries before being summoned from the dais.

(Petraeus, by the way, was in Washington to meet up with officials regarding the status of the fragility of the Pakistani government, and both Pakistani President Asif Ali Zandari and Afghan leader Hamid Karzai are both scheduled to visit the White House this week.)

Franken said flatly that Pakistan is the number one foreign policy issue of the U.S. right now, adding, “It’s an avowed nuclear capable nation that has large stretches of ungoverned areas, and it’s teetering.” Petraeus has apparently been saying the same thing behind closed doors.

The Pakistan/Afghanistan region (or AfPak, as its been newly branded) has become, to borrow a favorite phrase from the last administration, the new central front on the war in terror in the eyes of Team Obama. Or to some, the latest war of choice.

After listening to the CentCom official, it seemed the central question should be posed to him: Is putting all of our resources in that area about making America safer, or just another diversion?

The U.S. originally bombed Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 as a way of hitting Osama Bin Laden and the other members of Al Queda who were responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

As we all now know, the effort then shifted away from Afghanistan in 2002, and all our marbles went into attacking Iraq.

Democrats such as Barack Obama, Joe Biden & Hillary Clinton campaigned hard in 2007 and 2008 that the Bush Administration had erred in shifting the emphasis from Afghanistan to Iraq. And while that is no doubt true, particularly in 2002/2003, the question needs to be asked: Is the safety of Americans in peril in 2009 because of the instability of the Zandari government right now?

I asked that question directly to Rear Admiral Franken in the few moments I had alone with him last Saturday. He appeared less forthcoming one on one than he did before the Toastmasters audience, unfortunately,

“What were doing will make us safer in America, safer in the world. I think that’s right…..”

It was not exactly a ringing endorsement of the current strategy.

When asked the question that invariably is said about Afghanistan (and even alluded to by Franken in his speech), that it’s the “Graveyard of Empires” (see Britain, Russia), the Admiral replied, “We have the shortcomings of others have made to reflect upon…we are looking at the structures of government to do a better job to doing the COIN strategy…Clearing an area of negative elements and bringing a level of security necessary, so we can build from the bottom up for that area to grow…it is not going to be easy…But the President outlined a strategy that deserves our best effort to go forward.”

And what about the Taliban, whom, unlike Al Queda, has not set designs on killing Americans, per se?

As foreign policy maven Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek, in February:

To be clear, where there are Qaeda cells and fighters, force is the only answer. But most estimates of the number of Qaeda fighters in Pakistan range well under a few thousand. Are those the only people we are bombing? Is bombing—by Americans—the best solution? The Predator strikes have convinced much of the local population that it’s under attack from America and produced a nationalist backlash. A few Qaeda operatives die, but public support for the battle against extremism drops in the vital Pashtun areas of Pakistan. Is this a good exchange?

Franken said on Saturday “there’s good Taliban and bad Taliban”. That seems to jibe with reports that the U.S. is interested in working with some of those Taliban elements who can be brought to support the U.S. aims, a la the Sunni Awakening. That’s where, we were able to persuade (some would say bribe) members of those groups to support the U.S. side, and worked hand in hand with the surge to bring about a level of stability in Iraq that seemed an impossibility in 2006.

Franken also spoke on several occasions of trying to bring a “‘whole of government’ approach to Afghanistan…to allow it an opportunity to better present itself in all aspects of caring and good governance, and to spread its governance throughout the country, which has been lacking, for a millennium, frankly.”

Again, more Zakaria in Newsweek:

Would a strategy like this work in Afghanistan? David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who has advised Petraeus, says, “I’ve had tribal leaders and Afghan government officials at the province and district level tell me that 90 percent of the people we call the Taliban are actually tribal fighters or Pashtun nationalists or people pursuing their own agendas. Less than 10 percent are ideologically aligned with the Quetta Shura [Mullah Omar's leadership group] or Al Qaeda.” These people are, in his view, “almost certainly reconcilable under some circumstances.” Kilcullen adds, “That’s very much what we did in Iraq. We negotiated with 90 percent of the people we were fighting.”

Clearly, it’s in the interests of the U.S. and NATO to rid AfPak of the negative Taliban influences. But at what cost? The Christian Science Monitor reports the government is pouring over a hundred million dollars into Afghanistan, “But it’s running the risk of repeating some of the same mistakes it made in Iraq where government auditors have said it wasted billions of dollars.”

All in all, it seems that though AfPak doesn’t’ seem to animate Americans concerns as Iraq has (in part because the loss of human life hasn’t been as severe), attention needs to be paid.

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