[Mb-civic] Reselling the Wars - Jackson Diehl - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Reselling the Wars
Are Troop Withdrawals the Price for Further Commitment in Afghanistan 
and Iraq?

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, November 7, 2005; Page A21

America's ambassadors to Iraq and Afghanistan were both in Washington 
during the past 10 days. They peddled plans for badly needed corrections 
of U.S. policy -- and they listened to the furious debate over Scooter 
Libby, Valerie Plame and the handling of flawed intelligence three years 
ago. The disconnect they encountered between the challenging realities 
of two ongoing wars and the otherworldly discussion in Washington could 
hardly have been greater.

Baghdad envoy Zalmay Khalilzad and Kabul-based Ronald Neumann did not 
coordinate their home visits or their messages. But they had drawn 
similar conclusions -- in essence, that the Bush administration's effort 
to win quickly and cheaply in Afghanistan and then Iraq has boomeranged. 
Now a new military and political strategy is in place in both theaters 
that calls for making the long-term investments and fighting the battles 
that administration strategists -- above all, Defense Secretary Donald 
Rumsfeld -- disastrously tried to dodge.

The problem is, that requires selling Washington, from the White House 
budget office to the media and Congress, on more money and more patience 
for wars generally regarded as nearly finished or already lost. And 
Washington is consumed with discussing the insubstantial visit a retired 
ambassador made to an obscure African country nearly four years ago.

Start with Neumann, a seasoned State Department pro whose father also 
served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. His visit was a quiet one; he 
didn't do much talking for the record. But his message was blunt: While 
there has been some success in Afghanistan, including the recent 
parliamentary elections, nothing is finished. There is still much to do, 
and a lot more American money will be needed. It's going to take years, 
and it's going to be bumpy.

Neumann's problem, in a way, is that Afghanistan looks great compared 
with Iraq. Yet the elected government of Hamid Karzai still doesn't 
control the country outside of the capital. Reconstruction remains slow, 
stalled by bottlenecks in roads and electricity. Drug traffickers 
control a large part of the rural economy. Meanwhile, training of Afghan 
police and army forces is proceeding at a snail's pace. Even in Kabul, 
there is a desperate shortage of competent and uncorrupted officials to 
staff the government.

Why has more not been accomplished in four years? Because the first-term 
Bush administration believed reconstruction could be left to others -- 
allies and contractors -- or limited to bare-bones measures. Neumann is 
the face of a more hard-nosed second-term team that understands the 
necessity of a long-term U.S. commitment. He told congressmen that an 
additional $700 million in reconstruction aid is needed for Afghanistan 
next year, above the $622 million request for 2006 -- and that sums of 
that magnitude would be needed for three more years. Senators on the 
Foreign Relations Committee were receptive, but Afghanistan must compete 
with Katrina, and with Iraq.

In Iraq, Khalilzad, who brokered the political process that is 
Afghanistan's signal success, now tries to repeat his feat. Almost 
orphaned by a president who limits his public discussion of Iraq to 
brave democrats and evil terrorists, the ambassador has worked with 
enormous energy to channel the complex and increasingly violent struggle 
for power among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds into elections and 
negotiations. The mistakes of the past 2 1/2 years have made his job 
much harder: Iraqis are far more polarized along ethnic lines than they 
were in 2003, and the insurgency is deeply entrenched, thanks to the 
Pentagon's slowness in taking it seriously.

The ambassador argues that U.S. policy is finally on track. "We do have 
the beginning of adjustments that I think puts us on the right path," he 
told Gwen Ifill of PBS in one of his few on-the-record interviews. In 
addition to his own diplomacy, which has persuaded Sunni parties to 
compete in upcoming elections and Shiite and Kurdish parties to agree to 
post-election negotiations, there is, at last, a concerted 
counterinsurgency campaign underway, aimed at clearing areas of 
militants and then holding them. Khalilzad believes Baghdad should now 
be systematically secured, starting with the airport and then moving 
into the city. But the process will be slow and hard: Just pacifying the 
capital could take a year.

How to buy the patience for a such an effort, which will surely cost 
many more American lives, and billions more dollars, in a Washington 
where debate over Iraq has become unhinged? Khalilzad seems to believe 
that only the beginning of troop withdrawals will buy the necessary 
time. In his PBS appearance, he predicted that "significant reductions" 
would be possible "in the coming year."

In Afghanistan, too, plans for troop withdrawals have been drawn up: 
4,000 of 20,000 troops could be brought home next year. A pullback of 
forces, of course, doesn't really fit with a strategy that otherwise 
calls for a recommitment of American energy and resources. But for the 
pragmatists who now quietly strive to give Iraq and Afghanistan a chance 
for success, it is the price for past mistakes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/06/AR2005110600613.html
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