More of Everything in Afghan

Tom Engelhart gives his take on the new Af-Pak War:

In a recent "60 Minutes" interview (though not in his Friday announcement), the president also emphasized the need for an "exit strategy" from the war. Similarly, American commander in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, has been speaking of a possible "tipping point," three to five years away, that might lead to "eventual departure." Nonetheless, almost every element of the new plan -- both those the president mentioned Friday and the no-less-crucial ones that didn't receive a nod -- seem to involve the word "more"; that is, more U.S. troops, more U.S. diplomats, more civilian advisors, more American and NATO military advisors to train more Afghan troops and police, more base and outpost building, more opium-eradication operations, more aid, more money to the Pakistani military -- and strikingly large-scale as that may be, all of that doesn't even include the "covert war," fought mainly via unmanned aerial vehicles, along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, which is clearly going to intensify.

In the coming year, that CIA-run drone war, according to leaked reports, may be expanded from the tribal areas into Pakistan's more heavily populated Baluchistan province where some of the Taliban leadership is supposedly holed up. In addition, so reports in British papers claim, the U.S. is seriously considering a soft coup-in-place against Afghan President Hamid Karzai. Disillusioned with the widespread corruption in, and inefficiency of, his government, the U.S. would create a new "chief executive" or prime ministerial post not in the Afghan constitution -- and then install some reputedly less corrupt (and perhaps more malleable) figure. Karzai would supposedly be turned into a figurehead "father of the nation." Envoy Holbrooke has officially denied that Washington is planning any such thing, while a spokesman for Karzai denounced the idea (both, of course, just feeding the flames of the Afghan rumor mill).

What this all adds up to is an ambitious doubling down on just about every bet already made by Washington in these last years -- from the counterinsurgency war against the Taliban and the counter-terrorism war against al-Qaeda to the financial love/hate relationship with the Pakistani military and its intelligence services underway since at least the Nixon years of the early 1970s. (Many of the flattering things now being said by U.S. officials about Pakistani Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, for instance, were also said about the now fallen autocrat Pervez Musharraf when he held the same position.)

Despite that mention of the need for an exit strategy and a presidential assurance that both the Afghan and Pakistani governments will be held to Iraqi-style "benchmarks" of accountability in the period to come, Obama's is clearly a jump-in-with-both-feet strategy and, not surprisingly, is sure to involve a massive infusion of new funds. Unlike with A.I.G., where the financial inputs of the U.S. government are at least announced, we don't even have a ballpark figure for how much is actually involved right now, but it's bound to be staggering. Just supporting those 17,000 new American troops already ordered into Afghanistan, many destined to be dispatched to still-to-be-built bases and outposts in the embattled southern and eastern parts of the country for which all materials must be trucked in, will certainly cost billions.

As Obama's economic team overseeing the various financial bailouts is made up of figures long cozy with Wall Street, so his foreign policy team is made up of figures deeply entrenched in Washington's national security state -- former Clintonistas (including the penultimate Clinton herself), military figures like National Security Adviser General James Jones, and that refugee from the H.W. Bush era, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. They are classic custodians of empire. Like the economic team, they represent the ancien régime.

The foreign policy team is no more likely to exhibit genuinely outside-the-box thinking than the team of Tim Geithner and Larry Summers has been. Their clear and desperate urge is to operate in the known zone, the one in which the U.S. is always imagined to be part of the solution to any problem on the planet, never part of the problem itself.

In foreign policy (as in economic policy), it took the Bush team less than eight years to steer the ship of state into the shallows where it ran disastrously aground. And yet, in response, after months of "strategic review," this team of inside-the-Beltway realists has come up with a combination of Af-Pak War moves that are almost blindingly expectable. Whether as custodians of the imperial economy or the imperial frontier, Obama's people are lashed to the past, to Wall Street and the national security state. They are ill-prepared to take the necessary full measure of our world.