CHRISTOPHER CLARY
President Donald Trump has announced the results of his “comprehensive review” of U.S. strategic options in Afghanistan and South Asia and – as many have already noted – they are uninspiring. Sixteen years of war leads to bouts of soul-searching, but it seems we aren’t obliged to turn up any new thinking in the search.
Any Afghanistan policy review is necessarily a Pakistan policy review. This is simply because, as many experts and even the president has realized, Afghanistan is not “solvable” absent some dramatic change in Pakistani behavior. Jeff Smith, for example, concludes that unless this current review “starts and ends with a decisive change in our Pakistan policy, it will produce the same outcome as every Afghan strategy before it.”
The logic that a change of Pakistani strategy is a necessary condition for any prospect of Afghan success is fairly simple. A 2010 study by the RAND Corporation examined 30 counter-insurgency campaigns and found none were successful so long as there was significant cross-border insurgent support. And, for years now, the U.S. government has concluded that Pakistan provides a safe haven for, among others, the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network as they engage in violent operations in Afghanistan. Some believe that in addition to providing operational space for insurgent groups to train, fundraise, and escape pressure, Pakistan’s intelligence agencies may directly provide weapons and money to these groups.
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