Taking it to the Taliban
I’ll be at a luncheon panel at The Century Foundation tomorrow, discussing Central Asia strategy with Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and Francesc Vendrell, the former EU special representative in Afghanistan. As readers know, I’m something of a skeptic about our deepening involvement in this region, and I’m looking forward to an ...
I’ll be at a luncheon panel at The Century Foundation tomorrow, discussing Central Asia strategy with Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and Francesc Vendrell, the former EU special representative in Afghanistan. As readers know, I’m something of a skeptic about our deepening involvement in this region, and I’m looking forward to an interesting discussion.
I’ll be at a luncheon panel at The Century Foundation tomorrow, discussing Central Asia strategy with Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and Francesc Vendrell, the former EU special representative in Afghanistan. As readers know, I’m something of a skeptic about our deepening involvement in this region, and I’m looking forward to an interesting discussion.
We’re getting lots of encouraging reports about the Pakistani army’s current offensive in the Swat Valley, and I hope the optimism is justified. But two features of the situation give me pause. First, the area has been pretty much off-limits to journalists, and we are therefore relying almost entirely on the Pakistani army’s reporting of its own achievements. Needless to say, there is a long and rich history (and not just in Pakistan) of militaries exaggerating their achievements on the battlefield. And even if they have killed a fair number of Taliban fighters and forced the rest to flee, the real question is whether the gains will endure. Remember that it was an unnamed "senior Administration official" who warned at the outset "they’ll displace the Taliban for awhile. But there will also be a lot of displaced persons and a lot of collateral damage. And then they won’t be able to sustain those effects or extend the gains geographically."
That’s my second concern: does it make strategic sense to displace upwards of three million people in order to go after around four thousand Taliban, most of whom aren’t "global terrorists" in the same way that al Qaeda is? The Pakistani army has reported only light losses thus far, which suggests they aren’t risking their own soldiers in careful counter-insurgency operations but are relying instead on firepower and other indiscriminate tactics (which helps explain why people are fleeing in such large numbers and could be why the region has been off-limits to reporters). If the operation has left a lot of destruction in its wake, as seems likely, will it make the government or the Taliban more popular in the long run? And given that we helped egg the Pakistani government into this, are we likely to get blamed for it down the road?
Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter: @stephenwalt
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