Al Qaida Wants the U.S. to Escalate in Afghanistan

Posted by Derrick Crowe, Brave New Films at 5:27 PM on November 11, 2008.

With little fanfare, Richard Barrett, the Coordinator of the Al-Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team of the United Nations Security Council, released a report in September that asserted a flood of foreign troops into Afghanistan would be a severe strategic miscalculation.

The report said, in part:

"The key to defeating Al-Qaida will be to undermine its local base in the Afghan- Pakistan border area. …[I]t will be important to promote the drift of the Afghan Taliban away from Al-Qaida, which could be achieved by allowing President Karzai more political room to negotiate a deal. The Pakistan government, on the other hand, needs to drive awedge between tribal leaders and Al-Qaida. For both governments, it will be critical to improve their bilateral relationship and cooperation.
 
"The international community can and must help with this, but it will have to do  so carefully. Al-Qaida will fight hard to obstruct the influence of the central government (in both Pakistan and Afghanistan) and will try to discredit it by arguing that it acts on behalf of external interests; it will aim to provoke further intervention by foreign forces, knowing that this is the one thing all the tribes will unite against. In order to be successful, therefore, the key objectives need to be achieved – and need to be seen to be achieved – by local governments on their own rather than as a result of external intervention.
 
…
 
"Al-Qaida…will aim to provoke further intervention by foreign forces, knowing that this is the one thing that all the tribes will combine to oppose; it will exult in civilian casualties that it can exploit to stir up tension, and it will continue to abuse religion as a method of indoctrination and justification for its acts…[P]ouring more troops into Afghanistan will not help if it alienates the local population and allows both Pakistan and Afghan Taliban to forget their internal differences and combine against a common enemy. The focus should remain squarely on Al-Qaida, not on the internal politics of Afghanistan."

Earlier this week I wrote that we cannot not afford an escalation in Afghanistan; Barrett's report illustrates what we'd get for our trouble.  Outside pressure would fuse the fractious Taliban groups back together and help generate a political atmosphere favorable to al Qaida's recruitment efforts and their effort to retain the Taliban as their protectors and allies. This is obviously not a win for the U.S.

Proponents of a surge point to classic counterinsurgency strategies as a good model. They assert that one of the main factors driving AQ's recruitment effort is the high civilian casualty rate, which is driven primarily by our over-reliance on air strikes, which are imprecise by nature.  More troops on the ground would mean deeper relationships with local populations and better intelligence, as well as up-close-and-personal target identification.  All of this would, in this view, lead to fewer civilian casualties and enable us to work with local populations to inoculate them against al Qaida's messages and recruitment strategies.

This view, however, is fraught with problems and bad assumptions.  First, Afghanistan is not Iraq, and al Qaida and the Taliban are not obvious foreign interlopers hoping to take advantage of turmoil in a distant land to set up a caliphate. This is where they have lived for many, many years.  The Taliban and al Qaida have intermarried and raised children in Afghanistan. Winning people over by building a water well is one thing when you're fighting foreign thugs.  It's quite another thing to win them over when our enemy is their husband, father, or son.

Second, it's not at all clear that fewer *proportional* civilian casualties will equal fewer *total* civilian casualties. Depending on the size of the escalation, it's very plausible that total numbers of civilian casualties will increase even if the number of civilians killed per engagement dropped.  And, a larger troop presence would inevitably be more disruptive to daily life of the Afghan people, further enabling al Qaida's depiction of the U.S. as a hostile occupation force.

These considerations, in addition to the prohibitive costs involved in sustaining a troop presence in a remote, landlocked country with poor infrastructure, lend further credence to Barrett's report.

Simply put, al Qaida wants us to escalate in Afghanistan. Will the new president play into their hands? Let's hope not.

Tagged as: barack obama, taliban, afghanistan war, al qaida, richard barrett

Derrick Crowe is a five-year veteran of Capitol Hill and an outspoken advocate for nonviolent solutions to political conflict. Crowe blogs on current events from a Christian nonviolence perspective at http://returngood.com.  Find Derrick Crowe on Facebook.