Peter Bergen has been a consistent and persuasive optimist when it comes to Afghanistan, reminding everyone that the Afghans mostly have a positive view of coalition forces, and concluding that a “renewed and better resourced American effort in Afghanistan will, in time, produce a relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state.” In his defense of the Obama administration’s commitment to the war in Afghanistan in TIME this week, Bergen writes (emphasis mine):
In August, President Obama laid out the rationale for stepping up the fight in Afghanistan: If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al-Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans. So this is not only a war worth fighting. This is fundamental to the defense of our people. Obama’s Af-Pak plan is, in essence, a countersanctuary strategy that denies safe havens to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, with the overriding goal of making America and its allies safer. Under Obama, the Pentagon has already sent a surge of 21,000 troops to Afghanistan, and the Administration is even weighing the possibility of deploying as many as 40,000 more.
There’s been a lot of reporting about the back and forth within the administration over adopting a counterinsurgency strategy or a counterterrorism strategy. Critics of COIN contend that there’s little evidence COIN actually works, while critics of CT counter that their approach has been the failed policy of the last few years. I’m not sure that there’s a real distinction between the countersanctuary strategy Bergen refers to here, and what General McChrystal is advocating.
Rhetorically though, the term may offer an opportunity for the Obama administration to frame the ultimate strategy as a pragmatic choice between two very different options in order to make their final decision seem sensible, and it allows them to distance themselves from the long sustained commitment that counterinsurgency implies while reminding everyone of the “modest goal” of disrupting and dismantling Al Qaeda and the Taliban. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the White House adopt it.
— A. Serwer
