Is Obama’s 2011 Afghanistan Deadline a Mistake?

General Petraeus and everyone else in the Obama chain of command swears up and down that they’re committed to the July 2011 deadline for beginning to bring troops home. But the question remains: is setting a transition date actually a mistake?

The Obama administration argues that the date sends “a message of urgency” to the Afghan government to get its act together and start governing. Less clearly stated but still salient is that the war has stretched out for over nine years with minimal progress and the public is tired of waging it. Advocates for the Obama administration’s strategy don’t say that they think their approach to the war will work. They say that it’s the least-worst strategy to secure U.S. interests against al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Whatever that says about the administration’s intellectual honesty, it’s not a rallying cry to fight.

Meanwhile, the administration’s opponents in the Senate today said any deadline heralding any transition to Afghan responsibility is a bad idea. Their refrain is that you don’t announce the date a war will end before you win it. And in a conventional conflict, that’s true. In a conflict that depends on the popular legitimacy of a foreign military coalition waging a really long war, and on the ability of the Afghan government to deliver prosperity and justice and essential services, it’s more complicated.

But Sen. John McCain and company are right that the July 2011 date is problematic. Even the most stalwart defender of the administration’s decision to set the date has to concede that it hasn’t been quite the “forcing mechanism” for the Afghan government that Obama intended. Since the date was unveiled, Hamid Karzai has shown himself to be far more inclined to cut a deal with the Taliban than he has to govern. His “peace jirga” started to build a consensus for offering the Taliban peace terms. Reportedly, he and the Pakistanis are working on the contours of what the New York Times reported could amount to a “separate peace” on terms that may or may not support U.S. interests against al-Qaeda, with the Pakistanis offering to bring its quasi-proxies in the Haqqani extremist network and the Taliban in from the cold if Karzai agrees to share power.


There’s only so far you can go with this assessment, in fairness. Karzai has pledged support for NATO-Afghan security operations in the southern city of Kandahar. And everyone pretty much acknowledges that the Afghan war is going to end with some kind of negotiated power-sharing arrangement with unsavory characters.

But contrast it with what the Afghan government is doing on, well, governance. The famous “government in a box” that Gen. Stanley McChrystal forecast would be airlifted into Majra in February turned out to be empty. And a recent United Nations report found that while there are some positive signs that the Afghan government is starting to prioritize economic development, it’s not really gotten into gear out past Kabul, where it matters. (Or, as the report put it, “the capacity of subnational government to coordinate through the sector working groups is limited in many locations where mechanisms are operating below expectations.“) To top it all off, Karzai is backsliding on pledges to hold government officials accountable for the country’s endemic corruption. Does this sound like Karzai’s hearing that “message of urgency” on governing?

None of this is to say that Karzai would act with greater haste to govern if Obama didn’t say that U.S. troops are going to start to very slowly come home in July 2011. The U.S. has eight years’ worth of evidence that an unpressured Karzai is pretty disinclined to reform. And no critic of the Obama administration’s July 2011 transition date has offered any alternative proposal for how to compel Karzai to sack up and start governing. What’s more, Petraeus made it clear that if the Taliban have taken any encouragement from the date, he intends to beat it out of them.

But it is to say that if we’re to take Obama and Petraeus seriously that capable governance is the key to Afghanistan’s long-term stability, it’s worth acknowledging that the mechanism that Obama chose to compel Karzai to govern looks more like it’s compelled him to move in a different direction — one that has a far less clear benefit to U.S. interests. And that might strengthen the hand of aides in December’s upcoming administration-wide strategy review who argue that only a more-rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops than Obama and Petraeus currently envision will have the desired result.
Wired

It also tells our allies that we can't be trusted, and that come some fixed date, we're out of here, so don't count on us.