US setting objective before planning:

The raging American desire of demonstrable achievements, if not victory, in Afghanistan clearly seems beset by two factors:

1. Rush for results; and
2. Lack of clarity on who is the real enemy.

Think tankers and officials alike continue churning out security assessments and scenarios for Afghanistan. One after the other, almost every study and advice therein seems intended for what key  Obama aides would like to hear; how to create conditions that would allow the US to begin a gradual  draw-down of forces’ from July 2011. Underlying these recipes for how to extricate the USA out of the Afghan quagmire is a sense of panic within the administration which looks desperate to show-case some “stunning success” towards the end of the year before the mid-term Congressional elections get underway.

Things gone awry in Operation Enduring Freedom:

Special Envoy Richard Holbrook’s latest Islamabad visit, to be followed up by secretary of state Hilary Clinton next month, also underscore that panic in an extremely volatile situation; the official American casualty toll has just touched 1108, and a UN report released over the weekend points to  “ alarming  increases in suicide bombings and a 45 percent increase in assassinations of government officials in a three-month period ending June 16, and almost doubling   of roadside bombings for the first four months of 2010.

Deadly suicide bombings, according to the UN,  tripled this year compared with 2009, with “such attacks now taking place an average of three times a week compared with once a week before,” with almost half the suicide attacks  taking place in southern Afghanistan. “The shift to more complex suicide attacks demonstrates a growing capability of the local terrorist networks linked to Al Qaeda,” the report said. This also underlines that the insurgents’ reaction to an ever-increasing number of allied forces – by  August the total US-led forces would reach close to 150,000 in Afghanistan-   has also grown manifold, meaning thereby that every additional deployment of troops is only escalating the conflict.

…with little or no hope:

Clearly, domestic politics of expedience, corruption, tribal affinities among militants and local stake-holders, and religious conservatism are also contributing to the vicious insurgency that has gobbled up almost 300 billion dollars so far. And the bitter reality is that all these factors are tripping up all international efforts in institution-building and not helping in stabilization at all – at least as of now.

Mushrooming of think-tanks and reports is of no use:

Simultaneously, scores of studies and analysis by hop-in-hop-out analysts and think-tankers as well as military officials still appear clueless and confused about the real obstruction in the way of peace and stabilization in Afghanistan; for some the Pakistan army and its mighty Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) pose the real threat, and thus need to be tamed before one could think of fixing problems in Afghanistan. For others, the Haqqani Network represents the most lethal threat which needs to be at least neutralized if success were the goal. And for many others the real villains are the pro-Iran Sunni Afghan warlord, Hekmetyar and his  maverick countryman Mulla Omar, whose refusal, first to Saudi Arabia and then to the US, to expel, if not turn over, Osama bin Laden resulted in the “global war against terrorism in October 2001?

Do we really know the enemy to hunt for? Probably not until this confusion about the enemy and on the strategy towards the end-game prevails. 

Operation Marja was a failure – so would be any such operation in Kandahar:

The hyped-up offensive  in Marja probably also explains Pentagon’s naivety as well as helpless; in February, the US led-forces set out to conquer what they called the Taliban bastion in the tiny town of Marja in the Helmand province, Pentagon and its affiliates began projecting it as the “battle for ultimate victory against Insurgents.” Today, given the size of Marja and the scale of the offensive, that campaign lies in tatters, with no real end or victory in sight. What hopes therefore are left for success in the much-bigger minefield called Kandahar.

US should run a reality check on its policies:

The Obama administration needs to understand that it cannot snub on Afghan faction and pick up another one talks by drawing political distinction between them. Haqqani, Hekmetyar and Mulla Omar constitute the bedrock of current insurgency. Applying the classical “divide and rule” will only spell more disaster both for the country as well as its international allies.

As far Pakistan, the administration would probably be better advised to take it into confidence on what constitutes Islamabad’s strategic interests and probably find ways to factor them into the peace calculus. The tendency to treat Pakistan as an obstruction and ostracizing it for disregarding the “US national interests,” the Obama administration needs to demonstrate empathy for “Pakistan’s national interest” (the way the government and the army in Islamabad view it). Success would probably elude us as long as we continued looking at Afghanistan and Pakistan through the American prism with the eyes of the streams of desk-top analysts, most of whom hardly get out of the fortified political and military establishments of Kabul and Islamabad.