NEW YORK, Dec. 1 (Xinhua) — Military force is only one component of the counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan, while other tools are also crucial, a Brookings expert on Afghanistan said on Tuesday.
“Other tools of statecraft, such as economic development, public diplomacy, strategic communications, and crucially the delivery of the necessary public goods — public safety, rule of law, and economic conditions enabling job-generating development — are critical,” Vanda Felbab-Brown told Xinhua.
Commenting on U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement on Tuesday to send additional troops to Afghanistan, Felbab-Brown said that “even though military power is far from the sole means to defeat the Taliban insurgency and al-Qaida efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is a critical ingredient.”
Felbab-Brown, a Brookings expert on Afghanistan, insurgency, civil war and terrorism, said: “Without changing the Taliban’s calculus and taking the momentum away from it, the Taliban will not participate in any serious reconciliation effort nor will the Afghan people risk their lives to resist the Taliban and build their country.”
However, she believed that without the troops surge, there would have been no chance to turn the security situation around, take the momentum away from the Taliban and hence enabling economic development and governance and rule of law improvements.
Talking about Obama’s Afghanistan strategy, Felbab-Brown said that there is for the first time a clear emphasis on the quality of governance and a sense that Afghan leaders to be held accountable to the Afghan people and their international partners.
“There is now a far stronger emphasis on the regional aspects of the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and the need to involve all of the important stakeholders in the region and the world,” she added.
Speaking about the effort of building up Afghan security forces and working with local forces, she said that “the clear and strong emphasis of the Obama administration is on building up the necessary Afghan state’s capacity to take over the administration of its country.”
“This is indeed critical — both from a perspective of the country’s and Afghan state’s long-term development and stability, but also from a short-term perspective of counterinsurgency since local forces are far more adept at combating insurgents than outsiders,” she added.
However, she pointed out the shortcomings of the local forces, saying that while the building up of the Afghan National Army has widely been considered a success, the army still faces major limitation: in its regional make-up, retention capacity, logistics, mobility, operational tempo, and command quality.
Felbab-Brown strongly believed that the logistical challenges of deploying American 30,000 troops to Afghanistan are significant. “But it is possible to deploy the designated 30,000 deployment within the specified period,” she said.
“It is not only possible to deploy fast, it is also important to do so rather than trickling troops in small increments so that sufficient momentum on the ground can be achieved and there is sufficient troop density build-up in designated districts to clear and consistently hold territory,” she said.
“The patience of the Afghan people is limited and the big push needs to be made now and quickly,” she added.
On the 18-month timeline of drawing down U.S. troops from Afghanistan, she said that there is a dilemma in this regard.
On the one hand, the timeline allows the Afghan administration to build support domestically and indicate to the skeptical U.S. public that the effort in Afghanistan is not an open-ended commitment regardless of outcomes.
However, she said the downside of setting such a timeline is that the Taliban will decide that they should now lie relatively low for the next 18 months and quietly prepare for the big push when the United States starts drawing down.
Therefore, she said, it is important to note that drawing down does not necessarily mean withdrawing all or even the bulk of the forces.
She said that the Obama administration has made it clear that how the transition would be carried out — in what geographic areas and what functional spheres — will be determined by a careful evaluation of the situation on the ground, district by district, sphere by sphere.
Felbab-Brown, who has written extensively on Afghanistan, is an adjunct professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She is also the author of the forthcoming book Shooting Up, analyzes the options the United States faces in Afghanistan.
U.S. troops surge in Afghanistan only one component of strategy
www.chinaview.cn 
2009-12-02 18:05:41
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