AFP 09/08/2010
By Shaun Tandon

WASHINGTON – The United States should scale back troops and goals in Afghanistan as its military campaign has backfired and boosted the Taliban, according to a study billed as a Plan B for President Barack Obama.

The report by nearly 50 scholars and policymakers states bluntly that the United States does not need to defeat the Taliban, describing it as a movement with local goals that is unlikely to regain control of Afghanistan.

Instead, the study said the United States has only two vital interests in the region — preventing Afghanistan from regressing into a haven for Al-Qaeda extremists and ensuring the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

“What we have been doing for several years is not just failing but counterproductive,” said Matthew Hoh, the director of the study dubbed the Afghanistan Study Group.

“We need to provide the Oval Office with another alternative,” said Hoh, a former Marine who resigned from a State Department position last year due to disagreements over Afghan policy.

Study authors described it as non-partisan, although many involved are critical of the war.

Representative Mike Honda, a liberal member of Obama’s Democratic Party from California, praised the report and called for a congressionally mandated version along the lines of the influential 2006 study on Iraq.

The report “offers a much-needed rethink on the war in Afghanistan, especially given Washington’s near-silence on alternatives,” said Honda, whose policy advisor Michael Shank participated in the study.

The United States overthrew the Taliban in 2001 following the September 11 attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda. The report noted that the conflict now costs US taxpayers 100 billion dollars a year — more than seven times Afghanistan’s gross domestic product.

US policy “certainly has lost sight of any careful comparison between the cost and benefit of waging the continued counter-insurgency there,” said Paul Pillar, a professor at Georgetown University and former CIA analyst who contributed to the report.

The study called on Obama to go ahead or even speed up the July 2011 deadline to begin pulling some of the nearly 100,000 US troops out of Afghanistan, eventually ending all operations in the Pashtun-dominated South.

It argued that the US military footprint had radicalized the Pashtun, who have turned to insurgency as a way to drive out foreign troops.

“The goal of defeating the Taliban and stabilizing Afghanistan has come to be treated as a kind of end in itself. It is not,” Pillar said.

The study stopped short of recommending a complete pullout, saying the United States should be ready to destroy any Al-Qaeda cell that regroups. It also disputed that a US drawdown would hurt Afghan women, whose rights were severely curtailed under Taliban rule.

The authors of the study said they were hoping to stir debate, and their views are likely to meet strong opposition in some quarters.

US military leaders have held out the option of recommending that Obama delay the July 2011 date.

The Republican Party, which is forecast to make gains in November congressional elections, has strongly backed operations in Afghanistan.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said last week that Obama’s July 2011 date has “hurt” Afghanistan operations and the surge of troops “is beginning to show some benefits.”

Several scholars who worked on the Afghanistan Study Group declined to sign it, some saying it downplayed a real threat from Taliban or did not pay enough attention to neighboring Pakistan.

Charles Kupchan, a Georgetown University professor, said the United States needs to keep paying close attention to Pakistan in light of its internal fissures and tensions with India.

“We have to do much more than stand back and only worry about the integrity of their nuclear weapons, in part because the integrity of their nuclear weapons depends on what goes on inside the country,” Kupchan said.

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