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A major pillar of United States President Barack Obama's earlier Afghan policy,
articulated in a March speech, was missing from his long-awaited address on
Tuesday in which he committed an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan.
Conspicuous by its absence was any reference - apart from Pakistan - of the
other stakeholders in the neighborhood, notably Iran.
In his March speech, Obama said, "And finally, together with the United
Nations, we will forge a new contact group for Afghanistan and Pakistan that
brings together all who should have a stake in the security of the region - our
NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies and other partners, but also
the Central Asian
states, the Gulf nations and Iran; Russia, India and China."
German Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has pointed out the need to
engage India in deliberations on Afghanistan's future. But the commanding US
general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, has painted a negative view of
India's role in Afghanistan as one "likely to exacerbate regional tensions",
perhaps one reason why Obama shrank from mentioning India in his speech. On the
other hand, Russia, which has allowed a limited movement of material across its
territory into Afghanistan, is now poised to increase its assistance.
It is not that the US has given up on the contact group. The proposed January
28, 2010, meeting promises to once again bring a host of nations, including
Iran, China, Russia and India, around the table. The problem is Obama's narrow
focus on a few select players - NATO, Pakistan - while relegating others to a
secondary role.
With respect to Iran, Obama's decision to avoid any mention of it may have made
sense in light of the escalating tensions over the Iran nuclear issue, yet it
was hardly a prudent one in terms of Afghanistan's needs. At the April Hague
Conference on Afghanistan, where Iran's delegation promised to cooperate with
the Obama administration, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly admitted
that Iran had a "natural role to play" in light of the "Afghan drug traffic".
For sure, Islamabad is not necessarily thrilled by the new interventionist
tinge of Obama's speech that promised to deal with al-Qaeda's safe havens
inside Pakistan. If the president's intention is to engage the US and NATO
forces in more cross-border attacks on al-Qaeda and Taliban sanctuaries within
Pakistan, then inevitably that is a recipe for more, and not less, tensions
with Pakistan.
For its part, Tehran has reacted negatively to the news of more US forces
heading for neighboring Afghanistan, insisting that the presence of foreign
forces is counter-productive and fuels the Taliban-led insurgency.
Nor is Tehran in sync with the US's new tribalist approach that looks beyond
the central government to create a confederation of loyal tribes and warlords
while bolstering the central government and its security apparatuses.
Obama conceded that the Taliban had "gained momentum" and were now in control
of an "additional swath of territory". So with the effective parceling of
control and authority throughout Afghanistan, the national and provincial twin
strategies of the US/NATO increasingly look like a split personality, with
policies put into motion that reinforce rather than reduce the resulting
incoherence. This is mainly out of the conviction that a new track on political
legitimacy not centered on the central government must now be found.
Imagine if Obama in the same speech had announced that he would be dispatching
thousands of new engineers, doctors, nurses, road and transportation experts,
etc. Or that he was also revising US aid programs by moving away from big
projects in favor of micro-projects, relying less on predatory US private
contractors and more on international non-governmental organizations, and so
on. Now that would be some new strategy.
But in addition to laying out a price tag - about US$30 billion - that is not
inclusive of the yet-to-be-determined nature of the new civilian component to
the new strategy, another key problem of Obama's new policy is that it
underestimates the difficulty of uprooting the "narco-cancer". This has
engulfed so many of Afghanistan's provinces that is is as important as the
other cancer mentioned in his speech - terrorism.
To tackle the former, the US would have to come up with a new blueprint for the
narco-economy - a root cause of government and security corruption - instead of
pushing President Hamid Karzai in vain for a more vigorous "anti-corruption"
campaign, thus addressing the symptoms rather than the causes.
With the bulk of the Afghan drug trade passing through Iran, part of it through
the porous Pakistan border, there cannot be a successful war in Afghanistan
without a successful war on drugs. That, in turn, necessitates a new and
expanded level of US/NATO cooperation with Iran. Such cooperation could take
several forms, including NATO's extension of financial and other contributions
to Iran in its costly war on the Afghan drug trade.
In exchange, Iran may consider allowing NATO to use the Iran corridor,
including the recently built (by India) road from western Afghanistan that
links with Iran's Persian Gulf ports. Iran may do so if it is convinced that
Obama's "exit strategy" is not a mere put-on and that there are serious
intentions behind it.
For now, however, Tehran prefers to remain skeptical about the US president's
public pronouncements, preferring to see real changes in action. A Tehran
Foreign Ministry spokesman has stated that Iran sees no important changes from
the George W Bush administration, but then again, the legacy of that era
included a brief rapport with Iran in 2000-2001 that was subsequently buried
under a new "axis of evil" strategy.
After nearly a year in office, Obama's initial enthusiasm for some sort of
resurrection of the US-Iran common cause on Afghanistan has apparently fizzled
out. It has been replaced with a new strategy of self-reliance, reflected in
the omission of any reference to Iran and other important regional players.
Should things not go as planned, however, Obama may soon veer back to his
initial belief hat the road to Kabul travels through Tehran.
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New
Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) . For his Wikipedia entry,
click here. His
latest book,
Reading In Iran Foreign Policy After September 11 (BookSurge Publishing
, October 23, 2008) is now available.
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