Republican senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina appears on Fox News' On The Record, February 2

Republican senator Lindsey Graham voiced concern about the future of American military involvement in Afghanistan a day after his country’s defense secretary, Leon Panetta, had told NATO allies in Brussels that the United States could suspend combat operations as early as 2013, a year before the alliance is scheduled to transfer security responsibility to the Afghans.

Graham, a South Carolina native and Air Force veteran, is a noted national security hawk who previously questioned the administration’s decision to withdraw thirty thousand surge troops from Afghanistan before the end of this year. “This is all domestic politics,” he said on Fox News’ On The Record on Thursday. “There is no military commander suggesting that we pull out in September of this year the surge forces.”

In bringing home tens of thousand of troops this year, President Barack Obama overruled his military advisors who recommended a slower withdrawal. Admiral Michael Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress last June that the president’s plans were more “more aggressive and incur more risk” than he was originally prepared to accept. Before he resigned in July, defense secretary Robert Gates acknowledged that waning popular support for the grinding military effort was a factor in the government’s decision to draw down forces at a faster pace.

“If we take combat operations off the table in 2013, that’s the second fighting season we’ve lost,” Graham lamented. He worried that General John Allen, the commander of international forces operating in Afghanistan, wouldn’t have the resources necessary to expand his counterinsurgency effort into the eastern tribal regions where the Taliban maintain an active presence.

Defense secretary Panetta insisted that Western troops “will have to be fully combat ready” and will fight “as necessary” even as native forces assume the security lead. However, few NATO countries are still willing to see the war through.

Just two weeks ago, France suspended its combat operations after four servicemen were shot and killed by a local trainee. President Nicolas Sarkozy, facing a war weary electorate as well, could pull out French forces by 2013, a year ahead of the 2014 deadline that was set by NATO two years ago.

These moves communicate a weakness to the insurgents, said Graham. “If you’re trying to win a war and negotiate with the enemy, you want to do so from strength.” Republicans are critical of setting deadlines for troops withdrawals altogether, fearing that the Taliban will bid for time and return to power once Western armies have left the country.

Asked what advice he would give the president, Graham said, “What I think he should do is enter into an agreement with the Afghan Government at their request to have military bases in the country, three or four, past 2014, with air power and Special Forces units that can defeat the Taliban in perpetuity. Then you negotiate with them. Not now.”

There may not be the political will to commit to Afghan security in the long term. Vice President Joe Biden told NBC News in December 2010 that the United States were “gonna be totally out of there, come hell or high water, by 2014.” Other administration officials have been less adamant but far from clear on what, if any, military engagement the president envisions in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 deadline.

Hina Rabbani Khar, Pakistan's foreign minister, addresses the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, January 26 (Remy Steinegger)

Pakistan’s foreign minister on Wednesday rejected claims that her country’s spy agency was actively supporting the Taliban in their fight against NATO forces in Afghanistan. “We have no hidden agenda in Afghanistan,” Hina Rabbani Khar said in Kabul.

The BBC and The Times reported earlier in the day that insurgents captured by Western forces had told them that with Pakistani support, the Taliban were poised to return to power after 2014 when NATO’s mission is supposed to come to an end.

“Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly,” the BBC quoted a NATO report as saying.

This confirms the suspicion that was raised by America’s top military officer, Admiral Michael Mullen, last year when he said that the Haqqani network, a militant Islamist organization that is allied to but not necessarily affiliated with the Taliban, “has long enjoyed the support and protection of the Pakistani Government and is, in many ways, a strategic arm” of Pakistani intelligence.

The NATO study that was obtained by British news media also asserted that Taliban leaders meet regularly with Pakistani intelligence officers “who advise on strategy and relay any pertinent concerns of the government of Pakistan.” It alleged that Islamabad was “intimately involved” in an effort to topple President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul.

Pakistan’s civilian authorities may not be part of the plot but there is little question that its intelligence services and possibly its military maintain ties with Afghan insurgents in order to regain their influence in the country once NATO forces pull out.

Taliban sanctuaries are known to exist in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. NATO commanders have long complained that they hamper the war effort and that there doesn’t appear to be the political will in Islamabad to crush the Islamist insurgency on their frontier.

The Pakistanis are reluctant to expand counterinsurgency operations because they have to prepare for the eventuality of a Taliban resurgence if not the formation of a “Pashtunistan” in the tribal area that manages to assert itself independently of Kabul.

Pakistan, moreover, regards the modern day mujahideen as a wedge against India, to be deployed whenever New Delhi seeks to strengthen its ties with the Afghans. India has indeed fostered relations with the Karzai regime to upset Pakistan’s quest for “strategic depth” in the country.

The rivalry that has defined South Asia for half a century won’t dissipate overnight, no matter America’s insistence that the Pakistanis have nothing to fear from India and little to gain from betraying the West.

The Pakistanis have problems of their own. Years of antiterrorist operations by a majority Punjabi army in predominantly Pashtun territory have pushed the Muslim nation onto the brink of civil war. The army’s offensives in the region displaced nearly half a million people. Before the Afghan war escalated, the battle was confined to the tribal areas but since 2008, it has spread into Pakistan proper with bombings and assassinations taking place in major cities including Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.

Since the United States are preparing to withdraw, it makes no sense for the Pakistanis to crack down on extremists that might prove an asset in the future. The surest way for them to fill the power vacuum that will be left in Kabul once the Americans are gone is to cultivate ties with the Taliban and their allies. If they don’t, there may be a place for India in whatever power constellation emerges across Pakistan’s porous western border in the next couple of years.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France participates in a military remembrance ceremony in Paris, June 6, 2011

France on Friday warned that it may accelerate the withdrawal of its forces from Afghanistan after four unarmed French servicemen were shot and fifteen others wounded in a killing spree by an Afghan soldier in the northeastern Kapisa Province.

President Nicolas Sarkozy announced the immediate suspension of training and joint combat operations with Afghan forces. “The French army stands alongside its allies but we cannot accept that a single one of our soldiers be wounded or killed by our allies,” he said. “It’s unacceptable.”

NATO played down the threat. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the organization’s secretary general, insisted that attacks by Afghan forces are rare. “Such tragic incidents are terrible and grab headlines but they are isolated,” he said before pointing out that there are some 130,000 foreign soldiers serving alongside three hundred thousand Afghans.

France’s participation in the NATO mission in Afghanistan is unpopular. Sarkozy’s two main challengers for the presidency this year, Socialist Party candidate François Hollande and Marine Le Pen of the far right and isolationist Front nationale, have each promised to bring the roughly four thousand Frenchmen who serve in Afghanistan home. Elections in France are scheduled for April and May.

The president on Friday said that he would dispatch his defense minister to Afghanistan to investigate the shooting. He added that if Afghan authorities cannot ensure the safety of French troops, “the question of an early withdrawal of the French army would arise.”

Afghanistan’s defense ministry said the attacker had been arrested and was being questioned. President Hamid Karzai is due to visit Paris next week.

French troops in Afghanistan concentrate on training local security forces which includes accompanying them on patrols. The force is set to be reduced to three thousand this year before NATO hands over security responsibility to the Afghans in 2014.

The latest deaths brought to number of French soldiers killed in Afghanistan since deployment to eighty-two.

At sunset a convoy of Canadian Light Armored Vehicles overwatches the area near Khadan Village, Afghanistan, January 25, 2010

With American and NATO forces preparing to pull out of Afghanistan in 2014, will counterinsurgency soon be over? No, writes retired United States Army Colonel Robert Killebrew at Foreign Policy. The real counterinsurgency is only just beginning.

Killebrew defines counterinsurgency as the deployment of American power in support of local combat forces. If a foreign army becomes too involved in a local struggle, he points out, it risks “stealing the oxygen” from the essential relationship between native government and the insurgents who are fighting it.

It may be necessary for one of our troops to shoot an insurgent from the next village but killing somebody’s cousin isn’t going to make either us or the local government loved. If there ever was a doubt, look at the celebrations breaking out in Iraq with our departure.

The intense counterterrorism campaign that has been waged in Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan for roughly the last two years hasn’t made the United States very popular there. Both Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul and officials in Islamabad have demanded an end to nighttime raids by special forces and aerial bombardments by unmanned “drone” planes in the unruly tribal area along the frontier.

By 2014, American and other Western armies currently fighting in Afghanistan are scheduled to transfer security responsibility to the Afghan forces. “What this means,” writes Killebrew, “is that Afghan forces do the fighting, helped by small American advisory teams embedded in Afghan units, living and fighting alongside Afghan troops, and backed up by US air power and logistics.” No longer would the Americans be perceived as meddling in an internal conflict, rather the central government bears responsibility for ending the insurgency.

“This is not new to us,” writes Killebrew. The United States have worked alongside and supported local troops in conflicts for decades, most recently in Vietnam, El Salvador, Colombia and the Philippines.

In Colombia, a success story, a Colombian general complimented the US for getting it right and “letting us fight our own war.”

Colombia’s guerrilla against the FARC as well as Sri Lanka’s battle against Tamil insurgents provide lessons for counterinsurgencies elsewhere.

Niel Smith wrote about the Sri Lankan experience in Small Wars Journal more than two years ago. The conditions for a successful counterinsurgency, he argued, included an unwavering political will; disregard for international opinion and internal opposition distracting from the goal; no negotiations with the forces of terror and; complete freedom for the security forces.

Smith admitted that, “Most Western readers will find the lack of concern for civilian casualties in this strategy disconcerting.” A “ruthless” counterinsurgency however does resolve a conflict more quickly and therefore incurs less collateral damage whereas a “population centric” approach, aimed at winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace, “while humanistic, takes longer, with uncertain probabilities of success.”

So the question Killebrew raises is whether the Obama Administration, “the Defense Department and the services have the stomach for such a shift to the actual prosecution of a counterinsurgency effort.” This, he admits, is still an open question.

A US Marine greets local children during a partnered security patrol with Afghan National Army soldiers in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, December 18, 2011

American and NATO forces in Afghanistan have enough to deal with as is but a video that surfaced a few days ago of US Marines urinating on three dead Taliban militants—the men joking and laughing as they did—will only make the job of pacifying the country that much more difficult.

On top of bomb blasts, IED attacks straddled along major roadways and ambushes during neighborhood patrols, the soldiers that are now operating in Taliban infested areas will very likely be faced with an uptick in violence in response to the video.

Even more disparaging, the Afghan people who have either seen or heard of the tape, the very people that NATO has been trying to court for the past two years, could very well start distancing themselves from the war effort.

The video has yet to be fully authenticated but Pentagon officials say they have no reason to believe that it is a farce. Senior American officials have certainly been acting as if the video was real. Both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta have issued press statements and interviews strongly condemning the actions of the individual Marines.

In a joint press meeting with Algeria’s foreign minister, Secretary Clinton said she joined Secretary Panetta in “condemning the deplorable behavior that is reflected in this video.”

It is absolutely inconsistent with American values, with the standards of behavior that we expect from our military personnel and the vast, vast majority of our military personnel, particularly our Marines, hold themselves to.

Both officials have been frantically telephoning their Afghan counterparts. Panetta called President Hamid Karzai to reassure him that the United States military will spare no effort in investigating why the soldiers in the video did what they did; who those soldiers are; and what type of punishment fits their misconduct.

Marine Commandant General James Amos has ordered the Naval Criminal Investigative Services and the Marine Corps to look into the matter as diligently and thoughtfully as they can.

The United States clearly understand that this incident is extremely serious and that if not handled properly, could have a lasting impact on not only Afghans but Muslims around the world.

Sadly, the urination video is not an anomaly or the first of its kind. The US military has been embarrassed a number of times over the last ten years of war, not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq.

The most graphic and publicized case was back in 2004 when CBS News aired dozens of disturbing photographs depicting American military policemen posing in the front of naked and humiliated Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison facility.

In 2006, Time magazine ran a story about a band of Marines from Kilo Company that shot and killed twenty-four Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha without inquiring whether any of those individuals were belligerents. The casualties included unarmed women and children.

In 2010, Rolling Stone broke a controversial story describing a rogue American unit in Afghanistan where some of its soldiers hunted Afghan civilians for sport. Photographs of the accused troops smiling next to the dead Afghans accompanied the publication’s version of events.

The “vast, vast” majority, as Secretary Clinton put it, of American armed forces personnel operating in Afghanistan and other war zones is professional, disciplined, brave and caring—not only caring deeply for their country but for the people who are entrusted in their area of operation. This must be remembered especially when something terrible like Abu Ghraib happens under America’s watch.

One hopes that the perpetrators of this video are brought to some kind of justice, if not for the sake of justice itself then for the health of the war effort which relies on gaining the trust of the people and host government the American troops are fighting for. But as the inquires are launched and the final judgments made, it must also be recognized that the unethical or illegal acts of a few soldiers do not tinge the character of the entire service. If that were the case, the morale of the enemy would be reinforced and the heroism of people who choose to answer their nation’s call to arms unjustly tainted.

Presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Barack Obama of the United States meet on the sideslines of a NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal, November 20, 2010

Very rarely do we receive good news from Afghanistan. Insurgent ambushes and bomb attacks continue to claim the lives of innocent Afghan civilians every day. But as peace talks between the Taliban and the United States are reportedly progressing, the prospect for a negotiated end to the ten year old war may finally be in the making.

The strongest political irritant to NATO operations in Afghanistan has been the Taliban’s consistent rebuffing of peace overtures regardless of where those requests came from. President Barack Obama’s announcement that American soldiers would be winding down their campaign by 2014 likely provided the Taliban leaders with an incentive to fight for another three years before aiming directly at Hamid Karzai’s civilian government.

Yet with the Taliban facing a number of drawbacks over the past eighteen months—thousands of operatives killed or captured, a movement fracturing on the Pakistani side of the border and an insurgent leadership that is at times disconnected from its field units—the movement’s top members may be reconsidering that assumption.

As in any negotiation process, the exact details of the talks with the Taliban are being kept under the wraps. The New York Times has managed to publish some of the major items being debated between the two sides nevertheless. The hope is that movement on these issues will create trust on both sides to discuss an eventual peace agreement.

One proposal under review is a traditional quid pro quo that will surely be controversial for members in the United States Congress—the release of five senior Taliban prisoners from the Guantánamo Bay interrogation facility in Cuba. In return for that sacrifice, the Taliban would officially open a political office in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, setting up shop in order to further explore the diplomatic option in the coming months.

The White House has already come out to denounce this arrangement, describing reports of Guantánamo transfers as “not accurate.”

For a president who is just starting to get his reelection campaign in synch, releasing five Taliban officials who had close links with Al Qaeda operatives would be a difficult thing to sell to the electorate.

Republican presidential candidate and presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, who has been at his most passionate when bashing Obama’s foreign policy record, would exploit this move as an opportunity to further put his opponent on the defensive. Lawmakers who are unsympathetic to any Taliban overtures could view the prisoner release as a dangerous breach of American national security, if not an unnecessary capitulation before negotiations are even conducted in a serious manner.

The Obama Administration, then, has a problem on its hands. It clearly wants to end the war and bring American soldiers home but doing so will entail confidence building measures that may weaken its image during a hostile election season. Will the president attempt to secure his reelection, or travel down the long and unpredictable road of negotiating with an enemy that, if successful, could end America’s longest war in modern history?  As a war-time president who has invested a considerable amount of time on looking for ways to end the war, one can only hopes he chooses the latter.

Four US Navy F/A-18 Hornet aircraft fly over mountains in Afghanistan, November 25, 2010 (US Air Force)

Three weeks ago, twenty-four Pakistani soldiers dug in trenches along the Afghan-Pakistani border were accidentally killed by NATO aircraft during one of the many counterinsurgency missions that American and Afghan troops have undertaken over the past year. Except on this particular nighttime raid, the precision and professionalism that have become hallmarks of the coalition’s military campaign in Afghanistan were lost, tragically ending the lives of over two dozen men.

The Pakistani military and government, which have had a frosty relationship with the United States for most of the year, responded angrily. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington went so far as to tell reporters that the NATO operation was a deliberate act aimed at loosening the morale of the Muslim nation—a viewpoint that, while conspiratorial, may be acceptable given Islamabad’s roller coasty partnership with the Americans.

Sensing that another fallout in American-Pakistan relations would hurt the NATO war effort in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense called their Pakistani counterparts and told them that a transparent and factually based investigation would be implemented. That Pentagon study is now out and to the consternation of Western military officials, it looks like the Pakistanis may not have been wrong in all of their assertions.

Although the final report has not been made public, the Defense Department released a press statement briefly touching upon its most important findings. In sum, the investigation concluded that NATO was perfectly within its right to return fire in self defense but the coordinates that were given to Pakistani soldiers in the area turned out to be wrong.

The investigating officer found that US forces, given what information they had available to them at the time, acted in self defense and with appropriate force after being fired upon. Nevertheless, inadequate coordination by US and Pakistani military officers operating through the border coordination center—including our reliance on incorrect mapping information shared with the Pakistani liaison officer—resulted in a misunderstanding about the true location of Pakistani military units.

The study is not a perfect inquiry. Out of protest, the Pakistani military refused to cooperate with the Pentagon’s investigation, which lead investigator Brigadier General Stephen Clark acknowledged was a significant setback in uncovering all of the facts.

The findings are certain to draw condemnation from the Pakistanis who continue to feel insulted by what they view as Washington’s lack of appreciation for the thousands of military and civilian casualties that they have suffered in the fight against terrorism since 2001. General Athar Abbas, the chief Pakistani military spokesman, quickly indicated that his colleagues rejected the report’s conclusions.

The completion of the inquiry leaves the Obama Administration with a difficult decision to make. Does the president “swallow American pride” and formally apologize for NATO’s part of the responsibility or will he continue to express regret over the incident without offering that apology?

At least for the time being, the White House and the State Department have not budged from their original position. A State Department spokesman attempted to take responsibility for NATO’s infractions at a press briefing after the report’s release, all the while punting questions on apologizing.

Now that US/NATO forces are indeed held liable for at least part of the border incident, the administration should in fact reverse its previous stance, privately and publicly making it clear that anyone on the American side who was part of the problem will be dealt with accordingly.

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have been on the phone for weeks with Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani and the Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, trying to rebuild a tattered relationship. Kayani has reestablished contacts with NATO commander General John R. Allen, a good start to making sure that a deadly accident like the one that occurred on November 24 does not happen again. But neglecting to say “I’m sorry,” even as the Pentagon investigation details that NATO did in fact make mistakes, will give the Pakistanis a greater reason to doubt the United States as committed partners in the region.

The reality is that as long as the United States are engaged with tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan, Washington needs Pakistan’s help—whether or not Pakistan has been truly forthcoming in battling militancy on its own soil. Absent cordial relations between the two countries, NATO commanders can expect Islamabad to continue closing down supply routes that go into Afghanistan—forcing the coalition to either spent millions more airlifting supplies or putting them increasingly into the pockets of Central Asia’s autocratic regimes.

Pakistan may be a double faced partner right now but imagine how much worse NATO’s experience in Afghanistan would be without a measurable level of Pakistani complicity. Sometimes in war, a nation does not get to choose its allies. Pakistan is one such nation—a pain to deal with but necessary for a smooth NATO conclusion to the war across the border.

President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, September 26, 2007 (Lindsay Beyerstein)

Negotiations between the Taliban and the United States broke down after President Hamiz Karzai balked at the terms of a reconciliation proposal.

The Washington Post reports that the deal would have seen the Taliban renouncing Al Qaeda and terrorism and the United States transferring five prisoners currently held at a naval facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The prisoners would have been held under house arrest in Qatar where the Taliban plan to set up an office.

According to officials who spoke with the newspaper, the Afghan president had failed to build political support at home among powerful Afghan players, particularly ethnic Tajiks and other forces in the northern part of the country who resent the southeastern Pasthun fanatics that constitute the heart of the insurgency.

The news comes less than a week after Vice President Joe Biden sparked controversy with his assertion that the Taliban is “not per se” America’s enemy. “We are in a position where if Afghanistan ceased and desisted from being a haven for people who do damage and have as a target the United States of America and their allies, that’s good enough,” he told Newsweek.

There are risks to negotiating a ceasefire however. With international forces preparing to pull out of Afghanistan in 2014—”come hell or high water,” as the vice president put it earlier this year—the Taliban might determine that their best option is to negotiate an end to the deadly American counterinsurgency tactics and renege on a reconciliation agreement later.

If there is a reconciliation, it would likely see the Taliban return to provincial power in the south of Afghanistan where, over time, a virtually autonomous Pashtunistan could emerge that will destabilize Pakistan, home to forty-four million Pashtun, unless Islamabad restores its special relationship with the Taliban—which would also enable is to reclaim “strategic depth” there against India.

The United States would probably not prevent such a fundamentalist Islamic polity from emerging. Once American troops pull out, Washington is unlikely to deploy military force again to maintain the balance of power that has previously been attained.

India, which could be a critical American ally across the Indian Ocean region in containing China’s rise, remains baffled that the United States would pick impoverished and fragmented Pakistan as a partner over New Delhi. The different ethnicities and tribes once united in the Northern Alliance seem quite prepared to deal with India but they are in the minority versus roughly fourteen million Pashtun who are estimated to constitute some 40 percent of the population.

Karzai, two months ago, entered into a strategic partnership with India. Balaji Chandramohan observed at the time that whereas Pakistan’s influence in Kabul is eroding, “there is a chance for India to jump into the vacuum that is Afghanistan and facilitate a comprehensive reconstruction effort, one that is supported by the neighboring states that have most at stake in the country, including Iran, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.”

None of these countries wants to see the Taliban return to power but they have not been prepared yet to commit more than minimal financial support to Hamid Karzai’s civilian government, let alone

Republican senator Mark Kirk of Illinois, November 3, 2010 (Jonathan Daniel)

Republican senators on Tuesday were critical of sustained American aid to Pakistan and called for a deeper engagement with India instead. Mark Kirk suggested “making India a military ally of the United States” and said he encouraged it “to fill the vacuum in Kabul once we leave.”

Lawmakers suspended $700 billion worth of financial support until Pakistan convinces them that it is providing all the help it can in battling the production and spread of improvised explosive devices in the region which target American troops operating in neighboring Afghanistan.

The opposition legislators responded to mounting public pressure to penalize Islamabad for its perceived lackluster effort in combatting militant Islamists in the region and sheltering terrorist leader Osama bin Laden who was found to be hiding in a Pakistani garrison town in May where he was killed by American special forces.

The United States have spent $20 billion in security and economic aid to Pakistan since 2001, much of it in the form of reimbursements for assistance in fighting militants.

Although Pakistan has lost more soldiers in the War on Terror than any other country, its intelligence services still maintain ties with mujahideen because it seeks “strategic debt” for Pakistan in Afghanistan in the event of an armed conflict with India.

The former chairman of the American Joint Chiefs of Staff told Congress in September that the terrorist Haqqani network in particular, which is allied to the Taliban, “has long enjoyed the support and protection of the Pakistani Government and is, in many ways, a strategic arm” of Pakistan’s spy agency.

Illinois senator Mark Kirk cited Haqqani when he argued that military aid to Pakistan is unsustainable. If the country choses “to embrace terror and back the Haqqani network,” he said, it should do so “without subsidies from the US taxpayer.”

Senator John McCain of Arizona, who is leading proponent of intensifying the Afghan campaign in Congress, scolded Pakistan last month when he claimed that “the vast majority of the material used to make improvised explosive devices originates from two fertilizer factories in Pakistan.” Hence his insistence on Tuesday that Pakistan dismantle these plants if it is to continue to receive financial support from the United States.

McCain, who has favored strong American ties with India at least since his failed 2008 presidential campaign, reiterated his position on Tuesday that an Indo-American relationship could also check Chinese ambitions in the Indian Ocean region.

The administration has so far hesitated to deepen ties with India because it needs Pakistani support in the War on Terror. Many of the insurgents operating in Afghanistan maintain shelters in western Pakistan.

American drone attacks against suspected insurgent and terrorist targets in Pakistan’s frontier area are deeply unpopular there however because they sometimes incur civilian losses. What is more, years of antiterrorist operations by a majority Punjabi army in the predominantly Pashtun territory has pushed the Muslim nation onto the brink of civil war. The army’s offensives in the northern and western tribal areas displaced nearly half a million people. Whereas the conflict used to be confined to the border, bombings and assassinations now regularly take place in Pakistan proper.

With the international coalition prepared to pull out of Afghanistan militarily in 2014, it makes little sense for the Pakistanis to continue to hunt down extremists who might prove an asset in the future. Indeed, the surest way for Pakistan to fill the power vacuum that is likely to result from an American withdrawal is to cultivate ties with the Taliban and its allies. If it doesn’t, there may be a place for India in whatever power constellation emerges across Pakistan’s porous western border three years from now.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany during an Afghan security conference in Bonn, December 5 (AFP)

December 5, 2011 may have been just an ordinary day for most of the world but for Hamid Karzai and his government in Kabul, it represented a day of international solidarity for his country’s fate. 

After quick successes by the United States and heir coalition allies against Al Qaeda and Taliban bases, the war in Afghanistan has grinded on for a decade. Afghans of all ethnicities and tribes have suffered immeasurably at the hands of all sides involved in the conflict. Suicide bombings, unheard of in Afghanistan prior to 2001, are now a facet of everyday life. 

The insurgents have even targeted Kabul, a city that was once relatively insulated from violence in the rest of Afghanistan, with ever more ferocity. The latest suicide attack in the capital striking at the heart of Shī’ah commemorations killed close to sixty innocent people.

It’s not all bad however. Death and destruction may have defined the war effort so far but the Afghan Government, the Afghan people and the world are clearly hoping that the future brings more hope. In Bonn, Germany, representatives of a hundred countries and organizations converged to talk about where Afghanistan is headed and what the international community can do to make the lives of Afghans a little less violent and a little more prosperous.

President Hamid Karzai was the keynote speaker during the conference and praised Europe, the United States and the rest of his partners for the immense sacrifices that they have made for the benefit of the Afghan people. For American delegates sitting in on the meeting, Karzai’s remarks, which tend to change as fast as events on the battlefield, were noteworthy in their sincerity and appreciation.

Together, we have spent blood and treasure in fighting terrorism. Your continued solidarity, your commitment and support will be crucial so that we can consolidate our gains and continue to address the challenges that remain.

Challenges there are. Economic growth in Afghanistan has been at a standstill in the countryside where most Afghans live due to the dangerous security situation on the ground.

The government of Hamid Karzai is so reliant on foreign aid that his authority would quickly collapse if the billions of dollars in international spending were to be cut even marginally. As of 2010, the United States alone had donated at least $52 billion to the Afghan Government for a variety of tasks, most related to security but others related to reconstruction programs and reconciliation activities.

Yet even that amount has not solved Afghanistan’s problems. The financial constraints on Karzai are so severe that he asked global contributors for an additional $15 billion for 2015 at the Bonn Conference—a pledge that Washington and its allies have nominally supported if the Afghans continue to progress on the political reform front.

Where does this conference leave the United States and their NATO partners at the moment? Right now, the military mission in Afghanistan continues on its present course. NATO soldiers, with embedded Afghan units, are scheduled to take the fight to the enemy in the caverns of eastern Afghanistan, the home base of the Haqqani network and an area that will be extremely difficult to pacify without political dedication from NATO countries and an aggressive counterterrorism approach that will result in at least some casualties.

Unfortunately, even with these force enablers in mind, it stretches credulity to expect these operations to do anything but temporarily dent the insurgency—especially without cooperation from Pakistan, who did not even participate in the Bonn Conference. 

The training of Afghan security personnel will undoubtedly accelerate as Afghanistan’s own army only has a short three years to get its act together before NATO draws down and leaves the nation’s security where it belongs—in the hands of the Afghan people.

Regrettably, the geopolitical aspect of the equation—which must include regional acceptance of Afghanistan as a sovereign and independent state, without interference from its neighbors—and reintegration with the Taliban is a dim prospect. In the end, what the Afghan people do not need is more war, but a political settlement that is acceptable to all of the major players in the country.