Tough Choices for US in Afghanistan

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The latest episode of the podcast gets into the difficult choices facing president Barack Obama in Afghanistan. After eight years of war, the US military is now thinking about starting all over in Afghanistan by implementing the kind of counterinsurgency strategy that helped avert complete disaster in Iraq. At the top of the agenda is defeating the Al Qaeda terrorist network and its Taliban allies. But would that necessarily require transforming a nation that has suffered more than a generation of war, turmoil and complete economic stagnation? And can the US afford to do what it would take to even help this country give itself a decent shot at success?

For Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, the answer to that last question is a simple one. No. Bacevich is an ex-Army officer who’s become a leading voice against doubling down in Afghanistan. He says it’s high time for Mr. Obama to start lowering expectations for the US and its partners in that country.

In many ways, Rory Stewart is on the same page as Bacevich. He’s a British scholar who’s spent a lot time in Afghanistan and other parts of Central Asia and the Middle East. Stewart says the US and its allies owe it to the Afghan people to be more honest about what they can really accomplish there, which is likely to be something far less ambitious than even the kind of tenuous nation-building that’s taken place in Iraq since 2003.

Military analyst Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution and Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations argue that the US cannot afford to let Afghanistan go back to being a safe-haven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Send me an email to thworldpolitics [at] gmail [dot] com.

And thanks for listening!