South Asia Archive

A few thoughts on the announcement that Gen. Stanley McChrystal will replace Gen. David McKiernan as commander of American forces in Afghanistan. First, most of the news reports and blog commentary I’ve read so far trace the decision directly back to Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, with some noting the role played by Joint Chiefs head Adm. Michael Mullen. Indeed, a few of the ledes I’ve seen have formulated it as Gates, or alternatively “the Pentagon,” calling for McKiernan’s resignation. That stands in stark contrast to the last two headline-making cases of a commander relieved […]

A big part of the American exit strategy from both Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed a big part of U.S. COIN doctrine more generally, is the de-Americanization of the conflicts through the progressive replacement of U.S. forces by indigenous security forces. The same thing can essentially be said about efforts to get Pakistan to address the Taliban insurgency in FATA and the NWFP more aggressively as well. Those efforts will obviously hit snags, as this NY Times article about the lapses in Iraqi security forces’ preparedness illustrates. There’s also something predictably counterproductive about having the Pakistani military commit the same […]

Although the subject of India was barely mentioned in public, it was central to the private discussions between U.S. and Pakistani officials in Washington yesterday. Here’s Helene Cooper writing in the NY Times: [T]he one thing that no one seemed to be talking about publicly is theone thing that, privately, Obama officials acknowledge is the mostimportant: how to get the Pakistani government and army to move thecountry’s troops from the east, where they are preoccupied with a warwith India that most American officials do not think they will have tofight, to the west, where the Islamist insurgents are taking over […]

I’ve been taking my time to fully digest the wildly fluctuating press reports coming out of Pakistan and Washington over the past few weeks. But I tend towards a bit of skepticism towards both. There seems to be a lot of “not seeing the forest for the trees” on both sides. In Pakistan, that means an almost casual, business-as-usual approach to a residual problem that totally misses the increasingly urgent cues coming from the Obama administration. In Washington, that means a heightened alarmism that is better adapted to shaping American opinion than it is to addressing what amounts to a […]

At my own risk and peril, I’ve got to take issue with Joshua Foust on this one (third bullet point down in his post). The problem here isn’t that Al Jazeera “cannot tell the difference between standard issue evangelical boilerplate and a command to go destroy Islam in the name of Jesus.” It’s that a population that already suspects it’s being targeted as part of a religious crusade against Islam might not be able to. Given some of the quotes in the article, I wonder whether the evangelicals at issue might not be able to either. Clearly the U.S. Army […]

President Obama’s plan to send 4,000 more troops to Afghanistan — in addition to 17,000 previously announced — was apparently a compromise between his political advisors and his military ones. Described as a “down-payment” option on future commitments once the Iraq draw-down is completed, this measure seems designed to buy time in the hope that Afghan President Karzai, who is meeting with President Obama on Wednesday, will get his army and his government in good enough shape to effectively engage with the Taliban and their allies. The Washington consensus seems once again to be that the U.S. is not engaged […]

The top item at President Barack Obama’s two-day mini-summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Pakistani leader Asif Ali Zardari at the White House this week will be “cooperation.” The agenda is also likely to include a pile of other challenges now facing South Asia — like the 40 percent spike in civilian deaths in Afghanistan last year, the popular backlash in Pakistan against the United States’ use of drone missile attacks, and the floor-to-ceiling corruption that pervades President Karzai’s government. With all that to talk about, maybe the summit should last the whole week. Because the three men would […]