According to George Friedman from the Stratfor intelligence group the United States should forget the idea of sending more troops to Afghanistan and concentrate instead on covert operations against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

As has become increasingly clear, the administration of President Barack Obama faces a hard time raising its troop presence in Afghanistan without either relying on precarious supply lines through Pakistan or making political compromises with Russia to win its support for using alternative routes through Central Asia.

“So how can Mr. Obama reconcile the two goals of strengthening the American presence in Afghanistan while curbing Russian expansionism?” asks Friedman. “The answer is to rely less on troops, and more on covert operations like the CIA. Covert operators are far more useful for the actual war that we are fighting (and they can carry their supplies on their backs). The primary American interest in Afghanistan, after all, is preventing terrorist groups from using it as a base for training and planning major attacks. Increasing the number of conventional troops will not help with this mission.”

His article struck me not so much for the suggestion about the need for covert operations. One wonders whether Friedman has ever lived in a small-town environment where you can barely open a curtain without being noticed let alone carry a backpack with satellite phone and whatever other equipment you might need to hunt down equally sophisticated militant groups who will have made a point of recruiting intelligence from the local population.

What is interesting is his assertion that sending more troops is not the answer.

There are a few articles out there suggesting that Afghanistan could be Obama’s Vietnam, including from U.S. analysts Juan Cole and Norman Solomon.  But such suggestions are usually dismissed as the talk of the American left, and most of the discussion in Washington seems to be more about the fine details of exactly how the United States should refine its strategy in Afghanistan to focus on limited, achievable goals rather than a grander vision of a tolerant pluralistic democracy — while nonetheless accepting the need for more troops

So are those who are fretting about how the United States should recalibrate strategy in Afghanistan missing the point? Is Friedman right to say that sending more troops is not the answer? And if so, what is the alternative?

(Reuters photo of Nuristan in Afghanistan/Bob Strong)

Central Asia is much in demand these days, whether as a transit route for U.S. and NATO supplies to Afghanistan as an alternative to Pakistan or for its rich resources, including oil and gas.

So it’s worth noting that India has been hosting Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev as its guest of honour at its Republic Day celebrations while signing a bunch of trade deals in the process. According to reports in the Indian media, including in the Business Standard, the Week and the Times of India,  India is seeking supplies of uranium for its nuclear plants and access to Kazakhstan’s oil and gas and in return would be expected to support Kakazhstan’s bid for membership of the World Trade Organisation. (India’s state-run Oil and Natural Gas Corp (ONGC) said on Saturday it had signed a deal to explore for oil and gas in Kazakhstan.)

Before anyone gets too carried away about India stealing a march in Central Asia, this Indian website adds a note of realism: “India’s strategy towards Central Asian countries has been no different than its strategy towards African nations, and can be only summarized as ‘playing catch-up with the Chinese’,” it says. “In this new “Great Game” of the century, India is consistently assuming the role of “Johnny-come-lately” to China in Central Asia.”

That said, it still struck me as an interesting signpost in the competition between Asia and the U.S-led west for resources and influence, with Central Asia likely to become increasingly important both as a source of energy and as a supply route to Afghanistan.

The significance of this competition is unlikely to be lost on Russia which, according to this article by former Indian diplomat M K Bhadrakumar ,could end up playing off the United States against China.  He writes that while Russia does not want to see the United States and NATO defeated in Afghanistan, nor does it want them to use Central Asian supply routes to Afghanistan as an excuse to win access to the region’s oil and gas. “Russian experts estimate that the proposed Caspian transit route could eventually become an energy transportation route in reverse direction, which would mean a strategic setback for Russia in the decade-long struggle for the region’s hydrocarbon reserves.” So as part of this complex balancing act, he says, it is looking for a bigger role for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation — dominated by Russia and China — in stabilising Afghanistan.

Critics of the Bush administration acknowledged that former vice-president Dick Cheney got the importance of Central Asia even as they condemned his methods. Now India is jumping in on the act.  How is the new administration of President Barack Obama going to approach Central Asia, while juggling relations with Russia, trying to turn the tide in Afghanistan and reducing U.S. dependence on Pakistan?

(Photos: President Nursultan Nazarbayev inspects guard of honour in New Delhi/B. Mathur

Young hunter with his tame golden eagle in central Kazakhstan/Shamil Zumakov)

Britain’s commander in Afghanistan has said the war against the Taliban cannot be won and suggested talks with the group might be a way of making progress.

“We’re not going to win this war. It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army,” Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith said in an interview with the Sunday Times.

“If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this,” he said. “That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable.”

His comments are perhaps not quite as startling as they first appear. NATO commanders and diplomats have been saying for some time that the Taliban insurgency cannot be defeated by military means alone and that negotiations will ultimately be needed to bring an end to the conflict. In some ways, it’s almost stating the obvious since insurgencies are never totally defeated and all sides have to sit down and negotiate at some point.

Last week, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said he had made a call for peace to Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and had asked Saudi Arabia to help in talks with the group. A senior Taliban commander rejected the call and said the Taliban would not negotiate while there were still foreign troops on Afghan soil.

But despite the rejection, there does seem to be a growing sense that something is going on, and that people on the ground are beginning to think about how eventually to end the war in Afghanistan.

In an article in Canada’s Edmonton Sun, Eric Margolis has no doubts that it is time for Canada to bring its troops home, arguing that the occupation of Afghanistan is not about preventing another 9/11 but rather to secure routes for pipelines bringing Caspian oil and gas from Central Asia to the West.

“The Taliban are not ‘terrorists’,” he writes. “The movement had nothing to do with 9/11 though it did shelter Osama bin Laden …  Only a handful of al Qaeda are left in Afghanistan. The current war is not really about al Qaeda and ‘terrorism’, but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin to the West. Canada and the rest of NATO have no business being pipeline protection troops.”

But in an op-ed in the New York Times, Robert Kaplan writes that the Afghan campaign is “more than a manhunt” and must be secured,  at the very least to ensure the stability of neighbouring Pakistan.

He writes that it may be necessary to make make deals with some Taliban groups against others. “For the Taliban are not a monolithic organization, but bands of ornery Pashtun backwoodsmen who have been cut out of the power base in Afghanistan by an increasingly corrupt and ineffectual government in Kabul. They are not al Qaeda …”

Then picking up the same theme as Margolis but reaching a different conclusion, he says Afghanistan would benefit from becoming a transit route for Central Asian oil and gas.

“Even under a weak central government, Afghanistan could finally achieve economic salvation: the construction of a web of energy pipelines that have been envisioned for years connecting Central Asia with the Indian Ocean. These might run, for example, from the natural gas fields of Turkmenistan down through Afghanistan and into the dense population zones of Pakistan and India, with terminals at ports like Gwadar in Pakistani Baluchistan and Surat in the Indian state of Gujarat,” he writes. “In other words, in Afghanistan we are not simply trying to save a country, but to give a whole region a new kind of prosperity and stability, united rather than divided by energy needs, that would be implicitly pro-American.”

(I wrote just a couple of days ago about whether energy pipelines could become a cause for peace rather than war, in a post about long-delayed plans for an Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline bringing Iranian gas to Indian markets.)

So is it time to think about bringing an end to the Afghan campaign? And if so, on what terms? By walking away and trying to avoid any more bloodshed? Or by achieving peace – if necessary by offering parts of the Taliban a share of power in Kabul – and then securing it by giving Afghanistan a strategic importance that binds it into the regional and global economy?