Nation Building

David Brooks has a column in today's New York Times arguing for McChrrystal's recommendation to increase the amount of US troops in Afghanistan.

And David Brooks hits the nail on the head on at least one major point. "You [cannot] fight a counterinsurgency war with a light footprint." The US cannot make the same mistake that Rumsfeld made in Iraq. Either the US must hunker down and send more troops and prepare itself for a difficult, long, and maybe winnable road ahead. Or the US must pack up and leave. Brooks does not shy away from using even stronger language to describe the choices. He writes, the US must "surrender the place to the Taliban or do armed nation-building."

And this is something that almost all supporters of the War in Afghanistan have refused to say. No one wants to call it "nation building." The neoconservative ghosts of old are supposed to be dead and buried. But the truth seems to be that in a nation that is as complex as Afghanistan (diversity and drug cartels among other things), and that has as strong an insurgency as it does, the only real options are committing to a long haul which includes substantial infrastructure-building or packing up.

This, however, is the point where Brooks and I deviate. He goes on to argue that the war is a war of necessity (something even Richard Haas has questioned). He reasons that the US must fight in Afghanistan; if it does not then Afghanistan will fall to the Taliban (probably true), and if it falls to Taliban then al-Qaeda will have a safe haven (maybe) and nuclear-armed Pakistan will be in grave danger (I'm not so sure).

Of all the bold broad strokes that he paints, this is the one that I'm most intrigued by and most unsure of. In all that I've read about Afghanistan, I still don't fully understand how the conflict in Afghanistan affects Pakistan. I know that much of the fighting in Afghanistan is along its mountainous border with Pakistan. But the Taliban is not a monolith, as Brooks suggests when he writes that "the Taliban is a transnational Pashtun movement active in both Afghanistan and Pakistan." As Christia and Semple argue in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs, the Taliban is more of a patchwork of self-interested and pragmatic tribal groups that first and foremost look out for their own political survival. They may fight in two nations, but they are not a movement as Brooks argues. And I don't understand the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda either. I know the two share similar visions of a shar'ia rule South Asia. But how much do they work together, and how willing would Taliban factions be to fight against al-Qaeda?

Figuring out these questions affects where I stand on whether this a war of choice or a war of necessity. These two questions seem integral to the debate over a US troop increase. Brooks makes a strong argument about how the war must be fought, it's arguing if the war must be fought (and if not, what viable alternatives exist) that is lacking.