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THE CONSERVATIVE REVIEW - May 7, 2010

Hostage to a Timetable
by George Will

MacDILL AIR FORCE BASE, Fla. - The ticking clock does not
disturb the preternatural serenity that Gen. David Petraeus
maintains regarding Afghanistan. Officially, the U.S.
Central Command is located here; actually, it is wherever
he is, which is never in one place for very long. He is
away about 300 days a year, flying to and around his vast
area of responsibility, which extends from Egypt to where
his towering reputation is hostage to a timetable --
Afghanistan.

He earned his own chapter in American military history by
advocating and presiding over the surge that broke the back
of the Iraq insurgency. This was an instance of a military
intellectual given full opportunity for the unity of theory
and practice.

Today, however, only about half of the surge of 30,000
troops for Afghanistan, announced by the president in his
speech at West Point five months ago, have arrived. The
rest will be there by the end of August. Eleven months
after that, the withdrawal the president promised -- in
the sentence following the one that announced the increase
-- is supposed to begin.

But Petraeus cautions that the president's words, properly
parsed, allow ample time to achieve U.S. objectives. The
president said on Dec. 1 that the "transition of our forces
out of Afghanistan" must be "responsible," which means
"taking into account conditions on the ground" and allow-
ing for improved "Afghan capacity."

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Petraeus, who likes fine distinctions, speaks of "thinning
out" rather than "handing off" U.S. involvement, which is
"what we're still doing in Iraq." This will take time
because counterinsurgency in an underdeveloped society is,
inescapably, nation-building. Which brings us back to the
ticktock of the clock.

Petraeus believes that, "valley by valley and village by
village," skillful policy "can break up the Taliban," much
as Sunnis were peeled off the Iraq insurgency. But the
recent withdrawal of U.S. forces from the Korengal Valley
was evidence of a changing mission: Rather than contest
every valley and village, Petraeus wants to concentrate on
protecting population centers where more than 70 percent
of Afghans live.

That, however, might mean ceding to the Taliban control of
as much territory as it held when Osama bin Laden arrived
in 1996 to begin plotting the operation that came to
fruition five years later. Furthermore, because the Taliban
is not a transnational terrorist organization, the reason
America has identified defeating or taming the Taliban as
a "vital national interest" pertains to territory: Other-
wise al-Qaeda could again have space to train and plot
under Taliban protection, or indifference.

Petraeus speaks less about decisively defeating the Taliban
militarily than of the "reintegration" of lower-level
Taliban into society and "reconciliation" of the higher
level. This might seem like a piece of cake if you were,
as he was, involved in the darkest days in Iraq. In
December 2006, at the height of Iraq's sectarian violence,
an average of 53 bodies -- often decapitated and lacerated
by torture -- were found on Baghdad streets every 24 hours.
Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, is, he says, tranquil, other
than the occasional car bombs, which are not strategically
significant.

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Petraeus, who has a flair for understatement, says
Afghanistan "is a bit of a kaleidoscope of different
groups." That complicates counterinsurgency, concerning
which he wrote the book -- the 472-page U.S. Army/Marine
Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual. The three prongs
of counterinsurgency -- "clear, hold and build" -- involve
three entangled problems.

First, is an area "cleared" only because the Taliban have
cleared out, knowing they can wait out the enemy and then
return? The Americans are going home; the Taliban are
home. Second, what can be held by a counterinsurgency
force focused on an exit strategy? Third, can anything
lasting be built when what has been only tenuously cleared
is only conditionally held?

The answer to those questions must involve defusing an
insurgency by means of a political settlement, after
the insurgency has been weakened by the application of
violence, and sapping its ardor with new institutions
and economic infrastructure. Again, nation-building.

What Petraeus calls "a whole of government approach" does
not promise a tidy ending of "take the hill, plant the
flag, go home for a victory parade." Turning off an
insurgency is "never a light switch, it's more of a
rheostat." He recounts a story: An Afghan waits 99 years
for vengeance, then regrets his impatience. This parable
gives a serrated edge to a familiar Afghan aphorism regard-
ing outsiders -- "You have the watches, we have the time."
Tick, tick, tick.

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