Panelists Discuss Fragile Afghanistan

Is Afghanistan lost?

Four panelists—a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, a senior military analyst, a former Pakistani ambassador to the U.S., and a professor from New York University—considered this question yesterday as they debated the nation’s state seven years after the U.S.-led invasion. And while they may not have agreed on everything, they did agree on one thing: Afghanistan’s prognosis is not good.

Steven Coll, Mark Garlasco, Maleeha Lodhi, and Barnett R. Rubin addressed a packed auditorium yesterday afternoon in a panel discussion moderated by Harvard Kennedy School professor Samantha Power.

“It is literally true that the U.S. government does not have a joint-operating plan in Afghanistan,” said Cull, who heads the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public policy think tank. He went on to state that the Obama administration will work to fashion one.

“Presumably better to have a joint strategy than to have none at all,” he said.

Rubin, the director of studies at the Center on International Cooperation at NYU, echoed this sentiment.

“The war is going almost on auto-pilot,” said Rubin, who returned from Afghanistan Nov. 26.

He also said that the U.S. government has effectively created and continues to support a shadow state in Afghanistan by hiring private security guards, who are employed and controlled by war lords.

“There are a lot of places where you can drive by in your tank in the middle of the day without getting shot at, but the people that you are driving by are more afraid of the Taliban than they are of you,” he said.

Galasco, a senior military analyst for the Human Rights Watch, said he was optimistic that civilian casualties in Afghanistan might decrease due to the ban on cluster munitions, which Afghanistan signed despite protests from the U.S.

While the focus of the talk was Afghanistan, much was said about Pakistan and its relationship with the U.S. Lodhi, who has not only served as an ambassador to the U.S. but also the high commissioner from Pakistan to Great Britain, characterized the relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. as precarious and facing “increasing hostility.”

“A trust deficit has emerged between the two nations,” she said.

She said the U.S. must stop treating Pakistan “as hired help” rather than an ally. Rubin also called for an increased focus on Pakistan.

“The war on terror should focus on where terrorists are recruited, trained, and armed, and that is Pakistan,” he said.

Lodhi, however, said she took issue with the phrase “war on terror.”

“There needs to be a change in rhetoric,” she said. “‘War on terror’ was a very unfortunate metaphor that must be dropped.”

Lodhi said that the phrase has led to the popular perception in the Middle East that the U.S. is fighting a war on Islam.

She called for a strategy that was “mutually reinforcing” of the stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“A strategy for the stabilization of Afghanistan cannot lead to the destabilization of Pakistan,” she said.