With the Trump Administration set to take office next month, The Cipher Brief spoke with Robert Grenier, former CIA Chief of Station in Pakistan and Afghanistan and author of the book, “88 Days to Kandahar,” to discuss ways for the U.S. to move forward in its efforts to stabilize Afghanistan.
The Cipher Brief: What are some of the main challenges the next U.S. administration will face in Afghanistan?
Robert Grenier: I want to resist making judgments about where the Trump Administration is likely to go, but some of my answer is influenced by what we heard during the election and who might be in senior policy making positions in the administration.
One of the great challenges for us in Afghanistan going forward is patience. Afghanistan is not going to be fixed overnight, and we certainly are not going to expend the types of resources, both human and financial, that would be necessary to make a major short-term impact. Afghanistan, to some degree, is being left to fend for itself.
Our legitimate aspirations for whatever it is we do in Afghanistan have to be very limited, and it’s going to take a significant amount of patience for us to remain engaged there. That’s going to be a major challenge. The temptation of a great many people is to think, “Well look, we don’t want to have an open-ended, long-term engagement.” There is much skepticism about the efficacy of nation-building, and I happen to agree with that.
On the other hand, there is a tendency to think that we’ll need to take quick decisive action – go in, do what needs to be done, and then get out. Unfortunately, that is not an approach that is going to be effective in Afghanistan.
The challenge for us moving forward is going to be doing what is necessary in a sustainable way over the long-term – and that may be a very long-term – in order to nudge Afghanistan in the right direction.
TCB: What do you think the priorities need to be in the short-term for the incoming administration?
RG: In the short-term, our minimal objective is to make sure that the government in Kabul is not overrun by the Taliban. For some time under the Obama Administration, we haven’t been so much seeking victory – however we want to define that in Afghanistan – as much as we’ve been avoiding defeat.
Our minimal objective is to ensure that the Kabul government isn’t defeated by the Taliban, and that the Kabul government is able to maintain control over parts of the country where it has an advantage over the Taliban. Those areas are primarily the non-Pashtun areas in the north and the west, as well as the major urban areas, including Kandahar, in the south. We have to make sure that the government is able to maintain control over the areas where it has a competitive advantage over the Taliban and make sure that they are not overrun. We should aspire to objectives that are a little more aggressive than that, but in the short-term, that is really where we need to be focused.
TCB: What will the U.S. role be in terms of military support in Afghanistan? Are current U.S. troop levels sufficient?
RG: I think the number of U.S. troops does need to be increased but only modestly. Currently, our main engagement is so-called “advise and equip.” We are trying to stay engaged with the Afghan Security Forces by training and equipping them. Although we have also remained engaged through combat support to a certain degree, that’s probably going to need to be increased modestly.
The additional part of our engagement in Afghanistan, which we have significantly backed away from since the major withdrawal of U.S. forces, is to reengage with tribal and other anti-Taliban leaders who have the standing and specific gravity in their respective areas that will enable them to resist the Taliban. I’m thinking in the context of what we used to refer to as the Afghan Local Police (ALP). Those were essentially local militias that U.S. Special Forces were involved in equipping and influencing so that they could resist the Taliban on a local level.
One of the weaknesses in our approach with the ALP program in the past was that we were building up local militias that weren’t necessarily tied to local strongmen, because often times, those strongmen are problematic. We need to overcome our reluctance to engage with local strongmen, who may not meet all of our criteria for wise and honest leadership, but who do have the benefit of being motivated to resist the Taliban. Where possible, we should support them.
My overall advice should be understood within the context of the relatively small and sustainable efforts currently underway. Maybe increase troop levels to 20,000 troops and certainly no more than 30,000, but it’s the people on the ground who would have to determine what our force posture would have to look like.
The two aspects of what I would recommend that we do in Afghanistan are: first, training, advising, and equipping the Afghan Security Forces so that they can hold sway in the areas where they have a comparative advantage over the Taliban. And second, in those areas where the Taliban holds sway, we should also be helping insurgents who want to resist the local control of the Taliban so that over time, the Taliban will realize that they really can’t win the battle militarily, and that they will focus much more seriously on trying to develop some sort of a viable modus vivendi with the Kabul government that will hopefully bring the civil war to an end.
TCB: How can the next U.S. administration put pressure on Pakistan to push the Taliban toward partaking in negotiations with the Afghan government?
RG: That is exactly what I would advise against doing. The traditional U.S. approach, going back many decades with Pakistan, is to try to get them to do things that they have not been willing to do through tactics such as sanctions. If we’ve learned anything about Pakistan over many years now, it’s that we really can’t get them to do things that they don’t see as being in their national interest.
We’ve tended to lurch in our relations with Pakistan from one extreme to the other. During periods when we depend on them as a frontline state, most notably during the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s and then again immediately after 2001, we provided them with a tremendous amount of support so that they would have the capability to do what we and they agreed they should do, while also at the same time encouraging them to do those additional things that they are disinclined to do. Those are the positive periods in our relationship, and those are interspersed with periods where we don’t have a compelling need for Pakistan and where we, by sanctioning them, try to force them to change policy in important areas so that they will support our agenda.
During the positive periods, the Pakistanis have only been willing to cooperate with us in areas they saw as being in their national interest, and they have resisted going beyond that. There is a classic example in what we’ve seen since 2001. The Pakistanis saw it in their interest to cooperate with us against al Qaeda. They were certainly willing to fight against militants who pose a direct challenge to them. But they were not willing to take aggressive action against the Afghan Taliban or against militant organizations that they did not see as a direct threat to themselves. They were not willing to take on the risks associated with opposing those groups that primarily posed a threat to the Afghan government and U.S. forces. I just don’t think that is going to change.
Now, with our posture in Afghanistan being so much smaller than it was and with our force protection concerns being much reduced, we are poised once again to revert to a policy with Pakistan where we will begin to sanction them. They’ve been a frontline state since 2001 up until the present, and now that we need them so much less and we have so few illusions remaining about what they are going to do concerning the Afghan Taliban, we are going to revert once again to a negative relationship, where we are essentially trying to sanction them into changing their policy.
That has not worked in the past, and it will not work in the future. We need to put our relationship with Pakistan on a very different basis.
TCB: Do you see any change with Pakistan’s new army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa who replaced General Raheel Sharif?
RG: No, I don’t think so. General Raheel has been pretty aggressive in tackling militancy in Pakistan, although he has reflected a selectiveness in dealing with militancy that the U.S. does not approve of. We want him to attack militants across the board. He and the Pakistani government have been pretty selective in terms of which militants they will go after. But within that context, he has been far more aggressive than his predecessor, General Ashfaq Kayani. To that extent, we should look upon his tenure as being a very positive one.
I don’t know whether General Bajwa is going to be quite as aggressive as General Raheel, but I hope that he will. He is reputed to be more supportive of strong civilian leadership than is typical of senior Pakistani military officers. I would expect that General Bajwa would continue in the footsteps of General Raheel.
TCB: Are U.S. expectations for Pakistan too high?
RG: I’ve been talking about what we shouldn’t do in Pakistan and that is to try to get them to do things that they manifestly will not do. During the surge in Afghanistan, we had 100,000 U.S. troops, another 40,000 from NATO, and we weren’t able, at least in the time we gave to the effort, to defeat the Taliban. There seems to be an expectation in some quarters in the United States that the Pakistanis should take aggressive action against the Afghan Taliban to do what we couldn’t. That’s completely unrealistic. The Pakistanis are not going to take those risks.
The risk that they are running and that they have been concerned about all along is that militants wear various stripes, whether it’s the Afghan Taliban, whether it’s ISIS, whether it’s Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) – the Pakistani Taliban that the Pakistanis have been fighting aggressively against – and if Pakistan is not careful, all of those would unite against Pakistan. That is what they want to avoid. That’s why they’ve been so cautious in dealing with the Afghan Taliban and with other militants that don’t pose a direct threat to them.
That simply is not going to change. It’s a great point of frustration, particularly when we are talking about militants who are of great concern to us, such as the Haqqani network. We tend to think that you are either for us or against us – you’re either against militancy or you’re not. The Pakistanis are far more calibrated in their approach to these different militant groups than we would like. I just don’t think that is going to change. It is something that we need to accept, and as a result, we are probably not going to provide them with military support on the levels that we have provided in the past. It’s likely that we are going to continue to have a very transactional relationship with Pakistan, where we would support them in pursuing policies that we see as being to our mutual advantage and not providing them with support in the expectation that they are going to do things that they are simply not going to do.
More broadly, we need to remain used to the fact that Pakistan is engaged in a long struggle with militancy within its own borders. That’s a struggle in which we have a national interest in seeing them succeed. We should remain engaged with the Pakistanis. There is going to be a lot of contentiousness in that relationship inevitably, but we should provide them, in addition to military support in those areas where we see them acting in a manner that supports our national interest, with economic assistance, targeted in those areas that we think will help them to prevail against militants at home.
There are two areas that leap out. One is in helping them to continue to pacify the tribal areas. We should be engaged with them in helping them to do that. More broadly, helping them in areas such as education. If there is any one thing that is critically important to the future of Pakistan, it’s dealing with the education of their young people. We are very concerned about the influence of madrassas in radicalizing the youth of Pakistan. I think that’s true, and therefore we need to provide them with as much support as we can in providing secular educational alternatives to madrassa education. Absent that alternative, the Pakistanis dare not dismantle madrassa education, because among other things, that’s one of the ways in which parents are able to feed their children, by sending them to madrassas.
TCB: What can the U.S. do to help further a civil society in Afghanistan?
RG: My view, and it’s one that is shared by many other observers, is that Afghanistan unwisely adopted a highly centralized system of governance, which has fostered corruption in Kabul and has discouraged others from taking local initiatives to oppose the Taliban. There should be a push to change the Afghan Constitution to provide for greater devolution of power to the provinces and the districts.
I’m not aware that there is really an impetus for that within the Afghan government itself, so us wanting to see that and being able to influence them in that direction are two very different things. I’m not sure that there is a whole lot that we can do to improve governance in Afghanistan given the orientation of its current government and given the need to placate a lot of different power centers in the country. But to the extent that we can at the margins, we should push them towards a greater devolution of power. Our engagement with local forces, local tribal leaders, and others who have influence at the district and provincial levels could help to nudge Afghanistan in that direction. But again, absent support from the Kabul government, that’s going to be difficult for us to do.
