Choices in Afghanistan

As the Obama administration conducted its promised reassessment of the situation in Afghanistan, it faced three basic options for moving forward to deal with this intractable problem. The overall US strategic interest, as Obama has indicated on several occasions, is to prevent organizations with global reach, such as al Qaeda, from using Afghanistan as a base from which to attack US interests around the world.
One option is to scale back ambitions and restrict activities to those that would insure that Afghanistan is not used as an al Qaeda sanctuary. A second option is to mount a large scale counter insurgency effort utilizing large numbers of US/NATO troops to defeat the Taliban, create a large economic development effort and install a friendly government. The third option is to boost US commitment to train Afghan police and security forces to allow them to assume the primary role in the conflict.
Each of these options has risks, advantages and problems. In today’s announcement regarding the way forward in Afghanistan, the Obama administration appears to have signed up for the third option.
The first option would have required admitting defeat and conducting a long term campaign of military attacks and covert actions which would undermine and destabilize the Afghan government. It appears that this endless conflict was not palatable politically.
The second option would have required a large commitment of US/NATO combat forces for a long period of time. The administration would have faced escalating US casualties. Also, providing logistical support to a large combat force would also have been a daunting task. The Taliban has shown an increasing capability to interdict the current supply route through Pakistan and the Khyber Pass. The present alternate overland route through Russia and Central Asia is difficult and limited to “non-lethal” material. The best alternative for a massive logistical effort utilizes the Iranian port of Chabaher on the Gulf of Oman and the existing Indian/Iranian constructed highway into Afghanistan. For this overt cooperation with the US, Iran surely would have extracted major concessions on other issues that would have been politically difficult for the US.
The third option, while eliminating the downsides of the other two, has its own issues. Standing up the Afghan security forces will be difficult, time consuming and expensive. While many of the insurgents and their supporters, both within and outside of the security forces, are not ideological supporters of the Taliban, they do fear Taliban retribution and support them for economic reasons (They pay better.). Countering this will require establishing security, destroying the drug trade (the major source of Taliban funding), eliminating Taliban bases in Pakistan and co-opting low and middle level Taliban. Ongoing attacks inside Pakistan to eliminate bases, with the resulting civilian casualties, run the risk of destabilizing nuclear armed Pakistan.
What ever the option, the road out of this mess will be long and hard.