Going after al Qaeda does not require Washington to pacify the entire country or sustain a heavy-booted military presence in the region. After all, Central Asia holds no intrinsic strategic value to the United States, and America’s security will not be endangered if an oppressive regime takes over a contiguous fraction of Afghan territory.

Ideally, the United States should have already reduced its visibility in the region. Denying a sanctuary to terrorists that seek to attack the United States can be done through aerial surveillance, retaining covert operatives for discrete operations against specific targets, and ongoing intelligence-sharing with the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

America’s objective has been to eradicate the parties responsible for the atrocities committed on September 11th. The United States should not go beyond that objective by combating a regional insurgency or drifting into an open-ended occupation.

Since the raid by the Pakistani government on the Red Mosque (Lal Masjid) in Islamabad in July 2007, a wave of revenge attacks against the army and the government has been launched by loose networks of suicide bombers. It’s possible, depending on the culprit, that the recent attack in Peshawar might have been retribution for the Pakistan army’s month-long offensive against extremists in the country’s northwest districts.

While the United States hopes to eliminate the threat from extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan, increased U.S.-NATO efforts to stabilize Afghanistan destabilize Pakistan. America’s presence in the region feeds Pakistan’s insurgency. If America’s interests lie in stabilizing Pakistan, and ensuring that the virus of anti-American radicalism does not infect the rest of the country, the fundamental objective should be to get out of Afghanistan in a reasonable time frame.

But the strategic rift between Islamabad and Washington persists. Pakistan's military and intelligence establishments still believe their country faces a greater threat from India than from the low-intensity guerilla insurgency its army is ill-equipped and poorly trained to fight.

Policymakers in Washington can do their best to assuage Pakistani fears of an Indian attack. But until hawkish elements in Pakistan's government and military establishments come to that conclusion themselves, the United States and NATO will not have Pakistan's full cooperation.

Ultimately, Pakistan's own civilian leaders and defense planners must determine for themselves if insurgents or India poses a greater threat. The U.S. cannot decide that for Pakistan.

But the risks that the Taliban will retake power, and further allow al Qaeda to openly resume operations there, have been grossly overstated. We can continue to disrupt terrorist havens and beef up the Afghan army without an enormous military presence on the ground. Accordingly, we should be looking for ways to extricate ourselves militarily from Afghanistan, not excuses to dig a deeper hole.

This does not mean "walking away" from the Afghans. We need willing and able partners in Afghanistan. Therefore, we should consistently communicate to the Afghan people that we will support them in their efforts to ensure their country never again becomes a haven for terrorists, and to include financial assistance to enable them to expand their army and root out corruption in their police force and government. But this assistance should be tied to benchmarks so our short-term "capacity building" work doesn't lead to long-term dependency. Committing ourselves to an open-ended mission that does this fighting for the Afghans will significantly, and perhaps irreparably, impede their progress toward self-sufficiency.

In addition, spending money on elaborate aid projects only to see them destroyed because we can't maintain security around them 24/7 is an enormous waste. As a rule of thumb, providing security would require a lot of troops: 20 troops per 1000 indigenous residents. That is more than 600,000 troops. We cannot provide that level of security in a country as vast as Afghanistan.

But it's important to keep in mind that when we went into Afghanistan in October 2001--after which we seriously degraded al Qaeda's ability to pull off another 9/11 and removed the Taliban from power--we did so within the span of a few months and with a military force that played a relatively small role. In fact, much of the fighting on the ground was done by the Northern Alliance, the Taliban's sworn enemies inside of Afghanistan, with some guidance from a few hundred U.S. personnel, many of whom did not wear a uniform.

Since that time, we have continued to chase al Qaeda, but many of these operations now take place in Pakistan where we deliberately do not have (and should not have) a large and obvious military footprint. Most of the greatest successes scored against al Qaeda since 9/11 - including the snatch-and-grab operations that netted Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, or the missile strikes that killed Mohammed Atef and Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi -- have not relied on large numbers of U.S. troops. Meanwhile, our attempt to create, "some sort of central Asian Valhalla over there," in Robert Gates' memorable phrase, will surely fail.

America's embrace and subsequent abandonment of Pakistan and Afghanistan in the 1980s left an environment ripe for the rise of the Taliban, which provided aid and comfort to the al Qaeda organization responsible for terror attacks on the United States in 2001.

Understanding the legacy of the Soviet-Afghan War, and how its aftermath strained relations between Washington and Islamabad, can shed light of ways to move forward in Afghanistan today, and extricate U.S. troops from this volatile part of the world.]]> Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.cato.org/weekly/index.php?vid_id=101 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10061 Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10061 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10054 Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EDT http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10054 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10007 Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=10007 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9916 Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9916 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9910 Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9910 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9908 Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9908 http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9896 Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9896 http://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/podcast-archive.php?podcast_id=814 Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST http://www.cato.org/dailypodcast/podcast-archive.php?podcast_id=814