George Friedman at Stratfor on Obama’s plans for Afghanistan and the parallels with Vietnam. He notes that US/ARVN forces were never defeated by the NVA, but that the NVA won because of their superior intelligence thanks to widespread penetration of ARVN forces by communist sympathizers. He says (and I think he’s correct) that Afghan forces are similarly riddled with Taliban sympathizers, making it impossible for us to win without marshaling similar penetration of the Taliban with intelligence assets.
The problem with this is, the Afghans are already compromised and lack the expertise, while the US doesn’t have the personnel to place intelligence assets with the Taliban. Both of these are also probably true.
His suggestion to fill this gap is to use the Pakistani ISI (the Pakistani equivalent of the CIA or KGB), or at least elements therein. If that is indeed our best hope in Afghanistan, we are totally screwed. He mentions that Taliban has worked closely with the ISI and are already compromised, but that doesn’t go nearly far enough. My understanding is that the Taliban were essentially created by the ISI, or at least Jihadist elements in it, with more than a little help from Saudi money. The degree to which Islamists have been purged from the ISI is open to debate (my gut feeling is very little). They’re not so much a subordinate part of the government as a power player within it, with their own goals and agendas, in an country that not only suffers from ethnic divisions, but is largely an artificial conglomerate created by the post-Independence partition of India in 1947. There’s no reason to believe that Pakistan is any more unified than, say, Yugoslavia or the Soviet Union was in 1990.
My guess is that the United States would be better off creating our own Afghan intelligence service from the ground up, possibly starting with old elements of Ahmad Shah Massoud’s Northern Alliance, assuming elements of such could be scrounged up, and the Tajik/Pushtan divide bridged.
It was almost certainly a mistake for Obama to pre-announce when US troops would start withdrawing. But there are no good choices or easy victories to be had here.
(Just for the record, I had an article called “The Way to Afghan Peace” published in The World & I way back in 1992, so I actually have a long-running interest in the region. But the players, positions, and motivations of what actually goes on there are frequently murky not only to me, but even to far more experienced experts.)