When the administration announced the deployment of 17,000 troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, they also announced that a strategy review will be taking place between now and the NATO summit from April 3-4.

I oppose escalation in Afghanistan. But if troop deployments are certain and a strategy review is underway, then the debate changes. At the moment, the most pressing question is how the administration will define its strategy.

Many people have told me publicly and privately that it’s wrong to criticize the strategy before we know what it is. That’s unfair. As Jim Hightower says,

The president’s advisors are giving him the only answer ever offered by the war machine: more. They intend to double the number of soldiers in what now will become Obama’s war. Why? As one advice-giver put it: What we need are more troops in Afghanistan because we need security, and eventually we will get a strategy.”

Eventually??? That pretty well defines “bassackwards,” doesn’t it?

Moreover, some changes in the administration’s rhetoric indicate that progressive pressure has effectively counterbalanced conservative pressure in shaping the strategy so far.

But at the same time, critics of escalation should spell out what we want to see in a strategy. Here’s my wish list:

1) Define the Mission.

I want the administration to precisely define our mission in Afghanistan, and to choose counterterrorism over nation-building. Why? Because nation-building will keep us in Afghanistan for years, and it will likely fail.

Right now, we’re torn between the two kinds of mission. Until we know what we’re doing, we can’t know how long we’ll be there or what we need to complete the mission.

Some commanders favor nation-building, and have talked about a “sustained,” even generational, commitment to building a functioning democracy in Afghanistan.

But Obama and Gates are starting to sound like they favor a more limited approach.

As the Obama administration conducts a policy review to clarify U.S. goals in Afghanistan, Robert Gates offered a few clues about where that process is heading in his first television interview on Sunday as President Obama’s Defense secretary.

The key is to provide “a level of stability in Afghanistan that at least prevents it from being a safe haven from which plots against the United States and the Europeans and others can be put together,” Gates told NBC’s David Gregory on “Meet the Press.” Mr. Obama said much the same thing to PBS’s Jim Lehrer this past week: “I can articulate some very clear, minimal goals in Afghanistan, and that is that we make sure that it’s not a safe have for Al Qaeda, they are not able to launch attacks of the sort that happened on 9/11 against the American homeland or American interests.”

Achieving those ends, the president said, requires “the entire arsenal of American power. We’ve been thinking very militarily, but we haven’t been as effective in thinking diplomatically, we haven’t been thinking effectively around the development side of the equation.”

Confining the mission to counterterrorism is a good first step toward getting out. Afghanistan is not Germany, and we cannot conduct nation-building through force. We can provide development aid, but we don’t need to stay in South Asia for twenty years to help the Afghan people.

Once we define the mission as counterterrorism, then we have to ask how we’ll know when we’re finished in Afghanistan. That brings me to my second point.

2) Differentiate between Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency.

I would like to see the administration move away from the rhetoric of counterinsurgency.

If counterterrorism means preventing attacks on the United States, and counterinsurgency means “helping improve the capacity of the indigenous government and indigenous security forces,” then counterterrorism, rather than counterinsurgency, should be our priority.

Counterinsurgency often becomes a corollary to nation-building, the mission we can least afford to pursue in Afghanistan. Moreover, counterinsurgency, as practiced so far in Afghanistan, has gone hand in hand with high civilian casualties. As Derrick Crowe points out, counterinsurgency doctrines have resurrected the Vietnam-era practice of “body counts.” And even though the counterinsurgency experts have promised that troop increases will reduce airstrikes and therefore reduce civilian casualties, trends so far tell us that’s not the case. If counterinsurgency means continued civilian deaths, that only continues the cycle of violence we’ve seen since early 2007, which included a 40% increase in civilian casualties from 2007 to 2008.

Moreover, a counterinsurgency strategy that relies on bolstering Afghan security forces will trap us in South Asia for years. Drug use and corruption are rampant among Afghan police and security forces.

Counterterrorism, on the other hand, does not automatically mean an open-ended military commitment. If our goal is simply to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States, we have another course available to us.

3) Move from Military Solutions to Diplomatic/Containment Solutions.

I would like to see the administration acknowledge that a decisive military victory over the Taliban is unlikely. Instead of pursuing counterinsurgency practices adapted from Iraq or elsewhere, I would like them to say that they will use diplomatic techniques and smart power to contain and eliminate terrorist threats in Afghanistan, while helping Afghans solve their problems diplomatically.

If our primary mission in Afghanistan is counterterrorism, we are failing to address the root causes of terrorism. In fact, civilian casualties, the perception of foreign forces as occupiers, and distrust of America because of our role in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Iraq, and other geopolitical crises are fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan. We have killed thousands of “militants,” “terrorists,” and “insurgents” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, yet we have not killed Osama bin Laden or prevented terrorist attacks in Pakistan, India, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, England, and Spain. We cannot defuse the terrorist threat in South Asia, or across the world, through an extended occupation of Afghanistan. Nor can we do so by violating Pakistani sovereignty and inflaming anti-Americanism through repeated missile strikes inside Pakistani territory.

We can, however, work with regional partners and international allies to contain and eliminate terrorist threats. I applaud initial steps at diplomatic outreach, but I’m concerned they’re just for show. I want to hear that Iran will be deeply involved in conversations about Afghanistan’s future. I want to see the appointment of a special, high-level envoy to deal with the crisis in Kashmir and keep India and Pakistan from each other’s throats so that they too can contribute to solving the problem in Afghanistan in a positive way. I want to see that European leaders’ perspectives are heard and taken seriously.

If we reach out to the global community, we can do several things:

- Contain whatever government comes to power in Afghanistan after American withdrawal through economic sanctions and, if absolutely necessary, the use of airpower.

- Coordinate on effective police work to bust up terrorist networks and prevent attacks before they happen.

- Solve the long-standing crises in Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and Kashmir that fuel terrorist recruitment.

Our international diplomatic efforts, moreover, can help create a space for Afghans to solve their problems. Indeed, with talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban already underway, some Afghan leaders are explicitly asking for US support in order to give the talks more formality and weight.

Once we have a solid diplomatic framework for dealing with the question of Afghanistan’s post-NATO future, along with a framework for counterterrorism even after we leave Afghanistan, we can move to the crucial question of how to get out of Afghanistan.

4) Spell Out an Exit Strategy.

The President intends to develop a clear exit strategy for Afghanistan, and I’m excited to hear the plan. I hope it will include either a timeline or a precisely defined diplomatic goal.

If it’s the latter, I’d recommend making the goal getting through the presidential elections now scheduled for August 20th, and then encouraging whoever wins to negotiate a settlement with as many local factions as possible. Negotiations, whether the US participates or not, will help distinguish between the hardline elements of the Taliban and groups that might be willing to work with an elected government. In a helpful signal, the President recently indicated some willingness to pursue this course.

Even if negotiations fail, I think the US should still execute a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan. As I’ve reasoned above, if counterterrorism is our central concern, a long-term occupation of Afghanistan does not necessarily help us conduct that mission. We can, in fact, use the time we take to withdraw from South Asia to cultivate the strong diplomatic ties that will let us reduce terrorism’s root causes, while at the same time cultivating stronger police networks that will let us locate and crush terrorist cells.

********************

We are at a dangerous and complex cross-roads in Afghanistan. Experts and opinion-leaders from Andrew Bacevich to Bob Herbert have persuasively questioned the logic of escalation. If the administration is to pursue a limited escalation, they must prevent escalation from taking on a logic of its own. That means defining a strategy that gets us out of Afghanistan in a safe but speedy manner. The components I’ve laid out here - counterterrorism instead of nation-building, separating counterterrorism from counterinsurgency, favoring diplomatic over military solutions, and specifying an exit strategy - represent my ideal strategy, one that will allow us to keep the US secure but not get bogged down in a bloody, costly, and unnecessary quagmire.

[UPDATE 2:45pm]: Ilan Goldenberg, Policy Director at NSN, responds to the point about body counts:

I think your point about counterinsurgency and body counts is a little unfair.  Counterinsurgency experts hate body count metrics.  They think it’s a terrible way of measuring things and they specifically oppose it.  So, if there are problems in Afghanistan with commanders using body counts, those commanders don’t know what a counterinsurgency strategy is.  On the other hand, it’s fair to argue that counterinsurgency campaigns will inevitably include commanders who don’t understand counterinsurgency and that as a result you’ll have high civilian casualties.  So, you could argue that it’s inevitable and you shouldn’t do it.  Not sure I agree with that argument, but I think it’s fairer than saying that counterinsurgency = body counts.

Ilan makes a good argument. I think it depends, in this discussion as always, on whose counterinsurgency strategy we’re talking about. If we go back to the Guardian article that touched off the body counts discussion, it cites a RAND report on problems with counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, and the report complains about the use of body counts by commanders. Whether those commanders see themselves as practicing a generalized form of counterinsurgency, their own brand, or something Petraeus-inspired, or whether the Guardian and/or RAND are misusing the term “counterinsurgency,” is up for debate. In any case, the current strategy is causing problems and using counterproductive metrics, and needs to be changed and defined.

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