One U.S-Afghan Security Pact, Two Very Different Missions

Mechanics from the 1st Stryker Brigade combat team train to recover vehicles from the Kandahar mud. Photo: DVIDSHUB

The U.S. has finally completed an agreement pledging to protect Afghanistan for another decade, even after the vast majority of troops withdraw. (We hate to say we told you so.) But don't misunderstand. This deal isn't really about Afghanistan at all.

Or, to be more precise, it's about way more than Afghanistan. It's primarily about Pakistan ' and the shadow war that the U.S.-Afghan accord will allow Washington to continue waging there.

Details of the pact have yet to be released. But over the past year, top generals and Pentagon officials have sketched ' in congressional testimony, interviews and forum discussions ' an outline of how the U.S. will operate after the accord takes effect, following the departure of most U.S. troops in 2014. U.S. and Afghan troops will live together on joint bases formally operated by the Afghans. The U.S. mission for training Afghan soldiers and police will continue until 2017 or so, although for financial reasons, the size of those Afghan troops under U.S. mentorship will shrink after 2014. Starting immediately, Afghans will have significant if incomplete influence over U.S. commando raids.

But these mentorship missions will not be the most important ones the U.S. executes in Afghanistan after 2014. They're merely the visible ones. And they're the cost of getting to the missions the U.S. considers most important.

To be blunt: Afghanistan is valuable to the United States because it's the most logical place from which to conduct a war in Pakistan that's primarily fought by armed drones and occasionally special operations forces. It's not really valuable in and of itself. The U.S. interests in Afghanistan, as defined by the Obama administration, are to keep Afghanistan from internal collapse so al-Qaida doesn't return. President Hamid Karzai's government is corrupt? Yawn. Dealing with that is an expensive diversion from the core issue.

The core issue, as the Obama team sees it, is that there's a residual al-Qaida presence next door, in the Pakistani tribal areas. Because Pakistan won't let U.S. troops overtly operate on its territory, the U.S. basically needs to rent some nearby property. Afghanistan doesn't have much to offer the rest of the world ' minerals, maybe? ' but it has a lot of land abutting Pakistan.

Rumors have circulated for months in defense circles that the U.S. wants to retain a few bases that can serve as a staging ground for drone warfare and overhead surveillance of suspected terrorist activity in those Pakistani tribal areas. They include Bagram airfield, a huge aerial hub near Kabul; the airfields at Kandahar in the south and Jalalabad in the east, places where armed drones heading for Pakistan already take off; and perhaps a brigade-sized base called Salerno in Khost Province, just barely west of the Pakistan border and Mazar-e-Sharif, a transit and resupply hub in the north.

To be clear, the U.S. military has not formally confirmed the desire to retain access to any of those bases. That'll be the subject of follow-on negotiations with the Afghans, which will flesh out the accord reached on Sunday. 'We simply aren't there yet in terms of our thinking,' Navy Capt. John Kirby, a top Pentagon spokesman, recently told Danger Room.

None of this is to suggest the residual U.S. troop presence will simply munch down KBR-provided meals and pump iron at the on-base gyms if it looks like Afghanistan implodes after 2014. Its mentorship of Afghan troops, and continued presence, will allow Washington an emergency option should security descend into pure chaos. Additionally, special operations raids to hunt key Taliban and Haqqani Network insurgents or disrupt any al-Qaida supply chains are sure to remain on the U.S. agenda. But Washington wants to use those options as little as possible as it winds down the war and looks toward Asia and the Pacific as the centerpiece of U.S. security.

Notice, however, that all this gives Karzai a lot of leverage. He'll be, in essence, a landlord for the U.S. military. And as long as the U.S. wants to wage its shadow war in Pakistan ' a war it does not seem interested in ending ' he can set his rent as high as he likes. According to the New York Times, he's thinking about an annual rate of $2.7 billion to bankroll the Afghan security forces alone.

If all of this seems convoluted, it's the result of a basic cloudiness that has hovered over the war for its entire 10-year existence. In Afghanistan, the U.S. does not fight the enemy, al-Qaida, that prompted the war in the first place. It concerns itself with the byproducts of that war: al-Qaida's erstwhile Taliban allies; a network of other local insurgent groups; corruption; the cultivation of Afghan security forces; and so on. The 2014 drawdown plan and this new U.S.-Afghan accord that follows it won't resolve this strategic murkiness. Washington merely hopes to recalibrate it, so that its troops focus more on Pakistan than Afghanistan.

But the U.S. has failed to emphasize the shadow war in Pakistan for the entirety of the Afghanistan War. And the longer it stays in Afghanistan, the deeper it gets sucked into addressing Afghanistan's own concerns, which do not necessarily have much to do with U.S. security interests. The U.S. hopes to buck that trend, but there's little evidence to date that it can. And if all this seems like a lingering morass rather than a clean break with a decade of conflict, that's how the U.S. 'ends' its wars in the 21st century.