States has spent absorbed in the war in Iraq to hone their skills on the battlefield and develop a more centralised command structure that has enabled them to hold large swaths of territory and launch complex and coordinated attacks against primarily Afghan and coalition targets.

South Asia is the initial foreign policy focal point of Barack Obama's presidency. From an intractable and war-torn Afghanistan to a deeply conflicted Pakistan to a self-enclosed India, this is not a region in which the United States is comfortable operating. Nevertheless, South Asia in many ways will determine the success or failure of Obama's foreign policy record.
The most critical test will take place in Afghanistan, where an already-raging jihadist insurgency — consisting of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, Al Qaeda and various other radical Islamist groups — is intensifying. These jihadist fighters have used the time that the United States has spent absorbed in the war in Iraq to hone their skills on the battlefield and develop a more centralised command structure that has enabled them to hold large swaths of territory and launch complex and coordinated attacks against primarily Afghan and coalition targets.

Senior U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan, who have been watching the security situation degrade by the day, have requested that Obama approve an initial counter-insurgency plan to pour more troops into Afghanistan. The idea would be to get more boots on the ground in and around Kabul, push back the Taliban and devote more resources to nation-building operations. But while this surge strategy seems to have worked in Iraq, it is fundamentally flawed when applied in a country as large, complex and insular as Afghanistan.

Landlocked by Iran, Central Asia and Pakistan, Afghanistan is destined to be poor and insulated. As a largely arid, resource-deficient no-man's-land, the country lacks strategic value in and of itself and historically has served as a thoroughfare for invaders descending from the Central Asian steppes in search of the Indian subcontinent. Afghanistan stands out among the world's countries in that it has no core region that defines itself as the Indus River Valley does for Pakistan or as the Zagros Mountains do for Iran. The region's central mountain knot keeps most of its various ethnicities perched on the edges of the knot where water is available, but there are no meaningful barriers that separate them from each other. The result is a hodgepodge of ethnic groups and tribes constantly competing for dominance, endlessly able to dislodge their neighbours and yet lacking the natural barriers that could give them real security in the long run. Any outsider, therefore, will find Afghanistan easy to conquer — as did the Russians in 1979 and the Americans in 2001 — but impossible to hold. Representing a battered mix of ethnicities, the Afghan people have been hardened by wars of their own making and those brought to them by outsiders. Territory changes hands often, and the people pledge their loyalties accordingly.

Afghanistan's geographic features essentially deny the United States a successful military strategy. When the U.S. fights wars in Eurasia, it already expects to deal with critical disadvantages, such as having its forces far outnumbered and having to maintain long and vulnerable supply lines. From almost its very beginning, the U.S. has conducted expeditionary military operations overseas; since World War II, it has come to rely on its global maritime dominance and technological edge to impose its influence far beyond U.S. coastlines. In the present case of Afghanistan, however, all the strengths that the U.S. typically brings to a military operation are more or less nullified. With no real power base, the U.S. is fighting a stateless entity in a landlocked country with a scattered population. Such a dynamic prevents the U.S. from utilising its naval prowess and complicates the use of advanced weapons systems, particularly when used against a guerrilla enemy dispersed throughout the countryside. The only way to fight in Afghanistan is to use brute force and significant numbers of boots on the ground in a war of occupation — precisely the sort of war that lies outside the U.S. comfort zone.

In other words, Afghanistan's geography in many ways denies the United States any good policy options. Afghanistan historically has been a country exceedingly difficult for an outside power to pacify. At the very best, the U.S. can hope for a loose and shifting confederation of Afghan tribes and ethnic groups to try and govern the country and prevent transnational jihadist forces from taking root again. But for that strategy to work, the U.S. would first need to devote an immense amount of time and resources to long-term counter-insurgency and nation-building in a region extremely resistant to the sort of stability required for nation-building. Without the 9/11 connection, Afghanistan would continue to sit very low on the totem pole of U.S. strategic interests.

Compounding matters is the situation next door in Pakistan. Pakistan has reached a point where it has become both a facilitator and a victim of the jihadist insurgency that has seeped across the Afghan border and broken Islamabad's writ over the country's northwestern region. The root of this contradiction is steeped in Pakistan's geopolitical dilemma.

The Pakistani core lies along the Indus River Valley in Punjab and Sindh provinces, where the agricultural heartland, political epicentre and military corps commands are dominated by the country's Punjabi majority. The relatively narrow width of the Indus River Valley core denies Pakistan any real strategic depth against external threats, making it a geopolitical imperative for Pakistan to incorporate the ethnically disparate borderlands to the Baloch-dominated west and Pashtun-dominated northwest as strategic buffers. The mountainous Pashtun corridor to the north is inhabited by conservative tribal peoples who have more in common with their Pashtun brethren across the Afghan border than with the Indic peoples of the Pakistani core. The only way for Pakistan to maintain territorial integrity is to maintain an overwhelmingly powerful military that can impose its writ on the Pakistani periphery.

The military has long used the Islamic religious identity of the majority of the country and the ideology of Islamism as a state tool to assimilate the northwest Pashtun and as a foreign policy tool to spread influence into Afghanistan (thereby extending the Pakistani buffer) and to contain India, its rival to the east, through the use of Islamist militant proxies. The strategy worked for decades until a jihadist movement took root among the Pashtuns and Islamabad's militant proxies broke free of Islamabad's grip.

The situation has now deteriorated to the point where even the Pakistanis are acknowledging their dilemma. They have little choice but to take action against rogue Islamists within both the military-intelligence apparatus and the insurgent camp in order to fend off external pressure and hold onto their northwestern buffer.

But Pakistan continues to search for a middle ground. Unwilling to see the domestic backlash that would result from cutting ties to its former militant proxies, Islamabad wants to reach an understanding with certain Islamist militants and sympathisers within the military and among the Pakistani Taliban and Kashmiri Islamists to halt attacks at least inside Pakistan. The Pakistanis are also pursuing a complex strategy to sow divisions within Pakistan's northwest tribal network in an attempt to corner tribes that harbor Al Qaeda and other foreign militants. The problem with these middle-ground strategies is that making deals with the Pakistani Taliban and the tribes that support them only emboldens the militants and usually entails a private understanding to redirect the insurgent focus across the border into Afghanistan, where it becomes Kabul's and Washington's problem.

This is where Pakistan becomes a royal headache for the United States. Pakistan is a supply chain not only for the jihadists, but also for U.S. and Nato troops fighting the war in Afghanistan. The U.S. is tied to Pakistan in two fundamental ways: While U.S. and Nato forces must rely on increasingly unreliable Pakistani supply routes to fight the war in Afghanistan, Pakistan — fearful that the U.S. and India will establish a long-term strategic partnership — has the incentive to keep the jihadist insurgency boiling (preferably in Afghanistan) in order to keep the Americans committed to an alliance with Islamabad, however complex that alliance might be.

Moving forward, U.S. strategy for Pakistan will be aimed towards cutting those links, beginning with the supply-route issue. The United States is trying to develop alternate routes through Central Asia (which would come at a high political and logistical price) to supply the war in Afghanistan from the north. Less reliance on Pakistan means less leverage for Islamabad over Washington when the U.S. applies more pressure on Pakistan to take risks and 'do more' at home in battling the insurgency. That said, Washington will not be able to ignore the fact that Pakistan is currently in a very fragile state — politically, economically and militarily. This makes any U.S. action in Pakistan, including airstrikes against high-value targets, all the more precarious as Islamabad tries to hold the country together.

The more destabilised Pakistan becomes, the more nervous India will become; the November 2008 Mumbai attacks illustrated the extent to which Islamabad's grip had loosened over its militant proxies. India took no retaliatory military action in response to the attacks for fear of destabilising Pakistan further and giving the Islamist militant forces already operating in Pakistan an excuse to redirect their focus on India. But India also has to contend with the reality that a number of jihadist forces in Pakistan have a strong interest in forcing Pakistan and India into conflict, which would divert Pakistani military attention to the east and give the Taliban and Al Qaeda more breathing room.

It follows, then, that the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks would at least attempt follow-on attacks in India to push the South Asian rivals into conflict. If and when a large-scale attack occurs, Indian military restraint cannot be assured, especially in the event that a more hard-line Hindu nationalist government comes to power in upcoming Indian elections. In such a scenario, the United States will have to once again devote its efforts towards preventing India and Pakistan from coming to blows and from detracting even further from U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan.

The enormous complexity surrounding the war in Afghanistan does not allow for many good U.S. policy options, but there are essentially four proposals, not all mutually exclusive and each with its pros and cons, sitting before the president.

First, do not attempt nation-building in Afghanistan, where there are little to no strategic resources or institutions to build from. Instead of bringing a large number of combat troops into the country, which would absorb much of the U.S. military's capabilities, rely primarily on U.S. intelligence capabilities to narrow the war fighting focus just to Al Qaeda, in an effort to prevent the country from redeveloping into a jihadist base of operations capable of launching transcontinental attacks against the West. In other words, return to the original objectives and methods of the war.
Narrowing the U.S. effort to fighting Al Qaeda would free up the U.S. military for other pressing issues, particularly a resurgent Russia. On the other hand, eliminating the nation-building component would leave Afghanistan in the same hazardous condition that allowed the development of Al Qaeda in the first place.

Second, instead of nation-building, focus on rebuilding the traditional, decentralised tribal structures that historically have ruled Afghanistan and have been strained by years of civil war. Put the onus on the Afghans to battle radicalisation and to make the country inhospitable to foreign jihadist fighters.

Relying on local tribal structures to strengthen law and order in the country is far more attainable than attempting to implement an alien democratic structure at the centre in a country like Afghanistan. However, this policy still has to contend with the fact that many tribal structures have broken down from years of civil war and rule by the Taliban, that Islamist radicalisation has spread far and wide throughout the country and that, in some cases, the Taliban have done better in providing for the population than the largely corrupt Afghan government. Any 'success' using this strategy would generate a 'solution' as transitory as any Afghan 'government' to date.
Third, do not attempt nation-building, but instead try to defang radical groups by reconciling with more moderate Taliban who can be integrated into the political process.

Politically co-opting segments of the Taliban could well divide the insurgency, much as the United States did with Sunni nationalists in Iraq, who turned their backs to Al Qaeda after a major troop surge. However, the U.S. must first regain the upper hand in the fight and commit enough resources to the war to make it worthwhile for those who are reconcilable who can actually be identified to risk their safety in switching sides. The idea of reconciliation is critical in any counter-insurgency campaign but is often doomed to failure if approached too early in the process.

Fourth, subscribe to the belief that any policy that abandons some notion of nation-building will allow for the re-establishment of an Al Qaeda base to threaten western interests. Commit to Afghanistan for the medium to long term, and devote enough time and resources to build a strong enough state structure at the centre that would be capable of providing for the Afghan people and of containing irreconcilable jihadist forces.

A long-term commitment to Afghanistan may have the best chance of making the country inhospitable to jihadist forces, but given the number of competing high-priority issues threatening U.S. security right now, the United States likely will not be able to devote the amount of resources needed to pull off such a strategy — especially in a country that has never been pacified by a foreign occupier.

While there are options on the table for Obama to consider in prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, he does not have a lot of time to mull over those options. This is a war where the power of perception will play a key role if the United States hopes to divide the insurgency in any meaningful way. Thus far, the U.S. has not demonstrated that it is willing or even able to devote enough resources to decisively win the war. Senior U.S. military commanders have requested up to 32,000 additional U.S. troops (which would bring total U.S. and Nato force strength to more than 100,000) to help beef up their force structure in Kabul and to push back into Taliban-held territory. But with competing interests in Iraq, where senior U.S. military commanders want to consolidate the security gains made there by avoiding too hasty a withdrawal, only 17,000 additional troops have been approved for deployment to Afghanistan thus far. That troop surge of 17,000 will be spread out over the next six months, allowing the Taliban to consolidate their power in the spring and summer — the traditional fighting season — while the U.S. tries to get a relatively small number of additional troops into theatre.

In Iraq, where the ground realities are vastly different from those in Afghanistan, the United States was able to add more muscle to the counter-insurgency effort, lock down security and — just as importantly — deliver a psychological message to Iraqi Sunni insurgents that the U.S. would be their security guarantor against Iranian and Iraqi Shiite rivals and an al Qaeda force that had alienated the local population. In Afghanistan, a troop surge of 17,000 or even 32,000 troops will likely lack the psychological impact to convince the Taliban that the U.S. can still fight this war and win. The Taliban see a resumption of political power as a strategic goal, but they do not face a significant internal threat that would compel them to deal with the U.S. Stratfor sources have said that the Taliban leadership often tells its fighters that their job is not necessarily to win battles, but to make it as painful as possible for western forces to stay any longer. The insurgent strategy is simple yet effective: Outlast the enemy through the power of exhaustion. This strategy has been successfully applied before in a war against the U.S. (witness Vietnam), and it can be successfully applied again, given the U.S. penchant for concerted military power and quick victories.

The United States can try to battle the Taliban for some time, but insurgencies have long lives and a military stalemate in Afghanistan is a far more likely outcome. When that realisation is reached, the U.S. may have to settle on a strategy that focuses much less on troop strength than on special operations against Al Qaeda. This was the strategy that the U.S. embarked upon in Afghanistan in October 2001, and it is likely the strategy to which it eventually will have to return.

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