Another Biden Plan...

Vice President Biden has a nasty habit of attaching his name to oddball foreign policy gambits. The last "Biden Plan" was the scheme to de facto federalize Iraq on sectarian lines, a "solution" that almost no Arab Iraqis were interested in and wishfully assumed the US could completely disrupt the Iraqi balance of power and withdraw its troops, with no consideration for the violence that might erupt between Iraqis and against Americans redrawing their country's maps.

Biden's previous foreign policy record included backing the 2003 Iraq War in the first place, while opposing the 1991 Gulf War. He has also taken credit for ideas that, in retrospect, one might not want to take credit for - coming up with the idea of the USA PATRIOT Act (years before 9/11), or in the VP debates, claiming sending NATO into Lebanon, a policy it does not seem he actually supported in 2006 that nevertheless would have been disastrous.

So, I can't help but be skeptical when he advocates the George Will strategy in Afghanistan. American troops will pull out, while drones and special forces will attack al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once again, Biden prefers to ignore the actual political dynamics of the region. To Biden, everything comes down to a simple calculus - we spend $30 in Afghanistan for every $1 we spend in Pakistan. The ratio must change, because Pakistan is the greater threat.

Biden argues sending troops and conducting counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is simply throwing good money after bad. What is unclear is how this would be any different in Pakistan. American military aid to Pakistan has been notoriously squandered on weapons systems to use against India, and is in danger of simply fueling the country's rampant corruption. Biden continually assumes that factions can be bribed to oppose their geopolitical interests. Just as a central government to distribute oil money would keep allow Iraqi federalism to function without violence, aid to Pakistan will blind them to their national interest in a) supporting the Taliban to provide strategic depth and b) using defense spending to deter India.

What most advocates of drawdown do not acknowledge is that Pakistan's incentive to make peace with the Taliban and return them to power in Afghanistan increases if the US leaves a power vacuum. This means that the ISI will have increased incentive to protect Taliban and al Qaeda targets from US airstrikes, because most of the figures on our hit list will be potential Pakistani allies in a reconstituted Taliban. Why Pakistan would tolerate a necessarily heightened tempo of drone strikes, let alone the special forces raids that resulted in Pakistani guards firing on US helicopters?

I understand the point of the Afghan war was to deny al Qaeda a safe haven. However, the cooperative dynamic the Biden plan is dependent upon is less likely to play out in the drawdown it entails. Shifting operations to raids and drone strikes would not make the war "easy," and ultimately, the diplomatic challenges of counting on Pakistani cooperation while eroding our partnership through violations of their sovereignty and counteracting their interest will give way to the South Asia of the '90s - Pakistan and India pursuing politics as usual, Afghanistan in chaos or under Taliban rule, and al Qaeda extant but pestered by the occasional drone strike. Perhaps a bearable scenario, but hardly a desirable one.