Ambassador

A friend at Simmons College advised me of an interesting talk there by Charles F. Dunbar, who has been the Ambassador to a bunch of countries and has now sort of retired into a professorship at BU. He’s an expert on Afghanistan, and the talk was about the increasingly intertwined problems across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

For the most part, Dunbar said things that were not unexpected. It was a decent introduction to the history of the region. He did make some recommendations though, and a few stood out. Paraphrased, from memory:

One of the things that worries me most is that our many allies — the Europeans supported this war, remember, and also Canada and Japan — are beginning to pull out. They’ve taken substantial casualties, and they no longer have the patience for it. Also, some of the ones who are staying are saying that they won’t go where the loud sounds are.

It’s important to at least appear to be acting internationally, not just as a single country. I think we really need a UN Task Force on Afghanistan (and Pakistan) to provide that international backing.

One of the greatest problems in this region is the dependence on poppy cultivation. One major option, often considered, is eradication, but you can’t do that if you’re trying to win a counterinsurgency. It says it right on the first page of FM-3-24: if you’re trying to put down an insurgency, you can’t take away people’s livelihoods. You can’t alienate the people.

People have suggested lots of possibilities, like substituting other cash crops that could generate similar income, but realistically, it would always be less. One option I find tempting — maybe in the way that opium is tempting — is to simply buy up the whole crop. I don’t think that’s likely, unfortunately.

An important thing to remember is, even where the Taliban are now gaining in strength, there is no enthusiasm for them. They’ve lived under Taliban rule before; they know what it’s like. The Taliban are really not nice people. They’re not fair.

To have a chance at winning against the Taliban, we have to provide jobs for young men in these tribal areas. Currently, many of them are signing up with the Taliban for careers …. very short careers, that end abruptly.

What we need to do is to create some economic development projects, to give young men the feeling that they have a chance at a career. Now, these projects wouldn’t pass muster in any of our usual economic aid organizations, because there’s no way they’ll be able to pay for themselves. The region is terribly poor in natural resources, so any such projects would need some help, maybe a lot of help, from outside to keep running. That’s ok.

Now, the area is virtually undeveloped at the moment, so we’re fairly limited. I think heavy industry is pretty much out of the question. In fact, the US tried an agricultural development project here in the 1950s, using better irrigation to try to improve the farming, but it didn’t work, and shame on us for not having done our homework on that one. The Soviets actually ran a similar project nearby, growing citrus, which worked quite well in that climate. (This was at a time when we and the Soviets were competing in the arena of international aid.)

Anyway, to give you an idea of what I’m thinking of, maybe you could grow sugar beets, and then build a basic refinery to produce refined sugar. Then you could use the sugar for canneries and such, the beginnings of an industry. If you keep going like that, maybe eventually you can do an electric power plant, since there’s no electric grid yet in this area.

[At this point a discussion ensued between several former Ambassadors and other diplomats regarding the expected cost of the Obama administration's proposed "troop surge" of 17,000 additional soldiers in Afghanistan. They concluded that the total additional cost, over a period of a few years, would be about $15 billion.]

The cost of subsidizing these projects would be something like $2 or $3 billion … that’s like the interest on the cost of a troop surge.

["It's also about three weeks for AIG!" shouted someone in the audience.]

Dunbar: Ugh. Thank you for reminding me¡

After the talk, it turned out there was dinner, and my friend at Simmons seems to know the right people, because we somehow wound up there, eating dinner with all the bigwigs. The talk there (still quite formal, with a podium and microphone) shifted to be more “inside baseball” (to use their own term), debating issues internal to the State Department. The whipping boy of the evening seemed to be Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the experts said:

He’s just the least self-effacing of diplomats, so one can’t expect much in the way of quiet diplomacy.

This became a much more general debate on the value of Special Envoys, concluding that they can have a positive effect, so long as they remember to make use of the Foreign Service officers who have deep knowledge of the region. I found the whole session a bit mystifying, but also a pretty cool introduction to the way that this stuff actually gets done.

After dinner, as I was taking my bike down through the elevator, we ran into Dunbar again, on the way out. It turns out he biked there too, and so we talked for a bit about bicycles. He rode away in a suit on a classic black 10-speed roadbike with drop handlebars and an all-chrome fork.