Isn't It Time to Call Af-Pak a 'Quagmire'?' And Perhaps Obama's Vietnam?

Afghanistan has long since surpassed Vietnam as America’s longest war. And while the U.S. death toll is Afghanistan nothing like what it was in Vietnam, the news of U.S. officers getting "fragged" by their supposed Afghan allies, and in one of the most heavily guarded places in Kabul, is devastating. All of which makes me wonder whether foreign policy, in the form of the Af-Pak Quagmire--yes, it's really time to begin using the Q word--could become a big factor in the U.S. presidential election after all.

It's not just that the killing of two U.S. military officers, possibly by an Afghan intel officer, inside Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry has complicated President Obama’s plans to accelerate the withdrawal of U.S. troops and hand over operations to the new Afghan army by mid-2013.

Obama has an ever stickier problem than most people perceive. The shootings on Saturday, part of an explosion of anti-American violence ignited by the burning of Korans by U.S. troops, erupted just as the administration was quietly preparing another apology to neighboring Pakistan over the errant NATO strikes that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers last fall.

The Koran incident prompted an apology delivered by Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The Pakistan  apology was to have been delivered shortly by high-ranking U.S. military and civilian officials, most likely by Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, two U.S. officials told me in a story for National Journal. The statement of contrition, linked to an official Pentagon investigation that partially blamed mistakes made by U.S. forces for the NATO incident, as put off indefinitely after the Koran incident, but U.S. officials say they still plan to deliver it in coming weeks. 

The apologies over the Koran incident and the NATO strikes pose some political peril for Obama at home in an election year. Republican presidential candidates have been regularly accusing Obama of appeasement and, as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has put it, “apologizing for America.”

But Obama has little choice. In some ways the safe haven problem of Pakistan makes Afghanistan a tougher problem than even Vietnam. Last month, Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, sent a top-secret cable to Washington concluding that Taliban havens in Pakistan were jeopardizing the success of the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, The Washington Post reported on Saturday. That echoed many other analyses, including this one by retired Marine Col. T.X. Hammes, a counterinsurgency expert, who told me nearly a year ago that the Pakistan problem was far worse than the challenge U.S. forces had faced in dealing with the insurgency in Iraq, which had benefited from open borders with Syria and Saudi Arabia.

The administration initially had refused to apologize for the NATO strikes. The White House, Pentagon and State Department rebuffed the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron Munter, early on when he pressed for an immediate apology following the Nov. 27 incident. But prodded by the new Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Sherry Rehman, the State Department resurrected the idea in recent weeks, and this time the White House and Pentagon signed off on it. 

As one Defense official put it this week, the administration realized that something had to be done to “try move past the rough patch” with Pakistan, with U.S.-Pakistan relations still roiled by the fatal NATO strikes and other disputes, especially the unilateral mission that killed Osama bin Laden in a Pakistani city last year.  The administration must give Islamabad a face-saving way to resume normal ties. The United States is pushing for talks with the Taliban ahead of a planned withdrawal from neighboring Afghanistan that is to be completed in 2014. Recently the Afghan government and Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani also called for negotiations with the Taliban.

U.S. officials fear that without more assistance from Islamabad, the Taliban could exploit the American withdrawal from Afghanistan to wreak havoc from across the border. Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan are also tense following the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s chief peace negotiator and a former Afghan president himself, last September, allegedly by a Taliban suicide bomber. Kabul blamed Pakistan for the attack. Pakistan denied it, but Islamabad has sought to support the Islamist group as a strategic asset. 

Yep, it's a quagmire all right.