President Obama’s strategic review of Afghanistan and Pakistan is among the first foreign policy challenges for the new administration, and an early test of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s concept of “smart power.”
“My bottom line is that we cannot allow al Qaeda to operate,” Obama said last week. “We cannot have those safe havens in the region. And we’re going to have to work both smartly and effectively, but with consistency, in order to make sure that those safe havens don’t exist.”
Obama during the campaign promised to shift military resources from Iraq to Afghanistan, and to significantly increase the use of diplomacy — rather than military force — as a foundation for making foreign policy.
Last week he named former CIA official Bruce Riedel, an expert on South Asia and a prominent critic of Bush administration policy in the region, to conduct a review of the two restive U.S. allies ahead of a NATO summit in April.
“What Bruce is doing, and what other military planners are doing, is looking at the Afghanistan and Pakistan policies — not just in how many troops, but in a broad sense of what is possible and what needs to happen in order to change the direction,” said White House press secretary Robert Gibbs.
To that end, Obama’s directive dovetails with Clinton’s interest in ushering in a new era of “smart power” in U.S. foreign policy, which would deploy a mix of diplomacy, humanitarian aid and military power abroad.
“With smart power, diplomacy will be the vanguard of foreign policy,” Clinton told lawmakers last month. “This is not a radical idea.”
Clinton last week dispatched her handpicked envoy, veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke, to meet with leaders in Afghanistan and Pakistan as part of the administration’s strategic review. Holbrooke and Riedel will report their findings to Obama and national security adviser Gen. James Jones.
Malou Innocent, a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said Holbrooke’s brief would likely include pressuring on Pakistani leaders to crack down on tribal leaders in the border region, where U.S. officials believe terrorists are getting safe haven.
With regard to Afghanistan, Innocent said a potential trouble spot for Obama is the push to send more troops into Afghanistan immediately, before Washington is clear on what the objectives are for the country.
“The White House says they want to come up with a strategy before NATO,” Innocent said. “There is immense pressure to infuse greater troops in the region, but there is no objective in mind — and before you deploy the troops, you want to have a strategy.”
Obama’s White House review is one of a few recently undertaken. The Joint Chiefs of Staff completed one, and Gen. David Petraeus, an architect of the Iraq surge strategy and now the head of U.S. Central Command, is also in the process of reviewing American involvement in the region.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said the Pentagon has asked for more troops in Afghanistan, and expects a decision from Obama on deployments soon.
“There is a realization that some decisions have to be made before the strategic review is completed,” Gates said. “If [Obama] does decide to send at least an additional brigade combat team, even just one, the next one to go would need to be notified pretty quickly. So I think there will be a need for decisions before the strategic review is completed, but he has several options in front of him.”
