You’d think this morning’s Washington Post article by Greg Miller should throw some cold water on the relatively upbeat assessment I made yesterday: I said Petraeus is “trying to hit the Taliban leadership hard, driving it to the negotiating table from a position of weakness,” which “might be speeding up a potential resolution to the conflict.”
The headline appears to play me the fool: “Taliban unscathed by U.S. strikes”. Ouch, right? It would appear, based on the first few paragraphs of Miller’s piece, that the Taliban is doing fine:
Escalated airstrikes and special operations raids have disrupted Taliban movements and damaged local cells. But officials said that insurgents have been adept at absorbing the blows and that they appear confident that they can outlast an American troop buildup set to subside beginning next July.
It ultimately assesses that “there is little indication that the direction of the war has changed.”
But wait just a minute. Disrupting the Taliban isn’t the goal of the recent increase in op-tempo. The article fails to dis-aggregate the Taliban writ-large from its relatively small cadre of leaders.
While the organization plods on in a holistic sense, Petraeus’ raids and airstrikes are designed to telegraph a message to the leadership: “You can keep fighting, but you, Mr. Senior Taliban Leader, might be next.” With that life and death calculation staring them in the face, Petraeus rightly calculates that the Taliban’s leadership will be more interested in talking — a negotiation that will tip the leverage in NATO’s favor.
This is the same fundamental misunderstanding of international sanctions against Iran. No one believes they’ll put a fundamental break on the Iranian economy. But they will make life tougher on the mullahs, who now have to work hard to skirt them. The calculation is that one day, Tehran will say, “Man, I’m sick and tired of all this running around. Maybe we should sit down and negotiate with the West and we can get back to life as normal.”
Neither calculation may end up as an unqualified success, but the instincts behind them are right.
