Closure of supply route highlights inconsistency in U.S. Afghanistan and Pakistan policies
The high profile closure of the overland supply routes into Afghanistan by Pakistan’s interior ministry highlight the inconsistency and counter-productive nature of the United States’ Afghanistan and Pakistan policies. Pursuing a counter-insurgency policy in Afghanistan without regards to larger and broader strategic concerns, particularly those related to regional diplomacy, has resulted, over the last nine years, in an Afghan policy that finds 100,000 American troops entangled in another country’s civil war with little to no effect on al-Qaeda’s world wide operations. Meanwhile our actions in Afghanistan, to include the cross border strikes into Pakistan which fed the Pakistani public uproar that led to the supply route closures, have served not to stabilize Pakistan, but to rather to destabilize it, as well as engender Pakistani mistrust of and anger towards the US.
When looking at the United States’ two vital interests in that region of the world, al-Qaeda and the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, this last week’s episode puts into further question the logic and rationale behind our current strategy in Afghanistan. Our current efforts, focused on tactical level efforts at killing mid-level Taliban who pose no unique threat to the United States, are continuing to have a deleterious effect on an already fragile relationship with the government, military and people of Pakistan, whose political stability and safeguarding of nuclear weapons are of strategic national interest to the United States.
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