Frist Watch

Bill Frist's tacit endorsement of involving Taliban members in an Afghan unity government couldn't have been better timed to get largely ignored. Oh, it's already inspired some fits of pique and betrayal in the usual quarters, and understandably so. This is a tough one to soft-pedal; there's no getting around that the practical ramifications of Frist's statement -- no matter how he has since chosen to "clarify" it -- is that we may have to find a way to work with some of the very same people who brought down the World Trade Center, and have exhorted other terror cells worldwide to commit similar atrocities. After all we've committed to, after all the hortatory rhetoric and manly chest-beating hither and yon (mostly yon), this is unacceptable.

And yet, with suicide bombings increasing in Afghanistan at an exponential rate, a resurgent Taliban in that country, a truce between Musharraf and the Pakistani Taliban, and an increasingly impotent (if well-meaning) Hamid Karzai, the pathetic truth is that Frist may actually be right.

[Frist] later backtracked from his comments, but Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution says striking a deal with the Taliban might work. “Our true interest is in ensuring that Afghanistan does not again become a haven for al Qaeda,” he tells CFR.org. “The Taliban, under Pakistani pressure, might ensure this if its own position was secured. This is distasteful, and might mean [Afghan President Hamid] Karzai's departure, but it does preserve our one core interest in Afghanistan.”

Ethnic Pashtuns on both sides of the border sympathize with the Taliban’s cause. Experts agree any solution to the Afghan conflict must involve Pakistan, whose government stands accused of harboring terrorists. “ The real question is not whether Pakistan is or is not supporting the Taliban, but why it is doing so,” writes Frederic Grare of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. To rescue Afghan-Pakistani relations and root out the Taliban and other terrorists from the region, he suggests that military rule in Pakistan be ended and democracy installed in Islamabad.

Scary scenarios abound here, but there are relevant facts to consider. It is now commonly accepted wisdom that the insurgency in Iraq stemmed at least initially from CPA proconsul Paul Bremer immediately disbanding both the army and the Baath Party. This was a tactical mistake, but from the standpoint of the war marketeers, a necessary one. After all, you can't spend fifteen years insisting someone is the love-child of Hitler and Stalin, and not demolish his party apparatus upon deposing him. But again, operationally, hindsight suggests that we might have restored some semblance of stability early on by leaving at least the institutional shells intact, and enabling Iraqis to rebuild them from within. The problem is that we seriously thought rebuilding everything from the ground up would be a snap. Well, 3½ years into it, it's a $2bn/week snap.

So Frist might be taking that as a lesson to apply in the case of Afghanistan, and again, while in principle it's an utter abomination, it may be our only practical option remaining. See, if the Smart Set hadn't shunted that $700 mil and all those troops off to Qatar to start staging the Cakewalk, before we were remotely done squaring up Afghanistan and Pakistan, that might not be the case. But as we keep hearing, we are where we are now, and we must deal. And unless we're prepared to establish some sort of rump garrison state somewhere in Central Asia (we aren't, and no country in the region would allow us to do so anyway), this may actually be the least awful option.

Frist is a company man through and through; I doubt if he farts without prior approval from someone in the White House. Chances are he drew the short straw on test-marketing what will probably become the new operational policy, if not publicly. There's just no way around it anymore, without Musharraf's help, and while he's pretty much done what he can with what he has, he at least knows when to fold 'em.

It is time for the Serious Thinkers to really consider what they want out of all this, and then to seriously mull over whether they really think this administration is intellectually and diplomatically equipped to carry out their (or any, really) master plan. Reflexive hysterical dismissals along the lines of "Nancy Pelosi will let bin Laden rape your teenage daughters!" simply do not count anymore; the plan must be one of affirmation, not babbling nonsense.

Here are the cold hard facts:

• We are stuck refereeing a nascent civil war in Iraq.


• Our financial and military commitment to Iraq has essentially drained us, barring drastic measures (draft, tax/bond increase), of the ability to function effectively should another serious conflict arise.


• Our window of opportunity for "fixing" Afghanistan effectively started closing when we started diverting funds away for staging troops for the Iraq invasion.


• Pakistan, given the ideological makeup of its citizenry and its military, and its nuclear capacity and former prevalence in sharing their secrets with anyone with a suitcase full of money, is far and away the most volatile, dangerous nation to our interests right now.


• The fates of Pakistan and Afghanistan are inextricably entwined.


• Pervez Musharraf is the only thing holding Pakistan together right now.

Obviously, there are more, but you get the idea. What it boils down to is that our options are limited, and our time may be shorter than we think. I am not nearly as sanguine as the CEIP guy about democratic elections in Pakistan; I think this is a citizenry that would install either a populist clown or a dangerous fundamentalist lunatic at the helm of a nuclear state.

The only other thing I can think of besides screening some "Taliban types" through this initial phase of Afghanistan unity government is checkbook diplomacy, which is what we should have done in the first place. Yeah, I said it -- throw money, lots of it. The latest bill for increasing funds for Iraq brings the running total to around $400 bn and counting. And what have we gotten for it, besides bloody death and continuous brutality? Seems like $5-10 bn max would have given Afghanistan decent infrastructural systems, which has ancillary benefits, like giving citizens a sense of national unity, rather than the role of a serf trying to eke living under the radar of the local warlord. Same with the notorious "tribal" provinces of Pakistan -- help them out, bring them along at a pace that doesn't impact them too harshly.

Instead of killing thousands of people, bankrupting our treasury, and earning the contempt and fear of the entire planet, we could have spent probably 5% of that and saved countless lives and renewed the trust and love that the world once had in us.

I know it sounds all peacenik-y and hippy-dippy and shit, but better that than going broke trying to help Oedipus Tex and his henchmen resolve all their courage issues. In the meantime, the main thing to remember about Frist is that he didn't come up with that shit himself. This doesn't happen in a vacuum. We're getting ready to start backing away from the hornet's nest we stirred up -- the real trick for the Bushies is convincing the warporn enthusiasts that it was their idea. They'll come around; they always do.