The af pak paradox
The Af-Pak Paradox
By JOHN PRADOS
There is a new acronym in the lexicon of Obama administration national security moguls. "AfPak" stands for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The term denotes the administration’s desire to make a unified approach to policy and strategy for these two countries. President Barack Obama correctly views them as the central front of the war on terrorism and — also accurately — sees so many aspects of the strategic problem of the Afghan war playing out in both countries that it is far more useful to consider them intertwined.
Obama entered the White House determined to pursue this conflict, having stated repeatedly that he would reinforce U.S. troops in Afghanistan. He also hinted at a more muscular CIA covert operation in the unacknowledged parallel war across the Pakistani border. Yet last week on the television show Sixty Minutes, Obama stepped back, declaring that there "has to be" an exit strategy for this war.
What’s going on here? Obama just made final decisions based upon the policy review he ordered at the beginning of his administration. He’ll carry this decision to a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Strasbourg, France, on April 3. The new president will try to resolve this paradox with European allies, but the contradictions of the new AfPak policy may well doom the enterprise.